CO2 Capture with Ionic Liquids

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) and contributions of CO2 emissions to climate change is one of our most pressing environmental challenges. Separation of CO2 from stationary emission sources, such as power plants and chemical manufacturing facilities, followed by geological sequestration and/or conversion to useful products, will likely play a crucial role in GHG mitigation. Current technology using absorption with aqueous amine solutions is energy intensive and suffers from corrosion, degradation and other challenges. Our research has focused on developing a new class of materials, Ionic liquids (ILs), for CO2 capture applications. Ionic liquids are salts with low melting points so that they are liquid in their pure state (i.e., without any water) even at room temperature. Since they are salts, they have exceedingly low vapor pressures, so they will not evaporate into the cleaned gas stream from which CO2 has been removed. They can be made from innumerable different cations and anions along with a wide variety of substituents. Thus, they can be designed and tuned for specific CO2 separation applications. In this talk, we will present our major developments in designing, synthesizing, and testing ILs for CO2 separations.

Joan F. Brennecke is the Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering #16 in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin(UT Austin). She joined UT Austin in 2017, following an academic career at the University of Notre Dame. She serves as the Deputy Director of one of NSF’s Research Centers, the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR.) Her research interests are primarily in the development of less environmentally harmful solvents. These include supercritical fluids and ionic liquids. In developing these solvents, Dr. Brennecke’s primary interests are in the measurement and modeling of thermodynamics, thermophysical properties, phase behavior and separations. Dr. Brennecke is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received numerous awards from the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the U.S. Department of Energy and others. She has published more than 200 research papers garnering over 20,000 citations and has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data since 2010.