Converting CO2 into useful products

A new electrode design boosts the efficiency of electrochemical reactions that turn carbon dioxide into ethylene and other products – MIT

New research by engineers at MIT could lead to rapid improvements in a variety of electrochemical systems that are under development to convert carbon dioxide into a valuable commodity. The team developed a new design for the electrodes used in these systems, which increases the efficiency of the conversion process.

The findings are reported today in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT doctoral student Simon Rufer, professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi, and three others.

“The CO2 problem is a big challenge for our times, and we are using all kinds of levers to solve and address this problem,” Varanasi says. It will be essential to find practical ways of removing the gas, he says, either from sources such as power plant emissions, or straight out of the air or the oceans. But then, once the CO2 has been removed, it has to go somewhere.

A wide variety of systems have been developed for converting that captured gas into a useful chemical product, Varanasi says. “It’s not that we can’t do it — we can do it. But the question is how can we make this efficient? How can we make this cost-effective?”

In the new study, the team focused on the electrochemical conversion of CO2 to ethylene, a widely used chemical that can be made into a variety of plastics as well as fuels, and which today is made from petroleum. But the approach they developed could also be applied to producing other high-value chemical products as well, including methane, methanol, carbon monoxide, and others, the researchers say.