Porous Ionic Liquids for Sustainable Energy

As the societys need for energy is increasing, climate change points towards the need of finding sustainable renewable energy sources.

Biogas holds the potential to replace natural gas as energy carrier, thus reducing the reliance on fossil fuels while introducing renewables as drop-in solution to existing infrastructure.

However, existing technologies for the removal of carbon dioxide from biogas are energy intensive and considerably decrease the overall efficiency of biomethane as energy carrier.

The aim of the project Porous Ionic Liquids for Sustainable Energy (PILSEN) is to improve the energy efficiency of biomethane production from biogas while lowering the carbon footprint. We will achieve this by capturing carbon dioxide during the purification of biogas and using it as a source of carbon.

We propose to develop a versatile chemical platform for carbon dioxide removal from biogas, together with the subsequent conversion to value-added chemicals.

This chemical platform will be based on porous ionic liquids, which are a new and promising class of materials for processes involving gases.

Preliminary results confirm that porous ionic liquids show carbon capture performances similar to benchmark technologies allowing for simultaneous capture and utilization with minimum energy cost.

The design flexibility and low environmental impact of ionic liquids bears great potential for the tuneability of our chemical platform.

Hence, we will combine theoretical and experimental approaches to identify porous ionic liquids suitable for carbon capture and conversion including the energy-efficient isolation of products.