Science1 distinct publisher3 min readPublished
Advanced CO2-reduction catalysts are usually made 50 to 100 milligrams at a time, which is a large part of why they stay on the bench. A 75-gram single synthesis is several hundred times that, and the durability test has not been run.
The Scientist · Science desk
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Divide 75 grams by 100 milligrams and you get 750. Divide by 50 milligrams and you get 1,500 [1]. Somewhere in that band sits the gain in output per run, and Carter Racine gives it a physical translation: at 100 milligrams a batch, accumulating enough catalyst to cover 10 square meters of area takes a year or more, while at 75 grams a batch the same coverage takes a few days [4]. He also makes the quieter point that small batches spend more time and more electricity per gram, and that electricity is the cost line he watches [7].
This is a manufacturing result, and the numbers behind it are worth reading closely. The catalysis claim underneath the scale-up is that the 75 grams were made *without* losing the performance of the single-atom electrocatalyst [3]. The phys.org account puts no numbers on that claim, offering no selectivity or current-density figures and no hours on stream [13], so the ACS Omega paper [1] is where the retention claim has to stand or fall.
The economics want the same care. The reported figure is $145 per ton, described as some $255 below the current market price [5]. That implies an incumbent price of $400 [2] and a saving of about 64 percent [3]. What the release does not say is what the ton contains, CO2 consumed or carbon monoxide produced [14], and those are not the same denominator. The claimed 25 percent emissions reduction [6] carries the same gap, since the method it improves on is not named.
Stability is the specific hurdle that remains. Racine says the process still needs to be made stable enough for industrial use, and that long-term stability is the next line of work [12]. Note what nickel-iron has to displace: the startups Badreldin describes already run conventional silver-based catalysts [2]. An operator choosing between them is buying logged hours, not activity, and those hours have not been published yet.
The framing around the work is worth separating from the chemistry too. The release supplies national context, that CO2 is 80 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions from human activity and that the country emitted roughly 5 billion metric tons in 2022 by CDC figures [8]. A modular stack sized to one production line's ethylene or ethanol demand [11] does not register against a number that large. Badreldin's own argument is about supply, not tonnage: domestic production of fuels and chemicals, decentralized instead of concentrated in a few plants [10]. Carbon monoxide is the intermediate that makes this plausible, since paired with hydrogen it becomes syngas, the feedstock for fuels, plastics and pharmaceuticals that otherwise start from fossil carbon [9].
My reading, with its conditions stated: the scale-up claim is the credible part, because batch size is measurable and 75 grams either came out of the reactor or did not. The $145 stays provisional until someone states the basis of the ton and shows a durability curve. Those two things are what a startup with an electrolyzer in a warehouse actually needs before it orders a kilogram.
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Badreldin said most advanced nanostructured catalysts are currently developed at the milligram scale, often around 50 to 100 milligrams, and that companies rely on conventional silver-based catalysts.
Badreldin said that in a single synthesis the team can make 75-gram batches without losing the performance of advanced single-atom electrocatalysts.
A study by University of Mississippi researcher Ahmed Badreldin, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Carter Racine, a mechanical engineering doctoral student at Texas A&M University, published in ACS Omega, demonstrated a simpler, lower-cost way to produce carbon-recycling catalysts at much larger scales.
Racine said producing catalysts in small batches requires more time and energy and therefore increases costs, that how much electricity is needed is the biggest consideration, and that larger batches prove the logistics and feasibility of operating at large scale.
Carbon dioxide accounts for 80% of the United States' greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, and the country produced some 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides data.
The process converts captured carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, an industrial building block for fuels, plastics and pharmaceuticals; Racine said carbon monoxide mixed with hydrogen is syngas, and paired with green hydrogen it can make chemicals that would otherwise be produced from virgin fossil fuels.
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Peer-reviewed on grams, press-released on dollars
The scale-up has a paper under it — journal, DOI, and '75g/Batch' printed in the title. Everything a buyer would price on does not. No Faradaic selectivity, no current density, no hours on stream, and the $145 arrives without saying whether the ton is CO2 going in or CO coming out. One anchored claim towing several unanchored ones.
Startups invoked, none named
Badreldin says plenty of electrochemical-conversion startups already have the infrastructure and are stuck at exactly this bottleneck — then names not one of them. No pilot, no offtake, no licensee, no company that has taken a gram of this material. The only dated event in the whole story is the paper appearing, and the authors put industrial use behind a year-long durability test they say has not been run.
Headline runs ahead of the durability test
'Cheaper and easier to scale' is a cost model wearing the clothes of a result. The grams are real and the candour about stability is genuine — Racine volunteers the 350-day duty cycle that his catalyst has not been shown to survive — but that admission sits in the last section, after the reader has been handed a price, a saving and an emissions delta. Add the missing cost denominator and the gap between what is demonstrated and what is implied widens rather than narrows.
A university release with its edges intact
Both quoted voices are the study's authors, the framing is a campus communications office's, and phys.org passes it through without adding an outside chemist. The national-security and domestic-supply-chain language is the register of a funding proposal, not of a materials characterisation. None of that makes the 75 grams less real; it does explain which three numbers surfaced and which dozen did not.
Solid on the gram, thin on everything after
Confidence splits by claim. That a 75-gram single synthesis was reported and published, we can stand behind. That it costs $145 per ton, emits a quarter less, or supplies a commercial installation in days rests on one outlet quoting the authors, with no arithmetic shown and nobody else asked.