New tech offers pathway for instantly converting carbon dioxide as it is produced and locking it permanently in a solid state, keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere.
RMIT UNIVERSITY
Australian researchers have developed a smart and super-efficient new way of capturing carbon dioxide and converting it to solid carbon, to help advance the decarbonisation of heavy industries.
The carbon dioxide utilisation technology from researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, is designed to be smoothly integrated into existing industrial processes.
Decarbonisation is an immense technical challenge for heavy industries like cement and steel, which are not only energy-intensive but also directly emit CO2 as part of the production process.
The new technology offers a pathway for instantly converting carbon dioxide as it is produced and locking it permanently in a solid state, keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The research is published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Co-lead researcher Associate Professor Torben Daeneke said the work built on an earlier experimental approach that used liquid metals as a catalyst.
“Our new method still harnesses the power of liquid metals but the design has been modified for smoother integration into standard industrial processes,” Daeneke said.
“As well as being simpler to scale up, the new tech is radically more efficient and can break down CO2 to carbon in an instant.
“We hope this could be a significant new tool in the push towards decarbonisation, to help industries and governments deliver on their climate commitments and bring us radically closer to net zero.”
A provisional patent application has been filed for the technology and researchers have recently signed a $AUD2.6 million agreement with Australian environmental technology company ABR, who are commercialising technologies to decarbonise the cement and steel manufacturing industries.
Co-lead researcher Dr Ken Chiang said the team was keen to hear from other companies to understand the challenges in difficult-to-decarbonise industries and identify other potential applications of the technology.
“To accelerate the sustainable industrial revolution and the zero carbon economy, we need smart technical solutions and effective research-industry collaborations,” Chiang said.
The steel and cement industries are each responsible for about 7% of total global CO2 emissions (International Energy Agency), with both sectors expected to continue growing over coming decades as demand is fuelled by population growth and urbanisation.
Technologies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) have largely focused on compressing the gas into a liquid and injecting it underground, but this comes with significant engineering challenges and environmental concerns. CCS has also drawn criticism for being too expensive and energy-intensive for widespread use.
Daeneke, an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, said the new approach offered a sustainable alternative, with the aim of both preventing CO2 emissions and delivering value-added reutilisation of carbon.
“Turning CO2 into a solid avoids potential issues of leakage and locks it away securely and indefinitely,” he said.
“And because our process does not use very high temperatures, it would be feasible to power the reaction with renewable energy.”
The Australian Government has highlighted CCS as a priority technology for investment in its net zero plan, announcing a $1 billion fund for the development of new low emissions technologies.
How the tech works
The RMIT team, with lead author and PhD researcher Karma Zuraiqi, employed thermal chemistry methods widely used by industry in their development of the new CCS tech.
The “bubble column” method starts with liquid metal being heated to about 100-120C.
Carbon dioxide is injected into the liquid metal, with the gas bubbles rising up just like bubbles in a champagne glass.
As the bubbles move through the liquid metal, the gas molecule splits up to form flakes of solid carbon, with the reaction taking just a split second.
“It’s the extraordinary speed of the chemical reaction we have achieved that makes our technology commercially viable, where so many alternative approaches have struggled,” Chiang said.
The next stage in the research is scaling up the proof-of-concept to a modularized prototype the size of a shipping container, in collaboration with industry partner ABR.
ABR Project Director David Ngo said the RMIT process turns a waste product into a core ingredient in the next generation of cement blends.
“Climate change will not be solved by one single solution, however, the collaboration between ABR and RMIT will yield an efficient and effective technology for our net-zero goals,” Ngo said.
The team is also investigating potential applications for the converted carbon, including in construction materials.
“Ideally the carbon we make could be turned into a value-added product, contributing to the circular economy and enabling the CCS technology to pay for itself over time,” Daeneke said.
The research involved a multi-disciplinary collaboration across engineering and science, with RMIT co-authors Jonathan Clarke-Hannaford, Billy James Murdoch, Associate Professor Kalpit Shah and Professor Michelle Spencer.
‘Direct Conversion of CO2 to Solid Carbon by Liquid Metals’, with collaborators from University of Melbourne and Deakin University, is published in Energy & Environmental Science (DOI: 10.1039/d1ee03283f).
JOURNAL
Energy & Environmental Science
DOI
> “The “bubble column” method starts with liquid metal being heated to about 100-120C.”
The “bubble column” method starts with liquid metal being heated by fossil fuels to about 100-120C.
There. Fixed. Just like solar cells and windmills are inefficient coal batteries.
To reduce the carbon dioxide to carbon (from whence it came) requires input of a greater amount of energy than the burning of it produced (losses in the process, entropy changes and operation of the process (melting metal, etc).
The only avenue is an agent that would work for nothing, like a bacterium. This is unlikely to exist because if it did, there would be no CO2 in the soils or the sea and ultimately the atmosphere. This is one of those “breakthroughs” that we never hear about again.
Comment from today’s ‘Engineer’ (my bold)
“Ian Watson-Walker 19th January 2022 at 1:28 pm
Okay, so it splits the carbon dioxide into solid carbon (requiring ~94kcal/mol) and what? Gallium oxide, Ga2O2 at ~ -260kcal/mole? Indium oxide In2O2 at ~ -222kcal/mol? Either of these reactions should operate happily at 100°-120°C, but both metals are quite expensive so will have to be regenerated from their oxides – and the energy required will be more than double that released when the original carbon was burned. Where will the energy for this metal recovery come from, and at what cost?“
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/co2-conversion-process-ccs-rmit/
They use surplus power from renewables, when it’s producing when it’s not needed and so make it seem wind and solar are useful. What could go wrong?😁👍
Carbon reduction’s biggest problem is energy economics. Coal and the carbon black that comes out of this have about the same energy content.
The average coal plant converts 33% of the energy from coal into electricity. If this carbon reduction process is 100% efficient, a coal plant that used all of it’s output to run this process, would deal with 33% of the CO2 – and have no electricity left to do anything useful.
The same is true with gas plants, just replace 33% with 60%.
I’m not sure why anyone is researching this. It seems pointless if you know high school physics.
In theory, you could use renewables to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, then use more energy to reduce the CO2 to carbon black. But that’d be nutty expensive.
Does it need a pure CO2 stream or can it be used on combustor exhaust?
But then you need an entire SECOND coal plant to power this new C02 conversion process for the 1st plant…-
Exactly, this is a lot of scientese to covet the fact that this is pure, 100%, BS.
Cool, coal
In the future, we will mine asteroids for the necessary galium, indium, copper, and lithium that will make this process viable to save planet Earth.
How will you get to space without fossil fuels ?
Gallium and Indium don’t show up in the 23 most abundant elements of the solar nebula, which is a reasonable proxy for asteroids; albeit copper comes in at number 22. The problem is that the kind of asteroids that have high value (nickel, platinum) will have low concentrations of zinc, gallium, and indium, and are also more abundant than the quasi-crustal asteroids that might have concentrated gallium.
I thought the /s was understood..
Don’t look up!
By definition, removing the oxygen from a CO2 atom will require the same amount of energy as was gained when those oxygen atoms combined with the carbon atom.
In reality, due to the always present inefficiencies inherent in any physical system, it will take much more energy to de-oxygenate that carbon atom then you got from burning it in the first place.
Nearly everyone wants to get something for nothing. Doesn’t happen, honestly.
It sounds as if they are oxidizing a metal at a low temperature, which should generate enough energy to keep he process warm. On the other hand, taking the O2 away from the C has a heck of an energy demand. If it happens, heat has to be added (same as the heat produced by combustion/oxidation which is ~33 MJ/kg). There is no free lunch. But it doesn’t have to be high temp heat.
If the heat source can be ambient, or low tech solar, that’s cool! Do not dismiss clever indirect ways to use low grade energy sources to produce high value fuel (which pure carbon definitely is). This is an interesting development because the process temperature is trivial to achieve. Suppose it can be maintained by the waste heat temperature from the cooling tower side of the power station.
In theory (without looking into the black box) if you have 10 MW of 150C solar-sourced heat in a water pipe, plus the right technology, you could turn most of the waste heat from a coal fired power station into almost 10 MW of carbon fuel. The overall effect would be to raise the energy efficiency of the station. It indirectly turns solar thermal (which is cheap to build to shipyard specs) into electricity. It would turn many high tech generation sources into stranded assets. It could be fun to watch that happen.
The problem, as others have eluded to, is that fossil power plants do not produce pure CO2. CO2 flue gases contain low percentage levels of O2, which will preferentially react with the gallium-indium metal.
I’ve always thought that someone should market a solar-powered machine that generates liquid hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2. Yes, I know the process is not efficient, but it does not have to be since the input power is passive. It’s not a solution to any energy problems, but it would be nice to have a home supply of gasoline on tap.
so the process of converting CO2 to solid carbon would use only “green” energy- we’ll have to refer to the final product as green carbon?
meanwhile, over at Yale: “From Fertilizer to Fuel: Can ‘Green’ Ammonia Be a Climate Fix?”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/from-fertilizer-to-fuel-can-green-ammonia-be-a-climate-fix
The big question is – how much energy will the process consume. Since the gallium oxide formed will have to be reduced to the metal for re-use (last time I checked, 99% pure gallium sold for $3 a gram so no one is going to take the oxide to the landfill) this will probably be the main energy consuming part of the operation.
The energy required to split CO2 into C + O2 will be (at the very least) equal to the energy released by burning carbon in the first place. There is no free lunch in chemistry, just as in human affairs. Most likely the energy consumption will be a significant multiple of the energy released by burning carbon.
Oh, of course (silly me) the energy will be provided by solar panels and wind turbines, which means (as we all know) that it’s clean, renewable and getting cheaper by the day. So that’s all right then. Had me worried for a minute.
Another taxpayer-funded boondoggle.
There seems to be a common problem that these technologist ‘wunderkinds’ don’t differentiate between what is physically possible and what is economically possible.
That ability is one of the main differences between scientists and engineers.
There is educational experience gained.
All of the grad students and post docs working on the project will learn how to swindle taxpayers.
The process doesn’t use much energy, which is how they sell it as viable. Mining the materials for the process is a whole different story.
Does one detect a faint whiff of snake oil here?
It is a reasonable first approximation that it will take as much energy to remove co2 from the atmosphere as was released by putting it there.
More importantly, nature would put it right back in.
https://scc.klimarealistene.com/produkt/control-of-atmospheric-co2-part-2/
https://rclutz.com/2021/11/06/ipcc-data-rising-co2-is-75-natural/
https://rclutz.com/2022/01/19/on-co2-sources-and-isotopes/
Our process does not use very high temperatures
Merely 100 deg C above room temperature.
This method depends on the use of a gallium alloy. From the USGS, “Gallium is not produced in the United States, and demand is satisfied by imports, primarily high-purity material from France and low-purity material from Kazakhstan and Russia.” At least the source isn’t China!
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/gallium-statistics-and-information
If they actually figure out a way to pull and keep CO2 out of the atmosphere we need to get the left out of power NOW because this will kill us.
CO2 was at starvation levels before fossil fuel burning started to raise it to a safer level.
The NASA website’s CO2 page used to say that the minimum level of CO2 for sustaining life was about 400ppm, which we had not yet reached at that point.
Evidence from the last glacial period shows that some species of trees were very hard pressed to survive.
Temperatures and CO2 have been on downward trends, supporting a shrinking biosphere, since the Jurassic.
If not for people, life was headed down. We can do something to keep that descent from continuing, but the eco-freaks are trying to undo us.
So the process produces Carbon.
Wouldn’t Carbon Taxes make it unsustainable?
Wouldn’t it be easier just to pump the CO2 to the bottom of the ocean and let it bubble up from there?
The plankton would love the extra co2 when it floats up to the twilight zone and above, and if there is extra o2 in the same feed then all the other sea creatures would benefit.
Or, the top down approach, which is more natural, works too.
All that CO2 would cause the oceans to boil.
Reminds me of Skyonic, written up in the Details chapter of The Arts of Truth. They actually got $25million from the US to build and operate a ‘Skymine’ using sodium hydroxide to capture CO2. Cheaper than EGaIn LM, but same fatal energy flaws. Based on that fed grant, raised $128 million from the same sort of people who would buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
Skyonic still exists as a subsidiary of Eaton, but not in the carbon capture business.
Wait a second… does this mean the glaciers will increase, and the climate get colder? Perhaps the increased energy consumption to execute this process, will balance it out./sarc
The liquid metal is called EGaIn. It’s 75 wt.% Gallium and 25 wt.% Indium.
The reaction converting CO₂ to elemental carbon produces gallium oxide, Ga₂O₃.
And from where does the energy come for electrolysis of the original metal oxides to produce these expensive pure metallic elements? Ummmm.
The whole enterprise is a very large net energy loss. All cost, no benefit.
One of those involved posted about it on LinkedIn. He looked for scalable and economic advantage using a large array of solar PV.
My response there was, “Fat Chance.”
There’s nothing more idiotic than highly educated idiocy. It’s incredible.
The process to convert SiO2 to Si metal uses coal!
” Decarbonisation tech instantly converts CO2 to solid carbon ”
Coal, graphite or girls best friends?
The law of conservation of energy (Energy cannot be created nor destroyed) has been destroyed. Now we feed the new carbon back to the steam boiler, and hey presto we produce more power than we consume. And now pigs can be seen flying accompanied by unicorns.
Not a problem. I believe the latest Nobel prize for economics went to a group of Keynesian Klowns who ‘demonstrated’ that raising the minimum wage increases employment. In other words, the economic Law of Demand (higher price / lower demand) has now been overturned. This, of course, is just par for the course of post-modernism, which is the the tip of the left’s spear as it continues to march through the institutions.