Jingxiu Xie, assistant professor of catalytic processes for gas conversion at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, knows turning CO2 into kerosene isn’t difficult. But it’s her knowledge of catalysis and chemical engineering that she hopes will turn the process into a sustainable model.
According to a press release from the university, Xie plans to use the waste gases from major CO2 emitters. These waste gases contain many other molecules apart from CO and H2.
“And the commercial catalysts that are used in the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reaction [that take syngas and convert it into liquid fuel] do not respond well to this mixture,” says Xie. “We know that it is possible to use a cobalt catalyst to produce aviation fuel from carbon monoxide and hydrogen in the laboratory. But pollutants in the waste gases can result in shorter hydrocarbons. So, we need to combine knowledge of catalysis with knowledge of chemical engineering to get the process working in the way that we want: a fully green production of kerosene.”
She is working on ways to make the entire process more efficient. This is done by minimizing the purification steps for the waste gas and by tweaking the cobalt catalyst to work better in an industrial process.
Her ideas to produce hydrocarbons using carbon dioxide from waste gases may also change the way in which the chemical industry works. “Chemical factories are usually very large and use the economy of scale to produce cheaply. But when we start to use many different sources of carbon for our processes, this may require building small production units near these sources. This will increase costs. So, that is another reason why we have to simplify the production process: to reduce costs,” says Xie.
