The Svartsengi power station sits on the banks of the Blue Lagoon, an artificial geothermal spring and one of Iceland\u2019s most popular tourist attractions. For decades, it has supplied Icelanders with geothermal electricity and heat. The rub is that extracting this renewable energy from the ground requires fossil fuels to run the pumps. So in 2011, an Icelandic energy startup called Carbon Recycling International built the George Olah plant, which captures Svartsengi\u2019s CO2 emissions and turns them into a carbon-neutral fuel.<\/p>\n
The idea for CO2 recycling was around long before the George Olah plant became the first to put it into practice. The idea is to take carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and use some chemical wizardry to turn it into useful fuels like propane or methane. Aside from CO2, the main ingredients in this process are hydrogen and a metallic catalyst. Cook it all together at high temperatures and voil\u00e0: You\u2019ve got yourself a tank of liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Although emissions from hydrocarbon fuels are exactly the problem this process is trying to solve, in principle capturing the emissions from the newly made fuels can create a closed loop. The world pumps out nearly 40 billion tons of CO2 each year, so converting even a small fraction of that into carbon-neutral fuel would be a win.<\/p>\n
Yet Iceland\u2019s George Olah plant remains the only facility converting emissions into fuel on an industrial scale. The problem is that the most efficient techniques require nanoparticle catalysts that are expensive to produce, which stalled the technology on the road from the lab to the real world. But a new process for cheaply minting CO2-loving nanoparticles developed by chemists at the University of Southern California and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory may nudge carbon recycling toward mainstream adoption. \u201cThe sustainable production of catalysts has been a major bottleneck,\u201d says Noah Malmstadt, a chemical engineer at the University of Southern California. \u201cNanoparticle catalysts are very promising, and the ability to produce them sustainably at scale is something we\u2019ve really pioneered.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the heart of the USC system are carbide nanoparticles, a generic term for compounds of carbon and another element\u2014in this case a silvery metal called molybdenum. The nanoparticles are like a magnet to CO2 and kick-start the chemical reaction that turns emissions into fuel. \u201cMolybdenum carbide is particularly interesting to us because it is relatively low cost and is uniquely suited to perform the multiple functions that are required to convert CO2 to fuel, like breaking the carbon-oxygen bonds,\u201d says Frederick Baddour, a nanomaterials scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.<\/p>\n
Malmstadt and his colleagues aren\u2019t the first to use metal carbide nanoparticles to recycle CO2. But in the past, producing these nanoparticles meant baking them in reactors at around 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Reaching these temperatures was super energy-intensive. Even then, the size of the resulting particles was all over the place\u2014which kills efficiency, because the chemical reaction initiated by the particles happens only on their surface. A good catalyst is one in which the surface area of all the particles is maximized, which is one of the main benefits of using nanoparticles.<\/p>\n
The new system uses a millifluidic reactor, which operates at only 650 degrees Fahrenheit and forces the metal carbide feedstock through channels less than a millimeter wide. The result is nearly uniform metal carbide particles\u2014literal carbon copies\u2014that can be produced cheaply at scale. Malmstadt says the team has a paper under peer review that demonstrates their control of 16 of these reactors working in tandem. It\u2019s not exactly industrial scale, but it demonstrates that the process can easily be scaled up without needing to build a larger device.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Svartsengi power station sits on the banks of the Blue Lagoon, an artificial geothermal spring and one of Iceland\u2019s most popular tourist attractions. For decades, it has supplied Icelanders with geothermal electricity and heat. The rub is that extracting this renewable energy from the ground requires fossil fuels to run the pumps. So in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5571],"tags":[12330,14374,16737],"supplier":[11650],"class_list":["post-72000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-co2-based","tag-ccu","tag-emission","tag-nanoparticles","supplier-university-of-southern-california"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72000","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\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72000"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=72000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}