McMaster University and DTU researchers improve tech for CO2 capture for fuel and plastics

In Canada, the drive to capture airborne carbon dioxide from industrial waste and make it into fuel and plastics is gaining momentum after a team of researchers at McMaster University and computational chemistry experts at Copenhagen’s Danish Technical University uncovered precisely how the process works and where it bogs down.

The researchers set out to resolve why synthetic materials that have been shown to catalyze and convert carbon dioxide break down too quickly for the process to be practical at an industrial level.

Using extremely powerful magnification equipment at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy (CCEM) on McMaster’s campus, the researchers were able to capture the chemical reaction at nanoscale — billionths of a meter — allowing them to study both the conversion process and understand how the catalyst breaks down under operating conditions.