In a warehouse laboratory in Berkeley, California, Nicholas Flanders stands in front of a shiny metal box about the size of a washing machine. Inside is a stack of metal plates that resemble a club sandwich \u2013 only the filling is a black polymer membrane coated with proprietary metal catalyst. \u201cWe call the membrane the black leaf,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Flanders is the co-founder and CEO of Twelve, a startup founded in 2015, which received a $57m funding boost in July. It aims to take air \u2013 or, to be more precise, the carbon dioxide (CO2) in it \u2013 and transform it into something useful, as plants also do, eliminating damaging emissions in the process. Taking the unwanted gas wreaking havoc on our climate and using only water and renewable electricity, Twelve\u2019s metal box houses a new kind of electrolyser that transforms the CO2 into synthesis gas (syngas), a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that can be made into a range of familiar products usually made from fossil fuels. Oxygen is the only by-product. This August, the pilot scale equipment made the syngas that went into what Flanders claims is the world\u2019s first carbon neutral, fossil-free jet fuel produced by electrolysing CO2. \u201cThis is a new way of moving carbon through our economy without pulling it out of the ground,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twelve is one of many companies beginning to make stuff out of CO2, captured either from industrial emissions or directly from the air. High-end goods such as vodka, diamonds and activewear, industrial materials such as concrete, plastic, foam and carbon fibre, and even food, are all beginning to be created using CO2. In addition to jet fuel, which is a partnership with the US air force, Twelve has been using its syngas to explore making parts of car interiors with Mercedes-Benz, laundry detergent ingredients with Tide and sunglasses lenses with Pangaia. Online marketplaces such as Expedition Air and SkyBaron are even springing up to sell consumer goods made with CO2 emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are at the very early end of a new carbon tech industry,\u201d says Pat Sapinsley, of the Urban Future Lab at New York University, who oversees a new accelerator programme to help fledgling startups get a foothold. While the industry is still only emerging \u2013 most activity is only at bench or pilot scale \u2013 it is estimated by the Lab there are now about 350 startups hoping to deliver so-called carbon-to-value. Venture capital investment has sharply risen. This year, over $550m had flowed in by the end of September according to research and consulting firm Cleantech Group; that\u2019s more than in the previous five years put together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sector could have the potential to reduce the world\u2019s CO2 emissions by more than 10%, according to analysis by the University of Michigan\u2019s Global CO2 Initiative, which aims to help the sector emerge (fuels and building materials such as concrete and aggregates are considered to hold the biggest CO2 mitigation \u2013 and market \u2013 potential). That contribution, advocates argue, firmly makes carbon utilisation part of the suite of technologies we are going to need to reach the net zero commitments governments and corporations have been making and which, it is becoming clear, can\u2019t be met by renewable electricity alone. \u201cI don\u2019t see a path to net zero without these kinds of technologies,\u201d says Richard Youngman, CEO of Cleantech Group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Premium running shoe brand On \u2013 which went public this September \u2013 realised that if it was going to reach its aggressive net zero targets it would need to rethink its materials. Its vision is now that half of all its shoe bottom foam will be made not from petrochemicals but captured carbon. Last month, it announced plans to team up with US-based startup LanzaTech \u2013 an early pioneer of the sector, which uses a patented fermentation process to make ethanol out of waste carbon monoxide collected from factories which would otherwise be burnt to emit CO2 \u2013 and chemical manufacturer Borealis, which makes the foam by polymerising ethylene (to which ethanol can be converted). On is hoping to unveil its first pair of shoes made wholly from captured carbon sometime next year (it has separate arrangements to make the shoe uppers). That first pair will cost about $1m to make, says Caspar Coppetti, On\u2019s co-founder and executive co-chairman. It\u2019s a lab endeavour to prove viability \u2013 but, eventually, when it scales, he doesn\u2019t expect the shoes to cost much more than a regular pair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not that CO2 isn\u2019t already used industrially (think carbonated beverages). But those uses either put the gas unchanged back into the atmosphere or, in the case of enhanced oil recovery, where injected CO2 pushes out oil and then remains underground, still perpetuates the extraction of new fossil fuels. What\u2019s different here is that waste CO2 is chemically transformed to make new products. Some, such as building materials, eliminate emissions by locking the carbon away permanently; others, such as jet fuel, prevent new emissions by recycling already emitted carbon. Often grouped with utilisation is CO2 sequestration, which promises to store large amounts of captured CO2 permanently underground, but the two are quite different, as advocates point out. \u201cIt\u2019s almost a sin to throw away a valuable resource,\u201d says Volker Sick, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who directs the Global CO2 Initiative. \u201cThe beauty of carbon is you can make so many different things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New York-based startup Air Company, launched in 2017, is selling CO2-made vodka and perfume, and produced hand sanitiser during the pandemic. Like Twelve, it starts with CO2, water and renewable energy but combines them in its reactor to make alcohols such as ethanol. A litre of vodka removes a pound of CO2, and it may soon even use CO2 captured from the heating systems of Manhattan office buildings (in a collaboration with capture startup CarbonQuest).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, like Twelve, Air Company has jet fuel in its sights \u2013 which can also be produced from ethanol. It is a crowded field \u2013 others pressing ahead with CO2-made jet fuel include LanzaJet, a spinoff from ethanol maker LanzaTech, and SynHelion, which uses solar energy to transform CO2 to syngas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Typically, it is small amounts \u2013 think litres per hour \u2013 of jet fuel being made at this stage, says Ian Hayton, a materials and chemicals analyst at Cleantech Group. But countries are beginning to introduce quotas for sustainable aviation fuels, which could move things forwards. And the advantage of making it from CO2, rather than biomass or waste vegetable oils, is that it uses far less land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Canadian company CarbonCure, founded in 2012, is one of the pioneers on the building materials side. Backed by investors such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates\u2019s investment firm, its technology involves injecting CO2 into concrete as it is being mixed. The injected CO2 reacts with the wet concrete and rapidly becomes permanently stored as a mineral, the same one as in limestone. CarbonCure\u2019s business model is to license its technology to concrete manufacturers themselves. CarbonCure retrofits their systems, transforming them into carbon tech companies (the CO2 is supplied by waste emission sources in their region). It gives them a green sales advantage, but really what the concrete producers like is the economic benefit, says co-founder and CEO Robert Niven. It means less cement is needed to make the concrete \u2013 most are able to reduce their cement content by about 5% \u2013 and the addition of the CO2 also strengthens the final material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is hard to imagine that food in the form of protein could be mass produced from CO2, but that is exactly what another subset of carbon tech companies are working on. Some, such as Solar Foods in Finland, and Air Protein in California \u2013 which uses the tagline \u201cmeat made from air\u201d \u2013 intend their products for human consumption, while others, such as UK- and Netherlands-based Deep Branch, are focusing on animal feed ingredients. With inputs typically of CO2, water and renewable electricity along with ammonia and nutrients, their proteins are produced in bioreactors from naturally occurring microbes. The microbes grow and multiply and are then dried out to produce a protein powder with all the essential amino acids. \u201cIt is somewhere between dried meat, dried soy and dried carrot,\u201d says Pasi Vainikka, Solar Foods co-founder and CEO, of its product Solein. Admittedly, that doesn\u2019t sound very appetising, but, says Vainikka, the taste comes in the final product and Solein is versatile. It could replace pea and soy protein isolate in processed foods or even be used as a feed for the cultivated meat industry. Treated with heat and pressure, it can be eaten like a tasty slab of steak or tofu. Two kilograms of CO2 makes a kilogram of the product and it has been submitted to food regulators in Europe and the UK for novel food approval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet the field also faces many challenges to come to fruition. First, if the technology is really going to serve the climate, it has to be scaled up for mass production quickly and offer price-competitive products. \u201cThere\u2019s no point unless we can deliver on scale,\u201d says Allison Dring, CEO of German startup Made of Air, which is focusing on plastics replacements. Many of the companies have plans for their first commercial facilities \u2013 Twelve, for example, which has designed its equipment to be modular so it can easily be added to increase capacity, a bit like a solar farm, hopes to have its first shipping container-sized plant by next year and predicts significant commercial volume by 2023. But scaling up is capital intensive and takes time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One specific roadblock is finding customers. The startups need bigger companies to pair up with to buy their CO2-made raw materials, but it can be hard for them to break into established supply chains. A big focus of the startup accelerator programme run out of the Urban Futures Lab, called the C2V Initiative, is on making inter-industry connections but, really, more early movers like On are needed. CarbonCure is proud of the fact that 450 concrete plants have been retrofitted with its technology \u2013 accounting for virtually all the carbon utilisation project deployments to date, says Niven \u2013 but it is only a tiny fraction of the more than 100,000 concrete plants there are worldwide. \u201cRight now, what we need is partners,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another bottleneck to scale may be providing the large and low-cost quantities of CO2 needed. While technologies are certainly established to capture CO2 from industrial sources, it is only done on a minuscule scale at present, experts note. Direct air capture is less technologically developed and more expensive. And infrastructure will be needed to move the CO2 if, for example, it is being captured in a different place from where it is being used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Massive government intervention and support are required for rapid growth, say advocates \u2013 be that by setting a carbon price, through procurement policies in government contracts that require CO2-based alternatives, or by infrastructure investment. \u201cThis needs to be exponential growth\u2026 and we need policies to support it,\u201d says Peter Styring, an expert in carbon capture and utilisation at the University of Sheffield, who directs its Centre for Carbon Dioxide Utilisation. And while recent US efforts are welcomed \u2013 the US infrastructure bill, for example, includes over $8bn for direct air capture and CO2 transportation and storage \u2013 \u201cthere is space for governments to be braver,\u201d says Cleantech\u2019s Youngman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More detailed guidelines for carbon accounting might also be needed to aid consumer acceptance. Life cycle analyses for the products need to take the whole of the supply chain into account, but companies can set the boundaries in a way that excludes some processes. \u201cWe studied concrete production and, in some cases, it actually was worse than just making regular concrete,\u201d says Sick. Both he and Styring are working on improving how companies might perform their assessments as part of an international effort.
And just how controversial carbon utilisation will be remains an open question. Not everyone is gung-ho. Innovation has a role to play in curbing climate change, says Mike Childs, head of policy at the environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth, but such \u201cwonder technologies\u201d are \u201cunproven\u201d to work at the massive scale envisaged and are therefore a \u201chuge gamble\u201d with both people\u2019s lives and the planet. \u201cWe know that driving down emissions at source is the best and cheapest way to limit global heating,\u201d he says, adding that the technology also risks providing political and business leaders with justification to keep burning fossil fuels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transition away from fossil fuels is a must, say the advocates of CO2 utilisation. But if we want modern life to go on as normal without sacrifices, we\u2019ll need to find new ways of continuing to produce the goods fossil fuels have given us. This industry, they argue, will not only help mitigate climate change but provide the carbon-based products we will always need. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of \u2018climate don\u2019ts\u2019,\u201d says Flanders. \u201c[But] you can actually continue to use products that you like, just made in a better way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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