It may come as a surprise, but carbon dioxide, the infamous greenhouse gas driving climate change, is also a leading contender in the replacement of hydrofluorocarbons in the next-generation of “green” refrigeration systems. It offers many advantages over second and third generation refrigerants, including higher volumetric cooling capacity, lower operating temperatures, non-flammability, reduced operating costs, and lower global warming potential.
See full article at Advanced Science News.
Surface Frustrated Lewis Pairs (SFLPs) have been implicated in the gas‐phase heterogeneous (photo)catalytic hydrogenation of CO₂ via the cubic form of hydroxylated indium oxide. In their paper, Dr. Wang and co-authors report the room temperature dissociation of molecular hydrogen via SFLPs on the rhombodral form of the catalyst, which is shown to favour the heterolysis over the homolysis reaction pathway.
See full article at Angewandte Chemie.
When one thinks of the major sources of anthropogenic emissions entering the earth’s atmophsere, chances are that air conditioning isn’t the first to come to mind. However, the carbon footprint of AC systems is far from negligeable: they are expected to contribute an additional 167 gigatonnes of CO2 by 2050. But what if AC systems could be re-designed to provide an opportunity to capture CO2 from the air? Global adoption of on-site conversion of CO2 from AC systems into chemicals and fuels could have a key role in addressing global climate change.
See full article at Advanced Science News.
Congratulations to authors Prof. Roland Dittmeyer, Michael Klumpp, Paul Kant, and Prof. Geoffrey Ozin on the release of their Nature Communications article, “Crowd oil not crude oil”. The delocalized nature of climate change poses a major challenge to mitigation efforts. The authors propose retrofitting air conditioning units to convert water and carbon dioxide into fuel. The users would collect the synthetically-made oil for their personal use, or to redistribute within their community, as to encourage decentralized CO2 conversion and energy democratization. Read full article at Nature Communications.
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The internet has had profound effects on virtually all aspects of society. It has revolutionized virtually every aspect of our lives, from the ways in which we engage and communicate, to our shopping and entertainment habits, and to our media and politics. But what of the effect of the internet age on academia? As one of the earliest adopters of email communication, academics have witnessed the many ways in which the internet has shifted the nature of scientific collaborations, publishing processes, and research patterns. Have we, however, reached a point where electronic communication has become more problematic than beneficial to academic research?
See full article at Advanced Science News.
Congratulations to authors Mireille Ghoussoub, Meikun Xia, Dr. Paul Duchesne, and Prof. Dvira Segal, as well as cover artist and alumnus, Dr. Chenxi Qian, for having their recently published review article featured on the cover of Energy and Environmental Science. Photothermal catalysis is an emerging sub-discipline of heterogeneous catalysis that exploits broad absorption of the solar spectrum to stimulate a combination of thermochemical and photochemical processes, which contribute synergistically to driving catalytic reactions. It is proving an effective and promising strategy for converting CO2 to synthetic fuels.
See full article at Energy and Environmental Science.
Chemicals and fuels derived from CO2 and enabled by solar power have taken the research world by storm over the past decade. However, CO2-derived fuel technologies, as promising as they may appear, are still subject to the harsh economic realities of chemical engineering. Is it possible to simultaneously achieve high photonic efficiencies all whilst adhering to the logic of economies of scale? Two new start-ups, The Solistra Corporation and Dimensional Energy, have taken on this challenge and are paving the way towards a future driven by solar fuel technology
See full article at Advanced Science News.
“Towards Solar Methanol: Past, Present, and Future” provides a comprehensive overview of how value-added products, notably methanol, can be produced affordably and sustainably from greenhouse gases. Harnessing light in the form of solar energy can assist is the production process in some capacity through various strategies, such as solar-thermochemical, photochemical, and photovoltaic-electrochemical. Commercially-ready technologies are compared via technoeconomic analysis, and the scalability of solar reactors is also discussed in the context of light-incorporating catalyst architectures and designs. Finally, the review offers perspective on the viability of the most promising solar methanol strategy to be applied at a global scale.
See full article at Advanced Science.
Congratulations to Wei, Chenxi, Govind, and Co-Authors on their New Years Eve Nature Catalysis publication in which they report on their discovery of how to make Silicon, the second most abundant element on earth, behave catalytically in the gas-phase heterogeneous hydrogenation of CO2 to CO, known as the Reverse Water Gas Shift Reaction. See full article at Nature Catalysis.
Photothermal catalysis is an emerging sub-discipline of heterogeneous catalysis that exploits broad absorption of the solar spectrum to stimulate a combination of thermochemical and photochemical processes, which contribute synergistically to driving catalytic reactions. In particular, it is proving an effective and promising strategy for converting CO2 to synthetic fuels. See full article at Energy & Environmental Science.
