Vodka. Jet fuel. Hand sanitizer. Perfume… More and more companies are looking to turn CO emissions2 obtained from the air or factory smoke into products for everyday consumption. That way, the greenhouse gases won’t escape into the atmosphere and heat the planet – or at least they’ll be recycled a few times before being emitted back.
Carbon capture technology works by separating CO₂ from other gases using expensive solvents. These solvents are capable of attracting each CO . molecule2 out of the air in the same way that iron filings are attracted to a magnet.
After being captured, people will bury CO₂ underground. How to bury a gas in the ground? Let’s take advantage of the oil wells that we have exhausted, pumping CO2 Underneath the empty gas fields and cover them.
That’s a great idea, but unfortunately it often doesn’t work in practice. That’s because of the cost of CO . separation2 with very high solvents. Furthermore, companies have to solve the CO₂ transport problem and find suitable geological structures to store it. So why work so hard when just building a chimney, it will be both cheaper and easier, right?
Unfortunately, scientists realize that if we continue to build chimneys indiscriminately, the Earth will be heated by an atmosphere filled with greenhouse gases. Even politicians see it as a danger.
Together, they have agreed to global emission-restricting agreements, standards and regulations. This promotes the formation of a green economy, helping people gradually abandon the corrupt industrial way, destroying their own living environment on Earth.
Recycle CO2 into alcohol, plastic, building materials and jet fuel
In parallel with the above transition, the ideas of a circular green economy with carbon also appeared. Typically a number of startups are chasing the idea”carbon capture and use” (CCU), they argue that CO₂ can be used to produce goods, the types of goods sold will go back to finance the scaling up of their technology.
For example, Air Company, a company based in Brooklyn, USA, says it has created a type of “world’s most sustainable alcohol” by mixing the CO₂ obtained with electrolyzed hydrogen from water and wind power. Their high-strength alcohol can be made into a variety of consumables, including vodka, which starts at $65 a bottle.
“Using the same amount of land, our technology can absorb a level of CO₂ 100 times the rate of a well-managed forest.”said Gregory Constantine, co-founder of Air Company.
Adaptavate, a UK startup, has taken a different approach. They use agricultural waste and lime-based binders to capture CO₂ and then create plaster walls.
If their product is widely used, it could cut emissions from the construction sector, a sector responsible for 38% of global energy-related emissions.
Another special example is Econic Technologies, a spin off company that came out of Imperial College London in 2012. They currently hold the technology to make polymers from CO₂. This is the premise for the production of a wide range of consumer and industrial products of petroleum origin, such as plastics.
According to Econic Technologies CEO Keith Wiggins, their process uses a licensed catalyst that can replace up to 50% of conventional petroleum-based raw materials.
The company wants to replace polyurethane, a polymer used for foaming found in insulation, mattresses, and refrigerators into coatings and adhesives with CO.2 Recycling.
They have now announced a partnership with Manali Petrochemicals, a major Indian producer. The company claims that if all polyurethanes worldwide were produced using their technology, we could reduce emissions by more than 11 million tons of CO2 each year.
According to the NGO Carbon180, the United States alone is forming a potential $1 trillion market for products made from captured CO₂ emissions. These products range from plastics and building materials to food and beverages.
An alternative product that is expected to make a difference to the global net-zero effort is aviation fuel, as we currently have no way of making it.
Now there’s Dimensional Energy, an energy company trying to make a usable fuel from waste carbon and sunlight. Their process works by adding water to the captured carbon and heating the mixture to high temperatures using electricity generated from solar panels:
Catalysts are introduced to combine carbon and hydrogen atoms from water into a compound that can be turned into fuel for cargo ships and passenger planes.
Dimensional Energy says it plans to acquire and use its first 500,000 tonnes of CO₂ by the end of the decade. This is an extremely ambitious goal because compared with the largest carbon capture plant in operation today, the Orca facility in Helsinki operated by Climeworks AG can only capture 4,000 tons of CO₂ per year.
Real effects or just inflated promises?
The problem for companies like Dimensional is that CCU was born as a vehicle to raise capital for carbon capture technologies. But today, many governments and companies have set emissions reduction targets to zero, meaning they will prioritize CO₂ storage technologies like burying them back in the ground instead of recycling them.
According to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at MIT’s Energy Initiative, capturing CO2 would be more efficient than trying to recycle it. Turning CO2 into other products that also require energy, and we don’t always have enough renewable energy to do that.
If you again use fossil energy to recycle CO2, which in turn creates new emissions. And even solar energy isn’t really clean, if it’s stored in batteries.
Thus, although CO . recycling technologies2 are proving to be an effective marketing tool, industry experts say that the scenarios they pose are all fiction. There will never be a way that you can replace all polyurethane worldwide with a CO recycled product2.
So when it comes to the promises of alcohol or hand sanitizer that are recycled from greenhouse gases, they will, in the best-case scenario, act as a tool to educate investors on the benefits of the technology. hold carbon. In the worst case, it’s just a gimmick that doesn’t do much for the planet.
This reminds us of a study published in the journal Nature in 2017, in which scientists were not very optimistic about the potential of CCU technologies. They estimate that even if there is enough clean energy to support CO . recycling2 On a large scale, the sector’s actual contribution to the global net-zero goal remains negligible, at less than 1%.
“Reusing carbon is like a climate solution, but it doesn’t permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere“, said Giana Amador, policy director at Carbon180.Neither capturing carbon nor removing carbon is a license for fossil fuel companies to continue emitting emissions.”
Refer to Bloomberg