“The goal of all of these pathways is to reduce the amount of carbon that is released to the atmosphere. I look at it as Oak Ridge National Laboratory investing in the future by taking a leadership role in balancing the carbon cycle in a holistic way." — ORNL nanoscientist Rigoberto Advincula
Historically, one of the major impediments to carbon dioxide mitigation has been cost. So ideally, technological fixes would include ways to recycle excess CO2 into products that pay for themselves.
To lots of folks, that sounds like a pipe dream—but not to ORNL nanoscientist Rigoberto Advincula, who is heading up the carbon initiative’s efforts to identify chemical processes that convert captured CO2 and other carbon emissions and byproducts into high-value commodities.
Advincula, who leads the Macromolecular Nanoscience Group at the lab's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences and also serves as Governor's Chair of Advanced and Nanostructured Materials at ORNL and the University of Tennessee, maintains that to balance the carbon cycle, we need to take a holistic approach.
“Sometimes we describe this as creating a 'circular economy,'” Advincula said. “A lot of effort has been put into carbon capture, but this has been basically limited to controlling the carbon footprint of specific industrial processes. Now the challenge is to convert the CO2 ecosystem into something that benefits society even more. This involves a lot of organic chemistry—essentially the chemistry of carbon.”
Modern-day alchemy
“There is a lot of demand for more efficient processes in the coal, oil and natural gas industries where carbon capture technologies have been used to trap ‘waste’ products, such as methane, for the last 20 or 30 years,” Advincula said.
These industries have made considerable progress in turning waste gases like methane into marketable commodities, like organic chemistry “intermediates.” Intermediates are chemicals that are used to manufacture a wide range of products—pharmaceuticals, for example—and, importantly, they help to offset the cost of carbon capture.
In the carbon initiative, Advincula’s team will improve this waste-to-high-value-product approach by applying more advanced chemistry to produce higher-value materials from CO2 and other carbon emissions and byproducts.
Many paths, one goal
“These high-value products could include polymers that perform well under extreme conditions, so they could be used to produce advanced composites and other materials used in the aerospace and automotive industries—or for advanced manufacturing applications, such as 3D-printing,” Advincula said.
He noted that the construction industry uses a lot of carbon-based thermosets, materials like fiberboard, tiles, and flooring, that make use of carbon fiber and carbon composites.
“The construction industry also relies on plastic for pipes, for different types of roofing material and for a variety of other carbon-based products,” Advincula said. “Using advanced chemistry, we will try to create a pathway to make the process of generating these materials from CO2 and other byproducts of the carbon ecosystem more efficient and more cost-effective.”
Another pathway the project will consider is direct carbonization, a process that converts plants, grass or any cellulosic material directly into carbon.
“This approach was popular 20 years ago,” Advincula said, “but there are new efficiencies that can be explored, new chemistry, new catalysts that we can use to convert plants directly into building materials.”
Advincula will also investigate the possibility of producing high-value materials directly from CO2 or hydrocarbons like ethane, methane, and propane rather than converting them into intermediate chemicals first. Decreasing the number of steps in the conversion process is another way to reduce the cost of production.
Finally, Advincula’s team will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to guide experimental models that will optimize the development of new chemical pathways to streamline the conversion of carbon ecosystem byproducts.
“These tools will enable us to apply data mining to determine which reaction parameters are likely to result in reactions that are faster and more efficient and require less energy,” Advincula said. “Unlike previous approaches, the use of AI allows global input—from molecular engineering to process engineering—that will enable new ways of synthesizing complex but practical macromolecular designs.”
By developing a range of chemical processes that can convert potentially harmful CO2 and other carbon emissions into high-value products, the carbon initiative aims to protect the environment while redefining carbon emissions as a valuable, renewable resource.
“The goal of all of these pathways is to reduce the amount of carbon that is released to the atmosphere.” Advincula said. “I look at it as Oak Ridge National Laboratory investing in the future by taking a leadership role in balancing the carbon cycle in a holistic way.”
