Reactor Optimization and Scale-up for the Sustainable Synthesis of Hydrocarbons from Carbon Dioxide: A Stride Towards Sea-Based Fuel Production

摘要

The reduction of available fossil fuel as well as the heavy global reliance on petroleum products for transportation has resulted in the pursuit for new processes and technologies that may effectively address current and future energy needs. This challenge is further complicated in that a sustainable solution must minimize impact on the environment (specifically with respect to carbon dioxide emissions) while still meeting performance specifications required for transportation fuels. Since carbon dioxide is readily available from the air, seawater, and as a byproduct of many industrial energy-producing processes that include gas, oil, and coal power plants and FT processes, it could serve as an abundant chemical feedstock for production of energy-rich hydrocarbons such as jet fuel. Processes that utilize CO2 from the environment could be envisioned as CO2 neutral. At the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), a process to isolate CO2 and H2 from seawater using an electrochemical acidification method has been recently reported and is currently refined for scale-up operation. As a consequence, realizing an efficient process to synthesize hydrocarbons from CO2 as the sole carbon feedstock has become the next stage in the development of a renewable process for fuel production at sea.