Lea Winter Wins DoE Early Career Award

For a project that aims to create better ways to convert carbon dioxide into useful products, Prof. Lea Winter has been awarded an Early Career Research Program award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). 

The award, which comes with a grant of $875,000 over five years, is part of the DOE’s efforts to develop the next generation of STEM leaders to solidify America’s role as the driver of science and innovation around the world.

Winter’s project focuses on combining the electrocatalytic conversion of the harmful greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) with plasma to increase the number and quality of products that can be made.

With conventional electrocatalytic CO₂ conversion, the goal is to create more complex, higher value products, such as ethanol and other commonly used chemicals and fuel additives. However, the catalyst has to do two things - break the chemical’s carbon-oxygen bonds, as well as be able to make new bonds to selectively create new products.  

“We're trying to break this trade-off,” said Winter, assistant professor of chemical & environmental engineering. Instead of relying on the catalyst to both activate the CO₂ and make the multi-carbon products, Winter’s team will use plasma to pre-activate the CO₂.  “Now it becomes easier to convert this activated CO₂ into multi-carbon products.”

To do so, Winter and her team are using an interface engineered in her lab that allows them to couple plasma - often referred to as the fourth state of matter - with the electrocatalyst. 

“We've been able to demonstrate that by doing this, we unlock new pathways,” she said. “We've measured new chemical products that can't be formed without plasma, and we’ve seen significant enhancements in various high-value alcohols or multi-carbon products when we're coupling with plasma.”

Now that they can unlock these new reaction pathways, Winter said, one focus of the DOE award is understanding these pathways and figuring out how they can better design catalysts to manipulate them.

The process, which happens at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, is scalable and easily adapted to an industry setting. 

“We could envision bringing this technology to an existing plant that is emitting CO₂ and then feeding their CO₂ stream into the system to convert it into liquid products.”