Syngas process boosts economic feasibility of carbon capture and storage

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have developed a process for turning captured carbon dioxide into syngas, a mixture made up primarily of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be used to make fuels and chemicals. The team has published its results in Green Chemistry, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

According to INL, traditional approaches for reusing the carbon from CO2 involve a reduction step that requires high temperatures and pressures. At lower temperatures, the CO2 doesn't stay dissolved in water long enough to be useful.

The process developed at INL is said to address this challenge by using specialised liquid materials that make the CO2 more soluble and allow the carbon capture medium to be directly introduced into a cell for electrochemical conversion to syngas.

"For the first time it was demonstrated that syngas can be directly produced from captured CO2 - eliminating the requirement of downstream separations," the researchers said in the paper.