{"id":143560,"date":"2024-05-06T07:32:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-06T05:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=143560"},"modified":"2024-05-03T14:35:48","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T12:35:48","slug":"new-approach-could-make-reusing-captured-carbon-far-cheaper-less-energy-intensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/new-approach-could-make-reusing-captured-carbon-far-cheaper-less-energy-intensive\/","title":{"rendered":"New Approach Could Make Reusing Captured Carbon Far Cheaper, Less Energy-Intensive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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Engineers at Georgia Tech have designed a process that converts carbon dioxide removed from the air into useful raw material that could be used for new plastics, chemicals, or fuels.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their approach dramatically reduces the cost and energy required for these direct air capture (DAC) systems, helping improve the economics of a process the researchers said will be critical to addressing climate change.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key is a new kind of catalyst and electrochemical reactor design that can be easily integrated into existing DAC systems to produce useful carbon monoxide (CO) gas. It\u2019s one of the most efficient such design ever described in scientific literature, according to lead researcher Marta Hatzell<\/a> and her team. They published details April 16 in Energy and Environmental Science<\/em><\/a>, a top journal for energy-related research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cAll of my team\u2019s research projects focus on decarbonization, which I care about because of climate change, but this one in particular has the opportunity to make an impact and move toward commercialization more quickly,\u201d said Hatzell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering<\/a> and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s why publishing our work is important, to help get this technology out into the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Typically, the DAC process involves pulling carbon dioxide out of the air using some kind of chemical or material that wants to grab the CO2<\/sub> molecules. To release that captured carbon \u2014 to store it underground, for example, or process it for productive reuse \u2014 requires significant energy and complicated, expensive systems. Along the way, those systems usually lose some of the CO2<\/sub>, often only using half of the carbon they\u2019ve removed from the air or less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hatzell\u2019s team is focused on improving an approach that uses a liquid alkaline solution called KOH to capture the carbon in a DAC system. The KOH turns the gas CO2<\/sub> into bicarbonates, which eventually have to be separated again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Georgia Tech design avoids that expensive, energy-intensive step altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working with Jihun Oh\u2019s lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, researchers created a new nickel-based catalyst and paired it with a bipolar membrane electrode assembly. Their setup uses electricity to extract CO2<\/sub> from the bicarbonates right next to the catalyst, which then converts it to carbon monoxide gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the secret sauce of the system designed by Hatzell, postdoctoral scholar Hakhyeon Song, and Ph.D. students Carlos Fern\u00e1ndez and Po-Wei Huang: It combines two steps into one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cWe’re capturing the CO2<\/sub>\u00a0into carbonates, which is a spontaneous process and doesn\u2019t take much energy. And we\u2019re getting rid of the desorption process and all of that energy expenditure,\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez<\/strong> said. \u201cWe save about 90% of the energy in the capture process, and about 50% of the capital cost.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Their setup also is extremely efficient at using all of the CO2<\/sub>\u00a0that moves through the reactor, according to Song. This is vastly better than systems that keep the carbon dioxide as a gas throughout the separation process.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re twice as efficient. Our CO2<\/sub>\u00a0utilization efficiency is almost 70%, but the gas-phase system is 35%,\u201d Song<\/strong> said. \u201cThe maximum CO2<\/sub>\u00a0utilization in gas-based systems is theoretically 50%. But in our case, our maximum efficiency is 100%.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In another important advance, the team\u2019s catalyst works well in an acidic environment, which has been a limitation of existing systems using bipolar membranes. When the reactor layer with the catalyst turns acidic, another chemical process called a hydrogen evolution reaction occurs that competes with the reaction that reduces CO2<\/sub> to CO. The new nickel-based catalyst suppresses this interference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Producing carbon monoxide from the CO2<\/sub> scrubbed from the air is a complicated, intensive process. But if done economically, the resulting raw material could be linked to existing chemical processes and turned into new useful products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making those connections is next on the team\u2019s plate. CO can become the basis for plastics, important industrial chemicals like ethylene, and maybe even jet fuel one day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThat’s why we chose CO,\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez said. \u201cOther products are harder to make, and CO is a good base for any carbon chemical. You can go from CO to almost anything through thermochemical processes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

About the Research<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Citation:<\/strong> Song, H., Fernandez, C. A., Choi, H., Huang, P. W., Oh, J., & Hatzell, M. C. (2024). Integrated carbon capture and CO production from bicarbonates through bipolar membrane electrolysis. Energy & Environmental Science<\/em>. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1039\/D4EE00048J<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Engineers at Georgia Tech have designed a process that converts carbon dioxide removed from the air into useful raw material that could be used for new plastics, chemicals, or fuels. Their approach dramatically reduces the cost and energy required for these direct air capture (DAC) systems, helping improve the economics of a process the researchers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":143565,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","nova_meta_subtitle":"A team led by Marta Hatzell designed a new electrochemical reactor to seamlessly integrate into direct air capture systems and turn CO2 into useful raw materials","footnotes":""},"categories":[5571],"tags":[10744,10416,15806,10743],"supplier":[2839,22375],"class_list":["post-143560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-co2-based","tag-carboncapture","tag-circulareconomy","tag-ethylene","tag-useco2","supplier-georgia-institute-of-technology","supplier-korea-advanced-institute-of-science-and-technology-kaist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143560"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=143560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}