Solar panels are now an accepted means of producing clean electricity, and Australia is revving along the roadmap to mass production of clean hydrogen using a two-step solar conversion process — photovoltaics followed by electrolysis. But this month, Swinburne University of Technology’s Associate Professor Tianyi Ma received an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship of more than $937,000 to pursue his work using solar energy directly in photocatalysis, to repurpose abundant carbon dioxide emitted during industrial processes into “solar” fuels such as green methane, methanol and carbon monoxide.
The efficiencies of Ma’s technology are currently lower than photovoltaics which have been developed to achieve between 20% and 30% conversion of light into electricity. His work with new-generation carbon dioxide photoreduction catalysts — perovskite-based ferroelectrics — have so far achieved a solar-to-fuels efficiency of 2-5%, but that’s increasing.
Importantly, the materials used are much cheaper than those used in solar panels, offering substantial savings on upfront capital investment and the technology shows potential for co-location with industry, to siphon off CO2 at the source and produce fuels that can replace high-emitting fossil fuels.
Yes, even these solar fuels when burned will release carbon into the atmosphere, but they go some way to achieving a low-cost circular economy for carbon-capturing what’s emitted, and producing replacements for new fossil fuel production.
“My goal is carbon neutrality,” the lead of the Carbon Neutrality Group at Swinburne University of Technology tells pv magazine Australia. Boom-boom!
The drive to purity
For some years Ma was known for his work using grid-supplied electricity in a process known as electrocatalysis, for reducing CO2 into potentially reusable fuels. “The thing is,” he says, “that the majority of electricity in the grid still isn’t green, so I recently changed focus to photocatalysis, because I want to use pure renewable energy.”
Ma says his work is still “inspired” by electrocatalysis, in that he’s using an external power source to accelerate a catalytic reaction. But there’s no voltage in raw sunlight, so “if we can create a little bit of an electric field in the semiconductor catalyst…”
Ma identified a novel ferroelectric, crystalline material that doesn’t have a symmetric structure, “So it has a little bit of polarisation in the structure”, which translates into “an intrinsic and spontaneous electric field” that delivers high-performance photocatalysis.
His Future Fellowship comes under the ARC Discovery Scheme, which aims to promote Australia’s strong capability in fundamental, or ‘blue sky’ research, and to generate new ideas, new jobs, economic growth and enhanced quality of life in Australia, according to the literature.
Ma’s group will use the funding over four years, initially, he says “to generate some high quality papers, scientific breakthroughs and even patent some of the technologies”.
Industry collaborations in place
Because Swinburne focuses heavily on translation of research to industry, Ma’s project team is also already collaborating with GrapheneX, a pioneer in the field of synthesising high-value carbon nanomaterials, from low-cost carbon sources; and with the Clayton Hydrogen Technology Cluster (Clayton H2), one of 15 nationwide renewable energy platforms supported by National Energy Resources Australia.
“We’re working with GrapheneX to treat carbon-dioxide emissions from the biomass lignite [aka brown coal]-mining industry,” says Ma, “and I can foresee that towards the middle of the four-year fellowship, we could partly commercialise some of those technologies.”
In his six-months-new role at Swinburne, which appointed him Associate Professor at the university’s Centre for Translational Atomaterials, Ma has also already published a paper describing a photocatalytic process to produce hydrogen from seawater, using a novel single-atom platinum catalyst, that yielded solar-to-hydrogen quantum efficiency of 22.2% under LED-550 illumination.
This is “among the best catalysts ever reported” for the solar-to-hydrogen process, said Baohua Jia, Founding Director of the Centre for Translational Atomaterials in February when the paper was released.
Potential pathways for carbon atoms lead back to much needed fuels
Compared to carbon-dioxide splitting, photocatalytic water splitting is a piece of cake, asserts Ma, but he was compelled to pursue CO2 splitting to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time produce chemicals that are useful.
The splitting of carbon dioxide, he says, can take more than six potential pathways. It can, for example, be catalysed to form carbon monoxide, formic acid, ethanol or methanol, of which the latter three are important chemical feedstocks.
“We’ve also been doing this photocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide in an aqueous, or water, solution,” explains Ma, which generates a competing reaction. That is, the water will also take part in the reaction and split out into hydrogen and oxygen.
“So you can never get pure carbon monoxide this way, you always have a monoxide with a little bit of hydrogen, which is what we call syngas — one of the most widely used fuels for residential cooking — there’s a huge market for it.”
Ultimately, his project, as described for Future Fellowship consideration, is expected to “deliver highly efficient photocatalysts and reaction prototypes for carbon dioxide reduction, to relieve the greenhouse effect and accelerate the development of large-scale carbon dioxide utilisation for clean fuels production by making use of abundant and clean solar energy”; the catalysts and techniques “are highly promising for commercialisation and industry-level application”.
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Carbon Dioxide is not deadly, quite the reverse it is vital to all life. We’re Carbon based lifeforms after all. We’re still recovering from the LIA, the coldest period for 8000 years the world has been cooling for those 8k years, with occasional short periods of warmth, each one cooler than the previous one, this is the latest the previous was the MWP. This interglacial isn’t as warm as the previous two
.All these developments are clever and impressive but we’re fighting the wrong foe.
Okay, the title isn’t spot on, but if you actually read the article and weren’t bent on shilling for fossil fuels, you would have gotten that this is a carbon neutral, not carbon reducing, way to sustain carbon gas burning applications (especially residential and small business ones).
As for plants and warming, for the first time on record we had plant killing heat in the Pacific Northwest this year. If GHG’s warm the planet to the point our food can’t reasonably be grown due to desertification, then it doesn’t really matter if CO2 is .05% or .5% of the atmosphere. Taking these arguments and running them out, you would be forced to conclude that, in fact, we should be farming on Venus… and if you think that’s a good idea, maybe we can pay for you and those making the same argument to get a one way ticket and a bag of seeds to do just that. If that doesn’t sound so good, stop making disingenuous arguments that equate a full degree Celsius of warming in the last 40 years to climate cycles that usually take thousands of years to do the same except for a few mass extinction events. Also, stop equating carbon neutral or some minor carbon storage with some idea that the earth will end up bereft of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The people publishing this research and innovating to slow or slightly reverse levels of GHG’s aren’t uneducated children and they clearly already know that CO2 is essential to life but also that we are increasing it at a dangerous extreme.
If you want to criticize a sensationalized headline, fine, but the actual subject here is pretty interesting and ultimately very much needed.
CO2 is not “deadly”, nor does it “stay around for ever” Carbon Monoxide is extremely deadly & Methanol causes blindness. Life depends on Photosynthesis which works like a microwave – excites electrons, but using ATP as a catalyst excites electrons to split H2O into Hydrogen ions & Oxygen ions. We are breathing that Oxygen. Hydrogen ions recombine with CO2 producing Glucose – Food
We are living on that Food
No CO2 NO FOOD
That a man is able to get financial help to turn vital to life CO2 into poison proves IPCC is all about $Billions corruption!