MIT Develops New Type of Battery That Gobbles Up Carbon Dioxide (scitechdaily.com) 59
MIT has developed a new type of battery that could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. "Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges," reports SciTechDaily. From the report: While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. The findings are described today in the journal Joule, in a paper by assistant professor of mechanical engineering Betar Gallant, doctoral student Aliza Khurram, and postdoc Mingfu He. [...] Gallant and her co-workers, whose expertise has to do with nonaqueous (not water-based) electrochemical reactions such as those that underlie lithium-based batteries, looked into whether carbon-dioxide-capture chemistry could be put to use to make carbon-dioxide-loaded electrolytes -- one of the three essential parts of a battery -- where the captured gas could then be used during the discharge of the battery to provide a power output.
This approach is different from releasing the carbon dioxide back to the gas phase for long-term storage, as is now used in carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. That field generally looks at ways of capturing carbon dioxide from a power plant through a chemical absorption process and then either storing it in underground formations or chemically altering it into a fuel or a chemical feedstock. Instead, this team developed a new approach that could potentially be used right in the power plant waste stream to make material for one of the main components of a battery. While interest has grown recently in the development of lithium-carbon-dioxide batteries, which use the gas as a reactant during discharge, the low reactivity of carbon dioxide has typically required the use of metal catalysts. Not only are these expensive, but their function remains poorly understood, and reactions are difficult to control. By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode. The key is to preactivate the carbon dioxide by incorporating it into an amine solution. "What we've shown for the first time is that this technique activates the carbon dioxide for more facile electrochemistry," Gallant says. "These two chemistries -- aqueous amines and nonaqueous battery electrolytes -- are not normally used together, but we found that their combination imparts new and interesting behaviors that can increase the discharge voltage and allow for sustained conversion of carbon dioxide."
The approach reportedly works, producing a lithium-carbon dioxide battery with voltage and capacity that are competitive with that of state-of-the-art lithium-gas batteries," reports SciTechDaily. "Moreover, the amine acts as a molecular promoter that is not consumed in the reaction."
This approach is different from releasing the carbon dioxide back to the gas phase for long-term storage, as is now used in carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. That field generally looks at ways of capturing carbon dioxide from a power plant through a chemical absorption process and then either storing it in underground formations or chemically altering it into a fuel or a chemical feedstock. Instead, this team developed a new approach that could potentially be used right in the power plant waste stream to make material for one of the main components of a battery. While interest has grown recently in the development of lithium-carbon-dioxide batteries, which use the gas as a reactant during discharge, the low reactivity of carbon dioxide has typically required the use of metal catalysts. Not only are these expensive, but their function remains poorly understood, and reactions are difficult to control. By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode. The key is to preactivate the carbon dioxide by incorporating it into an amine solution. "What we've shown for the first time is that this technique activates the carbon dioxide for more facile electrochemistry," Gallant says. "These two chemistries -- aqueous amines and nonaqueous battery electrolytes -- are not normally used together, but we found that their combination imparts new and interesting behaviors that can increase the discharge voltage and allow for sustained conversion of carbon dioxide."
The approach reportedly works, producing a lithium-carbon dioxide battery with voltage and capacity that are competitive with that of state-of-the-art lithium-gas batteries," reports SciTechDaily. "Moreover, the amine acts as a molecular promoter that is not consumed in the reaction."
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Yes, this is why it is impossible to buy batteries in stores today. If they could ever get batteries that could be sold in stores, it might be possible someday to have portable electronic devices. Think of the possibilities!
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I give up. How many?
Re: All Our Problems Are Solved! (Score:2)
If you think Europe is SocJus city think again
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We could use a lot of silver bullets to cut the population in half. Then a whole lot of problems go away.
Go home, Thanos. You're drunk.
Could be used in sealed suits? (Score:3)
It would be really interesting to see if this kind of battery tech could be used in sealed suits (like space suits, or diving rebreather units) to generate some small amount of power just from captured CO2 in exhalation.
I'm guessing the amount would be so low it's probably not worthwhile...
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But do you think it would be able to power the Bitcoin mining rig I'm thinking of building?
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Re: Could be used in sealed suits? (Score:2)
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A Beowulf cluster of Bitcoin mining rigs, optimized for streaming AI and Deep Learning in the cloud. That sounds like a totally new paradigm.
I'm in for two.
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A Beowulf cluster of Bitcoin mining rigs, optimized for streaming AI and Deep Learning in the cloud. That sounds like a totally new paradigm.
New? Hardly. I don't hear anything about serverless architectures or NodeJS. Sounds legacy to me.
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You get CO2 in compressed gas bottles ... if that helps.
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Umm... no, it doesn't help at all, not one little bit, I believe? :(
"By incorporating the gas in a liquid state, however, Gallant and her co-workers found a way to achieve electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion using only a carbon electrode."
Liquid CO2, not dry ice, not gaseous. Liquid.
Compressed gas bottles are... I think... compressed gas CO2, not liquid CO2?
If I'm wrong I'm happy to be corrected, with citations, thanks :)
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You are technically not wrong, but to get liquid CO2 you need high pressure.
As CO2 has under standard pressure no liquid phase, it goes from gas to ice and vice versa, without being liquid.
However, I have to admit, that the fact that liquid CO2 is used, escaped me :D
Re:Could be used in sealed suits? (Score:5, Funny)
while you drive around in your Tesla in the Hyperloop.
My Boring Company Flamethrower produces plenty of CO2, which I will use to power the battery, and the electricity will split water to make more hydrogen fuel for the flamethrower, which closes the perpetual energy Hyperloop, and all the world's energy problems and Global Warming are thus solved.
. . . and an additional Tesla option will burn the hydrogen with oxygen to produce fresh, desalinated water, so you can water your lawn while chasing the kids off it with your flamethrower.
trump will buy it (Score:1)
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We gotta pollute the world with co2 before we can use said co2 to power our vehicles
so the atmosphere is just a transport channel now?
'Now'? It has been a transport channel for a lot of things, including carbon dioxide, for an absurdly long time. You can even, on occasion, see water vapor being transported in the atmosphere without any special equipment.
what it really does (Score:5, Funny)
It not only sucks up CO2, it convert it to hype and fully charged buzzwords. And don't forget that multiple cells can be linked in a self-driving IoT blockchain.
Cute idea! (Score:3)
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That's a cute idea, if it makes batteries less expensive or more efficient. It won't, though, make even a tiny dent in the massive amounts of CO2 that humans are pushing into the atmosphere. Each passenger car puts out an average of 9,737.44 lb/year
The main reason it won't make a dent is that lithium metal has to be manufactured somehow.
Any solution will be technological (Score:1)
Whether this is it (or one of them) or not ... any solution will be technological, in this vein.
The solution will not be political and social badgering to make the hoi poloi give up modern life.
End Results Needed = (Score:2)
Capacity, Cost & Safety. If the reasearchers can prove superior results on these points it is a go!
NO, NO, NO! (Score:2)
How the hell are you going to convince joe-six-pack to give up their hydrocarbons if you do this?! #sarcasm
designed electrolytes? (Score:1)
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An electrolyte is a substance that conducts electricity when dissolved in water. Lead batteries use sulfuric acid dissolved in (distilled) water for this. Your body needs several electrolytes for its internal functions.
Re: designed electrolytes? (Score:1)
Electrolytes are what plants crave. Duh.
#Brawndo
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Given that they're being said to have specs like Li-gas batteries--which is probably what I'm getting seen called Li-air elsewhere--your scale's going to have to be huge. Li-air batteries are being looked at for EVs...and given that the cathode here is looks to be carbon dioxide, it's probably going to be probably a very safe pick. ('Safe' as in 'you do not really need gloves to handle a leaking one' which...you should with most lithium batteries on the market.)
Also, most electrochemical reactions can be
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