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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."
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
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.
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.
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?
'Now'? It has been a transport channel for a lot of things, including carbon dioxide, for an absurdly long time. You can even, on occasion, see water vapor being transported in the atmosphere without any special equipment.