Startups Make Products From the Carbon in Fossil Fuels

by Dylan Baddour (Inside Climate News) Now it (Graphitic Energy) hopes to turn a profit selling hydrogen, a clean burning fuel, and using the carbon soot to produce graphite, a critical mineral currently sourced primarily from China.

“We are able to monetize the carbon,” Jones said. He isn’t the only one chasing this target.

Another company in San Antonio, Carbon Free, built hardware to crystalize CO2 emissions into calcium carbonate, and is working in partnership with U.S. Steel. In Houston, Cemvita, has engineered microbes that recycle CO2 into chemicals or even cooking oil, and Dexmat, has devised pure carbon nano-materials which they call a replacement for metals.

In the near term, all these endeavors combined won’t divert more than a negligible fraction of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, even as global temperatures and fossil fuel consumption continue to rise. But in the long term, some scientists hope these technologies could help change the view of carbon as a waste product to be discharged into the atmosphere.

“It’s the economics that need to command this,” said Frederic Clerc, director of the Carbon to Value Initiative, an accelerator for carbon technology startups at New York University.

Their technologies may succeed, Clerc said, when big corporations can make more money selling their carbon byproduct than they would save by discarding it. But that can only happen after these technologies achieve large-scale production and the economic efficiencies it entails.

“It’s all about scale,” Clerc said. “To be competitive in commodity markets you need to be at a very big scale.”

Most carbon technology startups hope to partner with large scale industrial emitters and assume custody of the carbon at their smokestacks. German company enaDyne uses a process called plasma catalysis to recycle CO2 and hydrogen back into hydrocarbon fuels “at or below the price of fossil-based alternatives.”

New York-based Air Company produces alcohol using an extremely energy intensive process called electrolysis to turn water and captured CO2 into ethanol. So far, the company has produced vodka and hand sanitizer.

The Biden administration pushed to develop the practice of underground injection for disposal of CO2 without any oil involved, but its uptake has so far been minimal. It also requires a new web of pipelines and depends on government funding. Outside of subsidies, companies don’t make any money by capturing and injecting their CO2.

While decarbonization may have faded from vogue in Washington, D.C., the European Union continues to tighten and expand its climate regulations, at least for now.

Atop three stories of scaffolding, chief technology officer Patrick Hanks pats a large red tub. Forty feet tall and one foot wide, this “carbon formation vessel” is where the magic happens. It takes two days to heat up to 700 degrees Celsius and two days to cool down, but it’s designed to run 24/7. Inside the vessel, under extreme temperature, molecules of methane break apart into hydrogen and carbon.

Graphitic Energy plans to partner with big industrial companies that use hydrogen as fuel, for fertilizer or in chemical production. Currently, hydrogen is produced from methane through a process that requires less energy but also releases the carbon into the atmosphere as CO2.

Graphitic would provide its partners with hydrogen at a price buttressed by the income they hope to make selling carbon graphite, a critical mineral.

“You make so much carbon for the hydrogen you are producing,” said Hanks, a former ExxonMobil employee with a PhD in chemical engineering. “No supply chain dependencies on China or digging it out of the ground. We make limitless amounts from domestic natural gas.”

The company’s process would produce roughly three times as much graphite as hydrogen. It’s not the kind of premium graphite used in batteries and fuel cells, but a lower-grade mineral widely used in metallurgy and machinery.

“I do think there is a market for that,” said Marek Locmelis, an associate professor with the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin.

He said China currently dominates almost all of the world’s graphite supply. Meanwhile, the U.S. energy and defense departments are trying to establish domestic manufacturing capabilities. The country’s first graphite mine began production last year in Louisiana.

“It can take 10-plus years to get a natural graphite mine online,” Locmelis said. “If you can use this methane source instead of opening a new mine, then it will save you a lot of money.” READ MORE