SUMMARY:
A mechanism that turns fossil fuels into renewable power sources, by helping convert that CO2 back into fuel rather than letting it pollute the planet, nanoparticles are promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while allowing for the fossil fuel industry to survive.
Research in the U.S., India, Germany and Australia shows nanoparticles can convert CO2 back into fossil fuels. Nanoparticles can catalyze the transformation of carbon dioxide emissions into carbon neutral fuel.
Nanoparticles are a thousand times smaller than the width of a strand of hair. They have been developed sustainably at low temperatures, can be made at an industrial scale and are low cost, and with minimal environmental impact.
The next steps is finding the big investors needed to bring these new technologies to market. Will ExxonMobil, Chevron and others invest ?
DETAILS:
In February 2020, the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering announced that, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), it had discovered a metal carbide nanoparticle (a compound of carbon and metal) that can convert CO2 into fuel).
In July 2020, scientists at India’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) showed that gold nanoparticles could convert CO2 into methane.
In September 2020, researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany and the University of New South Wales in Australia used nanoparticles to convert CO2 into ethanol and propanol.
In October 2020, Stanford scientists demonstrated that iron oxide nanoparticles combined with ruthenium form a catalyst that assists in breaking CO2 into fuels.
“What our team developed was a scalable and continuous method to prepare nanoparticles,” says Frederick Baddour, a senior scientist at NREL. They did so under conditions that allow scientists to “better control the properties of these materials and develop a better understanding of how they can be tailored to converting CO2 into useful fuels or chemicals,” he adds.
“The amount of methane that you can produce from CO2 is not that high,” says Vivek Polshettiwar, an associate professor of chemical sciences at TIFR and co-author of the study on gold nanoparticles. That’s because the chemical reaction initiated by gold particles only happens on the surface.
USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering has come up with a system that produces more-effective nanoparticle catalysts. Using a process involving a millifluidic reactor — a small-scale chemical reactor system that has a minimal environmental footprint — smaller, more-uniform particles can be produced that are ideal for converting carbon dioxide to hydrocarbons. These nanoparticles have a higher surface area — compared to their mass — through which to work their chemistry magic.
Scientists at Stanford have devised a similar approach for producing cleaner fuel. Sophisticated X-ray characterization technologies helped researchers figure out what the perfect catalyst would be.
“There isn’t a fundamental understanding as to what catalyst is specifically needed for a good reaction,” explains Aisulu Aitbekova, a co-author of the Stanford study.