Revealing Mechanistic Processes in Gas-Diffusion Electrodes During CO2 Reduction to CO/Formate.

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Revealing Mechanistic Processes in Gas-Diffusion Electrodes During CO2 Reduction via Impedance Spectroscopy (Bienen et al., ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2020, 8, 36, 13759–13768)

Electricity is decidedly not a primary source of energy, and as such, it is always a thermodynamically degraded form of energy. It is therefore intrinsically wasteful. Storing electricity - generally as chemical energy although there are limited opportunities to store it as gravitational energy or as compressed gases - further thermodynamically degrades electrical energy and also is intrinsically wasteful both at the point of storage and at the point of release. Batteries, for example, give off heat, charging and discharging. Despite vast enthusiasm for energy storage by the general public, and tens upon hundreds of thousands of papers written on this subject, all of this is generally true, as I often state in my posts in this space.

There is one caveat however that is possibly of some possible import - if one captures energy that would have been wasted anyway and stores it in a form that is usable - the thermodynamic losses, although there still will be losses, will be minimized. At the most extreme, the only form of primary energy is nuclear. The sun is famously a nuclear device, which drives the wind, provides light - which over hundreds of millions of years was converted into chemical energy, dangerous fossil fuels which we can't burn fast enough - and also into current inventories of biomass, including but not limited to food. Some of the very best minds of the 20th century learned how to harness nuclear energy in the form of fission, although strictly put, uranium and thorium and the elements made from them are actually stored energy from ancient supernovae. Indeed, geothermal energy, which is provided by heat released by nuclear decay is also stored energy from ancient supernovae, being released in a generally regular way, earthquakes and volcanoes not withstanding. Only tidal energy is seemingly divorced from the nuclear primacy.

Nevertheless in practical engineering terms, we tend to think of dangerous fossil fuels and related biomass as primary energy, light from the sun as primary energy, wind as primary energy, geothermal as primary energy, gravitational energy, which is used in tidal and hydroelectric systems (the latter still driven by the sun) as primary energy, and of course, nuclear fission as primary energy.

The paper listed at the outset of this post is about wasting energy to make electricity and then wasting even more of it to make chemical energy, in this case formate and carbon monoxide, the latter, via the "water gas" reaction, an equivalent of hydrogen.

Despite my contempt for the thermodynamics of electricity, I do sometimes imagine cases where it might be acceptable to waste some energy to make electricity, and even chemical energy via electricity.

To illustrate, I offer a diversion. Over the last week or so, at various times of the day, on various days of the week, I've been downloading the data and graphics on the CAISO systems status pages, in three areas, demand, supply, and emissions. CAISO monitors and oversees electricity in California, CAISO = CAlifornia Independent System Operators. They have these wonderful real time page with graphics and numbers that will tell you the state of affairs with respect to electricity at any moment of the day. It's here: CAISO Pages

Here are some graphics I downloaded a little while ago as of this writing, near the 17th hour of the day, Pacific Time:

Here is the demand for electricity in California; the shaded area is historical data for the day, the line beyond is the predicted electricity demand.



The 17th hour, 5 pm PST or PDT +/- an hour or two, as the case might be is consistently close to the peak demand for energy in California, weekends, work days, holidays, every day.

Most people know that the sun is "going down" around that time, and as a result the output of solar energy is declining. California is unique among those places invested in the "renewables will save us" fantasy, in that the output of solar energy can dominate, at times, the output of so called "renewable energy", at least around noon.

This graphic and data breaks down what percentage was around the 17th hour of September 15, 2020:



This graphic and data shows the data for the September 15, 2020 up to 17:10 (5:10 pm):



The absolutely flat grey line near the bottom, 2,241 MW, is California's last remaining nuclear reactor, Diablo Canyon, two nuclear reactors contained in a single building. From midnight until 7 am this morning, it was producing just about as much energy as all of the wind turbines, solar cells, biomass combustion plants (which almost certainly include garbage incinerators), and geothermal plants in the entire state.

The disturbing line, of course, is the "imports" line and the "natural gas" line.

Here are California's emissions, as of 17:10 (5:10 pm PDT).



Don't hold me to this, but my general impression is that if you were to average all the "per hour" emissions data I've seen over the course of pulling up and downloading 20 or 30 of these files, the average would be somewhere between 7,000 metric tons and 8,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide ruthlessly dumped by the State of California to provide electricity to its citizens.

There are 8,767.76 hours in a sideral year, suggesting that California dumps about 65,750,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere each year, this while being "green" and regularly passing, going back to the wonderful time I lived in that State, now decades ago, "by 2000" and "by 2020" and "by 2050" and "by 2060" energy bills claiming that the state will be "green," at least as they imagine "green."

To be honest, my contempt aside, this actually isn't bad, and on their emissions page they have one of those innumerate "percent talk" statements about how great they're doing on emissions.

The reality is however, that all this talk, half a century of it, has not addressed climate change. California, and Oregon, and Washington, recently Australia, this week the Pantanal, are all burning, and powerful hurricanes slice through the Southeastern and Northeastern United States like coupled freight trains.

We needed to be releasing zero carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to generate electricity, and we needed to be doing it years ago.

I just went on the CAISO site again: Today's peak electricity demand took place at 17:18 this afternoon, at 35,971 MWe.

Diablo Canyon is not very impressive in terms of its thermodynamic efficiency with respect to its "primary" energy. Like most nuclear power plants designed in its era, it's around 33% efficient, atrocious really, but similar to all historic Rankine cycle plants. Modern gas powered plants, which are combined Brayton/Rankine cycle plants are closer, and sometimes exceed 50% efficiency.

The reality is, that today, to have provided all the electricity for today's peak demand, 35,971/2,241 would require 17 buildings the size of Diablo Canyon of Diablo Canyon's precise design - which is, by the way, going to be shut in three or four years, because it's "too dangerous" in the minds of people who can't think very well, but the huge tracts of the state burning each year is not "too dangerous."

Of course, at around 3:40 am on September 15, 2020, the demand for electricity in California was less than 22,000 MWe, and the bulk of the putative imaginary nuclear power plants would not be necessary.

In general, my thermodynamic sense is that it is stupid to generate electricity to create potential chemical energy. It is much smarter to use direct thermal to chemical energy conversion if one were to store energy.

However, all chemical processes require cooling, and the rules of process intensification, which are rules to derive the most usable energy per unit of primary energy generated, can conveniently convert thermal energy to electricity with Rankin or Brayton or Stirling heat engines, and storing this mechanical energy may be justifiably be done with an electricity intermediate.

The chemical process in the paper that I promised to discuss at the outset uses carbon dioxide as a feedstock; if this carbon dioxide is obtained from the waste dump into which we've transformed our planetary atmosphere, that can help clean it up.

Here is the cartoon associated with the paper's abstract, which can be read at the link:



From the introduction to the paper:

All countries that signed the Paris agreement have committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions according to the target to keep global warming well below 2 °C with regard to preindustrial values. This entails significant efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of all sectors in the following decades. Because industrial processes significantly contribute to the overall emissions of industrialized countries, for example, in the EU-28 with 8%, the development of innovative routes with lower or negligible CO2 emissions that can substitute traditional processes based on fossil resources can make a contribution to achieve the desired targets.(1?3) The electrochemical conversion of CO2 using renewable energy not only substitutes conventional CO2-intensive processes based on fossil resources but also utilizes CO2 itself as a feedstock, thereby making it a valuable carbon source.(4?6) Depending on the catalysts and reaction conditions, several carbon-based products can be obtained by the cathodic electrochemical reduction of CO2.(7,8)

This work focuses on the tin-catalyzed conversion of CO2 to obtain formate as the target product. Typically, CO2 is not solely converted to formate (eq 1) on tin catalysts but also to carbon monoxide to a lower extent (eq 2), while the aqueous electrolyte is reduced to hydrogen (eq 3) in a parasitic side reaction, reducing the charge efficiency with respect to formate formation, according to the following equations (1) (2) (3)



Formate can be used as a deicing agent or drilling fluid as well as for tanning and silage when protonated to formic acid.(9) In a proof-of-concept study, it was also shown that formate obtained via CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) can be utilized as energy carrier and fed into a direct formate fuel cell to produce electricity or after catalytic decomposition to hydrogen with subsequent re-electrification in a typical polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell.(10,11)

Unfortunately, the conversion of dissolved CO2 on planar electrodes is limited to a maximum current density of well below 10 mA cm–2 because of mass transport constraints evoked by the low solubility of CO2 in the aqueous electrolyte (33 mM L–1 in H2O, 25 °C, 1 atm) and the diffusion of dissolved CO2 from the bulk electrolyte to the electrode surface.(7,12,13) This limitation can be circumvented by the use of so-called gas-diffusion electrodes (GDEs) providing a porous architecture and intensifying the contact between the gas-, liquid-, and solid phases. Their use entails a substantial increase in the number of active sites while the diffusion length of dissolved CO2 to the catalyst surface is reduced. Accordingly, gaseous CO2 can be employed as the substrate and, due to the above effects; the macroscopic mass transport of the reactant is substantially accelerated.(14?16) As a result, the achievable current densities when using GDEs for CO2 electrolysis can be increased by more than an order of magnitude compared to planar electrodes without sacrificing selectivity toward CO2RR products.(17?19) The so far achieved current densities which are already on industrially relevant orders are the reason why GDEs have gained increasing interest in recent years for the investigation of CO2 electrolysis systems.(15,19?21) Nevertheless, long-term stability of these GDEs is an under-represented research topic in the literature. Besides potential catalyst degradation, GDEs might suffer from a change of their hydrophobic properties over time, resulting in flooding, efficiency losses, and in a shift of the product selectivity toward the undesired hydrogen evolution.(22,23) In that respect, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is a powerful tool to deconvolute contributions of specific physical and (electro)chemical processes to the overall resistance during operation of electrochemical devices. The knowledge which process (e.g., charge-transfer, mass transport of reactants) determines the polarization resistance gives valuable insights required for the rational optimization of the employed GDEs and can aid in revealing possible degradation mechanisms. To use EIS as an electrochemical diagnostic tool, it is crucial to know which physical phenomena are observed in the measured impedance spectra...