Carbon Capture and Conversion for Mobile Sources

Statement of the problem or situation that is being addressed in your application. The transportation sector accounts for a significant portion of CO2 emissions and is therefore an important focus of decarbonization efforts. Battery electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells are promising alternatives, however, they are difficult to implement for heavy-duty marine and overland transportation. A potential mitigation strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emission is to capture and upcycle the evolved CO2. This illustrates the need to develop a regenerative CO2 separation and transformation technology that efficiently sequesters CO2 from concentrated exhaust streams for generation of platform chemicals or fuels. Ľ General statement of how this problem is being addressed. This small business proposes an innovative approach for selective carbon capture from mobile point sources and subsequent transformation to platform chemicals or fuel. The innovation is a two-stage sorbent bed with high surface area that is functionalized to enable selective adsorption of exhaust gases. The proposed approach will result in a regenerative sorbent and catalyst system to upcycle the captured carbon dioxide to valuable fuel. The small business performed several pre-proposal experiments that have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed process. Ľ What is to be done in Phase I? The overall goal of the Phase I program is to demonstrate the feasibility and economic viability of the proposed approach. During the Phase I effort, this small business will: (a) demonstrate synthesis of selected sorbents; (b) demonstrate selective CO2 capture from simulated exhaust streams; (c) demonstrate transformation of the captured CO2 to fuel; and (d) perform techno-economic and lifecycle analyses to outline pathways for scale up and further development and optimization in Phase II. Ľ Commercial Applications and Other Benefits. The proposed approach will demonstrate a rapid, economically viable process to capture and upgrade CO2 from merchant marine vessels. Additionally, the process can be utilized for reduction of emissions from other mobile point sources such as rail transport, heavy trucking, and cruise ships.