The recent spike in food prices is not just a burden on grocery bills; it’s also impacting the sugars used in biomanufacturing, however, the challenge has pushed researchers to find alternative, more sustainable feedstocks
A new solution for sugar
One promising solution comes from Feng Jiao, the Elvera and William R. Stuckenberg Professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Jiao has developed a two-step process that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into valuable chemicals, including acetate and ethylene, which are crucial for producing food, plastics, and other commodities.
Jiao’s innovative tandem CO2 electrolyser can produce a kilogram of chemicals per day, a significant leap from previous technologies that managed only a gram per day.
This represents a 1,000% increase in production scale, making the technology commercially viable. This offers a potential way to industrial-scale CO2 conversion, addressing both economic and environmental concerns.
“Most work in CO2 electrocatalysis is done at a small scale,” Jiao explained. “Scaling up by three orders of magnitude to produce a kilogram per day, as we have done, is a big step, but still nowhere near the scale of global CO2 emission, which is gigatons per year.”
Jiao’s team faced numerous engineering challenges, such as separating the products and maintaining performance despite temperature and transport issues during scale-up.
Converting C02 on an industrial scale
Their tandem electrolyser works by first converting CO2 to carbon monoxide (CO) and then converting CO to multi-carbon products, enhancing efficiency through task specialisation. The system operated consistently for over 125 hours, producing 98 liters of acetate at 96% purity, showing its robustness and resilience against industrial impurities.
“This is the first step in scaling up to commercial applications,”
Jiao noted, “We’re trying to invent a scalable way to produce acetate from CO2, which would allow us to shift carbon feedstocks, provide economical pathways to use CO2 and turn it into something useful, and cut down CO2 emissions associated with traditional chemical manufacturing processes.”
If this CO2 conversion process can be scaled up further, it could dramatically lower the cost of sugar used to feed the microbes in biomanufacturing. It would also reduce the environmental impact of agricultural sugar production.
“We’re in the process of scaling the system up again, by another order of magnitude,” Jiao said. “We’re working on fine-tuning the system, for example by using different catalysts, and improving performance by making the more stable, robust and efficient. If everything works out, we could be seeing this technology in a commercial scale demonstration in five to ten years.”
