Within the framework of the National Laboratory for Renewable Energy (NLRE) project, four excellent researchers of our research group worked for a year on the theoretical and experimental part of the project.
Water oxidation to oxygen is the almost exclusively applied anode reaction during carbon dioxide (CO2) electrolysis. One of the serious challenges of the industrial applicability of CO2 electrolysis is the high operation cell voltage during the process. The cell voltage indirectly shows the energy required for the given process occurring at the given speed.
Our research group's study is special in that the electrochemical oxidation of glycerol replaced the previously mentioned water oxidation to oxygen. During the process, industrially valuable oxidation products are produced (oxalate, tartronate, glycerate, glycolate, lactate and formate), which could be utilized, for example, in the pharmaceutical industry, cosmetics industry, textile and leather industry, and food industry. Replacing water oxidation with glycerol oxidation resulted in a notable reduction of the cell voltage by almost 1 volt! Thus, the energy requirement for the operation of the electrolysis cell is much lower, which can facilitate the real-life application of the technology.
Following technological developments, this solution could make it cheaper to convert CO2 into carbon monoxide, which helps the technology to be implemented on a larger scale, and in the long term, they can even contribute to reducing the costs of synthetic fuels.
The entire article can be read at the following link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acscatal.3c05952
