In the race to draw down greenhouse gas emissions around the world, scientists at MIT are looking to carbon-capture technologies to decarbonize the most stubborn industrial emitters.
In the race to draw down greenhouse gas emissions around the world, scientists at MIT are looking to carbon-capture technologies to decarbonize the most stubborn industrial emitters.
Steel, cement, and chemical manufacturing are especially difficult industries to decarbonize, as carbon and fossil fuels are inherent ingredients in their production. Technologies that can capture carbon emissions and convert them into forms that feed back into the production process could help to reduce the overall emissions from these “hard-to-abate” sectors.
But thus far, experimental technologies that capture and convert carbon dioxide do so as two separate processes, that themselves require a huge amount of energy to run. The MIT team is looking to combine the two processes into one integrated and far more energy-efficient system that could potentially run on renewable energy to both capture and convert carbon dioxide from concentrated, industrial sources.
Read more at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Researchers uncovered how carbon dioxide can be both captured and converted through a single electrochemical process in which an electrode, like the one pictured covered in bubbles, is used to attract carbon dioxide released from a sorbent and convert it into carbon neutral products. (Photo Credit: John Freidah/MIT MechE)
