Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 22-December 6, 1999

Volume 28, Number 14

Yale team is first to turn
carbon dioxide into gel form

A Yale research team has succeeded for the first time in turning supercritical carbon dioxide, which is CO₂ under tremendous pressure, into gel form.

The discovery could have widespread application in a number of industries, including oil drilling, in which the gel form of CO₂ would be used instead of water to extract oil from the ground. The new process might be less expensive and much more environmentally friendly.

"The chemical and oil industries use hundreds of millions of gallons of organic solvents in their processes and their disposal creates an environmental problem," says Andrew Hamilton, the Irenee duPont Professor of Chemistry. "Supercritical CO₂ could replace some of these solvents."

The study published in the Nov. 19 issue of Science was a collaboration between Hamilton and his team at Yale -- Andrew Carr and R.E. Melendez, both postdoctoral researchers in chemistry -- and scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, among them Professors Robert Enick and Eric Beckman. The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The scientists set out with the challenge of designing synthetic molecules to increase the viscosity of supercritical CO₂, explains Hamilton.

"We were almost too successful," he says. "We discovered a molecule that gelled supercritical CO₂. Then we had another surprise. When we released the pressure, the CO₂ evaporated from this gel and left behind a solid material made up of interconnected networks of our designed molecules, and it had extremely low density."

The benefit of using the new solvent in oil recovery is that, once the oil is extracted, the supercritical CO₂ would be disposed of through evaporation or recycling, greatly reducing the cost of the extraction and protecting the environment, Hamilton says.

The next step, he notes, is to improve the viscosity-enhancing properties of the molecules and simplify the structure so that it can be produced in bulk.

"People see supercritical CO₂ as a more benign solvent for the next century," says Hamilton.

-- By Jacqueline Weaver

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