Scientists found a way to mass-produce a low-cost catalyst that turns captured carbon dioxide into chemicals used in fuels, plastics and medicines.
Turning captured carbon dioxide from power plants and factories into useful chemicals has struggled to make economic sense.
Run electricity through captured carbon dioxide in the presence of the right catalyst, and the gas can be converted into carbon monoxide.
Other teams have made carbon capture material out of old rubber gloves, or turned captured carbon into cement ingredients.
Carbon dioxide makes up 80% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions tied to human activity, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Scientists found a way to mass-produce a low-cost catalyst that turns captured carbon dioxide into chemicals used in fuels, plastics and medicines.
Turning captured carbon dioxide from power plants and factories into useful chemicals has struggled to make economic sense. A new production method could change that math.
The chemistry itself isn’t new. Run electricity through captured carbon dioxide in the presence of the right catalyst, and the gas can be converted into carbon monoxide.
What’s left is carbon monoxide, a building block used to make fuels, plastics and medicines.
The missing piece has been making enough of that material – a catalyst – fast enough to matter industrially.
That bottleneck is what chemical engineer Ahmed Badreldin at the University of Mississippi and mechanical engineer Carter Racine at Texas A&M University set out to fix.
Small batches kept the idea in the lab
Most advanced catalysts for this reaction have only ever existed in amounts you could balance on a fingertip. That kept them out of reach for companies that wanted to use them.
“There are plenty of companies out there, particularly startups in the electrochemical energy-conversion space, that have the infrastructure for this ready, but they’re reaching a bottleneck,” Badreldin said.
“Most advanced nanostructured catalysts are being developed right now at the milligram scale – often around 50 to 100 milligrams – and they’re relying on conventional, silver-based catalysts.”
“We have successfully showcased that in a single synthesis, we can make 75-gram batches without losing performance of advanced single-atom electrocatalysts.”
Seventy-five grams is roughly the weight of a large chicken egg. Getting from a lab-balance amount to a kitchen-scale amount, without losing any performance, is the step that had been missing.
It is one race among several. Other teams have made carbon capture material out of old rubber gloves, or turned captured carbon into cement ingredients.
Still others have used enzymes to build clean fuels, or found a room-temperature route to methanol. Most of these ideas have stayed stuck at lab scale.
Carbon monoxide has an industrial use
Carbon monoxide is the same colorless, odorless gas that makes a leaking furnace dangerous.
Combined with hydrogen, carbon monoxide forms syngas, a mixture industry already uses to make fuels, plastics and medicines.
Right now, most syngas starts with oil or natural gas instead.
Carbon dioxide makes up 80% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions tied to human activity, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The U.S. released roughly 5 billion metric tons of it in 2022 alone. Capturing even a slice of that, and turning it into syngas instead of venting it into the sky, is the goal.
The fix leans on a kitchen blender
The recipe starts with two ingredients anyone could buy: carbon nanotubes and melamine, a compound also used in some plastic dinnerware.
The researchers mixed the two in a standard kitchen blender. Then they baked the mixture in a furnace at a moderate 650 degrees Celsius for a few hours.
The trick is that the nanotubes already carry trace nickel and iron, left over from how they are made.
The process uses those leftover metals as the catalyst’s active ingredient. That means no acid-washing step afterward, and no multiday process like older methods needed.
Making enough catalyst the old way to cover about 10 square meters of area would take a year or more, according to the study. At 75 grams a batch, that much material can be ready within days.
The team even swapped in a cheaper, less pure grade of industrial nanotubes. It worked just as well. That matters, because that cheaper grade is the kind sold by the ton.
The switch also costs less to run
The new catalyst held its own against the industry’s usual silver-based version.
In lab testing, more than 98% of the electrical current driving the reaction went toward producing carbon monoxide rather than unwanted side products.
Maintaining that performance at high production rates makes the result much more promising for scale-up.
The study’s own cost analysis estimated a carbon monoxide production cost of $145 per metric ton, about $255 below the current market price.
It estimated $174 a metric ton for a comparable silver-based setup. The new recipe undercuts both the market and its silver-based rival.
A separate look at the process’s environmental footprint found it released about 20% less carbon dioxide-equivalent per metric ton of product than the silver-based route.
Most of that gap comes from using less electricity to do the same job.
Because the equipment is modular, a company could also size its unit to the carbon dioxide it actually has, instead of buying access to one huge plant.
Badreldin said the timing matters for another reason.
“The goal right now is largely driven by national security,” he said, pointing to a chance for the U.S. to build its own supply chain instead of depending on chemical industries centralized elsewhere.
Stability at scale remains unproven
Everything reported so far comes from tests lasting 48 hours at a stretch.
A real chemical plant runs nearly nonstop for most of a year between maintenance breaks. Nobody has yet shown that a catalyst made this way can hold up that long.
“Our future research is looking at figuring out long-term stability,” Racine said. “Big oil and gas plants and other industrial facilities, they run 24/7 for about 350 days of the year and take a week or so off to do maintenance.”
“If we want those facilities to use this, we have to have a model that can operate for nearly a year. That’s what we are, and everybody is, trying to figure out now.”
The full study was published in the journal ACS Omega.
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