Solar-powered process could decrease carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in 10 years
PhysOrg.com: Lisa Zyga - July 22, 2010
In the Solar Thermal Electrochemical Photo (STEP) carbon
capture process, the sun’s visible light and heat are used to capture
large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to solid
carbon for storage or carbon monoxide for fuel generation. Image copyright:
Stuart Licht, et al. ©2010 American Chemical Society.
(PhysOrg.com) -- By using the sun's visible light and heat to power an electrolysis
cell that captures and converts carbon dioxide from the air, a new technique
could impressively clean the atmosphere and produce fuel feedstock at the same
time. The key advantage of the new solar carbon capture process is that it simultaneously
uses the solar visible and solar thermal components, whereas the latter is usually
regarded as detrimental due to the degradation that heat causes to photovoltaic
materials. However, the new method uses the sun’s heat to convert more
solar energy into carbon than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes
alone.
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The new process, called Solar Thermal Electrochemical Photo (STEP) carbon capture,
was recently suggested theoretically by a team of scientists from George Washington
University and Howard University, both in Washington, DC. Now, in a paper just
published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, the scientists have
experimentally demonstrated the STEP process for the first time.
“The significance of the study is twofold,” Stuart Licht, a chemistry
professor at George Washington University, told PhysOrg.com. “Carbon dioxide,
a non-reactive and normally difficult-to-remove compound, can be easily captured
with solar energy using our new low-energy, lithium carbonate electrolysis STEP
process, and with scale-up, sufficient resources exist for STEP to decrease
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels within 10 years.”
As the scientists explain, the process uses visible sunlight to power an electrolysis
cell for splitting carbon dioxide, and also uses solar thermal energy to heat
the cell in order to decrease the energy required for this conversion process.
The electrolysis cell splits carbon dioxide into either solid carbon (when the
reaction occurs at temperatures between 750°C and 850°C) or carbon monoxide
(when the reaction occurs at temperatures above 950°C). These kinds of temperatures
are much higher than those typically used for carbon-splitting electrolysis
reactions (e.g., 25°C), but the advantage of reactions at higher temperatures
is that they require less energy to power the reaction than at lower temperatures.
The STEP process is the first and only method that incorporates both visible
and thermal energy from the sun for carbon capture. Radiation from the full
solar spectrum - including heat - is not usually considered an advantage in
solar technologies due to heat’s damage to photovoltaics. Even in the
best solar cells, a large part of sunlight is discarded as intrinsically insufficient
to drive solar cells as it is sub-bandgap, and so it is lost as waste heat.
By showing how to take advantage of both the sun’s heat and light for
capturing and splitting carbon dioxide, the STEP process is fundamentally capable
of converting more solar energy than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes
alone. The experiments in this study showed that the technique could capture
carbon dioxide and convert it into carbon with a solar efficiency from 34% to
50%, depending on the thermal component. While carbon could be stored, the production
of carbon monoxide could later be used to synthesize jet, kerosene, and diesel
fuels, with the help of hydrogen generated by STEP water splitting.
“We are exploring the STEP generation of synthetic jet fuel and synthetic
diesel,” Licht said, “and in addition to carbon capture, we are
developing STEP processes to generate the staples predicted in our original
theory, such as a variety of metals and bleach."