Targeting carbon dioxide
ChemSci Pick of the Week
A new catalyst could help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by industry.
The fight against global warming includes many different avenues of research. A key area involves exploring ways to capture carbon dioxide that has been emitted by power stations or during industrial processes, and converting it into harmless or useful chemicals.
Electrocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide is a chemical process whereby carbon dioxide is converted to carbon monoxide – which can in turn be used in the production of artificial petroleum. The drawback is that most of the existing studies target pure carbon dioxide – whereas in practice the emissions from industry and power plants contain only 3%–13% CO2.
We therefore need a way to target CO2 even when it’s at low concentration as part of a mixture. Currently the most common method is to send the emissions through an enrichment process, which itself consumes a large amount of energy.
Now, a team of scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan have come up with a method to convert low concentrations of CO2 directly and efficiently. They use a catalyst based on rhenium to achieve the conversion. The catalyst has very high selectivity – meaning it targets the CO2 molecule almost exclusively, even when it’s in a mixture of other chemicals – and works even when the concentration of CO2 is as low as 1%. It is likely to be the first catalyst discovered that works at such low concentrations.
Dr Osamu Ishitani says: "If we can develop the technology which we reported in this paper, we will possibly be able to use CO2 from the air to obtain artificial petroleum – similar to natural photosynthesis in future – by combining this technology with solar cells."
This article is free to read in our open access, flagship journal Chemical Science: Hiromu Kumagai et al., Chem. Sci., 2019, Advance Article. DOI: 10.1039/C8SC04124E. You can access all of our ChemSci Picks in this article collection.
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