Comments on: Capturing CO2 to Make Fuel: Illinois Research Team Makes Breakthrough in Artificial Photosynthesis

By: New Low-Cost Material Offers ‘Green’ Carbon-Capture

New Low-Cost Material Offers ‘Green’ Carbon-Capture — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 03:09:20 +0000

[…] fossil fuel emissions through the cheaper and more efficient capture of polluting gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulphur dioxide (SO2). The research, published in the scientific journal Nature Chemistry, […]

By: Capture CO2. Oil out of Air. « Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Capture CO2. Oil out of Air. « Climate Denial Crock of the Week — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 01:32:41 +0000

[…] Clean Technica: We’ve been reporting on the efforts and strides being made by energy researchers around the country to reduce CO2 emissions and produce clean energy by mimicking photosynthesis. Well, a research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently overcame a major obstacle in efforts to use CO2 emissions to produce liquid fuel. […]

By: Wilmot McCutchen

Wilmot McCutchen — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:30:00 +0000

Here is an excerpt from the abstract: “Electroreduction of carbon dioxide (CO2)—a key component of artificial photosynthesis—has largely been stymied by the impractically high overpotentials necessary to drive the process. Here, we report an electrocatalytic system that reduces CO2 to carbon monoxide (CO) at overpotentials below 0.2 volts (V). The system relies on an ionic liquid electrolyte to lower the energy of the (CO2)– intermediate, most likely by complexation, and thereby lower the initial reduction barrier. Then the silver cathode catalyzes formation of the final products. Formation of gaseous CO is first observed at an applied voltage of 1.5 V, just slightly above the minimum (i.e., equilibrium) voltage of 1.33 V.”

The rest of the article is behind a pay wall — scientific knowledge held hostage even though taxpayers (through DOE) financed the research.

The press release admits that this is not really a breakthough: “Next, the researchers hope to tackle the problem of throughput. To make their technology useful for commercial applications, they need to speed up the reaction and maximize conversion.” Not a trivial detail.

Mixing ionic liquid catalyst with huge volumes of hot and dirty flue gas sounds like a fool’s errand. Cracking CO2 at utility scale will require a lot of energy, but if curtailed wind and the spinning reserve at power plants could be harnessed then it might be possible and may even make CO2 a resource instead of a waste product. Sequestration (underground dumping) can’t possibly work and is dangerous to water supplies because of the oceans of very salty brine that will be displaced.