(538u) Current Technology Development for CO2 Utilization into Synthetic Fuels: Challenges and Opportunities

Retrieving fuels and chemicals efficiently from CO2 emission is a major key technology to accomplish the mission of "carbon peaking and carbon neutralization". Although CO2-based fuels offer an exciting and attractive perspective for a sustainable industrial combustible and green environment, this field is limited, as the ultimately achievable efficiencies remain insufficient. CO2 is a highly stable, noncombustible molecule, and its thermodynamic stability makes its activation energy demanding and challenging. To this end, it is necessary to develop new ideas and new technologies that cross multiple fields, as well as comprehensive strategies to vigorously solve system integration and key issues associated with the current processes. Owing to limitations in traditional approaches, there have been developed many novel technologies such as photochemical, biochemical, electrochemical, plasma-chemical, and solar thermochemical. They are currently being used for CO2 capture, sequestration, and utilization to transform CO2 into valuable products such as syngas, methane, methanol, formic acid, as well as fossil fuel consumption reduction. This study summarizes different traditional and novel thermal technologies used in CO2 conversion with detailed information about their working principle, types, currently adopted methods, developments, conversion rates, products formed, catalysts, and operating conditions. Moreover, a comparison of these novel technologies in terms of distinctive key features such as conversion rate, yield, use of earth metals, renewable energy, investment, and operating cost has been provided to have a useful review for future research direction.