Rice study helps advance conversion with specially designed polymer templates.
Rice study helps advance conversion with specially designed polymer templates.
Technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere keep improving, but solutions for what to do with the carbon once it’s captured are harder to come by.
The lab of Rice University materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and collaborators developed a way to wrest the carbon from carbon dioxide and affix it to hydrogen atoms, forming methane ⎯ a valuable fuel and industrial feedstock. According to the study published in Advanced Materials, the method relies on electrolysis and catalysts developed by grafting isolated copper atoms on two-dimensional polymer templates.
“Electricity-driven carbon dioxide conversion can produce a large array of industrial fuels and feedstocks via different pathways,” said Soumyabrata Roy, a research scientist in the Ajayan lab and the study’s lead author. “However, carbon dioxide-to-methane conversion involves an eight-step pathway that raises significant challenges for selective and energy-efficient methane production.
Read more at Rice University
Image: Soumyabrata Roy is a Rice University postdoctoral research associate in materials science and nanoengineering and the study’s lead author. (Photo by Gustavo Raskosky/Rice University)
