The hitch: The longer the hydrocarbon chain is, the more difficult it is to produce. Seven-year hitchĬargnello and his team took seven years to discover and perfect the new catalyst. Ruthenium also has the advantage of being less expensive than other high-quality catalysts, like palladium and platinum.Ĭargnello and his team describe the catalyst and the results of their experiments in their latest paper, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Like any catalyst, this invention speeds up chemical reactions without getting used up in the process. The new catalyst is composed of the element ruthenium – a rare transition metal belonging to the platinum group – coated in a thin layer of plastic. It produced 1,000 times more butane – the longest hydrocarbon it could produce under its maximum pressure – than the standard catalyst given the same amounts of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, catalyst, pressure, heat and time. Chains with eight to 12 carbon atoms would be the ideal.”Ī new catalyst, invented by Cargnello and colleagues, moves toward this goal by increasing the production of long-chain hydrocarbons in chemical reactions. “To capture as much carbon as possible, you want the longest chain hydrocarbons. “We can create gasoline, basically,” said Cargnello, who is an assistant professor of chemical engineering. The researchers also note that it might be possible to use their material to produce an energy source by combining the carbon monoxide produced with hydrogen.Chengshuang Zhou holds vials of ruthenium, left, and the coated catalyst, while Matteo Cargnello holds the pipe used for the reaction experiments. Another plus was that the team was able to split 240,000 CO 2 molecules per hour-putting it among the best at the job of any type of process. The end results was a material that proved to be 60 times better at splitting CO 2 than using porphyrins alone, and it was also more efficient-approximately 90 percent of the electrons were used in the process. The team found that the COF they developed worked much better than when using porphyrins alone, and then discovered that making the holes in the mesh bigger and adding copper improved the performance even more. As CO 2 percolates through the mesh, it is split into carbon dioxide and oxygen by a bit of current. In this new effort, the team found a way around these problems by creating a covalent organic framework (COF)-a material made by linking porphyrins together into a mesh-one that is also able to conduct electricity. But there are problems-the solution is dirty and the effectiveness of the porphyrins lessens over times. When they are added to a solution containing two electrodes, an electrolyte, and some dissolved CO 2, they are attracted to the negatively charged electrolyte, carrying electrons to the CO 2, causing it to split into CO and O. As one approach to removing CO 2, scientists have been studying what are known as porphyrins-ring-shaped molecules with a cobalt atom at their core. Plants, as we all know, remove CO 2, but the process is slow and there aren't enough of them to offset the amount of CO 2 currently emitted. And since we can't seem to stop pumping CO 2 into the air, researchers are looking into ways to pull it back out. Most scientists now agree that global warming is occurring at least partly due to greenhouse gas emissions, the most notorious being carbon dioxide.
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