According to a press release, engineers from the University of Delaware have developed a method for efficiently capturing 99 percent of carbon dioxide from the air using an electrochemical system powered by hydrogen.
Aside from improving the overall performance of carbon capture technology, the new method may also make it possible to commercialize more environmentally friendly fuel cells in the near future.
Capturing 99 percent of the CO2 that is released into the atmosphere
It was a setback in another research project that resulted in the development of the new system, which has been detailed in a new paper published by the journal Nature Energy.
This new technology was developed by the same team that was previously working on hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, which are a more affordable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells.
When the team was working on that technology, they came up against a significant obstacle. They discovered that HEM fuel cells are extremely sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air, which makes it difficult for the batteries to function properly.
Following on from that, researchers who once attempted to mitigate the negative effects of carbon dioxide on HEM fuel cells are now utilizing it to our advantage.
In the study’s conclusion, Brian Setzler, a co-author, said, “Once we dug into the mechanism, we discovered that the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that entered them, and they were extremely effective at separating it to the other side.”
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The team took advantage of the built-in “self-purging” process found in HEM fuel cells to develop a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. The results were published in the journal Science.
“It turns out that our strategy is extremely effective. If we have the right design and configuration, we can remove 99 percent of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a single pass “Yushan Yan, the study’s principal investigator and a University of Delaware professor, said.
Carbon capture: a panacea or a potentially dangerous distraction?
Today, the team has a more compact system that is capable of filtering larger volumes of air than it did previously. It is claimed by the researchers that their soda can-sized early prototype device is capable of filtering approximately 10 liters of air per minute and removing approximately 98 percent of carbon dioxide.
Even more impressive, they discovered that a smaller electrochemical cell measuring 2 inches squared and flowing at a rate of approximately two liters per minute could be used to continuously remove roughly 99 percent of the CO2 found in the air flowing through it.
The prototype developed by the team is intended to scrub CO2 from a vehicle’s exhaust, but it has the potential to be used in a variety of other applications, such as aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines, among others.
However, some scientists have expressed concern that carbon capture alone will not be enough to avert the global climate crisis, despite the fact that the new system has great potential for improving carbon capture overall.
Even scientists at the United States Center for International Environmental Law went so far as to say that carbon capture was a “dangerous distraction” that could be used as an excuse to delay the transition away from fossil fuel consumption as recently as July last year.
A number of large carbon capture projects are currently in the planning stages, including a new carbon capture facility in Scotland that will be capable of removing up to 1 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year.
