Carbon Fixation for Food Production

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Demand for food is ubiquitous around the globe. Different regions of the world meet their food needs in different ways, but at times the normal production and supply mechanisms are interrupted. Reasons include drought and natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, floods, or situations arising from conflicts. The work here pursues the vision to develop a system able to produce food from minimal resources, e.g., water, as well as N2, O2, CO2 from air, using renewable energy (wind, solar, hydro). Realization of this vision will require CO2 capture, carbon and nitrogen fixation, as well as conversion of the carbon and nitrogen substrates into biomass for subsequent processing into food formats such as shakes or puddings. This presentation will focus on developing the carbon fixation capability to help enable the vision of generating food from minimal resources. The specific approach involves the electroreduction of CO2 to CO in a membrane electrode assembly (MEA) cell, followed by the electroreduction in bipolar cells with a porous solid electrolyte of CO to acetate. This two-step approach is expected to achieve a higher selectivity for acetate than direction reduction of CO2 to acetate. An additional advantage is that the product stream of the second step is comprised of pure water with water-soluble products (acetate, traces of ethanol, etc.) without the presence of electrolyte salts, avoiding separation steps. This presentation will focus on catalyst, electrode, and cell optimization for both CO2 to CO and CO to Acetate conversion, with a focus on scaling of single cells and enhancing durability over multi-hour runs.