含羞草传媒

Converting a greenhouse gas into something good: U of T researchers recycle carbon dioxide

Group led by Professor Ted Sargent in U of T Engineering develops efficient way to convert CO2 into building block for fuels
photo of researchers in lab
U of T Engineering researchers Min Liu (left), Yuanjie Pang and their team designed a way to efficiently reduce climate-warming carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (photo by Marit Mitchell)

Turning carbon dioxide into stored energy sounds like science fiction: researchers have long tried to find simple ways to convert this greenhouse gas into fuels and other useful chemicals.

Now, a group of researchers led by Professor Ted Sargent of the 含羞草传媒鈥檚 Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have found a more efficient way 鈥 through the wonders of nanoengineering.

Researchers Min Liu and Yuanjie Pang, along with a team of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in U of T Engineering, have developed a technique powered by renewable energies such as solar or wind. The catalyst takes climate-warming carbon-dioxide (CO2) and converts it to carbon-monoxide (CO), a useful building block for carbon-based chemical fuels, such as methanol, ethanol and diesel. 

鈥淐O2 reduction is an important challenge due to inertness of the molecule,鈥 says Liu. 鈥淲e were looking for the best way to both address mounting global energy needs and help the environment,鈥 adds Pang. 鈥淚f we take CO2 from industrial flue emissions or from the atmosphere, and use it as a reagent for fuels, which provide long-term storage for green energy, we鈥檙e killing two birds with one stone.鈥

The team鈥檚 solution is sharp: they start by fabricating extremely small gold 鈥渘anoneedles鈥 鈥 the tip of each needle is 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.

鈥淭he nanoneedles act like lightning rods for catalyzing the reaction,鈥 says Liu.

When they applied a small electrical bias  to the array of nanoneedles,  they produced a high electric field at the sharp tips of the needles. This helps attract CO2, speeding up the reduction to CO, with a rate faster than any catalyst previously reported. This represents a breakthrough in selectivity and efficiency which brings CO2 reduction closer to the realm of commercial electrolysers.  The team is now working on the next step: skipping the CO and producing more conventional fuels directly.

Their work is  and making news around the world.

鈥淭he field of water-splitting for energy storage has seen rapid advances, especially in the intensity with which these reactions can be performed on a heterogeneous catalyst at low overpotential 鈥 now, analogous breakthroughs in the rate of CO2 reduction using renewable electricity are urgently needed,鈥 says Michael Graetzel, a professor of physical chemistry at 脡cole Polytechnique F茅d茅rale de Lausanne and a world leader in this field. 鈥淭he 含羞草传媒 team鈥檚 breakthrough was achieved using a new concept of field-induced reagent concentration.鈥

鈥淪olving global energy challenges needs solutions that cut across many fields,鈥 says Sargent. 鈥淭his work not only provides a new solution to a longstanding problem of CO2 reduction, but opens possibilities for storage of alternative energies such as solar and wind.鈥

 

This work was sparked by a $1-million grant from the 含羞草传媒鈥檚 Connaught Global Challenge fund, which united the multidisciplinary team to develop new bio-inspired energy conversion techniques. The project leveraged expertise from across the 含羞草传媒, including Professor Eugenia Kumacheva in the department of chemistry, Professor Shana Kelley in the Faculty of Pharmacy, and Professor David Sinton in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering.

Sargent鈥檚 research was further supported with the help of SOSCIP鈥檚 Blue Gene/Q, Canada鈥檚 fastest supercomputer, responsible for large scale parallel processing and grand challenge computational science. SOSCIP is a research and development consortium which pairs academic and industry researchers with advanced computing tools to fuel innovation leadership in Canada. U of T is a founding member of the consortium which includes the Ontario Centres of Excellence, IBM and 15 academic institutions. SOSCIP also provided funding to support a postdoctoral fellow for the project.

Read more about SOSCIP at U of T

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