Co-Generation of Carbon-Free Hydrogen and Electricity from Coal in a Carbon Fuel Cell with Carbon Capture

This project based on a novel fuel cell concept collectively aims to address three aspects of energy production and storage using coal, namely advanced coal conversion in a specialized fuel cell, electrochemical hydrogen production from coal for energy storage, and CO2 mitigation and capture without separation, all achieved in a single process chamber and without the need for external power from the grid. In other words, it strives to develop a clean coal technology that simultaneously generates electric power, stores part of coal’s energy in clean hydrogen fuel, and produces nearly capture-ready CO2. If successful and widely adopted, this technology promises to double the efficiency of coal power generation, resulting in a significant reduction in global CO2 emissions thereby ensuring continued use of our cheapest and most abundant fuel – coal – in an environmentally friendly manner. The steam-carbon fuel cell concept introduced in this project allows spontaneous conversion of coal into an environmentally benign fuel, hydrogen. This novel concept not only achieves steam gasification of coal while keeping hydrogen and carbon dioxide product streams unmixed and physically separated, but more importantly, drives the otherwise thermodynamically uphill reaction for steam dissociation energetically downhill. In this process scheme, no nitrogen enters the reaction stream so the anode product gases contain primarily CO2 and unreacted CO, while the cathode gas stream contains primarily H2 and unreacted steam. In other words, the steam-carbon fuel cell concept enables simultaneous and spontaneous production of carbon-free hydrogen and electricity from coal (or biomass) and produces a highly concentrated CO2 product stream that can easily be captured. Work in our laboratory over the past year has focused in building the research team and physical facilities necessary for assembly and testing of various fuel cell membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) of different catalysts compositions, particularly the testing of sulfur tolerant anode materials. As sulfur is a major coal contaminant and a barrier to advance this technology, this project also aims to develop sorbent materials for capture and removal of coal contaminants, mainly sulfur so screening is essential to the success of the project. Furthermore, work has begun on the synthesis of prospective catalysts that are reported to show good sulfur tolerance under conditions relevant to carbon fuel cells. We report the preliminary results of our synthesis efforts for sulfur tolerant anode materials. We are in the process of screening potential candidates for sulfur tolerant anode materials, assessing their performance and potential for this project, as well as synthesis and testing of candidates for solid sorbents. Finally, over the previous year we have successfully expanded our modeling work to demonstrate and quantify the effects from conductive, convective, and radiative heat transfer in carbon fuel cells. This advance in the modeling work has helped to more completely describe the different parameters relevant to predicting fuel cell performance, and serves as a starting point in expanding the model to account for the elementary rate processes at the membrane electrode assembly itself.