Amid the challenge of climate change, the whole world is seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But a new study by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may make it easier to capturing carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere to transform it into useful products as fuel or raw material.
The team of engineers developed a new, more efficient electrode design to be used in these electrochemical conversion systems. The article was published this Wednesday (13), in the journal Nature Communications.
“It’s not that we can’t do this — we can do this,” explained MIT mechanical engineering professor Kripa Varanasi, one of the study’s authors. “But the question is how can we make this efficient? How can we make this cost-effective?”
For the research, engineers focused on converting CO2 into ethylene, a chemical that can be transformed into various plastics and even fuels, but the same approach could have been used to produce methane, methanol, carbon monoxide and others. The scientists’ goal is to make the conversion as cheap or cheaper than the commercial price of ethylene – currently around US$1,000.00 per ton.
To increase the efficiency of the transformation process, they used a plastic material – PTFE, or Teflon – coated with a series of conductive copper wires. The challenge now is to make the conversion of CO2 into other products economically viable on a large scale.
“Considering that we will need to process gigatons of CO2 annually to combat the CO2 challenge, we really need to think about solutions that can be scaled,” Varanasi said.
This content was originally published in Invention can facilitate the transformation of CO2 into useful products on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil

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