Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products
"...It’s really a path forward for decarbonization because we can take CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, and turn it into things that are useful for chemical manufacture,”
MIT chemical engineers have devised an efficient way to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, a chemical precursor that can be used to generate useful compounds such as ethanol and other fuels.
If scaled up for industrial use, this process could help to remove carbon dioxide from power plants and other sources, reducing the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere.
“This would allow you to take carbon dioxide from emissions or dissolved in the ocean, and convert it into profitable chemicals. It’s really a path forward for decarbonization because we can take CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, and turn it into things that are useful for chemical manufacture,” says Ariel Furst, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the study.
The new approach uses electricity to perform the chemical conversion, with help from a catalyst that is tethered to the electrode surface by strands of DNA. This DNA acts like Velcro to keep all the reaction components in close proximity, making the reaction much more efficient than if all the components were floating in solution.
Furst has star( article continues at MIT News )