A catalyst turns CO2 into 2-propanol at room temperature, with the efficiency unstated

A Sungkyunkwan University team reports stable 48-hour operation at ambient conditions in Applied Catalysis B. The release claims a world record and publishes no number.

A team led by Professor Jung Kyu Kim at Sungkyunkwan University's School of Chemical Engineering has published a catalyst that converts carbon dioxide directly into 2-propanol at room temperature and ambient pressure. The work appeared online in Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy on August 5. The release says the catalyst held stable performance for 48 hours of continuous operation without degradation.

The reason a chemist would care is chain length. Most electrochemical CO2 reduction stops at one-carbon products such as carbon monoxide or methane, which are cheap commodities. 2-propanol is a three-carbon alcohol with an established industrial market, so making it directly from CO2 at ambient conditions would move captured carbon from a disposal problem to a feedstock. Doing it without heat or pressure is what removes most of the energy cost.

And then the release claims world-record efficiency and does not say what the efficiency is. There is no Faradaic efficiency, no current density, no selectivity percentage and no prior record named for comparison. Nor does it state whether this is bench, pilot or anything larger. We grade what is published, not what is implied, so this scores a 2. When the paper's numbers surface, the story can be re-graded upward on the same evidence rule that would have capped it today.

Source: Phys.org