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MIT Develops New Type of Battery That Gobbles Up Carbon Dioxide (scitechdaily.com)
MIT has developed a new type of battery that could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. "Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges," reports SciTechDaily. From the report: While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. The findings are described today in the journal Joule, in a paper by assistant professor of mechanical engineering Betar Gallant, doctoral student Aliza Khurram, and postdoc Mingfu He. [...] Gallant and her co-workers, whose expertise has to do with nonaqueous (not water-based) electrochemical reactions such as those that underlie lithium-based batteries, looked into whether carbon-dioxide-capture chemistry could be put to use to make carbon-dioxide-loaded electrolytes -- one of the three essential parts of a battery -- where the captured gas could then be used during the discharge of the battery to provide a power output.
This approach is different from releasing the carbon dioxide back to the gas phase for long-term storage, as is now used in carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. That field generally looks at ways of capturing carbon dioxide from a power plant through a chemical absorption process and then either storing it in underground formations or chemically altering it into a fuel or a chemical feedstock. Instead, this team developed a new approach that could potentially be used right in the power plant waste stream to make material for one of the main components of a battery. While interest has grown recently in the development of lithium-carbon-dioxide batteries, which use the gas as a reactant during discharge, the low reactivity of carbon dioxide has typically required the use of metal catalysts. Not only are these expensive, but their function remains poorly understood, and reactions are difficult to control. By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode. The key is to preactivate the carbon dioxide by incorporating it into an amine solution. "What we've shown for the first time is that this technique activates the carbon dioxide for more facile electrochemistry," Gallant says. "These two chemistries -- aqueous amines and nonaqueous battery electrolytes -- are not normally used together, but we found that their combination imparts new and interesting behaviors that can increase the discharge voltage and allow for sustained conversion of carbon dioxide."
The approach reportedly works, producing a lithium-carbon dioxide battery with voltage and capacity that are competitive with that of state-of-the-art lithium-gas batteries," reports SciTechDaily. "Moreover, the amine acts as a molecular promoter that is not consumed in the reaction."
This approach is different from releasing the carbon dioxide back to the gas phase for long-term storage, as is now used in carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. That field generally looks at ways of capturing carbon dioxide from a power plant through a chemical absorption process and then either storing it in underground formations or chemically altering it into a fuel or a chemical feedstock. Instead, this team developed a new approach that could potentially be used right in the power plant waste stream to make material for one of the main components of a battery. While interest has grown recently in the development of lithium-carbon-dioxide batteries, which use the gas as a reactant during discharge, the low reactivity of carbon dioxide has typically required the use of metal catalysts. Not only are these expensive, but their function remains poorly understood, and reactions are difficult to control. By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode. The key is to preactivate the carbon dioxide by incorporating it into an amine solution. "What we've shown for the first time is that this technique activates the carbon dioxide for more facile electrochemistry," Gallant says. "These two chemistries -- aqueous amines and nonaqueous battery electrolytes -- are not normally used together, but we found that their combination imparts new and interesting behaviors that can increase the discharge voltage and allow for sustained conversion of carbon dioxide."
The approach reportedly works, producing a lithium-carbon dioxide battery with voltage and capacity that are competitive with that of state-of-the-art lithium-gas batteries," reports SciTechDaily. "Moreover, the amine acts as a molecular promoter that is not consumed in the reaction."
Now the hardest, that seems almost impossible to battery inventions, part starts: to get it on the store shelves.
America Fuck Yeah!
Sing along: Silver bullets, silver bullets, silver bullets one and all. All our silver bullets save us ever more. There were many, more and more, but all the silver bullets, gone of yore, have proved to be just a bore.
It would be really interesting to see if this kind of battery tech could be used in sealed suits (like space suits, or diving rebreather units) to generate some small amount of power just from captured CO2 in exhalation.
I'm guessing the amount would be so low it's probably not worthwhile...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The reaction would produce lithium carbonate, which is used in the treatment of bipolar disorder.
We gotta pollute the world with co2 before we can use said co2 to power our vehicles
so the atmosphere is just a transport channel now?
It not only sucks up CO2, it convert it to hype and fully charged buzzwords. And don't forget that multiple cells can be linked in a self-driving IoT blockchain.
any questions ?
thanks again..
This. This is how reality is. Just as with the supposed population bomb or the predicted running out of resources or food which doomsayers of the 60s and 70s were hawking, along with their radical solutions which would have necessitated a totalitarian government's intervention, the global warming ptoblem will be solved by technology, not humans voercing humans.
relevant background:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon–Ehrlich_wager
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/great-moments-in-failed-predictions/
That's a cute idea, if it makes batteries less expensive or more efficient. It won't, though, make even a tiny dent in the massive amounts of CO2 that humans are pushing into the atmosphere. Each passenger car puts out an average of 9,737.44 lb/year (https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi/P100EVXP.PDF?Dockey=P100EVXP.PDF).
I don't respond to AC's.
These sorts of processes will likely produce as much co2 as they remove because of the fuel required to mine and transport the reactants to the point of use. Want cheap reliable energy? Go nuclear and build breeder reactors.
Whether this is it (or one of them) or not ... any solution will be technological, in this vein.
The solution will not be political and social badgering to make the hoi poloi give up modern life.
Capacity, Cost & Safety. If the reasearchers can prove superior results on these points it is a go!
My pet polar bear had this problem. It made him wander wander from pole to pole having sex with any male or female polar bear along the way.
How the hell are you going to convince joe-six-pack to give up their hydrocarbons if you do this?! #sarcasm
Do it's made of lithium metal, carbon and an electrolyte the researchers designed. Ok i understand lithium metal and carbon but... what are electrolytes?
I wonder if they'll capture enough to make a significant weight difference, and come marked with the exact weight of the battery, so you can throw it on a scale and check its remaining capacity that way. (Assuming also that increase in weight corresponds to diminished electrical voltage or ability to supply current at or near the rated voltage, of course.) It would be kinda neat. This would give rise to a new iteration of an old saying:
There's lies, damned lies, and battery CO2-capture-capacity-remaining specifications.
Hehehe....
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
And keep using them up at 100 billion tons of batteries each year, then we can stop thinking about cutting back on fossil fuels, we'll only have to stop increasing their use! So easy!
And most of that list is bollocks: they aren't the prediction. Most of the rest are not yet failed predictions (they are still in the future) and the very few which DID fail were the extreme outlier claims. Meanwhile every single prediction made by the WTFUWT "scientists" has failed.
Every.
Single.
One.
It sounds like the fossil fuel industry is putting out $millions in research grants to anyone who can produce headline-grabbing technologies that make fossil fuels sound less bad. And I guess universities are stepping up to cash in on these research grants. Who knows, maybe something good will come out of this through serendipity? Perhaps some useful scientific discovery?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Great, so now we're going to see a proliferation of devices that suck up the CO2 because, reasons, with no thought to the fact that it will cause mass starvation among our plant friends.
Will no one give thought to the poor trees that will be killed by this?
Parsing through the minefield of buzzwords implies a couple things:
The liquid CO2 reacts with some (hopefully cheap) metal ion in the electrolyte while the battery discharges. If the battery is making lithium carbonate, it is pretty much useless.
The metal ions in the electrolyte would have to be replenished and carbonate precipitate would have to be cleared out.
Aside from the current limit of ~10 charge/discharge cycles, producing the consumable electrolyte is probably power-intensive, defeating the purpose of carbon capture.