Photocatalytically reforming methane using carbon dioxide (“dry” reforming) is a promising pathway to produce low-carbon alternatives to common petrochemicals because it consumes the two most abundant greenhouse gases as feedstock to produce “synthesis gas”, a precursor to over 30,000 unique commercial chemicals. The opportunity to use agricultural, municipal, or organic industrial wastes as feedstock to enable the “circular economy” is especially exciting because carbon dioxide and methane gas are co-produced through the anaerobic digestion of these types of organic matter. Further, using light though photocatalysis rather than heat from fossil fuel combustion to drive this chemical reaction can potentially eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from chemical production.

This research work presents a systematic, multi-scale engineering analysis of photocatalytic dry reforming though which the question of whether the industrial adoption of a photocatalytic dry reforming process is possible, and further, whether it makes sense, is answered. To this end, a techno-economic analysis is completed to compare fifteen different implementation case studies for a photocatalytic dry reforming reaction, and to postulate different system performance targets for these varying applications. Following, a sensitivity analysis was performed which determined that the use of natural sunlight for up to six hours per day has an insignificant impact on the overall process economics. As a result, running the system for 24 hours per day using renewable electricity appears more favourable. To address the question of why using renewable electricity to run a photocatalytic process is better than using that electricity to drive a thermal or electrocatalytic process, a comparative thermodynamic analysis was conducted on three model systems.

Given the engineering advantages to using a photocatalytic dry reforming system to enable the production of greenhouse-gas derived chemicals, a novel nanocomposite photocatalyst is presented which shows high performance without making use of precious metals. Following, a novel printing method that uses self-assembling nanoparticle inks is presented as a proof-of-concept for the manufacture of largescale photocatalyst supports.