Grant: Alliance Grants

The reduction of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere is an urgent matter and a focus of global concern. As part of the worldwide efforts to reduce GHG emissions, Canada has committed to reduce 30% of its emissions below the levels of 2005 by 2030. In order to reach such ambitious target, Canada must tackle key emissions, such as those from the transport sector and industry, especially the chemical industry, which is highly energy intensive for its significant production of fertilizers and petrochemicals. In this context, several technologies are under development aiming to take advantage of the country's significant potential for clean and renewable energy production. Among these technologies, CO2 electrochemical reduction is a promising approach to reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by converting it into value-added products, such as chemicals and energy vectors. Electro Carbon is a Canadian start-up founded in 2019 and recognized for the development of a proprietary CO2 electrolyzer that allows the active use and conversion of CO2 emissions and water to potassium formate and formic acid. At the current state, this technology has the potential to reduce up to 10,750 tons of CO2 per year. However, there are still major challenges in the process optimization and in product recovery that must be considered as part of the technology development process towards industrial implementation. Therefore, this project aims at improving the mass transfer inside the electrochemical cell and to design an effective and low-cost separation process to maximize the recovery of potassium formate obtained from the CO2 electrochemical reduction. In addition, the project will benefit from a modeling approach that will describe and optimize the mass transfer phenomena in the CO2 electrolyzer and provide further information for the design of the separation process.