Low- Cost, Clean Methanol from Carbon Dioxide Gets a Step Closer

An international research team has created a new catalyst that can be effectively used to produce low-cost and clean methanol from hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

In a collaborative effort, scientists from Stanford, SLAC and Denmark created a new nickel-gallium catalyst that can be used to produce clean methanol, a key ingredient used in production of plastics, solvents, adhesive and also an alternative to fuel.  This newly created catalyst converts carbon dioxide into methanol with lesser  byproducts compared to the conventional catalyst.

"Methanol is processed in huge factories at very high pressures using hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from natural gas," said study lead author Felix Studt, a staff scientist at SLAC, in a news release .  " We are looking for materials than can make methanol from clean sources, such as sunshine, under low-pressure conditions, while generating low amounts of carbon monoxide."

The main aim of the scientists was to develop a large scale manufacturing process that is non-polluting and also carbon neutral using only clean hydrogen.

Annually, nearly 65 million metric tons of methanol is produced for use in paints, biofuels, glues and many more. The scientists spent three years studying methanol synthesis and industrial process. They discovered the active sites in copper- zinc and aluminium catalysts that synthesize methanol.

The researchers initially looked for the new catalyst that was capable of synthesizing methanol at extremely low pressure using just hydrogen and carbon dioxide. They looked for this catalyst in the computerized database.

The copper-zinc-aluminum catalyst was compared with over thousands of other materials from the database and it was during this process they identified the catalyst nickel-gallium.

To test these compounds, the researchers worked with the Technical University of Denmark.  The two compounds were later synthesized into solid catalyst. A battery of tests was conducted to investigate whether the new catalyst was capable of producing methanol at room pressure.

The test conducted in the lab confirmed that nickel-gallium were the perfect candidates.  They noticed that nickel-gallium produced excessive methanol at high temperature when compared to the conventional copper-zinc-aluminum catalyst. Also they produced less of carbon monoxide as a byproduct.

"You want to make methanol, not carbon monoxide," Chorkendorff, a co-author of the research paper, said. "You also want a catalyst that's stable and doesn't decompose. The lab tests showed that nickel-gallium is, in fact, a very stable solid. We'd like to make the catalyst a little more clean. If it contains just a few nanoparticles of pure nickel, the output drops quite a bit, because pure nickel is lousy at synthesizing methanol. In fact, it makes all sorts of chemical byproducts that you don't want."

The team hopes that this new catalyst could be used for industrial use.

The findings are documented in the journal Nature Chemistry.