A group of researchers including Prof. Marc Fontecave, holder of the Chemistry of Biological Processes Chair at the Collège de France and Director of the Chemistry of Biological Processes Laboratory (UMR 8229), has achieved a breakthrough in carbon dioxide recycling that could significantly reduce fossil fuel use and emissions in the future.
Every year, the billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere exacerbate the growing threat of climate change. Currently, an electrolysis-based approach uses renewable energy to convert wasteCO2 into fuels, but most of the addedCO2 is lost in the process or ends up in the atmosphere.
Marc Fontecave and Alessandro Perazio, researchers at the Collège de France, and Charles Creissen, researcher at Keele University in the UK, have discovered a new method for recycling " almost all " of carbon dioxide into usable fuels. The results were published on June 26 in the journal ACS Energy Letters.
Marc Fontecave and Charles Creissen report : " Electrolysis is a promising method, but the challenge we face is that currently most of theCO2 added to these systems is lost, as it is either mixed with the fuels or trapped in the solution, making it difficult and expensive to separate.
We have discovered a unique solution to this problem : theCO2 trapped in the solution is converted back into gas, which is then looped back into our system and reacted. This means that virtually all theCO2 we introduce into the reactor comes out in the form of usable fuels. This approach has never been demonstrated before, and would considerably reduce the cost of the process.
Our experiments show that fuels can be generated in this way with virtually no additionalCO2 wasted, making it a cost-effective, emissions-reducing method of creating "electrofuels". In the future, these systems could enable us to produce fuels fromCO2 without any waste, so that we can use plastics, power a house and drive a car sustainably. "
