Recycling of carbon dioxide to produce ethanol

In the coming years, a range of technological solutions aimed at reducing CO2 emissions should be developed. The objective of this paper is to study the technical feasibility of CO2 recycling into ethanol using solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC) technology, simulate the whole process using Aspen Plus (TM) software and make an economic assessment and a carbon footprint. The results of the economic analysis demonstrated that the ethanol production plant can deliver ethanol at a cost of $1.1/kg, assuming an internal rate of return on investment of 8%. Main challenges for this process are improvement of ethanol synthesis reaction catalysts and the SOEC performance. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.