(500d) Material and Process Optimization of Reactive Carbon Capture to Methanol Using Cu-ZnO-Al2O3 Dual Function Materials

Reactive carbon capture (RCC), an integrated CO₂ capture and conversion process that does not require generating a purified CO₂ stream, is an attractive carbon management strategy that can reduce costs and energy requirements associated with traditionally separate capture and conversion processes. Dual function materials (DFMs) comprised of co-supported sorbent and catalytic sites have emerged as a promising material design to enable RCC. DFMs have been extensively studied for methane production, but the noncompetitive economics of renewable methane necessitate the development of DFMs that can target more valuable, useful, and versatile products, such as methanol (MeOH).

Herein, we report the development and evaluation of modified Cu-Zn-Al (CZA) mixed oxide DFMs for the combined capture and conversion of CO₂ to MeOH. Previously, we demonstrated that a CZA DFM doped with a potassium sorbent (K/CZA) had promising performance with high conversion of adsorbed CO₂ (94.4%) and methanol selectivity (46%), leading to higher MeOH production (59.0 µmol/g_DFM) than the parent CZA or Ca/CZA DFM. In this study, we present a continuation of our efforts on the improvement of the DFM composition (alkali identity and loading) and process conditions (adsorption temperature, hydrogenation parameters) through a full factorial design of experiments, targeting higher MeOH production.