Solar Production of Fuels from Water and CO₂: Perspectives and Opportunities for a Sustainable Use of Renewable Energy

Abstract

-The increasing energy demand, the depletion of fossil fuels and the concern of maintaining clean environment have become the main reasons for a worldwide attention on renewable energy production. Fuel and energy productions from sunlight represent exciting challenges in the next future thank to the recent developments in related technologies, catalysts and materials. It will be discussed the present economic data concerning energy request, the current technological issues required to face an increase of the use of renewable energy, the main drawbacks related to low conversion efficiency in energy applications, the new routes for producing renewable hydrogen and the bio-mimicking approach provided by artificial leaves. Finally, the critical role of nanoscale engineered processes for the development of efficient and cost-effective systems will be evidenced.

Major Advances and Challenges in Heterogeneous Catalysis for Environmental Applications: A Review

“…Further information about the cost-effectiveness, present technological concerns, drawbacks related to low conversion effectiveness, new ways of creating renewable hydrogen, the bio-mimicking method delivered by artificial leaves, and nano-scale engineered processes for advances in the efficient and cost-effective creation of fuels from water and CO 2 can be found in a recent review paper [165].…”

Kinetics study and simulation of CO2 absorption into mixed aqueous solutions of methyldiethanolamine and hexylamine

“…Na 2 S has several applications in the chemical industry, the authors have used the Response Surface Methodology (RSM) to design and optimize experiments based on Central Composite Design (CCD). A model of Artificial Neural Network has also been used to predict the percentage by weight of Na 2 S. Passalacqua et al (2015) studied the possibility of converting CO 2 into fuel in the presence of solar energy and water in a direct photoreactor, the product obtained is a mixture of methane, methanol and formic acid.…”

Investigation of carbon dioxide (CO2) capture in a falling film contactor by computer simulation

“…In addition the amount of CO 2 needed for the aforementioned processes is much smaller than the amount that can be recovered from power plant flue gases. CO 2 capture is typically done by absorption with alkanolamine-water solutions although other processes were also considered such as catalytic hydrogenation [3] and utilization in renewable energy technologies [4]. The alkanolamines are bases, and they react with the acid species CO 2 to form different reaction products.…”