Scientists found a way to mass-produce a low-cost catalyst that turns captured carbon dioxide into chemicals used in fuels, plastics and medicines.<\/p>\n
Turning captured carbon dioxide from power plants and factories into useful chemicals has struggled to make economic sense. A new production method could change that math.<\/p>\n
The chemistry itself isn\u2019t new. Run electricity through captured carbon dioxide in the presence of the right catalyst, and the gas can be converted into carbon monoxide.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s left is carbon monoxide, a building block used to make fuels, plastics and medicines.<\/p>\n
The missing piece has been making enough of that material \u2013 a catalyst \u2013 fast enough to matter industrially.<\/p>\n
That bottleneck is what chemical engineer Ahmed Badreldin at the University of Mississippi<\/a> and mechanical engineer Carter Racine at Texas A&M University set out to fix.<\/p>\n Small batches kept the idea in the lab<\/p>\n Most advanced catalysts for this reaction have only ever existed in amounts you could balance on a fingertip. That kept them out of reach for companies that wanted to use them.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are plenty of companies out there, particularly startups in the electrochemical energy-conversion space, that have the infrastructure for this ready, but they\u2019re reaching a bottleneck,\u201d Badreldin said. <\/p>\n \u201cMost advanced nanostructured catalysts are being developed right now at the milligram scale \u2013 often around 50 to 100 milligrams \u2013 and they\u2019re relying on conventional, silver-based catalysts.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have successfully showcased that in a single synthesis, we can make 75-gram batches without losing performance of advanced single-atom electrocatalysts.\u201d<\/p>\n Seventy-five grams is roughly the weight of a large chicken egg. Getting from a lab-balance amount to a kitchen-scale amount, without losing any performance, is the step that had been missing.<\/p>\n It is one race among several. Other teams have made carbon capture<\/a> material out of old rubber gloves, or turned captured carbon into cement<\/a> ingredients.<\/p>\n Still others have used enzymes to build clean fuels<\/a>, or found a room-temperature route to methanol<\/a>. Most of these ideas have stayed stuck at lab scale.<\/p>\n Carbon monoxide has an industrial use<\/p>\n Carbon monoxide is the same colorless, odorless gas that makes a leaking furnace dangerous. <\/p>\n Combined with hydrogen, carbon monoxide forms syngas, a mixture industry already uses to make fuels, plastics and medicines.<\/p>\n Right now, most syngas starts with oil or natural gas<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n Carbon dioxide makes up 80% of the country\u2019s greenhouse gas emissions tied to human activity, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. <\/p>\n The U.S. released roughly 5 billion metric tons of it in 2022 alone. Capturing even a slice of that, and turning it into syngas instead of venting it into the sky, is the goal.<\/p>\n The fix leans on a kitchen blender<\/p>\n The recipe starts with two ingredients anyone could buy: carbon nanotubes and melamine, a compound also used in some plastic dinnerware. <\/p>\n The researchers mixed the two in a standard kitchen blender. Then they baked the mixture in a furnace at a moderate 650 degrees Celsius for a few hours.<\/p>\n The trick is that the nanotubes already carry trace nickel and iron, left over from how they are made. <\/p>\n The process uses those leftover metals as the catalyst\u2019s active ingredient. That means no acid-washing step afterward, and no multiday process like older methods needed.<\/p>\n Making enough catalyst the old way to cover about 10 square meters of area would take a year or more, according to the study. At 75 grams a batch, that much material can be ready within days.<\/p>\n The team even swapped in a cheaper, less pure grade of industrial nanotubes. It worked just as well. That matters, because that cheaper grade is the kind sold by the ton.<\/p>\n The switch also costs less to run<\/p>\n The new catalyst held its own against the industry\u2019s usual silver-based version. <\/p>\n In lab testing, more than 98% of the electrical current driving the reaction went toward producing carbon monoxide rather than unwanted side products.<\/p>\n Maintaining that performance at high production rates makes the result much more promising for scale-up.<\/p>\n The study\u2019s own cost analysis estimated a carbon monoxide production cost of $145 per metric ton, about $255 below the current market price.<\/p>\n It estimated $174 a metric ton for a comparable silver-based setup. The new recipe undercuts both the market and its silver-based rival.<\/p>\n A separate look at the process\u2019s environmental footprint found it released about 20% less carbon dioxide-equivalent per metric ton of product than the silver-based route. <\/p>\n Most of that gap comes from using less electricity<\/a> to do the same job.<\/p>\n Because the equipment is modular, a company could also size its unit to the carbon dioxide it actually has, instead of buying access to one huge plant. <\/p>\n Badreldin said the timing matters for another reason. <\/p>\n \u201cThe goal right now is largely driven by national security,\u201d he said, pointing to a chance for the U.S. to build its own supply chain instead of depending on chemical industries centralized elsewhere.<\/p>\n Stability at scale remains unproven<\/p>\n Everything reported so far comes from tests lasting 48 hours at a stretch. <\/p>\n A real chemical plant runs nearly nonstop for most of a year between maintenance breaks. Nobody has yet shown that a catalyst made this way can hold up that long.<\/p>\n \u201cOur future research is looking at figuring out long-term stability,\u201d Racine said. \u201cBig oil and gas plants and other industrial facilities, they run 24\/7 for about 350 days of the year and take a week or so off to do maintenance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf we want those facilities to use this, we have to have a model that can operate for nearly a year. That\u2019s what we are, and everybody is, trying to figure out now.\u201d<\/p>\n The full study was published in the journal ACS Omega<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.\u00a0<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists found a way to mass-produce a low-cost catalyst that turns captured carbon dioxide into chemicals used in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":881839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,128],"class_list":["post-881838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/881839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}