Toshiba claims to have developed the world's most efficient electrocatalyst technology for converting carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide for use in fuels and chemicals.
The catalyst operates at room temperature and can reportedly process up to a ton of CO2 a year, and is the first of its kind to be achieved through stacking catalyst electrodes.
Read more: Skybrators: bladeless turbines hope to reinvent wind energy
The company claims its stacking technology specifically eliminates lower speeds and dramatically improves CO2 conversion rate.
The new approach increases processing speed per unit of areas, allowing it to operate in areas with more limited space. For example, an incineration plant that releases 200 tons of CO2 per day would require an installation area of 2,000 square-metres.
The traditional operating space of a single cell is equivalent to a C5 envelope with proportions of around 162 x 229 mm.
Tests conducted also indicate the stack can be scaled up, which may be a major factor for bringing it much closer to commercialisation.
Toshiba is set to present this technology at the 88th Meeting of the Electrochemical Society of Japan, an online conference to be held from March 22-24.
CO2 is the greenhouse gas most commonly linked to climate change and is one of the most abundant pumped into the atmosphere and there already exist a number of commercial and experimental technologies to capture and store it, or convert it into a more useful substance.
Toshiba is presenting its electrocatalyst as part of a further push for complete industrial decarbonisation and massively reduced emissions, particularly in "high-risk" sectors such as the chemicals and steel sectors.
Recycling technologies are most likely to be installed into existing infrastructure such as factories.
Practical application requires facilities built in a limited space that can nonetheless process large volumes of CO2, which requires high CO2 throughput.
Read more: How industrial innovation can drive the European Green Deal
One way to increase CO2 processing to a level sufficient for practical application is to stack the electrodes, but until recently, this approach had resulted in the generation of heat produced by energy loss during electrolysis and actually lowered the net volume of CO2.
Toshiba integrated a cooling system inside the electrolysis cell, which lowered the heat generation and increased CO2 gains.
Toshiba will promote scaling up and system demonstration of the CO2 electrolysis stack technology, aiming to commercialize power to chemicals (P2C) technology that uses renewable energy to recycle CO2 in the late 2020s.
Back to Homepage
Back to Construction & Engineering
Back to Energy & Utilities