The extensive and close economic linkages among different regions of China have effects not only on regional economic growth, but also on CO2 emissions and carbon leakage among regions. Taking Beijing as a study case, we constructed MRIO models for China’s 30 provinces and municipalities for 2002, 2007 and 2010, to measure the embodied CO2 emissions in the interregional trade of China on region...

Greenhouse gas emission trading programs have been initiated in the European Union, Canada and the United States in an effort to harness market forces to efficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Three major methods for reducing or offsetting greenhouse gas emissions are purchasing greenhouse gas emission reduction credits, purchasing renewable energy certificates, and improving energy effic...

Electrochemical conversion of CO2 to useful chemical intermediates may be a promising strategy to help reduce CO2 emissions, while utilizing otherwise wasted excess renewable energy. Here we explore the effect of diluted CO2 streams (10–100% by volume using N2 as diluting inert gas) on the product selectivity and on the CO/CO2 conversion ratio for the electrochemical reduction of CO2 into CO, s...

Several imidazolium-based ionic liquids significantly enhance the activity of MoO2 for electrochemical reduction of CO2. The overpotential of CO2 reduction is as low as 40 mV. The ionic liquids act as both electrolytes and co-catalysts, which not only leads to lower overpotentials, but also alters the product selectivity.

The electrochemical reduction of CO2 has been extensively studied over the past decades. Nevertheless, this topic has been tackled so far only by using a very fundamental approach and mostly by trying to improve kinetics and selectivities toward specific products in half-cell configurations and liquid-based electrolytes. The main drawback of this approach is that, due to the low solubility of C...

We present a study on a microbial electrolysis cell with methanogenic microorganisms adapted to reduce CO2 to CH4 with the direct injection of electrons and without the artificial addition of H2 or an additional carbon source except gaseous CO2 . This is a new approach in comparison to previous work in which both bicarbonate and gaseous CO2 served as the carbon source. The methanogens used are ...

For more than a century human activities have caused an increase in air pollutants inducing an excess of greenhouse gases. In addition, the depletion and rising costs of fossil fuels, due to the increase in energy demand driven by global growth, leads to the search for alternative raw carbon sources. In this particular context, the transformation and utilization of carbon dioxide is today under...

We report here a theoretical study with quantum chemical calculations based on experimental results to understand highly efficient reduction of CO2 to formic acid by using zinc under hydrothermal conditions. Results showed that zinc hydride (Zn-H) is a key intermediate species in the reduction of CO2 to formic acid, which demonstrates that the formation of formic acid is through an SN2-like mec...

Artificial photosynthetic systems can store solar energy and chemically reduce CO2 We developed a hybrid water splitting-biosynthetic system based on a biocompatible Earth-abundant inorganic catalyst system to split water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen (H2 and O2) at low driving voltages. When grown in contact with these catalysts, Ralstonia eutropha consumed the produced H2 to synthesize b...

Herein we investigate computationally in detail the mechanism of the formation of the carboxylate adduct during the electroreduction of CO2 in water catalysed by cobalt porphyrin complexes. Specifically, we address qualitatively the competition between the concerted and sequential pathways for the proton-coupled electron transfer. We use a simple methodology for accurate computation of the pKa ...