Non-conventional CO2 sequestration via Vitamin C promoted green reaction: Yield evaluation

Carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is a relentless rise process. Many mitigation measures aimed at the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions coupled with capture in variously stable sequestration systems have been proposed over time. In a previous paper (Pastero, 2019), we proposed a new and green method to capture carbon dioxide avoiding the usage of hazardous reagents and the production of harmful compounds. The method involves the application of an aqueous solution of calcium ascorbate (vitamin C) as the only reagent and the precipitation of calcium oxalate as the main reaction product. The role of the chemical and physical process variables controlling the reaction has been investigated in order to increase significantly and stabilize the reaction yield in terms of CO2-sequestration capacity. In the present paper, we evaluated the performance of our method quantitatively, referring to two simple experimental setups: the maximum carbon dioxide yield exceeded 60 %, meaning that every 100 mol of carbon dioxide fed to the capturing system, 60 mol are removed and stored into a stable solid phase. This boost in the method’s performance was obtained optimizing the key-parameters of the reaction and increasing the exchange surface.