The Race to Upcycle CO2 into Fuels, Concrete and More

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April 06, 2022

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by Mark Peplow (Nature) Companies are scrambling to turn the greenhouse gas into useful products — but will that slow climate change? -- Tongyezhen is a town with coal in its bones. ... But later this year, a chemical plant here is set to become the world’s largest facility for recycling carbon dioxide into fuel. It will combine CO₂ from a lime kiln with excess hydrogen and CO₂ from a coking furnace to produce methanol, an industrial chemical used for fuel and to make plastics. Carbon Recycling International (CRI), the Reykjavik-based firm behind the operation, says that the Tongyezhen plant will recycle about 160,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year — equivalent to the emissions from tens of thousands of cars — that would otherwise go into the atmosphere.

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As long as the recycling process avoids creating more carbon emissions — by using renewable energy, or excess resources that would otherwise be wasted — it can reduce the CO₂ that industry pumps into the atmosphere and lower the demand for fossil fuels used in manufacturing. That’s a double climate win, proponents say.

This kind of recycling (sometimes called upcycling) is an increasingly crowded field, as companies big and small race to market a bewildering array of products made from CO₂.

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Many of the products made this way only briefly delay carbon’s journey into the atmosphere — fuels are burnt, products made from chemicals degrade and the CO₂ consumed during their creation is released again. That will happen at Tongyezhen: much of the methanol produced is destined to be burnt as fuel in China’s growing fleet of methanol-powered vehicles.

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Using CO₂ as a chemical ingredient isn’t a new idea.

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Reusing carbon dioxide: Flowchart showing the processes by which CO2 can be captured and reused. — *Adapted from ref. 10*

Many of the bigger players use catalysts that help to combine CO₂ with hydrogen to make fuels and commodity chemicals. Their main costs revolve around the energy needed to make hydrogen, capture streams of CO₂ and break this molecule’s strong carbon–oxygen bonds to forge new molecules. That is why so many early plants are located where there are plentiful streams of high-purity waste CO₂, widely available spare hydrogen and heat (which powers the methanol production at Tongyezhen), or low-cost renewable electricity.

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CRI is working on other full-size plants in China’s Jiangsu province and in northern Norway. Other consortia projects involving companies in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark will all recycle CO₂ to methanol for use as a chemical feedstock and shipping fuel, and aim to start operations between 2023 and 2025.

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California-based start-up firm Twelve, for instance, aims by the end of this year to have an electrolyser system the size of a shipping container that uses electricity to process more than one tonne of CO₂ each day into syngas. This mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is widely used to make other chemicals, including fuels. Twelve plans to offer CO₂ conversion as a service to firms wanting to reduce their emissions; it could charge per tonne converted, and sell its end products to cover costs.

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Twelve, by contrast, uses a modified commercial electrolyser, which normally splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Adding a metal catalyst to one of the device’s electrodes (the cathode) enables it to simultaneously convert CO₂ into CO, so that the system produces syngas at room temperature. Twelve aims to use renewable electricity sources to run these CO₂-recycling units.

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Avantium, a renewables chemical company in Amsterdam, is using improved catalysts² to make formic acid, which can be converted into more-valuable chemicals. It is currently testing an electrochemical reactor at a fossil-fuel power plant in Germany.

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Proponents argue that recycling industrial CO₂ into chemicals can reduce emissions in another way — by avoiding some fossil-fuel-based production. “Our process helps keep fossil fuels in the ground by tapping into existing streams of CO₂,” a spokesperson for Twelve told Nature.

The stringent way to examine this is through a life-cycle analysis (LCA) — a detailed accounting of the carbon involved in making and using a product, from the origins of its CO₂ to its final fate. Many CO₂-recycling firms say they have done these audits, but don’t publish them because they contain proprietary information.

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One firm that has released LCAs is LanzaTech, headquartered in Skokie, Illinois. The company uses bioreactors filled with Clostridium autoethanogenum bacteria to ferment industrial CO₂, CO and hydrogen waste emissions into ethanol. Its chief executive, Jennifer Holmgren, notes that this kind of bioconversion can handle messy waste-gas streams, such as those from municipal waste gasifiers, better than chemical processes do. The firm’s reactor at a Shougang Group steel plant near Tianjin in China has been producing ethanol since 2018. A second plant began operating at a Chinese alloy plant last year, and commercial plants in Belgium and India are expected to come online by the end of this year.

On 8 March, LanzaTech announced that it would become publicly listed, a move that values the company at $1.8 billion. This year, it reported that with genetic modifications, its bacteria could make larger molecules such as acetone and isopropanol, too⁴. Conventional production of acetone and isopropanol generates copious CO₂ emissions. By contrast, LanzaTech’s LCA suggests that its route is carbon-negative — consuming much more carbon than it emits⁴. But this analysis did not include what would happen to the CO₂ when the products were used.

Holmgren thinks that CO₂-based products will save on emissions anyway, by displacing their conventionally made equivalents. But she concedes that it is hard to be certain this is true — CO₂-based products might simply add to the growing global consumption of fuels and other chemicals, rather than displace incumbent production.

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To maximize climate benefits, it makes more sense to lock recycled CO₂ into products that last for decades. That’s where polymers come in.

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Polyols are usually made from expensive chemicals called epoxides, but her (Charlotte Williams, a chemist at the University of Oxford, UK) catalysts help CO₂ to take the place of some of these in the polymer chain. This traps CO₂ and reduces the consumption of epoxides — which themselves have a big carbon footprint.

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Despite this progress, projections suggest that using CO₂ as a polymer ingredient would lock up only around 10 million to 50 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2050⁶. So, is it really worth it? “I think it’s the wrong way of looking at the problem,” Williams says. “We have to make massive cuts in CO₂ emissions across the board, but we also have to invest in some technologies that can directly use it.”

The biggest opportunity to incorporate CO₂ into products lies in concrete and other building materials, says Runeel Daliah, a senior analyst at Lux Research, who is based in Amsterdam. The technology is proven and scalable, and could feed an enormous global demand for concrete, giving it the potential to dominate the CO₂-conversion market. “Concrete is really the only one where you have permanent sequestration of CO₂ in the product,” Daliah says.

One of the leaders in this sector is Canadian company CarbonCure in Halifax.

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In the United States, some companies say that a tax credit called 45Q is helping to encourage CO₂ conversion.

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The success of the CO₂-conversion businesses, however, could rest on LCAs and other measurements of carbon flows. The European Commission, for example, is developing a carbon-removal certification mechanism to provide a more rigorous framework for verifying whether a process is genuinely carbon negative.

So far, LCAs offer a rather downbeat assessment of most CO₂-conversion strategies. In a report¹⁰ published in February, environmental scientist Kiane de Kleijne at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and her colleagues scoured dozens of published LCAs to compare CO₂ conversion routes with conventional ways of making the same products. Then the researchers compared CO₂ savings from the recycling processes with the 2015 Paris agreement targets of halving global CO₂ emissions by 2030, and of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. “We found that very few of those routes are able to meet the criteria for Paris compatibility,” says de Kleijne. Routes that made the grade did so by storing CO₂ permanently — mixing the gas with slag from steel mills to make construction blocks, for example.

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And if the global economy does eventually end its reliance on coal, oil and gas, industries of the future might need these CO₂-conversion processes to produce the polymers and other chemicals we depend on.

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A project called Norsk e-Fuel in Oslo is taking a step in that direction with a pilot plant in Herøya, Norway, which aims to start turning CO₂-derived syngas into jet fuel.

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That technology is now in operation at Climeworks’s first large-scale direct air-capture plant, which opened in September 2021 in Hellisheidi, Iceland.

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Even if there are limited climate benefits from converting today’s fossil CO₂ emissions into products, some companies argue that it’s important to develop the technology so that it is ready to feed off CO₂ from the air once direct air-capture technology matures. “I do think it’s a valid argument,” says Ramírez Ramírez. “But we need to be careful that it is part of a transition, that we eventually replace the fossil carbon with sustainable sources.” READ MORE

Climeworks Raises $650 Million in Largest Round for Carbon Removal Startup (Bloomberg)

Avantium awarded €3 million EU grant to demonstrate the electrochemical conversion of CO2 to consumer products (Avantium)

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