Nov
12
CO2 Recycling Could Become a Big Business
November 12, 2019 | 1 Comment
From the study, linked below, with a full explanation and discussion. Image Credit: UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. Click image for the largest view.
UCLA, the University of Oxford and five other institutions’ research has been published in Nature. The paper is the most comprehensive study to date investigating the potential future scale and cost of 10 different ways to use carbon dioxide, including in fuels and chemicals, plastics, building materials, soil management and forestry. The study considered processes using carbon dioxide captured from waste gases that are produced by burning fossil fuels or from the atmosphere by an industrial process.
Going beyond a step the most previous research on the subject, the authors also considered processes that use carbon dioxide captured biologically by photosynthesis.
The research found that on average each utilization pathway could use around 0.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere. (A tonne, or metric ton of about 2200 pounds, is equivalent to 1,000 kilograms, and a gigatonne is 1 billion tonnes, or about 1.1 billion U.S. tons.) The math of 0.5 gigatonnes works out to 550 million tons or 1,100,000,000,000 pounds.
A top-end scenario could see more than 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year used, at a theoretical cost of under $100 per tonne of carbon dioxide. The researchers noted, however, that the potential scales and costs of using carbon dioxide varied substantially across sectors.
Emily Carter, a distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a co-author of the paper said, “The analysis we presented makes clear that carbon dioxide utilization can be part of the solution to combat climate change, but only if those with the power to make decisions at every level of government and finance commit to changing policies and providing market incentives across multiple sectors. The urgency is huge and we have little time left to effect change.”
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over the rest of the 21st century will require the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on the order of 100 to 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Currently, fossil carbon dioxide emissions are increasing by over 1% annually, reaching a record high of 37 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2018.
Cameron Hepburn, one of the study’s lead authors, director of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and Environment said, “Greenhouse gas removal is essential to achieve net zero carbon emissions and stabilize the climate. We haven’t reduced our emissions fast enough, so now we also need to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Governments and corporations are moving on this, but not quickly enough. The promise of carbon dioxide utilization is that it could act as an incentive for carbon dioxide removal and could reduce emissions by displacing fossil fuels.”
Critical to the success of these new technologies as mitigation strategies will be a careful analysis of their overall impact on the climate. Some are likely to be adopted quickly simply because of their attractive business models. For example, in certain kinds of plastic production, using carbon dioxide as a feedstock is a more profitable and environmentally cleaner production process than using conventional hydrocarbons, and it can displace up to three times as much carbon dioxide as it uses.
Biological uses might also present opportunities to reap co-benefits. In other areas, utilization could provide a “better choice” alternative during the global decarbonization process. One example might be the use of fuels derived from carbon dioxide, which could find a role in sectors that are harder to decarbonize, such as aviation.
The authors stressed that there is no “magic bullet” approach.
Carter, who also is UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, and the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and Environment Emeritus at Princeton University said, “I would start by incentivizing the most obvious solutions – most of which already exist – that can act at the gigatonne scale in agriculture, forestry and construction. At the same time, I would aggressively invest in R&D across academia, industry and government labs – much more so than is being done in the U.S., especially compared to China – in higher-tech solutions to capture and convert carbon dioxide to useful products that can be developed alongside solutions that already exist in agriculture, forestry and construction.”
Your humble writer has always suggested that the human activity on the planet gets to a carbon cycle in sync with the environment. Its still a saddening moment to again see the reliance on climate change as the single motivator when a CO2 recycling economic element has such potential to enrich the whole of the planet’s ecosystem.
The study is very welcome indeed. Its a certainty that when the technology of CO2 recycling produces products at competitive pricing the producers and consumers will be there. One hopes the study motivates increased efforts to discover and develop the processes to get CO2 recycling underway.
Comments
1 Comment so far
Feedburner
Reddit
Stumbleupon
I agree with your opinions expressed here. Can you please distinguish opinion/editorial statements from quotes from articles, by any chance?
There is no question in my mind that negative emissions requires solar farms that can reduce air captured CO2, with burial of the resulting carbon black in huge landfills. The size of these farms can easily be 50 km x 50 km per GTco2/year, and will have to be constructed in the Sahara. I figure you need a carbon tax of $150/Tco2 to make this happen.