Capturing Carbon Dioxide

Carbon dioxide has impacted the world’s climate for millions of years, helping to establish our atmosphere and setting our global thermostat. But when there is too much, there are negative consequences. What if you could use electricity to transform that excess carbon dioxide into more useful materials? We’ll explore in the U.S. National Science Foundation’s “Discovery Files”.
Excess amounts of greenhouse gases collect in our atmosphere where they absorb and radiate heat. Carbon dioxide also collects in the world’s oceans, where it raises the acidity of the water, impacting the creatures that call it home.
But at Case Western Reserve, NSF supported chemical engineers are finding new ways to recycle carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels.
The team developed special room-temperature ionic liquids that, when combined with electricity, start a complex chemical reaction that can effectively repurpose carbon dioxide. They found they could do it with less energy than previous work while avoiding unwanted side reactions.
By developing advanced electrochemical techniques to react carbon dioxide, the team is working to meet carbon reduction goals while creating industrially relevant products. The work will be further refined to better control chemical reactions and may one day be broadly used to convert greenhouse gases into renewable fuel sources.
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