Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to useful chemical intermediates

Dependence on fossil fuels for energy has led to a far reaching secondary problem of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. This rise in CO2, as well as the other so called “greenhouse gasses” has in turn led to global climate change, and increasing temperatures. There is a need to go beyond the basic capture and storage approaches to mitigating this CO2 rise. With the ever growing demand for key chemicals intermediates and fuels there is a growing need to develop methods to recycle and reuse this CO2, closing the carbon loop. Technologies that can directly recover the carbon and convert them into useful chemicals and higher hydrocarbon fuels are critical to addressing this need. The Mainstream innovative proposed stack and system design provides an energy efficient, high rate approach that directly electrochemical reduces carbon dioxide providing a path to the electrosynthesis of useful chemical precursors and fuels. In Phase I Mainstream will develop and demonstrate at the single cell level an innovative and scalable cell design utilizing our high performance gas accessible cathodes. This will allow the efficient reduce CO2 into a range of useful chemical precursors. In Phase II Mainstream will build a multicell, prototype system combined the high performance, high efficiency stacks for the mitigation of CO2 with the integrated separations technologies necessary to efficiency recovery of useful chemicals.