Over the past few years, the cost of electricity production from renewable sources such as wind and solar has decreased, and become cost-competitive in many situations. However, with increasing amounts of renewable electricity production, electricity will be very inexpensive during times of high production and low demand. This creates an opportunity for the development of chemical processes that can use this inexpensive electricity. Recently, interest in CO2 utilization has increased, as it has become clear that reducing emissions alone will not be able keep the world below an acceptable global temperature rise. It is generally accepted that CO2 utilization will begin with the purer sources of CO2 available industrially, and ethanol biorefineries are currently capturing the CO2 byproduct and selling it to merchant gas markets. Therefore, conversion of CO2 produced in biorefineries may be one of the first deployments for CO2 utilization technologies. In this talk, recent results from both low-temperature electrochemical and thermochemical CO2 utilization will be discussed. While electrochemical pathways can directly use electricity to drive chemical reactions, thermochemical pathways can indirectly use electricity when hydrogen used for CO2 conversion was produced via water electrolysis. Results from electrocatalyst development in a 3-electrode cell using transition metal phosphides will be discussed. In the thermochemical pathway, a process intensification approach combining reverse-water-gas-shift and C-C coupling functionalities will allow for the direct synthesis of C2+ hydrocarbons from CO2. Additionally, this approach is needed to enable thermochemical processing at smaller scales to match distributed CO2 sources. Catalyst development for the thermochemical route will focus on transition metal carbides, which possess the bifunctionality required to enable process intensification.

CO2 utilization: Electrochemical and thermochemical pathways

2019 Spring National Meeting

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