VATIS UPDATE Article

A team of researchers led by Professor Ted Sargent of the University of Toronto (U of T), Canada, have found an efficient way of turning carbon dioxide (CO2) into stored energy – through the wonders of nanoengineering. Researchers Min Liu and Yuanjie Pang, along with a team of U of T, have developed a technique powered by renewable energies such as solar or wind. The catalyst takes climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) and converts it to carbon monoxide (CO), a useful building block for carbon-based chemical fuels, such as methanol, ethanol and diesel.

The team’s solution started by fabricating extremely small gold “nanoneedles” – the tip of each needle is 10,000 times smaller than a human hair. “The nanoneedles act like lightning rods for catalyzing the reaction,” said Liu. When they applied a small electrical bias to the array of nanoneedles, they produced a high electric field at the sharp tips of the needles. This helps attract CO2, speeding up the reduction to CO, with a rate faster than any catalyst previously reported. This represents a breakthrough in selectivity and efficiency which brings CO2 reduction closer to the realm of commercial electrolysers.

The team is now working on the next step: skipping the CO and producing more conventional fuels directly. Sargent’s research has been supported with the help of SOSCIP’s Blue Gene/Q, Canada’s fastest supercomputer, responsible for large scale parallel processing and grand challenge computational science. SOSCIP is a research and development consortium which pairs academic and industry researchers with advanced computing tools to fuel innovation leadership in Canada. The work has been published in the journal Nature.