ETA 2021 Strategic Plan - Flipbook - Page 27
flexibility to incorporate zero-carbon sources of
heat without losing economic viability. Ultimately
the capabilities developed over the course of this
initiative will position ETA and Berkeley Lab more
broadly as a leader in the iterative development
of new polymers through evaluation and
characterization, life-cycle assessment, and
techno-economic modeling.
Detailed Approach
The Science of Manufacturing Initiative’s three
interconnected focus areas are designed to
enable next-generation, low- or negativecarbon manufacturing pathways to meet
critical chemical demands of the future. As
this initiative’s applications are too broad to
detail comprehensively in this section, it will
focus on just three exemplar studies of the
ones mentioned above — the Electrochemical
Refinery, the Circular Economy, and the
Decarbonization of Industrial Heat — and the
contributions of the three focus areas on those.
Electrochemical Refinery
A first exemplar application for the Science of
Manufacturing Initiative will be the validation
of the Electrochemical Refinery concept, where
green electrons are used for electrochemical
conversion and synthesis of compounds that
traditionally have been accomplished through
thermal catalysis or other means. Specific
work will be in the design of scalable chemicalmanufacturing trains at either low or high
temperature, with compounds and routes
informed via the adaptive life-cycle and technoeconomic analysis and scalability studies.
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Science of Synthesis
The synthesis pathways will primarily use
electricity as an energy input and leverage
fuel-cell GDE architectures, which are more
mature and well understood. Such designs
provide minimal cell losses while providing
separation at the point of generation. The
first application is in the efficient generation
of hydrogen either by itself or in conjunction
with intermediate compounds such as carbon
monoxide or ethylene. Hydrogen itself has
use as a separate fuel and energy source for
transportation, heating, and reducing agents in
steel manufacturing, among others. Research on
hydrogen involves optimizing various transport
and kinetics processes, including electrode
manufacturing, to enable electrolyzer cost
reductions and efficiency improvements. Further
investigations will be on electrosynthesis of
chemical feedstocks and precursors including
ethylene. Here, the GDE architecture provides
advantages such as the ability to generate
ethylene selectively, thereby avoiding its
traditional, high-energy separation from ethane.
In this effort, both low- and high-temperature
GDEs will be explored.
Low-temperature synthesis has the advantage
of primarily using green electricity as an energy
input. We will design and test cells that reduce
CO2 to ethylene using protons from a hydrogen
oxidation reaction or from a water reduction
to produce ethylene selectively under alkaline
conditions. This is in contrast to the current
state of the art for a CO2 reduction reaction,
which is mainly focused on carbon monoxide
evolution or fuels. That process uses liquidbased electrodes that require more complex
cell engineering and fluid management, with
reduced mass transport, selectivity, and faradaic
efficiency. We will initially utilize commercially
available copper nanoparticle electrocatalysts
(modified to tune the activity). They are known
to be selective for ethylene and commercially
available alkaline membranes and ionomers that
have recently achieved unprecedented current
densities in alkaline fuel-cell applications. We
will integrate the catalyst with alkaline ionomers
into GDEs to produce high rates of selective
chemicals. Initial focus will be on understanding
how the activity and selectivity proceed under
various electrode potentials. Other lowtemperature processes such as cold plasmas will
likewise be explored.
High-temperature synthesis provides a
hybrid approach of combined thermal and
electrochemical steps, opening up more
complex and impure feedstocks and complex
chemistry as well as a possible dramatic increase
in the overall production rate and reduced cell
operating voltage. However, the extra heat
required needs to be derived from decarbonized
thermal pathways. In this focus area, we will
utilize GDEs based on solid-oxide-electrolysis
cells (SOECs). Here, ethylene production will
likewise be explored using both oxygen-ion and
proton conducting ceramics. Berkeley Lab’s
unique metal-supported SOEC architecture
is expected to have advantages for power-toproducts scenarios in terms of stability, including
the use of intermittent electricity inputs and
thermal cycling.
Science of Scale-up
As noted above, hydrogen and GDE
development (or electrode development in
general) typically relies on high-throughput
slurry processes to make multicomponent
multilayers of various thicknesses. The design
is typically a black art dominated by empiricism.
Within the Electrochemical Refinery task, we
will systematically deconstruct the issues in
the fabrication of GDEs using a combination
of ex-situ and operando studies. Key will be
ensuring that ink formulations are consistent
with roll-to-roll high-speed manufacturing. ETA
will explore critical issues such as processing
impacts including different coating methods
that are representative of high-volume
manufacturing, and we will correlate different
design parameters (e.g., drying rate, ink velocity
and viscosity, quality assurance) rapidly and
intelligently. We will leverage ETA’s extensive
hi-fidelity modeling expertise in electrochemical
systems to establish virtual manufacturing trains
that can independently learn and optimize with
a minimum number of critical experimental
datasets. Such algorithms will also elucidate
the controlling parameters and how they
scale. Specific work will focus on exploring the
individual forces within ink constituents and
how they form a microstructure during drying
and subsequent processing (e.g., annealing,
calendaring), and linking that structure to
observed performance in the synthesis
efforts. Once completed, inverse design can
be accomplished, wherein one can go from a
desired performance to the ideal structure to
the ink and processing formulations.
Intelligent, Adaptive Analysis
The target chemical and scalable synthesis
pathways will require careful holistic LCA and
TEA to inform the balance between production
rate, operational cost, decarbonization impact,
and need. Initially, we will apply simple laws
of thermodynamics to calculate the minimum
energy requirement for bulk chemical synthesis
(ethylene and beyond) to understand how
much more progress we can make with novel
electrochemical technologies. Parasitic energy
costs of conventional fossil-fuel based synthesis
pathways will be determined and compared with
the energy penalties estimated for the low- and
high-temperature electrochemical pathways.
In addition to evaluating the potential room
for improvement on energy efficiency, we will
develop and apply a framework for screening
and studying chemical-market applications. The
distribution of these markets and distribution
infrastructure in place may have varying
implications for the value of a more conventional
centralized system compared to a modular,
distributed electrochemical facility. In addition to
energy and material balances, to bound system
efficiency and performance, we will develop a
first-order life-cycle cost estimate of promising
candidates for both pathways and compare
levelized costs across a range of production
scales.
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