Emerging research worldwide is demonstrating that a variety of liquid fuels and chemicals can be produced from CO2 in microbial electrochemical systems using electrodes as source of reducing equivalents, including organic acids (e.g., acetate (C2), butyrate (C4), hexanoate (C6)) or alcohols (e.g., ethanol, butanol, hexanol) in a process called microbial electrosynthesis, which has many proven benefits, including the offset of carbon emissions of many industrial processes producing CO2 as off-gas. However, the translation of these research advances into full-scale application is constrained by:
Recent work at the AWMC showed significant improvements in performance of such systems, achieving a full order of magnitude increase in acetate productivity from CO2. However, production of chemicals with longer carbon chain is feasible. Hence, this project aims to make significant contributions towards finding solutions towards 1) product diversification, 2) extraction of targeted products, 3) microbial understanding, and 4) design, materials and process configurations.