Recently, a research team led by Prof. ZHAO Hong and Prof. JIANG Biao from Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences first proposed a sustainable acetylene and carbon monoxide coproducing process based on BaCO₃-BaC₂-Ba(OH)₂-BaCO₃ barium cycle, which can simultaneously realize CO₂ capture and acetylene-carbon monoxide co-production at mild dynamic conditions with lower energy consumption and less waste emission.

The results were published in Green Chemistry. 

The dynamical behavior investigation suggested that BaC₂ can be efficiently solid-phase synthesized at about 1500 ℃ by using carbon and BaCO₃ as raw materials without CO₂ emission, which is more than 600 ℃ lower than the production temperature of CaC₂.

In addition, Ba(OH)₂ produced by the gasification of calcium carbide into acetylene is easily recovered and converted into BaCO₃ by absorbing CO₂, which is then used to synthesize carbide, verifying the coupling process between carbon-to-acetylene and carbon dioxide capture based on Ba loop, reducing the waste of carbide slag. 

The results suggested that BaC₂ is the more suitable intermediate for carbon-to-acetylene process than CaC₂, because of the milder formation temperature, the faster reaction rate, the more convenient barium recover to carbide production.

Featuring low cost, less wastes and high efficiency of co-producing of acetylene and carbon monoxide, this technology is expected to synthesize various of chemicals by using C₂H₂ and CO as platform chemicals instead of CO and H₂ produced by carbon gasification, which provides new ideas about reengineering process of carbon to chemicals.

Schematic of the barium-based carbon-to-acetylene process with the co-production of carbon monoxide (Image by SARI)

Contact: ZHAO Hong

Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Email:zhaoh@sari.ac.cn