The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more

Companies are scrambling to turn the greenhouse gas into useful products — but will that slow climate change?

The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more D41586-022-00807-y_20253346

The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more D41586-022-00807-y_20253346

Tongyezhen is a town with coal in its bones. In this part of China’s Henan province, people have been mining coal and smelting metals for millennia. Today, Tongyezhen hosts a sprawling industrial park where huge ovens bake coal and limestone into coke and lime, both key ingredients for producing steel. Unsurprisingly, it is one of the smoggiest places in China.

It might seem an unlikely venue for a clean-technology milestone. 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.

It’s an alluring idea: industrial CO2 emissions are warming the climate, and many countries are working on capturing the gas and storing it underground. But why not recycle it into products that are both virtuous and profitable? 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. Some are boutique items for the climate-conscious shopper — vodka or diamonds, for example — but most are staples of the global economy: fuels, polymers, other chemicals and building materials. More than 80 firms are working on new approaches to using CO2, noted a 2021 report by Lux Research, a market-research company in Boston, Massachusetts. The market for these products is tiny today, amounting to less than US$1 billion — but Lux predicts that it will grow to $70 billion by 2030, and could reach $550 billion by 2040.

This activity is being driven by a fall in the cost of renewable energy, along with rising carbon taxes and other climate incentives that are persuading firms to avoid CO2 emissions. At the same time, chemists have improved the efficiency of the underlying technologies.

.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00807-y

The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more

The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more

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