Enabling storage and utilization of low-carbon electricity: power to formic acid
Formic acid has been proposed as a hydrogen energy carrier because of its many desirable properties, such as low toxicity and flammability, and a high volumetric hydrogen storage capacity of 53 g H 2 L −1 under ambient conditions. Compared to liquid hydrogen, formic acid is thus more convenient and...
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| Published in | Energy & environmental science Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 1194 - 1246 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors | , , , , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
Cambridge
Royal Society of Chemistry
01.01.2021
|
| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Formic acid has been proposed as a hydrogen energy carrier because of its many desirable properties, such as low toxicity and flammability, and a high volumetric hydrogen storage capacity of 53 g H
2
L
−1
under ambient conditions. Compared to liquid hydrogen, formic acid is thus more convenient and safer to store and transport. Converting formic acid to power has been demonstrated in direct formic acid fuel cells and in dehydrogenation reactions to supply hydrogen for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells. However, to enable a complete cycle for the storage and utilization of low-carbon or carbon-free electricity, processes for the hydrogenation and electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide (CO
2
) to formic acid, namely power to formic acid, are needed. In this review, representative homogenous and heterogeneous catalysts for CO
2
hydrogenation will be summarized. Apart from catalytic systems for CO
2
hydrogenation, a wide range of catalysts, electrodes, and reactor systems for the electrochemical CO
2
reduction reaction (eCO
2
RR) will be discussed. An analysis for practical applications from the engineering viewpoint will be provided with concluding remarks and an outlook for future challenges and R&D directions.
Power to formic acid
via
CO
2
hydrogenation or electrochemical CO
2
reduction has great potential to enable a complete cycle with formic acid to power for the storage and utilization of low-carbon electricity at a scale of multi-gigatonnes per year. |
|---|---|
| Bibliography: | Indranil Dutta received his MSc at the University of Hyderabad (India) in Inorganic Chemistry. He pursued his PhD degree on metal-metal and metal-ligand cooperation strategies for organic transformation at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. Afterwards he moved to Osaka University, Japan, as a Postdoctoral Fellow before moving to KAUST, KSA. Currently, he has been working with Prof. Kuo-Wei Huang since 2019. His broad research interests include the design of various cooperative catalysts and study of their reactivity towards small molecule activation and in particular for dehydrogenation chemistry. His present work focuses on formic acid dehydrogenation and CO utilization, hydrogen storage, and small molecule activation by the PN Zhiping Lai is Professor of Chemical Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. He received his BE and MS from Tsinghua University China and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before joining KAUST, he was a research associate at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University. His research focuses on developing high-performance membranes out of ordered porous materials and their applications in the separation of hydrocarbon mixtures, seawater desalination, lithium-sulfur batteries, and low-grade heat recovery. He is the recipient of the 2020 AIChE Industrial Gases Award. H Kuo-Wei Huang is Professor of Chemical Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. He received his BS from National Taiwan University as a Yuan T. Lee Fellow and PhD from Stanford University as a Regina Casper Fellow. Before joining KAUST, he was an Assistant Professor at National University of Singapore and Goldhaber Distinguished Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The research interests of his group include CO + CO utilization. 2 3 Sudipta Chatterjee received his PhD degree in Inorganic Chemistry from Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, India, in 2017. He then worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University, USA, from 2017 to 2019. Since July 2019, he is working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at KAUST Catalysis Center, KAUST, Saudi Arabia. His research areas lie in the field of small molecule activation and reduction (O towards sustainable energy production and identification of vital intermediates using electrochemical, spectro-electrochemical and DFT studies towards understanding the structure-function correlations. Yanwei Lum is a Research Scientist at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. He received his BEng from Imperial College London and PhD from University of California, Berkeley. Before joining A*STAR he was a PostDoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His research interests include electrochemistry, materials chemistry, CO (P) platform his group has developed and pioneered. He was recently highlighted in the "Pioneers and Influencers in Organometallic Chemistry" series in Organometallics 2020. conversion to chemicals/fuels and partial oxidation of hydrocarbon feedstocks. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14 |
| ISSN: | 1754-5692 1754-5706 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/d0ee03011b |