The National Science Foundation has made a five-year, $26 million grant to the Carbon Utilization Redesign for Biomanufacturing-Empowered Decarbonization (CURB) Engineering Research Center, a collaboration between universities and industry to minimize the impact of man-made climate change.
The McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is leading CURB, which is working to decrease carbon dioxide emissions while simultaneously meeting society’s energy and manufacturing needs. The effort will seek to transform manufacturing toward zero or negative emissions by converting carbon dioxide into environmentally friendly chemicals and products that create a circular economy. CURB’s collaborators include researchers at the University of Delaware, Prairie View A&M University, and Texas A&M University.
CURB’s strategic goals include advancing scientific discoveries to create new hybrid engineering systems, creating pilot-scale testbed facilities, demonstrating the economics and publishing the research results, filing for patents, and developing new educational programs for middle and high school students and undergraduate and graduate students.
‘’This is not just another grant — this center has the opportunity to transform the U.S. economy,” said Joshua Yuan, chair of the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering in McKelvey Engineering and co-leader of CURB. “CURB will create highly efficient chem-bio hybrid systems to convert renewable energy and carbon dioxide into chemicals, fuels and materials. This will decarbonize U.S. manufacturing and replace a substantial amount of petrochemical products.”
CURB will use a Hybrid Electro-Bio CO2 Utilization System (HEBCUS) that uses electrocatalysis to turn waste carbon dioxide into intermediate substances, such as ethanol, acetate and propionate. These intermediates will be compatible with biomanufacturing systems that can more efficiently convert them into a range of products, such as platform chemicals, biofertilizers and other environmentally responsible materials.
Researchers will then take the new materials and test them for life-cycle emissions, supply chain design, market for new products, and environmental justice impact, among other things to identify potential barriers to commercialization and ways to improve the societal, environmental, economic, and ecological impacts.
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