The idea sounds almost absurd at first. Take the gas that is heating the planet, run it through a machine, and pull out useful chemicals on the other side. No carbon capture burial, no offsets, no credits, just chemistry. That is exactly what Feng Jiao, Lauren and Lee Fixel Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis’s McKelvey School of Engineering, has spent years working toward.
On May 11, Jiao published a commentary in Nature Chemical Engineering outlining the real obstacles standing between lab-scale CO₂ electrolysis and something an industry could actually use. The paper, co-authored with Gregory Hutchings and Bradie Crandall, is blunt about where the technology stands and what it needs to move forward.
What the machine actually does
The electrolyzer Jiao’s team works with looks like a stack of metal plates locked inside a cage. The top plate acts as a cathode, the bottom as an anode, and between them sit layers of separators that break apart the chemistry of carbon dioxide. What comes out the other side are platform chemicals such as carbon monoxide, formic acid, methanol, ethylene, acetic acid which are materials that manufacturers already use to produce food, fuel, and synthetic compounds.
The circular part matters here. Those chemicals can feed back into the same industrial processes that generated the CO₂ in the first place. Waste becomes raw material. The loop closes.
Scaling up is where things get complicated
Jiao’s core question is straightforward: how do you go from a device the size of a lab bench to one that works at commercial scale? The answer involves three problems that do not have clean solutions yet.
The first is compression. The stack needs pressure to function, but too much crushes its components and too little causes leaks. Finding the right balance, what Jiao calls the “Goldilocks zone” is not trivial at larger sizes.
The second is heat. Small electrolyzers manage temperature naturally. Bigger ones generate uneven heat that degrades performance, requiring modelling tools to map flow patterns and find configurations that stay within working range without driving up costs.
The third is flow. At a small scale, chemicals and gases move through the system evenly. At large scale, that uniformity breaks down, and the whole reaction becomes harder to control.
A global race with high stakes
Jiao and his co-authors did not soften their conclusions about what happens if the United States hesitates. “Europe and Asia are ramping up investment in electrolyzer manufacturing and demonstration projects,” they wrote, describing the scale-up effort as a global race. Without sustained government backing, private investment will not follow and any nation that developed the early science but failed to commercialise it will simply watch others benefit.
Jiao has co-founded a startup, Lectrolyst, to push the technology beyond the commentary page. The research was supported by the Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
