Protonic Ceramic Electrochemical Cells with Dry Reforming of Methane for Electricity Generation, Chemicals Manufacturing, and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Abstract

The massive exploration and utilization of fossil fuels for power generation and chemicals manufacturing have contributed to worldwide economic growth. However, these activities lead to significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which primarily include CO2 and CH4. The technologies, which intensify power generation with chemicals production from CO2 and CH4, will reduce the carbon footprint and address associated challenges. Dry reforming of methane (DRM, CH4 + CO2→ 2CO + 2H2) in electrochemical devices, which converts both CO2 and CH4 to a mixture of CO and H2 (i.e., syngas), and electricity, could be leveraged to achieve simultaneous power generation, chemicals manufacturing, and GHG mitigation. In this talk, we will present our novel protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (PCECs) for achieving this objective. The current PCECs with internal DRM suffer from poor performance, high operating temperature, and short durable operation, which is mainly ascribed to the lack of highly active and coking tolerant DRM catalysts that could be chemically and physically compatible with PCECs. This talk with present an oxide-supported in-situ exsolved Ni-Ru catalyst, which has been carefully designed and computationally validated as a highly active and coking-tolerant DRM catalyst. This DRM catalyst significantly enhances the catalytic activity and coking tolerance, which consequently lowers the operating temperatures of PCECs, with excellent fuel cell performance durability demonstrated. An exceptional peak power density of 0.94, 0.65, and 0.30 W cm-2 has been attained at 650 °C, 600 °C, and 550 °C, respectively, setting a record of PCECs for DRM.