A Waterloo Engineering research team has achieved a historic breakthrough in transforming the carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change into clean fuels.
Led by Dr. Yimin Wu, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, the team has refined a process over a two-year period that could play a significant role in helping decarbonize industrial emissions and boost both the environment and national economies.
This process was a result of the National Research Council (NRC) Canada’s Materials For Clean Fuels Challenge program, a multi-year program aimed at developing new technologies to decarbonize Canada’s energy sectors. Wu’s team collaborated with the NRC, which provided a $160,000 grant.
“This technology will help countries achieve the Paris Agreement’s net-zero carbon emissions goal by 2050. Nobody has achieved such high production of these hydrocarbon by-products before this,” said Wu. “This new process will give more economic benefits to companies and industries, making carbon capture more economically feasible to adopt.”
While other researchers have tried to do the same thing, they often failed to convert the carbon dioxide efficiently enough to make their processes economically viable. Wu’s team has overcome this stumbling block with their process which utilizes a different catalyst than prior attempts at a similar outcome.
Wu and his colleagues now hope to increase the long-term stability of the system’s reactor to operate with 1,000 hours with no downtime. But with the commercial potential of their research already apparent, Wu and his colleagues plan to create a spin-off company featuring their technology with a U.S. patent pending and early interest from investors.
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