OCOchem, U.S. Army Completes Phase II Project to Develop, Test Formate Electrolyzer Cell

OCOchem and the United States Army have finished a Phase II project aimed at developing and testing a formate electrolyzer cell. OCOchem scaled up the design from 10,000 cm² to 15,000 cm² over three years to reach the cell’s current industrial scale form. At industrial scale, the company’s CO² electrolyzer is 650% larger than other platforms and will scale out into multi-cell stacks in a large pilot plant.

“CO² electrolysis has historically been an academic cottage industry with little work done on cells much larger than a baseball card. The OCOchem approach has been different, focusing on rapid step change scale-up and then iterating much of the design with every 10x scale-up increment,” said Todd Brix, OCOchem CEO and Co-Founder. “What works at a tiny scale is not what works at a larger scale. We knew that and our constraints going in. The innovative modification and integration of off-the-shelf industrial-grade components, parts and systems, custom chemistry, and in-house fabrication of large-scale gas diffusion electrodes we deploy allows us to ‘live within constraints.’”

The CO² electrolyzer produces an organic platform molecule called hydrogen formate. The design does this by using clean electricity and advanced engineering to convert CO² and water into carbon-based molecules. Hydrogen formate is the use-ready liquid form of energized CO² and serves as a precursor chemical, providing carbon and hydrogen in a single molecule capable of synthesizing a range of materials, chemicals, and fuels. OCOchem’s formate generation process, known as electro-formation, is designed for 104% carbon-to-product efficiency, 85% energy efficiency, room temperature and pressure operation, and a reduction in waste by-products.

CO² electrolyzer; Image Credits: OCOchem

“CO² regeneration is a much more impactful way to reduce CO² emissions using captured CO²,” said Brix. “Instead of just moving and burying a ton of CO² and hoping it doesn’t come back out of the ground, you instead convert that CO² into a value-added useful product which displaces the same product made conventionally from fossil fuels and avoids the 5-10 tons of CO² emissions associated with fossil fuel use as a feedstock as well as use of fossil fuel process energy used to make it.”

Formate has several applications including silage preservatives, corrosion-free deicing salts, drilling fluids, fertilizers, and the manufacture of leather and clothing. It also serves as a liquid carrier of hydrogen and carbon oxides and plays a critical role in rubber production, bacterial disinfection, and waste and feed water treatment.

OCOchem’s electrolyzer minimizes the impact of carbon emissions by converting it to a valuable end-product, similar to the way in which the Flue2Chem project uses CO² for downstream applications. Carbon Clean is collaborating with 14 other organizations, including BASF, Proctor & Gamble, and Unliever, on the Flue2Chem project in the UK: a two-year project that aims to convert industrial waste gases to more sustainable consumer products. The project could result in a saving of 15-20 million tons of CO² emissions a year in the UK. As part of the project, Carbon Clean’s CycloneCC carbon-capture technology will capture 10 tons per day of CO² from three industrial sites.