Startups Strive to Recycle Emissions for 'New Carbon Economy'

by Sebastien Malo (Reuters) Jennifer Holmgren, chief executive of carbon recycling firm LanzaTech, explained modestly how the Chicago-based startup had cut multi-million-dollar deals on four continents, including in China, aimed at helping curb climate change and air pollution.

At the Jingtang Steel Mill in Heibei province, the company uses bacteria to convert waste gases into ethanol for use in cleaner fuel, capturing carbon so that it is not released into the atmosphere as planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2).

“It’s just like using sugar fermentation - like you do making beer,” said Holmgren. “The chemistry takes a couple of seconds.”

Like her, scores of entrepreneurs have been wracking their brains to move beyond the most common way to reuse waste CO2 - pumping it into the ground to extract oil - and deploy it instead to make more planet-friendly materials.

Keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere via carbon capture and storage (CCS) is viewed by many scientists as necessary to limit global warming to the lower target of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.

The $20-million Carbon XPRIZE, launched in 2015, has been slimmed down to ten companies chasing a remaining $15 million in awards. Their inventions seek to turn the heat-trapping gas into bricks, carbon fiber and stronger cement, among other things.

At Illinois Clean Fuels, Stephen Johnson, one of two-full time employees, said he was “on year 13 of sleepless nights” to launch a plant that will produce jet fuel from municipal garbage - and bury underground the CO2 it emits.

But pipelines could also one day be plugged into manufacturing hubs that use recycled CO2 to make chemicals and building materials - if those industries really take off, said Richard Middleton with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Middleton is one of a group of scientists mapping an expansive grid of pipelines that, if built out, would maximize the amount of CO2 taken from sources like energy plants and heavy industry to sites where demand is highest.

In industrial sectors that are likely here to stay, such as concrete manufacturing, removing CO2 will be key to tackling climate change, said Rebecca Dell, a strategist at the ClimateWorks Foundation.

Industry generates more than a third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and its emissions - dominated by the manufacture of steel, cement and chemicals - are increasing at twice the global rate, she said.

A 2018 study published in the journal Nature Communications concluded that “well-regulated” storage was “secure” overall but scientists were uncertain how CO2 behaved underground in the long term. READ MORE