Utilisation of Solar Energy and Electrocatalytic Processes for the Low Energy Conversion of CO2 to Fuels and Chemicals

One of the major current scientific and technological challenges concerns the conversion of carbon dioxide to fuels and useful products in effective and economically viable manner. This proposal responds to the major challenge of developing low energy routes to convert carbon dioxide to fuels and useful chemicals. The project has the following four main strands: (i) The use of electricity generated by renewable technologies to reduce CO2 electrocatalytically, where we will develop new approaches involving the use of ionic liquid solvents to activate the CO2 (ii) The use of hydrogen in the catalytic reduction of CO2, where we will apply computational procedures to predict new materials for this key catalytic process and subsequently test them experimentally (iii) The development of new materials for use in the efficient solar generation of hydrogen which will provide the reductant for the catalytic CO2 reduction (iv) A detailed life cycle analysis which will assess the extent to which the new technology achieves the overall objective of developing low carbon fuels. Our approach aims, therefore, to exploit renewably generated energy directly via the electrocatalytic route or indirectly via the solar generated hydrogen in CO2 utilisation for the formation of fuels and/or chemicals. The different components of the approach will be fully integrated to achieve coherent, new low energy technologies for this key process, while the rigorous life-cycle analysis will ensure that it satisfies the need for a low energy technology.