OSPE - The Voice - Spring 2020 - 18

CAREERS

CO2 Conversion Technology
with Queen's University's
Dr. Cao Thang Dinh, Ph.D.

"We know that if
we want to have
an economy with
less CO2 we
need to use more
renewable energy
resources like wind
and solar."

e know that the planet is warming, and we know that carbon
emissions - largely resulting from human activity - are to blame.
Instead of just releasing CO2 into the air, what if those emissions
could be put to better use?
Dr. Cao Thang Dinh, Ph.D., one of Queen's University's newest
Assistant Professors has spent the past six years working on the development of CO2
conversion technology. This technology allows us to use the CO2 from carbon emissions to
create fuel and other useful chemicals. The concept has been labelled "carbon neutral," since
any CO2 that might be removed from the air or from power plant flue gas is later burned as
fuel, thus reintroducing the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere. Widespread
adoption of this process will be an important stepping-stone towards a low carbon economy.
"We know that if we want to have an economy with less CO2 we need to use more
renewable energy resources like wind and solar," says Dinh. One particular barrier however,
is that "we need a way to store the energy from these sources because wind and solar are not
always available. The other factor is that wind and solar generate electricity, and electricity
only accounts for 15 to 20 percent of our total energy consumption. The rest comes from
other industries like transportation, chemical, cement, and steel - which is very difficult
to electrify."
CO2 conversion technology could help bypass this storage barrier as it allows carbon
dioxide to be stored and transported in the form of a liquid - simultaneously addressing
the problem of energy storage and excessive carbon emissions.
"If we wanted to produce something simple like carbon monoxide, the technology is
pretty ready [for commercialization], but to make something more complex like ethanol,
there are still barriers in terms of energy efficiency," explains Dinh. It takes a high amount
of energy to extract and convert CO2 from flue gasses, and until very recently there haven't
been many ways to offset the cost of production. As such, widespread commercialization of
these 'green' technologies has been slow. That might just be changing.
Before arriving at Queens six months ago, Dinh and a team of colleagues from the
University of Toronto developed a method of turning the CO2 they extracted from flue gasses
into ethylene - a precursor used to make plastic. During this time, the team also managed to
significantly lower the amount of electricity used in the conversion process. Their findings
were published in the academic journal Science and the team entered into the final round of
the world renowned "Carbon XPrize" competition, which challenges industry and academic
professionals to convert the waste CO2 from power plant emissions into useful substances
as feasibly as possible. Dinh hopes that this engineering breakthrough will soon allow the
technology to be scaled up to a commercial level, but cautions that the energy efficiency
needs to be improved even further before this is possible.
Today, Dr. Dinh works as the Principal Investigator of Refuel@Queens, a chemical
engineering lab at Queen's University dedicated to electrochemical CO2 conversion. He
hopes to see the disparate fields of science come together in the near future to help overcome
one another's limitations and finally close the carbon cycle. "If we work together combining
electrochemistry with biochemistry and with thermal catalysis - which have been around
for years - we could have an integrated system that is more efficient in converting the carbon
dioxide and storing energy."
ON THE WEB

To learn more about CO2 conversion technology and
the work being conducted at Refuel@Queens, visit:
www.refuelqueens.com

THE VOICE Spring 2020

http://www.refuelqueens.com

OSPE - The Voice - Spring 2020

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