Electrochemical Reduction of Carbon Dioxide with Flue Gas Impurities: Turning Fumes into fuels

Promovendus/a: Sam Van Daele

Promotor(en): prof. dr. Tom Breugelmans

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions drive climate change and require urgent abatement. The electrochemical reduction of CO2, powered by renewable energy, presents great prospects to turn this waste product into value-added products, yet the high costs of CO2 capture and purification hampers its profitability. One solution is to directly utilize waste CO2 gases, for example from an industrial flue gas exhaust stream as a feedstock to produce value-added chemical products. However, these waste gases typically contain CO2 in low concentrations together with impurities like O2, SO2 and NO that could interfere with the electrochemical process. This PhD thesis investigated the influence of gaseous impurities during the electrochemical CO2 conversion to chemical products.