Carbon Capture is Turning Into a Trillion Dollar industry for Spinning Out New Products

April 3, 2022

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A recent Bloomberg Climate newsletter contained an article written by Sylvia Klimaki and Ryan Hesketh that I felt contained an interesting twist on the emerging carbon capture market. It described how companies are turning captured carbon dioxide (CO2) into products that either permanently sequester the carbon or recycle it repeatedly to minimize its atmospheric impact.

One of the novel ideas that I first considered was capturing CO2 directly from the air or from post-production industrial processes and turning it into carbon fibre. Rather than vodka or perfume, inexpensive carbon fibre that could compete with steel and aluminum would fundamentally alter material choices in construction and transportation while sequestering the CO2 bound in the end products.

So inspired by Kilmake and Hesketh I have tackled the same subject as them and added to the conversation. I hope you find it idea inspiring.

Captured CO2 direct from the air or from smokestacks is being turned into vodka, jet fuel, hand sanitizer, and perfume states Sylvia Kilmaki and Ryan Hesketh in a Bloomberg Climate newsletter. They note that captured CO2, which involves a significant technological investment, is being seen as more than just a means by which we can counter the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on atmospheric temperatures. They note that this is not cheap technology. The extraction processes are complex whether taking the CO2 directly from the air, or from the backend of industrial manufacturing and powerplant facilities. And then there is the additional cost of transporting the captured CO2 to where it can be used by manufacturers to make the kinds of products described above.

Most carbon capture systems today are attached to coal-fired power plants. In Canada, we have the Boundary Dam facility in Saskatchewan. And we also have an oil sands carbon capture project that has been in place for several years. These two facilities transport the captured CO2 to locations where it gets pumped underground.

But what Kilmake and Hesketh are talking about isn’t sequestration, but rather CO2 as a raw material. That is CCU, carbon capture and utilization, which the two writers describe as a “potential $1 trillion market in the U.S. alone…according to non-governmental organization Carbon180, ranging from plastics and building materials to food and drinks.”

Jet and Marine Fuels

I have previously described one of the companies making a new product out of captured CO2 that recently vied for the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, but didn’t make the final cut. It is Dimensional Energy, a Cornell University spinoff, out of Ithaca, New York, that is producing synthetic zero-emission jet and marine fuels using captured CO2, sunlight and water. Why this is such a potential big deal is because both air and marine transportation fuels significant contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions today.

Vodka and Perfume

As for vodka from captured CO2, Air Company, which is Brooklyn, New York-based, claims that it has created the “most sustainable alcohol in the world” using captured CO2 combined with hydrogen extracted from water using wind energy. Their vodka sells for $65 a bottle. That’s a premium over a bottle of Grey Goose Original, considered a quality vodka that sells for about US $32. The technology Air Company uses “absorbs CO2 at around 100 times the rate of a well-curated forest” according to Gregory Constantine, one of the company’s founders.

Air Company is also going after the perfume market with its captured CO2 alternative to premium-priced products like those from Chanel. It isn’t alone in tackling this market opportunity. Coty, which makes perfumes for Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, and Calvin Klein, is working with technology startup, LanzaTech, to produce perfumes using CO2 extracted from industrial sources like steel mills.

Foam, Insulation and Mattresses

Using captured CO2 to substitute for polymers produced from fossil fuels is technology that Econic Technologies has been developing since 2012. The company which was spun out of Imperial College London, makes foams for mattresses, refrigerators, insulation and more. Econic is licensing its catalyst and processes to other manufacturers and has announced a partnership with Manali Petrochemicals out of India to make its CO2-based polyurethane for world markets. If its polymers were to replace fossil-fuel-produced polyurethane, it would remove more than 11 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Carbon Fibre

In 2015, researchers at George Washington University, in Washington, DC, used solar energy and molten salt to capture CO2 and convert it into nano-sized carbon fibres. A precursor to developing the technology to an industrial scale, scientists have been experimenting to find new ways to create carbon fibres which today are used in a variety of products from tennis rackets to bicycle frames to automobiles. The current cost of carbon fibres for use in the latter is between US $22 and 26 per kilogram ($10 to 12 per pound). When compared to steel ($1.65 per kilogram) or aluminum ($4.40 per kilogram), carbon fibre is cost-prohibitive.

But if a cheap way to manufacture carbon fibres were to be found such as harvesting the material from the CO2 emitted from smokestacks, or from direct-air capture, it would be more cost-competitive.

In Canada’s province of Alberta, the Carbon Fibre Grand Challenge is a CDN $15 million competition to extract carbon fibre from bitumen, the product that comes from the oil sands. With the country announcing its 2030 plan in the last week aimed at reducing GHGs by 40% and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, there will be a cap placed on both emissions and production as the decade progresses. Developing an alternate use for bitumen is seen as a way to create a replacement industry for the province. It’s not harvesting CO2 directly to create the materials, but it is diverting synthetic crude from being consumed in industry and transportation.

In other research on how to produce carbon fibre inexpensively, researchers at MIT, Western Research Institute in Wyoming, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have found a way to make carbon fibres from the waste material coming from oil refineries which in many ways has some of the same characteristics as the bitumen produced in Alberta. Considered “bottom of the barrel” heavy hydrocarbons, this is the residue from refineries, and also a byproduct in refining steel where what’s left of coking coal becomes a thick and messy hydrocarbon glop. The results of this research have been published recently in the journal Science Advances.

Does CCU give us a leg up on decarbonizing the planet to mitigate climate change? Only marginally considering the scale of emissions humans collectively produce. Stated Giana Amador, Policy Director at Carbon 180 in the Kilmaki and Hesketh article, “Carbon utilization has advantages as a climate solution.” But she noted that “Neither carbon capture nor carbon removal is a license for fossil fuel companies to continue emitting.”