Carbon dioxide electrolysers have long failed outside the lab because they relied on alkaline conditions that triggered wasteful side reactions—but this team has now built electrodes that work in acidic environments, sidestepping that barrier entirely. The problem is that foundation industries such as glass, cement, and chemicals produce 10% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions and will keep doing so for years. Capturing that CO₂ is one thing; turning it into something useful is another. Current electrolysers waste much of the captured carbon and degrade quickly, making them impractical at scale. This project will test the new acidic-electrode electrolysers with real captured CO₂ from industrial partners, then assess their environmental and economic viability. If the technology works outside the lab, it could convert waste CO₂ into platform chemicals such as carbon monoxide and ethylene—the building blocks of fuels, plastics, and pharmaceuticals—using only renewable electricity. That would create a circular carbon economy for hard-to-decarbonise industries, turning a waste stream into a feedstock without new fossil extraction.
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Modern society is reliant on carbon-based products that are ultimately derived from fossil resources. The vast range of carbon products that we use daily - ranging from fuels to consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and packaging, are generated from a relatively small number of platform petrochemical products. Displacing the unsustainable model of production of these platform chemicals requires switching to alternative carbon sources. Carbon dioxide is widely considered to be a waste gas and despite efforts to minimise emissions the hard to decarbonise foundation industries (glass, cement, metals, ceramics, and chemicals) are going to continue to be major emitters for the foreseeable future. These industries are the UK’s biggest industrial emitters, producing 10% of carbon dioxide emissions and the need to reach net zero has led to a focus on employing carbon capture technologies. The question then arises – what do you do with the captured carbon dioxide? Carbon dioxide electrolysis provides a potential answer. Electrolysis can be used to convert the carbon dioxide into key platform chemicals such as carbon monoxide (syngas) and ethylene using renewable energy. This could provide a way to generate economic value from the captured carbon dioxide and provide a sustainable pathway that enables net-zero ambitions to vital carbon products. Ultimately, by coupling carbon dioxide electrolysis to direct air capture there is even potential to generate circular pathways for carbon fuels and carbon negative products. A challenge for the science and engineering community has been that carbon dioxide electrolysers typically have low carbon utilisation efficiencies (leading to low system level efficiencies) and they have low stabilities. The primary cause has been the belief that electrodes for carbon dioxide conversion need to operate under alkaline conditions. This leads to side reactions of the carbon dioxide and makes them unsuitable for use outside of the lab. Our teams work, supported by EPSRC, has demonstrated that it is possible to make electrodes that operate in acidic environments overcoming these barriers. This opens the use of alternative electrolyser designs that deliver a step-change in efficiency and stability. This project will accelerate the exploitation of the fundamental knowledge and ip we have generated on new electrodes, membranes and devices over the last 5 years. Working with stakeholders from the foundation industries, capture technology companies and end users of the carbon products we produce we will carry out proof-of-concept trials with real-world captured carbon dioxide and use the data to carry out multi-layer systematic assessments that measure the environmental and economic impact of deploying our carbon dioxide electrolyser. This is a critical step in the exploitation pathway.
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