Room Temperature Conversion of CO2 to CO: A New Way to Synthesize Hydrocarbons

Room Temperature Conversion of CO2 to CO: A New Way to Synthesize Hydrocarbons

Credit: NIST


Illustration of a novel room-temperature process to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) by converting the molecule into carbon monoxide (CO). Instead of using heat, the nanoscale method relies on the energy from surface plasmons (violet hue) that are excited when a beam of electrons (vertical beam) strikes aluminum nanoparticles resting on graphite, a crystalline form of carbon. In the presence of the graphite, aided by the energy derived from the plasmons, carbon dioxide molecules (black dot bonded to two red dots) are converted to carbon monoxide (black dot bonded to one red dot. The hole under the violet sphere represents the graphite etched away during the chemical reaction CO2 + C = 2CO.



Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have demonstrated a room-temperature method that could significantly reduce carbon dioxide levels in fossil-fuel power plant exhaust, one of the main sources of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.


Although the researchers demonstrated this method in a small-scale, highly controlled environment with dimensions of just nanometers (billionths of a meter), they have already come up with concepts for scaling up the method and making it practical for real-world applications.


In addition to offering a potential new way of mitigating the effects of climate change, the chemical process employed by the scientists also could reduce costs and energy requirements for producing liquid hydrocarbons and other chemicals used by industry. That’s because the method’s byproducts include the building blocks for synthesizing methane, ethanol and other carbon-based compounds used in industrial processing.


The team tapped a novel energy source from the nanoworld to trigger a run-of-the-mill chemical reaction that eliminates carbon dioxide. In this reaction, solid carbon latches onto one of the oxygen atoms in carbon diox ..

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