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.
But there are tough questions about whether CO2 recycling genuinely benefits the climate. Many of the products made this way only briefly delay carbon’s journey into the atmosphere — fuels are burnt, products made from chemicals degrade and the CO2 consumed during their creation is released again. That will happen at Tongyezhen: much of the methanol produced is destined to be burnt as fuel in China’s growing fleet of methanol-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that the global market for recycled CO2 products is unlikely to lock up more than a few per cent of the CO2 that humans release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, which totalled 36 billion tonnes last year. CRI’s plant, for one, will convert the equivalent of a little over 2 minutes’ worth of annual global CO2 emissions. “We can avoid a lot of that, for a lot less money, than we can by turning CO2 into stuff,” says Niall Mac Dowell, an energy-systems engineer at Imperial College London.
“The assumption that we can fix this climate-change problem in an economically attractive and easy way — at best it’s naive, and at worst it’s actively disingenuous,” he says. It’s an argument that’s heating up as CO2 recycling goes mainstream.
