Dipartimento di Chimica

Descrizione del progetto

CO2, the primary driver of climate change via the Greenhouse Effect, is also a sustainable carbon resource for the production of value-added chemicals.
Nature uses 110 gigatons of CO2 every year as the primary carbon source for production of carbohydrates via photosynthesis.
Mimicking nature by using CO2 as a feedstock would result in substantial benefit for society with respect to lower carbon footprint for the production of value-added chemicals, reduced dependency on fossil fuels and reduced pollution.
Light olefins (ethene, propene and butenes) are key building blocks in the petrochemical industry, with an annual production of more than 120 million metric tons.
The use of CO2 as raw material for the production of light olefins would be an important contribution to an anthropogenic carbon cycle using CO2 capture and recycling, provided the energy input comes from renewable sources. In this context, CO2LO envisages to directly convert CO2 to light olefins through cascade reactions over a bifunctional catalyst.
The proposed cascade process connects hydrogenation of CO2 to CO and water, conversion of CO and hydrogen to methanol, and conversion of methanol to olefins, all well-known industrial processes but requiring two reactors, individually operating at widely different temperatures (250 vs.
400 ?C) and pressures (50 vs 1 bar), due to thermodynamic restrictions of the first two steps.
The combined process represents a strong thermodynamic driving force, enabled by the third, energetically favored reaction.
The project aims to develop a bifunctional catalyst by integrating, at the molecular scale, an active metal alloy for the CO2-to-methanol reaction.