Highlight SPES: CODEC ‘CO2 Oxygen DEpolarised Cathode’

22-12-2022

As part of the ‘Negative Emission Technology Lab – NET-Lab’ at SPES in Delft, funded by the ministry of EZK in 2020, the so-called CODEC setup has been designed and built as a flexible and versatile bench scale electrolysis setup.

End of October the set-up has arrived, followed by a Site Acceptance Test in the second week of November. The pictures below show the modular and mobile set up as well as an artist impression of the set-up.

The CODEC set-up serves as an electrochemical stripper & regenerator for a rich CO₂ solvent stream, stripping out the CO₂ in gas form, and subsequently regenerating the solvent to a lean CO₂ capture solvent. The main functionality of CODEC is to regenerate captured CO₂ by use of gas diffusion electrodes and/or plate electrodes at ambient and elevated temperatures. An important CO₂ source is air, since the investment was related to NET-Lab, but it is not limited to this, other sources like flue gases can serve as CO₂ source as well.

At Voltachem we will further use this setup for integrated carbon capture and conversion studies, where we use the electrochemically released CO₂from CODEC in one of our many, advanced electrochemical CO₂ conversion set-ups.

The acronym of the CODEC reactor stands for CO₂ Oxygen DEpolarised Cathode. In the figure below the working principle is shown. For any questions related to CODEC, please feel free to contact Matti van Schooneveld.