{"id":111374,"date":"2020-08-15T06:25:32","date_gmt":"2020-08-15T13:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/new-catalyst-efficiently-turns-carbon-dioxide-into-useful-fuels-and-chemicals"},"modified":"2020-08-15T06:25:32","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T13:25:32","slug":"new-catalyst-efficiently-turns-carbon-dioxide-into-useful-fuels-and-chemicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/new-catalyst-efficiently-turns-carbon-dioxide-into-useful-fuels-and-chemicals","title":{"rendered":"New catalyst efficiently turns carbon dioxide into useful fuels and chemicals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-catalyst-efficiently-turns-carbon-dioxide-into-useful-fuels-and-chemicals3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to climb, scientists are looking for new ways of breaking down CO<sub>2<\/sub> molecules to make useful carbon-based fuels, chemicals and other products. Now, a team of Brown University researchers has found a way to fine-tune a copper catalyst to produce complex hydrocarbons\u2014known as C2-plus products\u2014from CO<sub>2<\/sub> with remarkable efficiency.<\/p>\n<p>In a study published in <i>Nature Communications<\/i>, the researchers report a catalyst that can produce C2-plus compounds with up to 72% faradaic efficiency (a measure of how efficiently <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/electrical+energy\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">electrical energy<\/a> is used to convert carbon dioxide into chemical reaction products). That\u2019s far better than the reported efficiencies of other catalysts for C2-plus reactions, the researchers say. And the preparation process can be scaled up to an industrial level fairly easily, which gives the new catalyst potential for use in large-scale CO<sub>2<\/sub> recycling efforts.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere had been reports in the literature of all kinds of different treatments for <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/copper\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">copper<\/a> that could produce these C2-plus with a range of different efficiencies,\u201d said Tayhas Palmore, the a professor of engineering at Brown who co-authored the paper with Ph.D. student Taehee Kim. \u201cWhat Taehee did was a set of experiments to unravel what each of these treatment steps was actually doing to the catalyst in terms of reactivity, which pointed the way to optimizing a catalyst for these multi-carbon compounds.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to climb, scientists are looking for new ways of breaking down CO2 molecules to make useful carbon-based fuels, chemicals and other products. Now, a team of Brown University researchers has found a way to fine-tune a copper catalyst to produce complex hydrocarbons\u2014known as C2-plus products\u2014from CO2 with remarkable [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1497,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-energy","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}