The Return of Electrofuels: Amazon, Mitsubishi, AP Ventures Invest in Infinium’s Bid to Make Fuels from CO2, Water

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) The Infinium Electrofuels process converts renewable power into green hydrogen, then uses this green hydrogen and waste carbon dioxide to produce net-zero carbon fuels. These fuels may be used in today’s plane, ship and truck fleets without changes in infrastructure.

Nearly a quarter of global carbon emissions stem from the transportation sector, posing a significant challenge in industry efforts to reduce emissions. New business mandates that include corporate climate commitments and ESG investing are increasing the demand for low-carbon transportation alternatives. Other solutions, such as electrification, carbon offsets, carbon capture and hydrogen fuel cell technology are part of the solution but do not fully address transportation’s carbon reduction needs.

Why a big deal?

It starts as a hydrogen play, splitting water to make green hydrogen — so, cleaner than many other technologies using hydrogen made from natural gas.

What do we know about Infinium’s’ tech? We have three steps.

2. Hydrogen & carbon dioxide are converted to syngas in the Infinium reactor using the proprietary CO2Cat catalyst

3. Syngas is fed through a proprietary synthesis step that directly produces high value fuels

Let’s unpack that, because there’s some novel tech claims to pay attention to here. Now, water-splitting to make green hydrogen is pretty established technology — though splitting salt water would be more novel, but there’s no sense that we have anything earth shattering. By the way, you need about 1.25 gallons of water to make a gallon of hydrocarbon fuel — and when you combust the fuel, it makes water again, so the water gets displaced but is not “destroyed”.

The big step is the Infinium reactor — the claim is that it makes syngas from hydrogen and CO2. Yes, you can react hydrogen and carbon dioxide (to make water and methane), and you can heat biomass to make carbon monoxide and hydrogen (syngas), but reacting CO2 and hydrogen to make syngas takes a little doing, you have to strip an oxygen atom off of CO2, something CO2 does not like to do. Still, people are worming on this. Here’s some work reported last year using a palladium catalyst (yes, the same stuff that Iron Man used, originally, and it ain’t cheap). And, here’s some work on reducing CO2 to carbon monoxide at Stanford, though you end up with lighter molecules like propane and ethane. Here’s a cheaper material — zinc oxide catalysis, based on work at the University of New South Wales.

So, there are routes to using CO2 as a feed for syngas. Efficiency, yield and stability are major factors for fuels creation, as we have to make something cheap which means a robust process that can operate at bigger scales than pharma or materials.

The third step, syngas to fuels. Velocys has pioneered a microchannel Fischer-Tropsch process that allows for conversion of syngas to renewable diesel and jet, cheaply, at the smaller scales suited to biomass than giant petroleum refineries using the historic F/T process. So, we know that you can do this, and Velocys has operated successfully at commercial scale. Infinium’s tech to accomplish this? We don’t know much yet.

Progress towards scale

OK, so this is a Series A investment, so think proof of concept and not much scale, as yet. Ultimately, the company says that it ally with strategic partners to build Electrofuels production plants, focusing first in markets where low-cost renewable power generation coincide with large CO2 volumes. Ports come to mind, cement plants, ethanol plants with nearby wind farms. READ MORE