Page 5 – Research

The consumption of petroleum by the transportation sector in the United States is roughly equivalent to petroleum imports into the country, which have totaled over 12 million barrels a day every year since 2004. This reliance on foreign oil is a strategic vulnerability for the economy and national security. Further, the effect of unmitigated CO{sub 2} releases on the global climate is a growing concern both here and abroad. Independence from problematic oil producers can be achieved to a great degree through the utilization of non-conventional hydrocarbon resources such as coal, oil-shale and tarsands. However, tapping into and converting these resources into liquid fuels exacerbates green house gas (GHG) emissions as they are carbon rich, but hydrogen deficient. Revolutionary thinking about energy and fuels must be adopted. We must recognize that hydrocarbon fuels are ideal energy carriers, but not primary energy sources. The energy stored in a chemical fuel is released for utilization by oxidation. In the case of hydrogen fuel the chemical product is water; in the case of a hydrocarbon fuel, water and carbon dioxide are produced. The hydrogen economy envisions a cycle in which H{sub 2}O is re-energized by splitting water into H{sub 2} and O{sub 2}, by electrolysis for example. We envision a hydrocarbon analogy in which both carbon dioxide and water are re-energized through the application of a persistent energy source (e.g. solar or nuclear). This is of course essentially what the process of photosynthesis accomplishes, albeit with a relatively low sunlight-to-hydrocarbon efficiency. The goal of this project then was the creation of a direct and efficient process for the solar or nuclear driven thermochemical conversion of CO{sub 2} to CO (and O{sub 2}), one of the basic building blocks of synthetic fuels. This process would potentially provide the basis for an alternate hydrocarbon economy that is carbon neutral, provides a pathway to energy independence, and is compatible with much of the existing fuel infrastructure.

More Details

TYPE SAND Report YEAR 2009

OSTI DOI

Fundamental Materials Issues for Thermochemical H₂O and CO₂ Splitting: Final Report (FY08)

Coker, Eric N.; Rodriguez, Marko A.; Ambrosini, Andrea A.; Stumpf, Roland R.; Stechel-Speicher, Ellen B.

Hydrogen and carbon monoxide may be produced using solar-thermal energy in two-stage reactions of water and carbon dioxide, respectively, over certain metal oxide materials. The most active materials observed experimentally for these processes are complex mixtures of ferrite and zirconia based solids, and it is not clear how far the ferrites, the zirconia, or a solid solution between the two participate in the change of oxidation state during the cycling. Identification of the key phases in the redox material that enable splitting is of paramount importance to developing a working model of the materials. A three-pronged approach was adopted here: computer modeling to determine thermodynamically favorable materials compositions, bench reactor testing to evaluate materials’ performance, and in-situ characterization of reactive materials to follow phase changes and identify the phases active for splitting. For the characterization and performance evaluation thrusts, cobalt ferrites were prepared by co-precipitation followed by annealing at 1400 °C. An in-situ X-ray diffraction capability was developed and tested, allowing phase monitoring in real time during thermochemical redox cycling. Key observations made for an un-supported cobalt ferrite include: 1) ferrite phases partially reduce to wustite upon heating to 1400 °C in helium; 2) exposing the material to air at 1100 °C causes immediate re-oxidation; 3) the re-oxidized material may be thermally reduced at 1400 °C under inert; 4) exposure of a reduced material to CO₂ results in gradual re-oxidation at 1100 °C, but minimization of background O₂-levels is essential; 5) even after several redox cycles, the lattice parameters of the ferrites remain constant, indicating that irreversible phase separation does not occur, at least over the first five cycles; 6) substituting chemical (hydrogen) reduction for thermal reduction resulted in formation of a CoFe metallic alloy. Materials were also evaluated for their CO₂-splitting performance in bench reactor systems utilizing chemical reduction in place of thermal reduction. These tests lead to the following general conclusions: 1) despite over-reduction of the cobalt ferrite phase to CoFe alloy on chemical reduction, splitting of CO₂ still occurs; 2) the kinetics of chemical reduction follow the sequence: un-supported < ZrO₂-supported < yttria-stabilized ZrO₂ (YSZ)-supported ferrite; 3) ferrite/YSZ re-oxidizes faster than ferrite/ZrO₂ under CO₂ in the range 400 – 700 °C. The temperature and pressure regimes in which the thermal reduction and water-splitting steps are thermodynamically favorable in terms of the enthalpy and entropy of oxide reduction, were determined. These metrics represent a useful design goal for any proposed water-splitting cycle. Applying this theoretical framework to available thermodynamic data, it was shown that none of the 105 binary oxide redox couples that were screened possess both energetically favorable reduction and oxidation steps. However, several driving forces, including low pressure and a large positive solid-state entropy of reduction of the oxide, have the potential to enable thermodynamically-favored two-step cycles.