Graphene sheets and nickel turn CO2 into usable energy
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory are part of a scientific collaboration that has identified a new electrocatalyst that efficiently converts CO2 to carbon monoxide (CO), a highly energetic molecule.
There are many ways to use CO, says Eli Stavitski, a scientist at Brookhaven and an author on the paper. You can react it with water to produce energy-rich hydrogen gas, or with hydrogen to produce useful chemicals, such as hydrocarbons or alcohols. If there were a sustainable, cost-efficient route to transform CO2 to CO, it would benefit society greatly. Indeed, scientists have been looking for a way to do just that, but traditional electrocatalysts can't effectively initiate the reaction. That’s because a competing reaction, called the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) or water splitting, takes precedence over the CO2 conversion reaction.