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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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116 records · Page 7
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Techno-economic and life cycle analyses of the synthesis of a platinum–strontium titanate catalyst

The heterogeneous platinum/strontium titanate (Pt/SrTiO 3 or Pt/STO) catalyst has garnered significant attention as a promising candidate for the hydrogenolysis of polyolefins to hydrocarbon oils. This study evaluates the cost and environmental impacts of a newly developed scalable Pt/STO catalyst production, which includes the synthesis of the STO support and the deposition of Pt onto the support. This two-step synthesis plays a significant role in assessing the commercial feasibility of the catalyst, while energy consumption during the process plays an important role in its environmental impacts. The CatCost and the Research and Development Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (R&D GREET) models were used, respectively, to perform techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle analysis (LCA) of the newly developed catalyst. The TEA showed that the raw materials, accounting for approximately 76% of the total operation cost, has a profound effect on the estimated catalyst cost, mainly due to the platinum precursor. The LCA findings indicated that the catalyst production generates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 66 kg CO 2 e per kg, primarily due to the use of solvents and electricity in the process. The sensitivity analysis indicated that the total operating costs (OpEX), platinum precursor cost, and spent catalyst value (SCV) significantly impact the cost of the synthesized catalyst. Additionally, adopting solvent recovery strategies and using renewable electricity can reduce the GHG emissions of catalyst production to 29 kg CO 2 e per kg.

Heterogeneous Platinum/strontium titanate Catalyst↗
DOE OSTI2025

Silver(I) Supported Liquid Membranes for Selective Ethylene Recovery from Mixed-Gas Streams of Tandem CO 2 Electrolysis

Large-scale olefin separations from unreacted paraffins and other byproduct gases are primarily done by energy-intensive cryogenic distillation processes at refineries. Silver(I) supported liquid membranes (Ag SLMs) can be implemented at smaller production scales of ethylene (C 2 H 4 ), a critical industrial chemical, such as its electrocatalytic (EC) production from CO 2 . Challenges of EC C 2 H 4 production mainly stem from reducing gases like hydrogen (H 2 ), where the redox reactions pertinent to Ag(I) facilitators diminish olefin transport. Herein we report that aqueous Ag(I) solution in a composite Ag SLM can operate in mixed-gas conditions containing H 2 gas utilizing reduced titania compounds, such as titanium(III) oxide (Ti 2 O 3 ). Embedding Ti 2 O 3 in the polydimethylsiloxane layer of Ag SLM assisted in selectively separating C 2 H 4 from mixed-gas feed streams related to CO 2 electrolysis containing H 2 . The direct exposure of a mixed-gas stream containing C 2 H 4 , CO 2 , CO, N 2 , and CH 4 with as high as 50 vol % H 2 maintained excellent C 2 H 4 separations for 7 days of continuous operation. The Ag SLM provided effective separations of C 2 H 4 from CO (at detection limits), CH 4 (selectivity ratio (α) = 20–30), and H 2 (α = ∼20), but C 2 H 4 from CO 2 (α = 2–4) revealed a slightly lower separation. These data show that aqueous Ag(I) solution(s) used in the SLMs can separate C 2 H 4 for extended periods, even under highly reducing gas conditions. Also, we report C 2 H 4 recovery from the gas mixture produced in the EC CO 2 reduction process. In conclusion, the Ag SLM gave C 2 H 4 selective separation from a five-component complex mixed-gas stream, relevant to tandem CO 2 electrolysis.

37 - INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL AND ANALYTICAL C↗
DOE OSTI2021

Case Study: Hybrid Carbon Conversion Using Low-Carbon Energy Sources in Coal-Producing States

The demand for more carbon efficient power sources and a decrease in natural gas prices has decreased the desire for coal power. This decrease in demand has led to massive job losses in coal mining regions over the past decade. The purpose of this project is to develop a hybrid energy system utilizing both a coal power plant and advanced reactor, which is competitive with natural gas by improving on profitability and decreasing carbon emissions. This report details the problem with a summary of the impact on the coal industry and the availability of renewable energy sources in the Appalachian region. Because of the geography of the region, variable renewable energy sources are not available without significant size and siting restrictions. However, biomass in the form of wood waste is abundant and can be used as a carbon neutral energy source. Combining biomass and coal processing, in addition to thermal power plants, can increase system profits and efficiency by providing peaking power and conversion opportunities for secondary markets. The electric load is based on publicly available demand data from Appalachian Power, which services the western Virginia and southern West Virginia in the Appalachian region. The demand information is combined by service, normalized, and scaled to an average demand of 1000 kW, which will be the basis for sizing the hybrid energy system. A traditional screening curve analysis for a coal plant and advanced reactor shows that the least cost design varies significantly based on the assumed discount rate and capital recovery period. An optimization program to size the design in TEAL based on the load curve gives 10 optimal designs, all with a negative resulting net present value (NPV) and a coal plant capacity of less than 15%. Including profits from selling captured carbon at a flat rate results in a positive NPV; however, the coal capacity factor only increases to about 40%. There are limitations with this optimization as well since the price of CO2 is likely to decrease as more is sold to the conversion market. The suggested design will combine coal power, an advanced reactor, and coal and biomass coprocessing to produce a variety of products that can be sold to the conversion market while increasing system efficiency. The analysis of conversion pathways for coal and biomass reveals that multiple options will need to be included in the analysis to produce the optimal system design. Three systems will be optimized and compared to determine the best design based on the figures of merit of total NPV and cost of carbon avoided. The first system will include a coal power plant and an advanced reactor that will sell electricity to the grid to meet demand and sell captured carbon to the conversion market. The second system adds a high-temperature steam electrolysis plant, which will utilize electricity during times of low demand to produce hydrogen and sell it to the conversion market. The third system adds biomass and coal processing with options for hydrocarbon oils, syngas to be produced for the conversion market, and electricity generation to power components within the system or provide peaking power. This analysis will be based on a new approach that combines traditional screening curve methods with a dispatch algorithm that optimizes the system based on the opportunity cost of different production options. The resulting optimization algorithm should provide results with less processing time than HERON’s decision tree method. The results from this analysis will determine an optimal design and reinforce the benefits of coal power when used in a hybrid energy system. The initial results show that the addition of a secondary market for carbon sales could result in a positive NPV and increases the capacity factor of the coal plant as compared to a design with only sales to the electricity market. The addition of more markets and additional coal consumption from biomass coprocessing could increase NPV further, replace carbon in other markets through the sale of biomass-derived hydrocarbons, and demonstrate the value of coal power technology.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2025

Methods for Carbon Mass Closure in Polyolefin Hydrocracking

Heterogeneous catalytic hydrocracking of polyolefins is a promising approach for the processing of postconsumer plastics, but product quantification methods remain inconsistent across the literature. In systems that generate a large fraction of vapor-phase products, typical product capture methods can result in large carbon balance deficits, exceeding 50%, compromising reported yields and selectivities. Here, we identify the major sources of product loss and develop enhanced capture methods to improve the quantification accuracy. Seven supplemental techniques were evaluated, targeting either increased vapor recovery (by increasing the volatility or system volume) or enhanced retention in the liquid phase (by decreasing volatility). Among these, a flow collection approach using a continuous helium sweep and downstream gas sampling bag capture yielded the highest recovery, achieving a 96 ± 9.2% carbon balance closure. We show that the efficacy of these methods is strongly dependent on product distribution. In general, solvent addition was most effective when condensable species dominate the product distribution, while flow collection was preferred when both condensable species and light gases are present in high concentrations. These results highlight the need for method-specific workup strategies and demonstrate that no single protocol is universally optimal. We provide general guidelines for selecting and implementing robust product capture techniques, enabling accurate yield and selectivity determinations in polyolefin hydrocracking systems.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2020

Mechanistic Insight into Lignin Slow Pyrolysis by Linking Pyrolysis Chemistry and Carbon Material Properties

As a highly abundant renewable carbon source, lignin can be converted to a variety of advanced carbon materials with tailorable properties through slow pyrolysis. In this study, slow pyrolysis of kraft lignin, for the first time, was investigated with a commercial pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (Py–GC–MS) system through evolved gas analysis-MS (EGA-MS) and heart-cutting-GC–MS (HC-GC–MS) analyses. These analyses allow recovery and examination of the multiphased gas products generated from thermal decomposition of lignin during slow pyrolysis at a controlled heating rate over a long time course, thus making it possible to link operation conditions, pyrolysis chemistry, and carbon material properties. The overall product distributions, including volatiles and solid products, were quantitatively tracked at different heating rates (2, 20, and 40 °C/min) and different temperature regions (100–200, 200–300, and 300–600 °C). Solid residues were further characterized using a suite of analytical tools, in correlation with the investigation of formation mechanisms of volatiles to reveal the reaction chemistry of lignin during slow pyrolysis and to determine the morphology, pore structure, and interfacial chemical properties. This study provides critical insights into the slow pyrolysis chemistry of lignin and the properties of the resulting carbon material. These results will facilitate a better design and control of the lignin slow pyrolysis process for synthesizing functional carbon materials.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2024

Integrated protonic ceramic electrochemical cell for sustainable energy economy using water-energy nexus framework

Reliance on fossil fuels will continue for the next decades even though there are global pushes away from it to mitigate the overarching climate challenge, most especially by its highest consumers and availability. While there is a hastening global shift away from fossil fuel, integrating its assets into this technology helps limit the risk and future losses of stranded assets and reduce the cost of investment in the new technologies. Moreover, the generation of electricity from intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind has witnessed a significant surge in recent years, leading to a pressing demand for practical energy storage systems. Electrical energy storage is anticipated to play a pivotal role in the future global energy system, facilitating load-leveling operations to support the greater integration of renewable and distributed generation. Reversible electrochemical cells (RECs) offer a promising option for addressing the fossil fuel assets integration and energy storage challenges through the interconversion between electrical and chemical energy and concurrent utilizing carbon emission. In their electrolysis mode, the RECs convert electricity into durable, storable, and portable valuable chemical fuels such as syngas and methane. Conversely, the produced chemical fuels can be used as reactants in the fuel cell mode to generate electricity on demand with minimal (hydrocarbons) or zero when H2 or NH3 is used emissions. However, a challenging goal for this type of technology remains to achieve optimal operation and high roundtrip efficiencies, which has hindered the deployment of previous electrochemical cells. This dissertation demonstrates how reversible protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (RePCECs) can be integrated with fossil fuel power plants and renewable energy sources as a potential energy storage system. In this work, integrated RePCEC systems are designed and examined using computational modeling at scales to determine appropriate system configurations and operating conditions that achieve high roundtrip efficiencies. Cell level design of the PCEC is the first approach, several cells are assembled for the stack level model that is integrated into combined cycle powerplant and solar photovoltaic for the system level model. After critical literature review, this answered the operational and integration research questions proposed to address these challenges. The designed systems perform two functions, utilizing captured CO2 and storing renewable energy through co-electrolysis of steam and CO2. The co-electrolysis reaction involves endothermic water electrolysis and exothermic methanation reaction. To enhance high roundtrip efficiency, there is a need for thermal balance and management in the electrolysis mode. This involves operating the RePCEC stack under conditions that favor methane production to balance out heat needed by water electrolysis, it crucial for the RePCEC system operation. Methanation is enhanced by low temperatures. Leveraging on fabricated BCZYYb-electrolyte RePCEC, the cell model designed revealed that the optimum temperature for methane production is 450℃ at atmospheric pressure. Thus, to achieve optimum system performance, operating in the temperature range 450-525℃ is recommended at the given configuration, combining between the optimum temperature for methane production and temperature for the optimum stack roundtrip efficiency. Configuration with carbon capture system and purge stream is the optimum configuration from the seven conceptualized and evaluated. The modeling outcomes include a thermodynamic examination of integrated RePCEC systems, calibration of cell and stack level models, and steady-state simulation and integration into a 600MW combined cycle power plant retrofitted with two two-stage membrane-based carbon capture system and a wastewater treatment and recovery unit. At 100% powerplant loading, the stack and system roundtrip efficiencies are 72% and 51.37% respectively. Adding a purge stream for produced hydrogen at the system downstream improves the efficiencies to 74 and 55.48% respectively. At atmospheric pressure and 525℃, the system model suggests that a stack roundtrip of 82% is achievable, and overall system efficiency increases by reducing the energy consumption by the balance of plant components for steam generation and storage. Economic analysis of the process gives levelized cost of methane as $2.24/MMBtu lower than the conventional production route that range between $3.46/MMBtu and $9.85/MMBtu. The lifecycle analysis shows that the global warming potential for the production of methane and hydrogen from the RePCEC system is 3.83 kg CO2 eq which is lower than 9.35 kg CO2 eq emission during steam methane reforming for hydrogen production. This answered both the environmental and economic concerns in the raised research question. The proposed RePCEC configuration and analysis carried out in this dissertation to address the surge in renewable energy and challenges with PCEC technology hold significant potential in achieving large-scale energy storage while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions. These advancements, coupled with suitable governmental policies and incentive programs, have the potential to economically disrupt the natural gas industries by using RePCEC systems for methane production, thereby making them more favorable for eventual implementation and commercialization.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2026

Life Cycle Analysis of Natural Gas Supply Chain and End Use Applications in the United States

Natural gas (NG) plays a crucial role in current and future energy systems in the United States due to its abundance and affordability. In this study a life cycle analysis of the NG supply chain in the United States was conducted using Argonne's R&D GREET model, examining stages from recovery to distribution using reported field data processed and documented by National Energy Technology Laboratory. Supply chain emissions were evaluated across multiple spatial scales, including national average, overall regional production, region-to-region, and basin-to-region scenarios. The GHG intensity of the U.S. average NG supply chain was estimated at 10.3 kg CO 2 e/MMBtu (lower heating value), with a range across regions from 7.8 kg CO 2 e/MMBtu (Northeast) to 15.1 kg CO 2 e/MMBtu (Pacific). The analysis further assessed how upstream NG emissions influence the life cycle GHG emissions of key end-use applications, including electricity generation (0.044–0.086 kg CO 2 e/kWh from upstream NG in combined cycle facilities), hydrogen production (1.04–2.20 kg CO 2 e/kg H 2 for steam methane reforming [SMR] and 1.06–2.23 kg CO 2 e/kg for autothermal reforming [ATR]), and transit bus operation utilizing compressed natural gas fuel (0.19–0.37 kg CO 2 e/mile) and hydrogen fuel (0.12–0.25 kg CO 2 e/mile for hydrogen produced in SMR and ATR).

compression↗
DOE OSTI2023

Robust highly durable solid oxide fuel cell cathodes – Improved materials compatibility & self-regulating surface chemistry

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are electrochemical conversion devices that directly transform hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels to electricity, with energy efficiencies as high as 90%, coupled with reduced emissions. Several factors, however, remain to be addressed when considering scale-up of SOFC technology, including the need to overcome decreased performance due to sluggish rates of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) at the cathode under reduced temperatures and susceptibility to degradation in performance from surface poisoning e.g. from chromia, while limiting the use of critical raw materials (lanthanides and transition metals) present in high performing mixed ionic electronic conducting electrodes like (La,Sr)CoO 3 (LSC). In this project we explored the key descriptors for determining ORR activity in SOFC electrodes and tried to recover performance degradation by applying them to SOFC electrodes. In order to do this, we first selected a model mixed ionic electronic conducting (MIEC) oxide, Pr-doped CeO 2 (Pr 0.1 Ce 0.9 O 2-δ , PCO), which is a chemically stable fluorite and free of inherent poison sources (e.g. Sr segregation in LSC) that potentially react with external impurities such as Cr-species vaporized from the interconnect. The three approaches originally planned in this project are as follows: 1) evaluation of scavenger exsolution characteristics, 2) study of scavengers gettering efficacy following Cr and Si poisoning and 3) integration of new compositions into porous electrodes. Among them, exceptional progress has been made in 2) and 3), especially understanding the role of surface infiltrants in impacting electrode performance and degradation of PCO materials. We found that the Smith acidity scale for binary oxides serves as a powerful descriptor for tuning and predicting the oxygen exchange kinetics on MIEC PCO surfaces. As a result, with infiltration with binary oxides, ranging from strongly basic (Li 2 O) to strongly acidic (SiO 2 ) onto the surface of porous PCO, it was possible to systematically vary the chemical surface exchange coefficient (k chem ) by 6 orders of magnitude! L i2 O increased k chem by nearly 1,000 times over that of pristine PCO, while SiO 2 decreased k chem by nearly the same factor. Strikingly, although the pre-exponential of k chem scales linearly with the acidity of the infiltrated binary oxide, there is nearly no change in the activation energy. With this insight, we attributed the origin of these dramatic changes in k chem values to the systematic increase and decrease in the surface electron density induced by infiltrated binary oxides. More interestingly, although both Cr 2 O 3 and SiO 2 were determined to be acidic by Smith, suggesting that this feature could likely be the primary reason that these compounds serve to poison the ORR on SOFC cathodes, the effect of poisoning could be subsequently tuned by adding multiple infiltrants and controlling their relative surface acidities. We also systematically examined the effect of serial infiltration of basic and acidic oxides. It turned out that serial infiltration of Li not only recovers approximately 20-fold degraded k chem of PCO by acidic Cr 2 O 3 but its k chem is enhanced even beyond that of the non-infiltrated PCO by more than three orders of magnitude. This was further verified with a screen-printing PCO symmetric cell in terms of the electrode performance (area-specific resistance, ASR) related to approach 3). These observations point to acidity as a key descriptor not only in tuning and predicting the ORR activity of SOFC cathodes that largely determines the overall performance of SOFC, but in mitigating and reactivating poisoned electrode performance. This work provides novel guidelines for making the electrode performance much more active and robust in SOFCs, which can further be applied to all applications requiring oxygen exchange reaction, such as electrolyzers, permeation membranes and gas sensors.

30 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION↗