In its pure form, the gas can then be pumped into storage tanks or underground, mineralized, or further converted into chemicals or fuels. High temperatures are then applied, typically in the form of fossil-fuel-generated steam, to release the captured carbon dioxide from its amine bond. This is done primarily using large retrofits to funnel emissions into chambers filled with a “capture” solution - a mix of amines, or ammonia-based compounds, that chemically bind with carbon dioxide, producing a stable form that can be separated out from the rest of the flue gas. The study’s MIT co-authors are lead author and postdoc Graham Leverick and graduate student Elizabeth Bernhardt, along with Aisyah Illyani Ismail, Jun Hui Law, Arif Arifutzzaman, and Mohamed Kheireddine Aroua of Sunway University in Malaysia.Ĭarbon-capture technologies are designed to capture emissions, or “flue gas,” from the smokestacks of power plants and manufacturing facilities. That’s where we see a sweet spot, where something like this system could fit.” “Even if we get rid of all our power plants, we need some solutions to deal with the emissions from other industries in the shorter term, before we can fully decarbonize them. But deeply decarbonizing industries like cement or steel production is challenging and will take a longer time,” says study author Betar Gallant, the Class of 1922 Career Development Associate Professor at MIT. “We can and should switch to renewables for electricity production. The study’s results imply that, while these electrochemical systems would probably not work for very dilute environments (for instance, to capture and convert carbon emissions directly from the air), they would be well-suited to the highly concentrated emissions generated by industrial processes, particularly those that have no obvious renewable alternative. Knowledge of this main driver, or “active species,” can help scientists tune and optimize similar electrochemical systems to efficiently capture and convert carbon dioxide in an integrated process. In other words, the more pure carbon dioxide that makes contact with the electrode, the more efficiently the electrode can capture and convert the molecule. The MIT team carried out extensive experiments to determine that driver, and found that, in the end, it came down to the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. Others have reported similar demonstrations, but the mechanisms driving the electrochemical reaction have remained unclear. The process involves using an electrode to attract carbon dioxide released from a sorbent, and to convert it into a reduced, reusable form. In a study appearing today in ACS Catalysis, the researchers reveal the hidden functioning of how carbon dioxide can be both captured and converted through a single electrochemical process. The MIT team is looking to combine the two processes into one integrated and far more energy-efficient system that could potentially run on renewable energy to both capture and convert carbon dioxide from concentrated, industrial sources. Technologies that can capture carbon emissions and convert them into forms that feed back into the production process could help to reduce the overall emissions from these “hard-to-abate” sectors.īut thus far, experimental technologies that capture and convert carbon dioxide do so as two separate processes, that themselves require a huge amount of energy to run. Steel, cement, and chemical manufacturing are especially difficult industries to decarbonize, as carbon and fossil fuels are inherent ingredients in their production. In the race to draw down greenhouse gas emissions around the world, scientists at MIT are looking to carbon-capture technologies to decarbonize the most stubborn industrial emitters.
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