Grant: Alliance Grants

The climate crisis is heating up Canada twice as fast as the world average, and Canadians are paying for it with their money, with their homes, and with their lives. Last year has seen forest fires in virtually every province in Canada, including Ontario, spreading toxic smog across borders and affecting the quality of life of numerous populations. Carbon conversion reactions, such as the ones explored in the proposed research project, reuptake CO2, thus reducing its concentration in the atmosphere, and transforming it to useful products such as syngas and climate neutral petroleum-like chemicals. The goals of the proposed partnership between the Energy and Particles Technology Laboratory (EPTL) at Carleton University, CanmetENERGY and GH Power Inc are: 1) develop catalysts for carbon conversion via the scalable Flame Spray Pyrolysis (FSP) nanoparticle synthesis process, and 2) assess the feasibility of building a modular pilot reactor that can commercially produce syngas using captures CO2 and zero carbon hydrogen, and valuable climate neutral petroleum-like chemicals. The inability to synthesize many nanoparticles on industrial scales has presented a prohibitive obstacle towards their potential applications. The catalytic processes explored in this proposed project will convert CO2 into fuel and climate neutral petroleum-like products (e.g. plastics, paints, car parts or construction materials). This partnership leverages the R&D capabilities and expertise of EPTL on nano catalyst synthesis and CanmetENERGY on carbon conversion, and the commercialization capacity of GH Power. It will provide affordable syngas, climate neutral petroleum-like chemicals, and carbon conversion catalysts that can be widely and commercially deployed to combat the climate crisis.