SBIR Phase I: Improved Catalysts for Sanitizer Ethanol Production (COVID-19)

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to scale a renewable technology. The proposed system uses renewable energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into value-added chemicals with the only byproduct being oxygen. This approach has the potential to make chemicals and fuels that consume and prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Unique to this process is production of the world’s first carbon-negative alcohols. These can be used as feedstock for materials including consumer goods, bioplastics, and fuel, both more sustainably and at a cost potentially lower than any other technologies in use today. The system’s most critical component is a proprietary catalyst that transforms carbon dioxide into alcohols, namely ethanol, using only earth-abundant elements and avoiding the use of precious metals. This SBIR project will focus on significantly improving these earth-abundant catalysts to reduce the cost of sustainable chemical production. This SBIR project proposes to make transformative improvements to heterogeneous catalyst efficiency and yield for ethanol production. In doing so, it will improve understanding of how carbon dioxide interacts with the metals in novel heterogeneous catalysts. The new industrial chemical process produces ethanol from carbon dioxide in a single step. This process produces the first and only lifecycle carbon-negative ethanol to date, with the potential to be more energy efficient than legacy and state-of-the-art renewable ethanol processes. The proposed novel catalysts enable new conversion phenomena not observed previously, which presents a challenge toward improving and scaling catalyst production. This project will study variants of the catalyst under varied pressure, temperature, flow rate, and other conditions along with chemical characterization to better understand how carbon dioxide and hydrogen bind to the catalyst surface. This data will be used to iterate and improve rate and selectivity toward production of USP grade ethanol. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.