Non-thermal plasma fixing of nitrogen into nitrate: solution for renewable electricity storage?

Abstract

The rapid deployment of solar and wind technology produces significant amount of low-quality electricity that calls for a better storage or usage instead of being discarded by the grid. Instead of electrochemical CO₂ reduction and/or NH₃ production, here we propose that non-thermal plasma oxidation of N₂ into nitrate or other valuable nitrogen containing compounds deserve more research attention because it uses free air as the reactant and avoids the solubility difficulty, and also because its energy consumption is merely 0.2 MJ/mol, even lower than the industrially very successful Haber–Bosch process (0.48 MJ/mol) for NH₃ production. We advocate that researchers from the plasma community and chemistry community should work together to build energy efficient non-thermal plasma setup, identify robust, active and low-cost catalyst, and understand the catalyzing mechanism in a plasma environment. We are confident that free production of nitrate with zero CO₂ emission will come true in the near future.

Keywords

energy storage / nitrogen fixation / non-thermal plasma

References

[1] Lund H, Munster E. Management of surplus electricity-production from a fluctuating renewable-energy source. Applied Energy, 2003, 76(1–3): 65–74

[2] Lv W, Zhang R, Gao P, Lei L. Studies on the faradaic efficiency for electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to formate on tin electrode. Journal of Power Sources, 2014, 253: 276–281

[3] Zhou F, Azofra L M, Ali M, Kar M, Simonov A N, McDonnell-Worth C, Sun C, Zhang X, MacFarlane D R. Electro-synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen at ambient temperature and pressure in ionic liquids. Energy & Environmental Science, 2017, 10(12): 2516–2520

[4] Thomas H. The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, A Doomed Tycoon, and The Scientific Discovery That Fed The World But Fueled The Rise Of Hitler. 1st ed. New York: Harmony Books, 2008

[5] Schrock R R. Reduction of dinitrogen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006, 103(46): 17087

[6] Erisman J W, Sutton M A, Galloway J, Klimont Z, Winiwarter W. How acentury of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience, 2008, 1(10): 636–639

[7] Cherkasov N, Ibhadon A O, Fitzpatrick P. A review of the existing and alternative methods for greener nitrogen fixation. Chemical Engineering and Processing, 2015, 90: 24–33

[8] Kipouros G J, Sadoway D R. Toward new technologies for the production of lithium. JOM, 1998, 50(5): 24–26

[9] Appl M. The Haber–Bosch heritage: the ammonia production technology. In: Proceedings of 50th Anniversary IFA Technical Conference, 1997, 25

[10] Legasov V A, Rusanov V D, Fridman A A. Non-equilibrium plasma-chemical processes in heterogeneous media. Plasma Chemistry, 1978, 5: 222–241

[11] Rusanov V D, Fridman A A, Sholin G V. The physics of a chemically active plasma with nonequilibrium vibrational excitation of molecules. Soviet Physics-Uspekhi, 1981, 24(6): 447–474

[12] Mccollum E D, Daniels F. Experiments on the arc process for nitrogen fixation. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, 1923, 15(11): 1173–1175

[13] Partridge W S, Parlin R B, Zwolinski B J. Fixation of nitrogen in a crossed discharge. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, 1954, 46(7): 1468–1471

[14] Rahman M, Cooray V. NO_x generation in laser-produced plasma in air as a function of dissipated energy. Optics & Laser Technology, 2003, 35(7): 543–546

[15] Namihira T, Katsuki S, Hackam R, Akiyama H, Okamoto K. Production of nitric oxide using a pulsed arc discharge. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 2002, 30(5): 1993–1998

[16] Wang W, Patil B, Heijkers S, Hessel V, Bogaerts A. Nitrogen fixation by gliding arc plasma: better insight by chemical kinetics modelling. ChemSusChem, 2017, 10(10): 2145–2157

[17] Patil B. Plasma (catalyst)-assisted nitrogen fixation: reactor development for nitric oxide and ammonia. Eindhoven: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 2017, 93–125

[18] Holland P L. Metal–dioxygen and metal–dinitrogen complexes: where are the electrons? Dalton Transactions (Cambridge, England), 2010, 39(23): 5415–5425

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61725401) and the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2016YFA0204000). We also thank Junye Zhang from School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Sai Tu from College of Chemistry and Molecular Science, Wuhan University for helpful discussions.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2018 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature