Scientists at Cornell University have developed an oxygen-assisted aluminum/carbon dioxide power cell that can sequester carbon dioxide while producing electricity, the university announced Thursday. “The group’s proposed cell would use aluminum as the anode and mixed streams of carbon dioxide and oxygen as the active ingredients of the cathode. The electrochemical reactions between the anode and the cathode would sequester the carbon dioxide into carbon-rich compounds while also producing electricity and a valuable oxalate as a byproduct,” the release says.
The new system addresses one of the major drawbacks of traditional carbon capture technologies. “The fact that we’ve designed a carbon capture technology that also generates electricity is, in and of itself, important,” said Lynden Archer, a Cornell professor of engineering. “One of the roadblocks to adopting current CO2 capture technology in electric power plants is that the regeneration of the fluids used for capturing CO2 utilize as much as 25 percent of the energy output of the plant.”
The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
