A New Catalyst Can “Recycle” Carbon Dioxide into Useful Chemicals

(University of Chicago) Research by Argonne, University of Chicago scientists aims to turn CO2 into resource -- Carbon dioxide is leaking from industrial operations into the atmosphere, causing a cascade of dangerous changes to Earth’s climate. But some scientists wondered if instead it could instead be captured and converted to useful chemicals.

A group of scientists with Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, Northern Illinois University and Valparaiso University, have showed how to make a family of catalysts that can efficiently convert CO2 into ethanol, acetic acid or formic acid.

These are among the most produced chemicals in the U.S. and are found in many commercial products. For example, ethanol is a key ingredient in numerous household products and an additive to nearly all U.S. gasoline.

“If fully developed, our catalysts could convert the CO2 produced at various industrial sources to valuable chemicals,” said Di-Jia Liu, a senior chemist at Argonne and a senior scientist in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. “These sources include fossil fuel power plants and bio-fermentation and waste treatment facilities.”

The method used by the team is called electrocatalytic conversion, meaning that CO2 conversion over a catalyst is driven by electricity.

The catalysts are based on tin metal deposited over a carbon support. By varying the size of tin from single atoms to ultra-small clusters and also to larger nano-crystallites, the team could control the CO2 conversion to acetic acid, ethanol and formic acid, respectively. Selectivity for each of these chemicals was 90% or higher.

“Our finding of a changing reaction path by the catalyst size is unprecedented,” Liu said.

Because the reaction does require electricity, in order to make the technology fully green, Liu said the goal is to use locally generated electricity from wind and solar.

This would require integrating the newly discovered catalysts into a low-temperature electrolyzer to carry out the CO2 conversion with electricity supplied by renewable energy. Low-temperature electrolyzers can operate at near ambient temperature and pressure. This allows rapid start and stop to accommodate the intermittent supply of renewable energy; it is an ideal technology to serve this purpose.

“If we can selectively produce only the chemicals in need near the site, we can help to cut down on CO2 transport and storage costs,” Liu noted. “It would truly be a win-win situation for local adopters of our technology.”

This research benefited from two user facilities at Argonne — the Advanced Photon Source and Center for Nanoscale Materials. READ MORE

Excerpt from Argonne National Laboratory: About Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials
The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities/User-Facilities-at-a-Glance.

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science. READ MORE