Science Daily May 3, 2023 About 90% of the acetic acid market is for feedstock in the manufacture of paints, coatings, adhesives, and other products. Production at this scale is primarily derived from methanol, which comes from fossil fuels. An international team of researchers (China, Canada, New Zealand, USA – Northwestern University) has created acetic acid out of carbon monoxide derived from captured carbon. Their process consisted of capturing CO2 and passing it through an electrolyzer where it reacted with water and electrons to form carbon monoxide. Gaseous CO was then passed through a second electrolyzer, where another catalyst transformed […]
Tag Archives: Carbon capture
Stripping carbon from the atmosphere might be needed to avoid dangerous warming—but it’s a deeply uncertain prospect
Phys.org November 25, 2022 The target to limit global warming to 1.5℃ this century remains but it is unlikely we’ll meet it. Attention is turning to other options for climate action, including large-scale carbon removal. Proponents argue carbon removal is required at a massive scale to avoid dangerous warming. However, successfully stripping carbon from the atmosphere at the scale our planet requires is a deeply uncertain prospect. The IPCC said in a report this year that large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal was “unavoidable” if the world is to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. According to the IPCC report in […]
Diazotrophs are overlooked contributors to carbon and nitrogen export to the deep ocean
Phys.org October 17, 2022 Diazotrophs are widespread microorganisms that alleviate nitrogen limitation in 60% of our oceans, thereby regulating marine productivity. Yet, the group-specific contribution of diazotrophs to organic matter export has not been quantified. An international team of researchers (France, Israel, Spain) examined the fate of five groups of globally distributed diazotrophs by using an original combination of mesopelagic particle sampling devices across the subtropical South Pacific Ocean. They demonstrated that cyanobacterial and non-cyanobacterial diazotrophs are exported down to 1000 m depth. Phycoerythrin-containing UCYN-B and UCYN-C-like cells were recurrently found embedded in large organic aggregates or organized into clusters of […]
A simple, cheap material for carbon capture, perhaps from tailpipes
Science Daily August 5, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkely, Stanford University, Texas A&M) has demonstrated new sustainable, solid-state, polyamine-appended, cyanuric acid–stabilized melamine nano porous networks (MNNs) via dynamic combinatorial chemistry (DCC) at the kilogram scale toward effective and high-capacity carbon dioxide capture. Polyamine-appended MNNs reaction mechanisms with carbon dioxide were elucidated with double-level DCC where two-dimensional heteronuclear chemical shift correlation nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy was performed to demonstrate the interatomic interactions. They distinguished ammonium carbamate pairs and a mix of ammonium carbamate and carbamic acid during carbon dioxide chemisorption. The coordination of polyamine and cyanuric […]
Low-cost battery-like device absorbs CO2 emissions while it charges
Science Daily May 19, 2022 The most advanced carbon capture technologies currently require large amounts of energy and they are expensive. Researchers in the UK have designed a supercapacitor that consists of two electrodes of positive and negative charge. They found that alternating from a negative to a positive voltage improved the supercapacitor’s ability to capture carbon. When the electrodes become charged, the negative plate draws in the CO2 gas, while ignoring other emissions, such as oxygen, nitrogen, and water. Using this method, the supercapacitor both captures carbon and stores energy. They have developed a technique to understand the mechanism […]