News Release

University of Toronto chemists envision new fuel economy

Grant and Award Announcement

CMC Research Institutes

TORONTO, ON -- Imagine pulling up to the pump and filling your tank with fuel derived from greenhouse gas emissions. This vision of a new fuel economy is taking shape as University of Toronto researchers put novel chemical reactions to work in order to develop a carbon-neutral system to recycle carbon dioxide, or CO2, into liquid fuel.

The innovative research project is fueled by a $268,000 grant from Carbon Management Canada (CMC-NCE), a Network of Centres of Excellence that supports research to eliminate carbon emissions from the fossil energy industry.

In the 2011 round of CMC-NCE funding, $10 million was awarded to Canadian researchers working on 18 projects. The recently announced decision to fund the projects was made after a rigorous, international peer-review process. The University of Toronto project is one of three that focus on enabling and emerging technologies.

U of T chemists Douglas Stephan and Eugenia Kumacheva are laying the foundation for an efficient and cost-effective method to transform CO2 and hydrogen into water and methanol, a liquid fuel. The ultimate goal is an energy-generation system that would be carbon neutral, with every CO2 molecule released from fuel consumption being converted back into methanol.

"The CMC funding is giving us an opportunity to explore chemistry that relates to one of the biggest problems facing humankind," said Stephan.

Methanol, or methyl hydrate, is the same clean-burning fuel that's used to heat a fondue pot. A liquid, methanol is relatively easy to store and transport, even with existing delivery systems—gas station pumps, for example.

"The big problem with new possible fuels is the infrastructure for transportation," commented Stephan.

The unprecedented approach to CO2 capture and reuse builds on his group's breakthrough discovery of a new way to capture and use CO2, research that has been supported in part by NSERC and the green chemistry commercialization body, GreenCentre Canada

"It's really incredibly simple chemistry that we've discovered," said Stephan. "We generate this new reactivity that we've been able to observe with CO2 and a variety of other small molecules."

To carry out the process, chemical reagents dubbed "frustrated Lewis pairs" are used to effect these new chemical reactions. Extremely effective and versatile, the frustrated Lewis pairs are also nontoxic—unlike conventional catalysts employed to convert CO2 to methanol.

"Now the question is," said Stephan, "can we tweak the system? Optimize the system?"

"If we could do this catalytically," he explained, "…so that you could use a very small amount of our catalyst…to grab CO2, transform it to methanol, release it, and then go back and do it again…you really bring down the cost of the process."

Another challenge is that the reactions happen so quickly, it is difficult to study them. However, a new technique developed in the Kumacheva lab is making it easier to obtain the needed data.

Along with a clean source of hydrogen—a technology that Stephan noted is imminent—the team hopes that the CO2 to methanol system will one day revolutionize the fuel sector.

"New chemistry is going to be part of the solution to environmental issues," said Stephan, adding "it's not widely recognized just how much chemistry goes into just about every solution to any problem."

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About Carbon Management Canada (www.cmc-nce.ca)

Carbon Management Canada is a Network of Centres of Excellence supported by federal and provincial governments as well as industry. CMC is a community of over 140 university researchers, and industry and government practitioners with the vision, the commitment, and the enthusiasm needed to take the upstream fossil energy industry to zero carbon emissions.


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