A Gas Station on Mars? University of Cincinnati Engineers Consider the Possibilities
By Michael Miller, UC News
September 22, 2021 -- Engineers
at the University of Cincinnati are developing new ways to convert greenhouse
gases to fuel to address climate change and get astronauts home from Mars.
UC College of Engineering and Applied
Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a carbon catalyst
in a reactor to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Known as the “Sabatier
reaction” from the late French chemist Paul Sabatier, it’s a process the
International Space Station uses to scrub the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts
breathe and generate rocket fuel to keep the station in high orbit.
But Wu is thinking much bigger.
The Martian atmosphere is composed
almost entirely of carbon dioxide. Astronauts could save half the fuel they
need for a return trip home by making what they need on the red planet once
they arrive, Wu said.
“It’s like a gas station on Mars. You
could easily pump carbon dioxide through this reactor and produce methane for a
rocket,” Wu said.
UC’s study was published in the journal
Nature Communications with collaborators from Rice University, Shanghai
University and East China University of Science and Technology.
Wu began his career in chemical
engineering by studying fuel cells for electric vehicles but began looking at
carbon dioxide conversion in his chemical engineering lab about 10 years ago.
“I realized that greenhouse gases were
going to be a big issue in society,” Wu said. “A lot of countries realized that
carbon dioxide is a big issue for the sustainable development of our society.
That’s why I think we need to achieve carbon neutrality.”
The Biden Administration has set a goal
of achieving a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas pollutants by 2030 and an
economy that relies on renewable energy by 2050.
“That means we’ll have to recycle carbon
dioxide,” Wu said.
Wu and his students, including lead
author and UC doctoral candidate Tianyu Zhang, are experimenting with different
catalysts such as graphene quantum dots — layers of carbon just nanometers big
— that can increase the yield of methane.
Wu said the process holds promise to
help mitigate climate change. But it also has a big commercial advantage in
producing fuel as a byproduct.
“The process is 100 times more
productive than it was just 10 years ago. So you can imagine that progress will
come faster and faster,” Wu said. “In the next 10 years, we’ll have a lot of
startup companies to commercialize this technique.”
Wu’s students are using different
catalysts to produce not only methane but ethylene. Called the world’s most
important chemical, ethylene is used in the manufacture of plastics, rubber,
synthetic clothing and other products.
“In the future we’ll develop other
catalysts that can produce more products,” said Zhang, a doctoral student in
chemical engineering.
Like his professor, Zhang said he sees a
bright future for green energy.
“Green energy will be very important. In
the future, it will represent a huge market. So I wanted to work on it,” Zhang
said.
Synthesizing fuel from carbon dioxide
becomes even more commercially viable when coupled with renewable energy such
as solar or wind power, Wu said.
“Right now we have excess green energy
that we just throw away. We can store this excess renewable energy in
chemicals,” he said.
The process is scalable for use in power
plants that can generate tons of carbon dioxide. And it’s efficient since the
conversion can take place right where excess carbon dioxide is produced.
Wu said advances in fuel production from
carbon dioxide make him more confident that humans will set foot on Mars in his
lifetime.
“Right now if you want to come back from
Mars, you would need to bring twice as much fuel, which is very heavy,” he
said. “And in the future, you’ll need other fuels. So we can produce methanol
from carbon dioxide and use them to produce other downstream materials. Then
maybe one day we could live on Mars.”
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