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2016-2022
500,000

Deepak Pant

+32 14 33 69 69
Contact
  • Carbon conversion to chemicals by microbial electrosynthesis
  • To develop the MES technology to pilot level using joint resources of VITO and Indian Oil R&D Centre

VITO’s role:

  • Development of specialized  gas diffusion electrodes for MES
  • Exchange of knowledge on reactor design and upscaling for MES
  • Hosting Indian Oil researcher at VITO
  • Visiting Indian Oil facility for knowledge sharing

Abstract

In recent years, various approaches for capturing and transforming CO2 to value-added chemicals has been developed among which microbial electrosynthesis (MES) is one of the vibrant technologies that can utilize the renewable energy from solar or wind to transform CO2 into value added products. Microbes that are capable of exchanging electrons with solid electron acceptors and have ability to accommodate CO2 into their metabolic pathways catalyze this reaction. There is a need of developing selective culture that has capability to produce higher organics. In this project, selectively enriched mixed culture will be developed for an efficient MES. The project will also explore the application of gas diffusion electrodes (GDEs) for the CO2 transformation to alcohols in MES. The final goal of the project is to build and operate a pilot MES reactor.