STTR Phase I: HI-LIGHT - Solar Thermal Chemical Reactor Technology for Converting CO2 to Hydrocarbons

这项小型企业技术转让（STTR）项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力涉及这样一个事实，即化石碳的开采和消费每年造成60多亿吨二氧化碳排放。虽然一些缓解方法已经相当成熟，如捕获二氧化碳用于封存或提高石油采收率，但它们在可变成本和资本成本方面都非常昂贵，而且几乎没有机会提供投资回报。由于没有从循环经济的角度看待化石燃料和原料，我们估计这些公司错过了每年约500亿美元的潜在利润机会，这些利润来自碳氢化合物（包括甲醇），这些碳氢化合物可以用废弃的二氧化碳制成。如果成功，我们的HI-Light反应堆将实现一种基于将游离的二氧化碳转化为有用碳氢化合物的新经济，并解决投资回报问题。这个STTR一期项目建议开发HI-Light，一种太阳能热催化“反燃烧”技术，使二氧化碳和水转化为甲醇和其他碳氢化合物的速度大大高于目前的水平。以前的方法受到两个障碍的限制：(1)半导体催化剂只能使用能量大于其带隙的光子，这是阳光下存在的光子的一小部分；(2)由于次优的光和反应物传递，这些反应器中的大部分催化剂材料未得到充分利用。我们独特的反应器采用专利的多尺度方法来增强光和试剂直接传输到反应部位，并利用传统上未使用的光子来提供热量并提高反应效率。我们的反应器的独特之处在于：(1)优化了光传输，以确保所有催化剂材料都有足够的光来激活反应；(2)先进的纳米工程光催化剂，其配体功能化，以增强二氧化碳的捕获和转化。第一阶段的目标是建造一个集成的原型反应器，并以每克催化剂每小时产生的碳氢化合物克数来评估其生产力，并证明其比目前的技术水平提高了10倍。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project relates to the fact that the extraction and consumption of fossil carbon accounts for over 6 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions each year. While some mitigation approaches are fairly mature, like capturing CO2 for equestration or for enhanced oil recovery, they are very expensive in terms of both variable and capital costs and have little chance of ever providing a return on investment. By not viewing fossil fuels and feedstocks through a circular economy lens, we estimate these companies miss an opportunity for approximately $50 billion per year in potential profit from hydrocarbons, including methanol, that could be made with waste CO2. If successful, our HI-Light reactor will enable a new economy based on the conversion of fugitive CO2 into useful hydrocarbons and solve the return on investment problem.This STTR Phase I project proposes to develop HI-Light, a solar-thermocatalytic "reverse combustion" technology that enables the conversion of CO2 and water to methanol and other hydrocarbons at rate significantly greater than the state of the art. Previous approaches are limited by two roadblocks: (1) the semiconductor catalysts can only use photons with energies greater than their bandgap, which is a small fraction of those present in sunlight and (2) a large fraction of the catalyst material in these reactors is under-utilized due to sub-optimal light and reactant delivery. Our unique reactor uses a patented, multiscale approach to enhance light and reagent transport directly to the reaction site and makes use of traditionally unused photons to provide heat and enhance reaction efficiency. The unique features of our reactor are (1) optimized light delivery to ensure that all of the catalyst material has enough light to activate the reaction and (2) an advanced nano-engineered photocatalyst which is functionalized with ligands to enhance CO2 capture and conversion. The goal of this Phase I effort is to construct an integrated prototype reactor and evaluate its productivity in terms of the grams of hydrocarbon produced per gram of catalyst per hour and demonstrate a 10x improvement over the state of the art.