Researchers may gave discovered a cheap and easy way to convert carbon dioxide into methanol, which is a primary ingredient in plastics, adhesives, and can also be used as a fuel. The new method will also produce fewer side-products.
"Methanol is processed in huge factories at very high pressures using hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from natural gas," study lead author Felix Studt, a staff scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory said in a Stanford University news release. "We are looking for materials than can make methanol from clean sources under low-pressure conditions, while generating low amounts of carbon monoxide."
The researchers are working to create a methanol-production technique is carbon-neuteral and non-polluting and employs clean carbon.
"Imagine if you could synthesize methanol using hydrogen from renewable sources, such as water split by sunlight, and carbon dioxide captured from power plants and other industrial smokestacks," o-author Jens Nørskov, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, said in the news release. "Eventually we would also like to make higher alcohols, such as ethanol and propanol, which, unlike methanol, can be directly added to gasoline today."
About 65 million metric tons of methanol are produced every year globally. For methanol production natural gas and water are converted into synthesis gas ("syngas"),which is then converted into methanol in a high-pressure process that employs a "catalyst made of copper, zinc and aluminum."
"We spent a lot of time studying methanol synthesis and the industrial process," Studt said. "It took us about three years to figure out how the process works and to identify the active sites on the copper-zinc-aluminum catalyst that synthesize methanol."
The researchers began a hunt for a low-pressure catalyst that could be used as an alternative.
"The technique is known as computational materials design," Stanf Nørskov said. "You get ideas for new functional materials based entirely on computer calculations. There is no trial-and-error in the lab first. You use your insight and enormous computer power to identify new and interesting materials, which can then be tested experimentally."
The researcher found the most promising material was a compound made from nickel-gallium.
"You want to make methanol, not carbon monoxide," co-author Ib Chorkendorff said in the news release. "You also want a catalyst that's stable and doesn't decompose. The lab tests showed that nickel-gallium is, in fact, a very stable solid."
The new method gives researchers high hopes, but still needs some work.
"We'd like to make the catalyst a little more clean," Chorkendorff said.. "If it contains just a few nanoparticles of pure nickel, the output drops quite a bit, because pure nickel is lousy at synthesizing methanol. In fact, it makes all sorts of chemical byproducts that you don't want."
