From MIT, a possible solution to allow coal fired power plants to meet the new draconian CO2 emission requirements imposed by the EPA. Hybrid copper-gold nanoparticles convert carbon dioxide to methane CO2=>CH4
May reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants: Instead of being released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide would be circulated through a copper catalyst and turned into methane — which could then power the rest of the plant. Such a self-energizing system could vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired and natural-gas-powered plants.
But copper is temperamental: easily oxidized, as when an old penny turns green. As a result, the metal is unstable, which can significantly slow its reaction with carbon dioxide and produce unwanted byproducts such as carbon monoxide and formic acid.
Now researchers at MIT have come up with a solution that may further reduce the energy needed for copper to convert carbon dioxide, while also making the metal much more stable.
The group has engineered tiny nanoparticles of copper mixed with gold, which is resistant to corrosion and oxidation. The researchers observed that just a touch of gold makes copper much more stable. In experiments, they coated electrodes with the hybrid nanoparticles and found that much less energy was needed for these engineered nanoparticles to react with carbon dioxide, compared to nanoparticles of pure copper.
A paper detailing the results will appear in the journal Chemical Communications; the research was funded by the National Science Foundation. Co-author Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli of MIT says the findings point to a potentially energy-efficient means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from powerplants.
“You normally have to put a lot of energy into converting carbon dioxide into something useful,” says Hamad-Schifferli, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering. “We demonstrated hybrid copper-gold nanoparticles are much more stable, and have the potential to lower the energy you need for the reaction.”
Going small
The team chose to engineer particles at the nanoscale in order to “get more bang for their buck,” Hamad-Schifferli says: The smaller the particles, the larger the surface area available for interaction with carbon dioxide molecules. “You could have more sites for the CO2 to come and stick down and get turned into something else,” she says.
Hamad-Schifferli worked with Yang Shao-Horn, the Gail E. Kendall Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, postdoc Zichuan Xu and Erica Lai ’14. The team settled on gold as a suitable metal to combine with copper mainly because of its known properties. (Researchers have previously combined gold and copper at much larger scales, noting that the combination prevented copper from oxidizing.)
To make the nanoparticles, Hamad-Schifferli and her colleagues mixed salts containing gold into a solution of copper salts. They heated the solution, creating nanoparticles that fused copper with gold. Xu then put the nanoparticles through a series of reactions, turning the solution into a powder that was used to coat a small electrode.
To test the nanoparticles’ reactivity, Xu placed the electrode in a beaker of solution and bubbled carbon dioxide into it. He applied a small voltage to the electrode, and measured the resulting current in the solution. The team reasoned that the resulting current would indicate how efficiently the nanoparticles were reacting with the gas: If CO2 molecules were reacting with sites on the electrode — and then releasing to allow other CO2 molecules to react with the same sites — the current would appear as a certain potential was reached, indicating regular “turnover.” If the molecules monopolized sites on the electrode, the reaction would slow down, delaying the appearance of the current at the same potential.
The team ultimately found that the potential applied to reach a steady current was much smaller for hybrid copper-gold nanoparticles than for pure copper and gold — an indication that the amount of energy required to run the reaction was much lower than that required when using nanoparticles made of pure copper.
Going forward, Hamad-Schifferli says she hopes to look more closely at the structure of the gold-copper nanoparticles to find an optimal configuration for converting carbon dioxide. So far, the team has demonstrated the effectiveness of nanoparticles composed of one-third gold and two-thirds copper, as well as two-thirds gold and one-third copper.
Hamad-Schifferli acknowledges that coating industrial-scale electrodes partly with gold can get expensive. However, she says, the energy savings and the reuse potential for such electrodes may balance the initial costs.
“It’s a tradeoff,” Hamad-Schifferli says. “Gold is obviously more expensive than copper. But if it helps you get a product that’s more attractive like methane instead of carbon dioxide, and at a lower energy consumption, then it may be worth it. If you could reuse it over and over again, and the durability is higher because of the gold, that’s a check in the plus column.”
Written by: Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office
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Steve R said on April 11, 2012 at 5:55 pm:
Translation: Methane (natural gas) + carbon (coal) yielding gasoline
An initial step is mentioned by this company:
http://www.carbonsciences.com/
2011 article about their “dry reforming catalyst” and process here:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/06/csi-20110606.html
The relevant initial US patent, issued in 2011, describing the “nickel-cobalt bimetallic catalyst”:
http://www.google.com/patents/US7985710?dq=Hui+Wang+saskatchewan+methane+reforming
Credit for company link to fred berple, found in comment on WUWT here. Where it’s mentioned as the process uses carbon dioxide as the additional carbon source. You know, back during one of those other times when CO₂ to fuel to keep the Greens happy was being discussed?
Now that I’m thinking about it….
Install a “Carbon Buster Booster Pump” in the side of the Smoke Stack.
This is that American Smog Pump Trick where you just pump air into the exhaust air stream to make it look like you are lowering the numbers. It’s all about numbers isn’t it ?
If this were both possible and true then you should easily be able to start the process from nothing but CO2. Coal/natural gas is not needed. Since this has no scale factor, and since the efficiency is now 100%, anyone with a cattle farm and run their entire operation with nothing but a shovel.
Sounds like 100% BS to me.
Septic Matthew/Matthew R Marler says:
“I think you have it about right, but the methane goes back to the power plant. So the result is not quite as bad as you portray.”
Have to disagree, I think it would be as bad as I portray. The methane can’t go back to that power plant because its a coal plant, plus it wouldn’t look PC (politically correct) because now it doesn’t have the appearance of saving any CO2 from being released by the plant.
The whole idea of making methane from CO2, from an energy perspective, makes absolutely ZERO sense and it actually increases CO2 emmisions per MW of power provided to the consumer. It’s ALL about appearances, and sending the methane back to the plant is a BAD appearance.
Soon as I saw this, I said perpetual motion. Be careful promoting this! you could lose credibility.
It looks like a lot of readers have picked up onthis!
Even if conversion from CO2 to CH4 was not an endothermic reaction and even if the second law of thermodynamics did not apply, Converting carbon dioxide to methane and then using the methane for energy production elsewhere which the article assumes will happen, just moves the CO2 production from the power plant to elsewhere. It would allow the plant to meet the emission requirements but just move them elsewhere. Exactly what a driver of an ’emissions free’ electric car does.
Let’s see, electric car owner shifts his “carbon” to the power plant, and the power shifts it’s “carbon” to…where?
duncanmackenzie says:
April 11, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Please, duncan–don’t say that or the EPA will wake up and find a way to stop natural gas production, too!
/sarc
MIT arent these the same folks that gave us “Wheel of Climate?” 🙂 http://www.desmogblog.com/mit-researchers-unveil-climate-roulette-wheel… Hard to take anything that comes out of MIT seriously after that
if we could just somehow tweak this reaction so that it turned out Nitromethane, the NHRA could go green!
if we could just tweak the reaction to produce Nitromethane, the NHRA could go green, and wouldn’t that be a PR triumph?
/white smoke
Grant Shirreffs says
Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like a perpetual motion machine?
No matter how good your catalyst, if the reaction is CO2 + ? => CH4 +?, and you can then burn the CH4 to give CO2+energy, then you must put more energy into the catalyzed reaction than you get from the subsequent burn.
A possible reaction would be C02 + 2H2O => CH4 + 2O2. The opposite of combustion of methane. In the case of a methane plant you’d effectivly be trying to create a perpetual motion machine.
In the case of a coal plant you most likely need to add stream. The other issue would be if there’s anything in existing coal power plants which uses methane in the first place.
Jimbo says:
WTF! The propaganda has taken a deep root indeed. Co2 used by plants – very deadly. Greenhouse growers please reduce that 1,000 ppm to a safer 350ppm.
Strange how few of these supposedly clever people have though about feeding the exhaust from a power plant into a greenhouse…
I hope we will eventually learn that this is an April Fool’s joke, although it is dated April 11. But otherwise we would have to conclude that MIT has joined the ranks of nature (the magazine) when it comes to science.
You can only have catalysts catalyzing a reaction from low energy (CO2) to high energy (CH4) when that delta of energy is provided by something else. Maybe by burning coal?
This has got to be a joke. A oor one, though.
That’s electrocalatysis, nothing more! If you get some electricity by the using of reaction in the fuel cell, you may reserve that reaction if you put some electricityl into the system!
So obviously (for a given meaning of ‘obvious’) this is useless as (1) it requires more energy to run than it would get from burning the methane and (2) you get either methane or CO2 as outputs which doesn’t help with the EPA ‘pollution’ warning.
More interesting though – isn’t this a way of generating hydrocarbons from electricity? So plug some of these into a nuclear power plant and you can generate stuff to run cars on, far more useful than trying to run cars on the relatively low power density of electric batteries.
Mark says:
Strange how few of these supposedly clever people have though about feeding the exhaust from a power plant into a greenhouse…
It does happen. Tomato growers are starting to use CHP systems to generate electriciy using the waste output to provide CO2 in their greenhouses.
http://www.britishtomatoes.co.uk/environment/index.html
Interesting research and potentially useful, perhaps for making high value products where energy input is of little or no concern – pharmaceuticals maybe.
But, it’s such a shame these clever people then go on to reveal either how dumb (poorly educated) they are and demonstrate how far removed from reality they are by not considering the energy ins and outs of what they’re doing.
Is it because the ‘drooling old farts’ mentioned elsewhere on here recently have reared up a generation so used to cheap and abundant energy that they (the youngsters) don’t even think about it. Then they have the arrogance to suggest that only ‘climate scientists’ can speak about the weather. Time for a reality check methinks.
Grant Shirreffs on April 11, 2012 at 2:16 pm said:
Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like a perpetual motion machine?
————-
Yep. While the chemistry is interesting the application as its described is bogus. You would need an external source of energy to run the reaction that converts CO2 to methane..
Photovoltaics would be a plausible source. If that was done you would in effect get twice or more energy per unit of CO2 released to the atmosphere.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper on my taxes to just vote someone else in who will put the EPA on its ear? At this point in time, a dog would be preferrable to what we have in the White House. My dog is really smart. He knows what a flashlight is for. That’s more than I can say about Obama. He seems confused about what CO2 is for. So I deduce that he hasn’t a clue about a flashlight.
JuergenK on April 11, 2012 at 2:43 pm said:
@Dear Grant
Did you read the whole thing?
Catalysts or enzymes (the biologic pendents of catalysts) do reduce the energy necessary for transformation of a certain molecule into
———–
JuergenK You are sort of correct. The catalyst speeds up the reaction by reducing the energy barrier between products and reactants. However the catalyst, or any catalyst, has no influence on the actual energy difference between reactants and final end products.
The CO2 to methane reaction described here has the same energy requirement as the reverse Methane to CO2 reaction so you gain nothing. To be useful this process needs an additional energy source of magnitude at least equal to that released by the combustion process.
“Natural gas is so abundant that the intentional production of methane is relatively rare”
says wiki, so it must be true!
Only alarmists would be interested in this process since using the methane expensively produced by CO2 capture is just going to release the CO2 back into circulation. Isn’t it?
Dr Burns on April 11, 2012 at 3:39 pm said:
Why not just go directly from coal to town gas and skip the CO2 generation ? It was all the rage when I was a boy. I still remember the gas spheres and filthy gas works.
Coal + water + high pressure = 50% hydrogen + 20% methane.
————
In my part of the world it had a large proportion of carbon monoxide. Quite dangerous but it makes more sense from a chemical point of view.
Steve R on April 11, 2012 at 5:55 pm said:
As long as we are on the topic of catalysts…Is there anyone here that can think of a catalyst to drive this reaction?:
9CH4 + 7C => 2C8H18
————
Sounds similar to what the petroleum industry does all the time. I think this is called a reforming catalyst and it’s used to tweak the output of gasoline.
@ur momisugly Paulo Z
“Because it would require a source of hydrogen and hydrogen can come only from a catalysed partial oxidation of methane or from the electrolysis of water.”
++++++++
Hydrogen can be liberated from coal using the water gas shift reaction by spraying water on hot coal. That involves neither methane nor electrolysis.
I agree there is no net gain in energy, but there are other ways one might get lots of H2. If the method allows a fuel to be piped to another plant and burned at a lower CO2/MJ level, it might beat the 1000 pound rule. Technically the liquid fuel is not an ’emission’ even though it contains carbon. If they are going to make stupid rules, then people will find stupid and perhaps energy inefficient ways to get around them. A combined coal-water power plant (1/2 – 1/2) could have net emissons under of 920 pounds.
No mention of detecting Ch3OH/CH4!!? Or did I miss something in my scan? Certainly other non-gold/noble metal alloys will also work in this application. Alloys of Cu/Co on a ZrO2 support immediately come to mind.