(604i) Tailoring Ionic Liquids for Optimal CO2 Capture

Due to increasing global climate action efforts, there is a great need to reduce concentration of greenhouse gases from our atmosphere. Approximately 86 % of greenhouse gas emissions arise from combustion of fossil fuels. This number is 83 % for United States.  One strategy is to gradually shift towards renewable energy resources (e.g. solar, wind and biofuels). This approach has lot of benefits in the long run, both from the environment and energy security stand point. However, in the short to medium term a significant proportion of our energy portfolio is going to be based on non-renewable resources. This would necessitate initiatives to mitigate the environmental problems arising out of using fossil fuels. Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is a central strategy in these initiatives, which holds great promise as it offers us the ability to use fossil fuel while meeting global GHG emission targets. The idea behind this approach is to capture CO₂ from point sources (e.g. power plants) and sequester it in deep geological formations (e.g. depleted oil fields, saline formation).

Ionic liquids are a class of solvents that offer significant promise for CO₂capture. Ionic liquids are molten salts that exist as liquids at a relatively low temperature. Ionic liquids have shown great promise for CO2 absorption. CO2 solubility in different ionic liquids has been previously reported. In this paper we show the use of computer-aided ionic liquid design (CAILD) method to design optimal ionic liquids with enhanced CO₂ absorption capacities. We utilize ionic liquid structure-property computational models in conjunction with optimization algorithms to achieve this objective.