Researchers from the University of Sydney have created a new CO2 catalyst that could potentially reduce CO2 emissions from oil refineries by up to 28%.
Oil refineries are the second largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, producing significant amounts of carbon during the refinement of crude oil when producing products like diesel, petroleum, and gasoline. They estimate that 20-30% is burnt off or transferred into waste during this process.
The petrochemical and bio-refinery industries use solid acids, particularly zeolites, and amorphous silica-aluminas (ASAs) as environmental catalysts. These help in the capturing and conversion of CO2.
Now a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Jun Huang, from the Faculty of Engineering and Sydney Nano Institute, has created a new amorphous silica-alumina catalyst that has a stronger acidity than any other silica-alumina material previously created.
Professor Huang talks about the invention:
This new catalyst can significantly reduce the amount of CO2 emitted by oil refineries, which has the potential to make the fossil fuel industry much greener and cleaner.
The materials used were able to provide Brønsted acid sites (BAS) that have tuneable densities and strength. These help to facilitate the optimization of surface acidity which promotes a series of important chemical reactions. Zeolites that have strong Brønsted acidity levels are becoming increasingly important for sustainable processes. This includes CO2 capture and conversion, air-pollution remediation, biomass conversions, and water purification.
The researchers and authors left the following comments about this important discovery:
“This new catalyst offers some exciting prospects, if it were to be adopted by the entire oil refinery industry, we could potentially see a reduction of over 20% in CO2 emissions during the oil refinement process. That’s the equivalent of double Australia’s crude oil consumption, over 2 million barrels of oil per day.”
The new catalyst also has the potential to develop the biomass industry. We can now look to biomass material like algae to be part of sustainable energy solutions.
“Renewable energy is important to achieving a more sustainable energy supply, but the reality is that we will still be reliant on fossil fuels in the foreseeable future. Therefore, we should do all we can to make this industry more efficient and reduce its carbon footprint while we transition to renewable energy sources.”
The team is looking forward to manufacturing this catalyst on a large industrial scale.
The present study highlights a promising route for generating BAS with zeolitic strength and high stability on ASAs, which could facilitate improved catalytic performances in a wide range of applications, including acid and multifunctional catalysis.
This research was a collaboration with the University Lille (France), the Centre National de la recherche Scientifique (France), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) and Macquarie University (Australia).
