{"id":66849,"date":"2019-09-26T06:59:36","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T04:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rss.nova-institut.net\/public.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chemie.de%2Fnews%2F1162811%2Fneuer-weg-zu-klimaneutralen-kraftstoffen-aus-kohlendioxid-entdeckt.html%3FWT.mc_id%3Dca0065%26pk_campaign%3Dca0065"},"modified":"2021-09-09T21:26:57","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T19:26:57","slug":"new-route-to-carbon-neutral-fuels-from-co2-discovered-by-stanford-dtu-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/new-route-to-carbon-neutral-fuels-from-co2-discovered-by-stanford-dtu-team\/","title":{"rendered":"New route to carbon-neutral fuels from CO2<\/sub> discovered by Stanford-DTU team"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new, practical starting point for converting carbon dioxide into sustainable liquid fuels could lead to fuels for heavier vehicles difficult to electrify, like airplanes, ships and freight trains.<\/p>\n

Carbon-neutral re-use of CO2\u00a0has emerged as an alternative to burying the greenhouse gas underground. In a\u00a0new study\u00a0published today in\u00a0Nature Energy, researchers from Stanford University and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) show how electricity and an Earth-abundant catalyst can convert CO2\u00a0into energy-rich carbon monoxide (CO) better than conventional methods. The catalyst \u2013 cerium oxide \u2013 is much more resistant to breaking down. Stripping oxygen from CO2\u00a0to make CO gas is the first step in turning CO2\u00a0into nearly any liquid fuel and other products, like synthetic gas and plastics. The addition of hydrogen to CO can produce fuels like synthetic diesel and the equivalent of jet fuel. The team envisions using renewable power to make the CO and for subsequent conversions, which would result in carbon-neutral products.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe showed we can use electricity to reduce CO2\u00a0into CO with 100 percent selectivity and without producing the undesired byproduct of solid carbon,\u201d said\u00a0William Chueh, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, one of three senior authors of the paper.<\/p>\n

Chueh, aware of DTU\u2019s research in this area, invited\u00a0Christopher Graves, associate professor in DTU\u2019s Energy Conversion & Storage Department, and\u00a0Theis Skafte, a DTU doctoral candidate at the time, to come to Stanford and work on the technology together.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had been working on high-temperature CO2\u00a0electrolysis for years, but the collaboration with Stanford was the key to this breakthrough,\u201d said Skafte, lead author of the study, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at DTU. \u201cWe achieved something we couldn\u2019t have separately \u2013 both fundamental understanding and practical demonstration of a more robust material.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barriers to conversion
\nOne advantage sustainable liquid fuels could have over the electrification of transportation is that they could use the existing gasoline and diesel infrastructure, like engines, pipelines and gas stations. Additionally, the barriers to electrifying airplanes and ships \u2013 long-distance travel and the high weight of batteries \u2013 would not be problems for energy-dense, carbon-neutral fuels.<\/p>\n

Although plants reduce CO2 to carbon-rich sugars naturally, an artificial electrochemical route to CO has yet to be widely commercialized. Among the problems: Devices use too much electricity, convert a low percentage of CO2 molecules, or produce pure carbon that destroys the device. Researchers in the new study first examined how different devices succeeded and failed in CO2 electrolysis.<\/p>\n

With insights gained, the researchers built two cells for CO2 conversion testing: one with cerium oxide and the other with conventional nickel-based catalysts. The ceria electrode remained stable, while carbon deposits damaged the nickel electrode, significantly shortening the catalyst\u2019s lifetime.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis remarkable capability of ceria has major implications for the practical lifetime of CO2 electrolyzer devices,\u201d said DTU\u2019s Graves, a senior author of the study and visiting scholar at Stanford at the time. \u201cReplacing the current nickel electrode with our new ceria electrode in the next generation electrolyzer would improve device lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Road to commercialization
\nEliminating early cell death could significantly lower the cost of commercial CO production. The suppression of carbon buildup also allows the new type of device to convert more of the CO2 to CO, which is limited to well below 50 percent CO product concentration in today\u2019s cells. This could also reduce production costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe carbon-suppression mechanism on ceria is based on trapping the carbon in stable oxidized form. We were able to explain this behavior with computational models of CO2 reduction at elevated temperature, which was then confirmed with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy of the cell in operation,\u201d said Michal Bajdich, a senior author of the paper and an associate staff scientist at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science & Catalysis, a partnership between the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford\u2019s School of Engineering.<\/p>\n

The high cost of capturing CO2 has been a barrier to sequestering it underground on a large scale, and that high cost could be a barrier to using CO2 to make more sustainable fuels and chemicals. However, the market value of those products combined with payments for avoiding the carbon emissions could help technologies that use CO2 overcome the cost hurdle more quickly.<\/p>\n

The researchers hope that their initial work on revealing the mechanisms in CO2 electrolysis devices by spectroscopy and modeling will help others in tuning the surface properties of ceria and other oxides to further improve CO2 electrolysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new, practical starting point for converting carbon dioxide into sustainable liquid fuels could lead to fuels for heavier vehicles difficult to electrify, like airplanes, ships and freight trains. Carbon-neutral re-use of CO2\u00a0has emerged as an alternative to burying the greenhouse gas underground. In a\u00a0new study\u00a0published today in\u00a0Nature Energy, researchers from Stanford University and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572,5571],"tags":[15787,12366,11857],"supplier":[1122,11306],"class_list":["post-66849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","category-co2-based","tag-carbonneutral","tag-fuels","tag-sustainable","supplier-stanford-university","supplier-technical-university-of-denmark-dtu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66849","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66849"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=66849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}