Unlocking The Potential Of CO2 Conversion To Fuels and Chemicals As An Economically Viable Route To CCR

CO₂ conversion to fuels and chemicals has the potential to treat hundreds of millions of tons of CO₂ annually, but so far the process has never been economic.   This paper will consider a simple process for CCR where CO₂ is captured, and subsequently converted to fuels and chemicals using a low temperature, low pressure electrochemical process running on renewable energy.  Previous workers have found that such a process is possible but not economically viable because the selectivity and energy efficiency of the process was modest.   In a recent paper published in Science, we reported new catalysts that raised the selectivity/potential utilization of the CO₂ to over 98% and increased the overall energy efficiency to nearly 80%.   The initial devices were small, but in ARPA-E funded work that started in Feb 2013, we already increased the scale of the device by a factor of 5 and increased the product output by a factor of 100.   The next larger cell prototype has already been built.   These results, and our future plans will be discussed at the poster.