Today, improving the utilization of renewable energy for CO2 mitigation has become a worldwide energy and climate policy. Therefore, an ideal route of power-to-fuels (recycling CO2 with renewable energy), which is a feasible strategy to convert CO2 with renewable energy, has attracted increased attention. Electricity is clearly becoming the most widely available green source of renewable energy in recent years. However, utilization and storage of renewable electricity is still a challenge due to its fluctuation. As a promising technology for the ideal power-to-fuels route, plasma is commonly generated by electric power and can be quickly switched on/off. Hence, it is feasible to power plasma with the fluctuant (renewable) electricity and store it to chemical energy. In plasma, the electrons are selectively heated due to their small mass, and they obtain almost all the applied plasma energy, creating non-thermal conditions. This means that in plasma, CO2 can be directly activated with energetic electrons, to induce its conversion. Amongst those plasmas, warm plasma formed by gliding arc is believed to be one of the most promising plasma types, especially for conversion of CH4 and CO2, because it operates at atmospheric pressure, and exhibits a high energy efficiency. In Laboratory of Plasma Physical Chemistry, we have developed an efficient reactor and technique of plasma catalytic reforming (PCR) for reducing CO2 with CH4 efficiently. An energy efficiency of 79% is obtained for plasma catalytic reforming (PCR) at a CH4 conversion of 99% and a CO2 conversion of 79%. Thereby, we propose a novel Power to Synthesis Gas (P2SG) strategy, composed of PCR and water electrolysis (WE) to produce high-quality syngas from CH4, CO2 and H2O. Considering an energy efficiency of 80% for WE, the P2SG system yields an overall energy efficiency of 79% to produce high-quality syngas featuring the ideal stoichiometric number of 2 and syngas concentration of 94.6 vol.%.

Energy-efficient CO2 conversion with renewable electricity storage by plasma catalysis

2019 Spring National Meeting

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