Battery made directly from power plant captured carbon dioxide

MIT has made a battery 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.

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.

Currently, power plants equipped with carbon capture systems generally use up to 30 percent of the electricity they generate just to power the capture, release, and storage of carbon dioxide. Anything that can reduce the cost of that capture process, or that can result in an end product that has value, could significantly change the economics of such systems, the researchers say.

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.

The new approach 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.

15 thoughts on “Battery made directly from power plant captured carbon dioxide”

  1. Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to be dispersed because we’ve been ignorant of their value. – R. Buckminster Fuller

  2. Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to be dispersed because we’ve been ignorant of their value. – R. Buckminster Fuller

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  6. Everyone should Check Out the HAZAR process listed as HZR on the Australian Stock Exchange ASX it converts Methane to Hydrogen and Graphite.

  7. Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to be dispersed because we’ve been ignorant of their value. – R. Buckminster Fuller

  8. Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to be dispersed because we’ve been ignorant of their value. – R. Buckminster Fuller

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