(737b) Coupling Biomass Conversion with CO2 Reduction in Hot Temperature Water

The global carbon balance is broken by anthropogenic activities as humans consume fossil fuels and release a significant amount of CO₂ within several hundred years, while the fossil fuel formation takes hundreds of millions of years.  To mitigate the imbalance of global carbon, it is appealing to develop technologies that can efficiently and rapidly convert CO₂ into fuels and chemicals without a high excess energy input.  Herein our approach is to couple biomass conversion with CO₂ reduction over heterogeneous catalysts under hydrothermal environment.  A variety of biomass feedstocks and metal and metal oxide catalysts were evaluated for the simultaneous biomass partial oxidation and CO₂ reduction. In presence of CO₂, increase of yields of the carboxylic acids was observed and a high formic acid yield was attributed to CO₂ reduction.  The results suggest that CO₂ reduction coupling with biomass partial oxidation is an attractive alternative to CO₂ capture and sequestration processes.