Oxylus Energy, the Yale-based start-up formerly known as Carbon Loop, has successfully passed key benchmark tests for the deployment and commercialization of its proprietary catalyst and electrolyzer technology in a 5cm² cell. This is a critical platform for design iterations, as it offers significant predictability for performance at the size of commercial-scale cells.

No existing company has achieved the capability to convert captured carbon dioxide into methanol using an electrolyzer at room temperature & pressure at a production-level scale. Oxylus’ technology, however, holds the promise of being one of the most cost-effective methods for generating renewable methanol, potentially surpassing fossil-derived methanol.

By directly converting CO₂ into methanol—avoiding the use of a second reactor to create hydrogen—Oxylus’ process saves costs and energy. Producing methanol as the only liquid end product also reduces separation and distillation expenses, making the entire process simpler and more cost-effective than other CO₂ electrolysis methods, the company says.

With the successful validation of its 5cm² platform, Oxylus is immediately prepared for the next phase of development, gearing up for tests at 10x scale before the end of the year. The upcoming trials will focus on the newly designed and constructed 50 cm² cell and incorporate stability testing into the evaluation process.

This successful test confirms our capacity to generate renewable methanol on a platform that instills confidence in our ability to scale. The 5cm² unit is the cornerstone of any electrolysis company as it has a high predictability for performance at the production scale. While diligently testing our 5cm² electrolyzer, we simultaneously developed a larger 50cm² counterpart to prove that we can develop larger electrolyzers that are firmly off the bench-scale.

Our sights are already set on the next significant step on our scale-up journey—a production-level cell. Major industries like the aviation and petrochemical industries need clean, renewable solutions now. We are not wasting any time.

—Perry Bakas, co-founder of Oxylus Energy

Although many metal coordination compounds catalyze CO₂ electroreduction to CO, cobalt phthalocyanine hybridized with conductive carbon such as carbon nanotubes is currently the only one that can generate methanol (CH₃OH). In October, in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie, researchers at Yale (including Oxylus co-founder Conor Rooney) and colleagues from Oregon State University, reported the first in situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy characterizations, combined with ex situ spectroscopic and electrocatalytic measurements, to study CoPc-catalyzed CO₂ reduction to methanol.

Resources

• Conor L. Rooney, Mason Lyons, Yueshen Wu, Gongfang Hu, Maoyu Wang, Chungseok Choi, Yuanzuo Gao, Chun-Wai Chang, Gary W. Brudvig, Zhenxing Feng, Hailiang Wang (2023) “Active Sites of Cobalt Phthalocyanine in Electrocatalytic CO₂ Reduction to Methanol” Angewandte Chemie, doi: 10.1002/ange.202310623