The Race to Capture, Use and Monetize Waste CO2

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Reduce carbon? Rid the world of excess CO2? Not so fast, buster. A new generation of technologies has come along that capture, re-purpose and monetize CO2 emissions. Will they realize their promise? As Liquid Light steps out of stealth and into the light, the state of the art is looking pretty good.
If you have watched the debate over carbon emissions for a reasonable length of time, you may have asked yourself why technologists and governments are so intent on preventing carbon emissions by transitioning away from fossil fuels, when they might just capture any CO2 at the point of release and do something useful with it, or simply store it.
The short answer to your question is that technologist are working on it — furiously. Venture capital has been funding efforts, and research labs have been hard at work as well.
Many technologies that have emerged have been biobased — using the CO2 fixing capability of plants and microbes. We’ve closely followed, for example, the story of a slew of algae tecnologies, plus more exotic technologies such as Proterro and Joule Unlimited, which use CO2, water and sunlight to directly build alkenes and alcohols (in the case of Joule), and sugars (in the case of Proterro). LanzaTech, which uses carbon monoxide in its process, is also hard at work for breakthroughs using CO2.
The limitation? There’s only so much CO2 that a plant or microbe needs (or can take), and the acreage needed for systems can be daunting, and exposes companies that need to get rid of CO2 into a complex supply chain.
And so we enter the world of two less-familiar acronyms — carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture and usage (CCU).
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This week, in Nature Chemistry, a team out of Stanford reported the development of new catalysts for converting CO2 (and hydrogen, possibly green hydrogen) into methanol. Scientists from Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Technical University of Denmark combined theory and experimentation to identify a new nickel-gallium catalyst that converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methanol with fewer side-products than the conventional catalyst.
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And even more interesting, a small company funded by BP Ventures, Redpoint, Osage University, VantagePoint and Chrysalix is coming out of sealth after six years of developing a technology to convert CO2 into an array of speciality chemicals at reactivity rates — and thereby costs — that not only make it attractive as a carbon remediation, but in this case actually lower the cost of carbon compared to using fossil oil & gas in the first place.
The company? Liquid Light, which is just now emerging out of stealth mode.
The goal? Create a (licensable) chemical process that can utilize carbon emissions that actually come from the chemical plant itself — and make an array of chemicals through electrochemical processes and catalysis.
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Think 2017-2018 for the company to be ready for deployment of large-scale systems. The company is at lab-stage and completed a commercial prototype — now it will be proceeding to build its pilot reactor and then a demonstration of the complete reactor cell and all components.
One item to note — as has been a trend in recent years, this is a modular design where multiple reactor cell units are stacked together — so scale-up has far less risky steps (as in the case of fermentation technologies, where there is the step-up to larger and larger fermenters).
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Not to mention that the world is just leetle bit short of hydrogen. READ MORE and MORE (Stanford University) and MORE (Liquid Light) Abstract