Scientists turn carbon dioxide back into coal

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Scientists turn carbon dioxide back into coal
“Scientists have harnessed liquid metals to turn carbon dioxide back into solid coal, in research that offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing the greenhouse gas from our atmosphere”. A brand new technique can that can convert CO2 back into carbon at room temperature, a process that is efficient and scalable. A second side benefit to this is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so this could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles. That is a brief background and summary but here are some more specifics. Also researchers have used liquid metals to turn carbon back into solid coal, they did this in a world-first-breakthrough that could transform our everyday approach to carbon capture and storage.  Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.


Technologies nowadays for carbon capture and storage mainly focus on compressing CO2 into a liquid form, transporting it to a suitable site and injecting underground, clever! But application has been hampered by some engineering issues, surrounding economic viability and environmental concerns about possible leaks from the storage sites, which could be harmful to the environment around the storage site/s.  According to RMIT researcher Dr. Torben Daeneke stated that converting CO2 into a solid could be a more sustainable approach. “To date, CO2 has only been converted into a solid at extremely high temperatures, making it industrially unviable.By using liquid metals as a catalyst, we've shown it's possible to turn the gas back into carbon at room temperature, in a process that's efficient and scalable”. He also said that even though more research needs to be conducted, it is a crucial first step to delivering the solid storage of carbon.


How carbon conversion works. Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh, a Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow in RMIT's School of Engineering, created the electrochemical technique to convert and capture atmospheric CO2 to storable solid carbon. So to convert the CO 2 the researchers designed a liquid metal catalyst with particular surface properties that made it extremely efficient at conducting electricity while also chemically activating the surface. First the carbon dioxide is dissolved in a beaker and this beaker is filled with electrolyte liquid and a very small amount of liquid metal, this is then changed into an electrical current. Next the CO2 slowly converts into solid flakes of carbon dioxide, these are naturally detached from the liquid metal surface allowing for a continuous production of carbonaceous solid. “Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced could also be used as an electrode.

A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles.The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications.” All of this research was conducted at RMIT’S Micro Nano research facility with lead investigator, Honorary RMIT and ARC Laureate Fellow, Professor Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh All of this research was also supported by the Australian Research Council Centre for Future Low-Energy Electronics Technology.


All of this research that theses scientists and researchers have developed and conducted can be very useful to our modern day, especially to scientists. Other scientists from around the globe can use all of this information about carbon and turning it into solid coal and use it to conduct further discoveries about this topic but they can also use this research to help them find out more about other topics in chemistry that may apply (not only to this specific topic but to other as-well). All of these discoveries can also help us, scientist are not the only ones who can use all of this research to there advantage other can too. This topic is also very interesting to read about and could be informative and very interesting to several.








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