{"id":70968,"date":"2020-01-29T07:26:06","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T06:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=70968"},"modified":"2021-09-09T21:22:39","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T19:22:39","slug":"five-ways-to-turn-co2-from-pollution-to-a-valuable-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/five-ways-to-turn-co2-from-pollution-to-a-valuable-product\/","title":{"rendered":"Five ways to turn CO\u2082<\/sub> from pollution to a valuable product"},"content":{"rendered":"

From using CO2 to make buildings or as plant fertilisers, Ella Adlen and Cameron Hepburn from the University of Oxford have explored how CO2 could be turned into something useful in order to avoid the worst impacts of global heating.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s far easier to avoid burning fossil fuels than it is to clean up CO\u2082 emissions once they\u2019re in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. But the world no longer has the luxury of choice \u2013 drastic emission reductions and rapid CO\u2082 removal and storage\u00a0will both be necessary\u00a0to avoid the worst impacts of global heating.<\/p>\n

What if, instead of wasting all that CO\u2082, it could be turned into something useful? There\u2019s currently little economic incentive for industries that emit CO\u2082 to capture it, let alone to draw it directly down from the atmosphere. Identifying valuable products and how to make them might kickstart CO\u2082 removal on an industrial scale, and help bring down emissions in the process. In\u00a0our recent paper, we set out to clarify what these processes and products might be.<\/p>\n

We considered processes that use CO\u2082 captured from industrial emissions, and also biological processes that can directly draw down CO\u2082 from the air. We projected that between one and ten gigatonnes of CO\u2082 could be utilised per year by 2050, at costs of under USD$100 (\u00a377) per tonne of CO\u2082. Humans currently emit 37 gigatonnes of CO\u2082 a year, and we need to reduce our impact to net-zero by around 2050. Some estimates\u00a0suggest this might mean removing around ten gigatonnes of CO\u2082 a year from 2050 onward. Some of these ideas for using CO\u2082, if implemented properly, could play a role in making that more economically viable.<\/p>\n

Some ideas for using CO\u2082 might not get off the drawing board. But with the right investment and incentives, others may move from niche research projects into credible plans, and from the work of small businesses to the goal of entire industries. Here is a selection of the ways that one person\u2019s pollution could become another\u2019s product.<\/p>\n

Creating a commodity out of carbon could help kickstart its removal from the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

1. Make buildings
\nThere are several ways in which buildings can be constructed with materials made from CO\u2082. The first is obvious: use wood. Growing and sustainably harvesting trees for building means that CO\u2082 is taken from the atmosphere converted into a valuable commercial product and stored as carbon in long-lived buildings.<\/p>\n

It also reduces the demand for cement, which is responsible for 10-15% of global greenhouse gas emissions through its production. New technologies, such as cross-laminated timber or acetylated wood, are making this substitution ever easier.<\/p>\n

The second way is to use and then store CO\u2082 in concrete-making processes, by\u00a0curing cement\u00a0or in the\u00a0manufacture\u00a0of other ingredients like\u00a0aggregate.<\/p>\n

2. Create plastic products
\nCO\u2082\u00a0can be used in polymers\u00a0to make durable plastics for cars and buildings. Around\u00a060% of plastics have applications in sectors other than packaging. Plastics made from CO\u2082 could displace\u00a0plastic products made from fossil fuels for these sectors, particularly as they don\u2019t require toxic or dirty ingredients such as phosgenes or epoxides, and can be cheaper to make than fossil-fuel-based materials. Because the CO\u2082 molecule is a stable part of the backbone of the polymer, it can be stored in these materials for as long as they last.<\/p>\n

3. Make fuel or fertilisers
\nCO\u2082 can be used as a feedstock for many chemical processes, with hundreds of potential end products, including hydrocarbon fuels and urea fertilisers.<\/p>\n

Fuels made from CO\u2082 can exist in the form of methanol as well as more complex products like so-called\u00a0synfuels. These fuels can often be blended or moved around using existing infrastructure like pipes and tankers. And although CO\u2082 fuels are currently very costly to manufacture, in the future they might be valuable in niches like aviation or long-distance shipping, which are\u00a0more difficult to decarbonise\u00a0than trains and cars because they need fuels with higher energy densities.<\/p>\n

If the CO\u2082 product is a fuel or a fertiliser, the CO\u2082 ends up back in the atmosphere once used. While two uses of the carbon are better than one, if the carbon atom originally came from a fossil fuel, it\u2019s not a long-term solution. To be climate neutral, the CO\u2082 feedstock will have to be sourced from the air \u2013 so the CO\u2082 is taken from the atmosphere, made into fuel, and then emitted back to the atmosphere. This is currently expensive and technically challenging. Crucially, the energy required for this process also needs to be renewable.<\/p>\n

4. Increase crop yields
\nThere\u2019s emerging evidence\u00a0that increasing the amount of carbon in soils can also increase crop yields. This is a natural form of CO\u2082 utilisation that already happens \u2013 scientists and farmers can just give it a helping hand. One particularly promising way is by using biochar \u2013 plant material that has been converted into a stable form of organic carbon via a process known as pyrolysis. Biochar buried in soils could store carbon for the long term and increase crop yields.<\/p>\n

The general benefits of\u00a0replenishing and maintaining carbon in the soil\u00a0are well established, but using soil as a store of carbon is challenging because it is easily disturbed.<\/p>\n

5. Extract more oil
\nCounter-intuitively, it\u2019s possible to both produce oil and store CO\u2082. That\u2019s because injecting CO\u2082 into an oil well increases the amount of oil that can be recovered \u2013 so-called \u201cCO\u2082 enhanced oil recovery\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is actually possible\u00a0to operate the well so that more CO\u2082 is put into it than is emitted in the process of producing the oil and burning it. But policy changes would be needed to incentivise this \u2013 oil companies would not do it otherwise. And it\u2019s a temporary fix. In a world that has fully decarbonised, demand for fossil oil should be close to zero.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, this could be a short-term way to\u00a0stimulate much-needed demand for CO\u2082 capture, as emitters could sell their waste CO\u2082 to oil producers.<\/p>\n

All these options for using CO\u2082 have potential, but making them a reality will need a clear understanding of the possible unintended consequences. Many could be failures, so it\u2019d be unwise to rely solely on any one of them, but instead, spread bets widely.<\/p>\n

This article is republished from\u00a0The Conversation\u00a0under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From using CO2 to make buildings or as plant fertilisers, Ella Adlen and Cameron Hepburn from the University of Oxford have explored how CO2 could be turned into something useful in order to avoid the worst impacts of global heating. It\u2019s far easier to avoid burning fossil fuels than it is to clean up CO\u2082 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572,5571],"tags":[5838,10744,10743],"supplier":[2802],"class_list":["post-70968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","category-co2-based","tag-bioeconomy","tag-carboncapture","tag-useco2","supplier-university-of-oxford"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70968"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=70968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}