CO2 To Go Please

 Posted by Garrett Moran

A very recent article on ScienceDaily illustrates a recent research group out of Caltech and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering coming up with a way to effectively and efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethylene. This conversion is incredibly useful as ethylene is a very important chemical used to produce solvents, plastics, cosmetics and many more important products around the world. This team accomplished this conversion by developing nanoscaled copper wires that had a specific shaped surface engraved into them. This copper wire surface looked almost like a staircase and would catalyze the chemical reaction and reduce the amount of CO2 produced while also generating ethylene. Co-corresponding author Yu Huang says that this conversion method is an excellent way to fight climate change as it reduces the amount of greenhouse gasses while also producing a very useful chemical product at the same time.

The article stresses that this efficient conversion has been attempted by scientist around the world for a long time but has never been truly successful with this degree of efficiency. The problem lies within the chemical reaction itself. This chemical reaction tends to produce both hydrogen and methane. These two products are undesirable in industrial production. Another problem lied within the system creating the reaction. Previous attempts from scientist resulted in the production of ethylene, but the product didn’t last long. As the system was allowed to run for longer periods of time, the conversion efficiency would drop resulting in an inefficient production of ethylene. The scientist from UCLA and Caltech decided to focus their studies on the design of the copper nanowire present in the system. These scientist designed a copper nanowire with highly active “steps” very similar to a set of stairs. With this design, the team was able to demonstrate an effective and efficient carbon dioxide to ethylene conversion rate of greater than 70%! This designed proved efficient as previous designs yielded 10% or less under the same conditions. Overall, UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering and Caltech’s research team have discovered new advances when it comes to copper-based catalysts and have demonstrated a promising way to fight climate change while also producing a very useful chemical agent in industrial productions.