BHP has signed an agreement for piloting of carbon capture and utilization technology with China’s HBIS Group Co., Ltd (HBIS), one of the world’s largest steelmakers and a major iron ore customer of BHP. As part of this new project, HBIS and BHP will trial pilot-scale demonstrations of carbon capture... Read more →
A research team led by Profs. CHEN Wei and WEI Wei from the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute (SARI) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed novel graphene/silicon carbide (SiC) catalysts for efficient CO2 photoelectroreduction to ethanol (C2H5OH). The results were published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The composite catalyst,... Read more →
United States Steel Corporation and CarbonFree Chemicals Holdings, LLC (CarbonFree) recently signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) jointly to pursue the capture of CO2 emissions generated from US Steel’s Gary Works manufacturing plant using CarbonFree’s SkyCycle technology. If a definitive agreement is reached, the project is expected to capture... Read more →
Tests conducted by Titirici Group, a multidisciplinary research team based at Imperial College London, have found that a novel carbon nanotube electrode material derived from CO2—produced by Estonian nanotech company UP Catalyst (earlier post)—enhances the cyclability of sodium-ion batteries. The results showed 93.75% capacity retention after exceeding 4000 charge and... Read more →
The US Department of Energy (DOE) will award some $118 million in funding for 17 projects to accelerate the production of sustainable biofuels. Made from widely available domestic feedstocks and advanced refining technologies, energy-dense biofuels provide a pathway for low-carbon fuels that can lower greenhouse gas emissions throughout the transportation... Read more →
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have created a new system—the least costly to date—that efficiently captures CO2 and converts it into methanol. The new PNNL carbon capture and conversion system brings the cost to capture CO2 down to about $39 per metric ton. The... Read more →
Elkem, a company developing silicones, silicon products and carbon solutions, officially inaugurated the world’s first carbon capture pilot for smelters. The Mobile Test Unit (MTU), delivered by Aker Carbon Capture, is now connected to Elkem’s plant in Rana, Norway, which produces high-purity ferrosilicon and microsilica. Ferrosilicon is mainly used for... Read more →
Raven SR, a renewable fuels company, and Chart Industries will collaborate globally on the liquefaction, storage, and transportation of hydrogen as well as pure carbon dioxide produced from Raven SR’s non-combustion Steam/CO2 Reformation process of converting waste to renewable fuel. Raven SR produces transportation-grade hydrogen as well as Fischer-Tropsch synthetic... Read more →
ETH-Zurich spin-off Synhelion has raised CHF 22 million (US$23.6 million) in another financing round. The funds were primarily provided by existing investors and selected new strategic investors, including Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS). The proceeds of the investment round will accelerate the company’s growth and support the scaling and commercialization... Read more →
At an event held at its steel plant in Ghent, Belgium, ArcelorMittal inaugurated its flagship carbon capture and utilization (CCU) project. (Earlier post.) The €200-million Steelanol project is a first of its kind for the European steel industry. Utilizing carbon recycling technology developed by project partner LanzaTech, the CCU plant... Read more →
UP Catalyst, an Estonia-based company developing a method to produce sustainable carbon nanomaterials and graphite from CO2 (earlier post), says that it can produce carbon-negative graphite, consuming 3.7 tons of CO2 per ton of graphite material produced. Conventional production of graphite not only takes place far away from battery manufacturing... Read more →
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have demonstrated a new technique, modeled after a metabolic process found in some bacteria, for converting CO2 into liquid acetate, a key ingredient in “liquid sunlight” or solar fuels produced through artificial photosynthesis. The work, reported in a paper in Nature Catalysis,... Read more →
Australia-based global energy company Woodside Energy and LanzaTech NZ, a US-based carbon capture and transformation company, announced a strategic collaboration with the signing of a Strategic Framework Agreement. Under the agreement Woodside will, in collaboration with LanzaTech and subject to a positive final investment decision, design, construct, own, maintain and... Read more →
AUDI AG and the Austria-based green tech company Krajete GmbH are jointly developing new technologies for filtering emissions from ambient air. In addition to robust adsorber materials, these direct air capturing technologies (DAC) are based, above all, on innovative processes. They make far-reaching energy and cost reductions possible. The latest... Read more →
The global capacity for carbon capture in 2030 is set to increase sixfold from today’s level, to 279 million tons of CO2 captured per year, according to research company BloombergNEF’s (BNEF) newly released 2022 CCUS Market Outlook. Sharp growth in the market has led to a 44% increase in expected... Read more →
Schlumberger has entered into an agreement with RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, to accelerate the industrialization and scale-up of its proprietary non-aqueous solvent (NAS) technology, which enhances the efficiency of absorption-based carbon capture. The NAS technology will be applicable to capture CO2 across a broad variety of industrial emissions.... Read more →
LanzaTech, a company that transforms waste carbon into materials such as sustainable fuels, fabrics, packaging, and other products, announced a funding partnership with Brookfield Renewable, and its institutional partners, to co-develop and build new commercial-scale production plants that will employ LanzaTech’s CCT technology, which transforms captured carbon into valuable raw... Read more →
The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) announced up to $30 million in funding (DE-FOA-0002614) for research and development (R&D) projects to advance carbon dioxide removal (CDR) approaches that will reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by capturing it directly from both the atmosphere and... Read more →
Electrofuels provider Infinium announced an agreement with Amazon to begin using Infinium Electrofuels in the retailer’s middle mile fleet as an ultra-low carbon alternative to traditional fossil fuels. The clean burning electrofuels will be produced for Amazon at one of the first electrofuels production facilities, located in Texas. Infinium Electrofuels,... Read more →
A research team led by Profs. CHEN Wei and WEI Wei from the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute (SARI) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a novel method that enables efficient CO2 electroreduction to CO by virtue of low-coordination chloride ion adsorption on a silver hollow fiber (Ag HF) electrode.... Read more →
JFE Steel Corporation, Itochu Corporation and Emirates Steel Arkan, the largest steel company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), will conduct joint detailed feasibility studies on the establishment of a supply chain of ferrous raw material for green ironmaking with low-carbon emission at the project site in Abu Dhabi. Emirates... Read more →
Sandia National Laboratories researchers recently delivered electricity produced by a new power-generating system to the Sandia-Kirtland Air Force Base electrical grid. The system uses heated supercritical carbon dioxide instead of steam to generate electricity and is based on a closed-loop Brayton cycle. The Brayton cycle is named after 19th century... Read more →
UK-based Expleo, a global engineering, technology and consultancy service provider, has developed a closed-loop fuel solution for global shipping that delivers a 92% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) in the model vessel. Expleo modeled its system-of-systems solution on the multi-tasking Bibby Wavemaster 1, a vessel used to service offshore... Read more →
Using an inexpensive polymer called melamine, researchers from UC Berkeley, Texas A&M and Stanford have created a cheap, easy and energy-efficient way to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks. The process for synthesizing the melamine material, published in an open-access paper in the journal Science Advances, could potentially be scaled down... Read more →
Researchers in Europe led by a team from ETH Zurich have designed a fuel production system that uses water, CO2, and sunlight to produce aviation fuel. The team implemented the system at pilot-scale in the field to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the entire sun-to-liquid fuel process chain, from H2O... Read more →
Carbon transformation company Twelve, Alaska Air Group, and Microsoft have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on advancing the market for sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) to include fuels derived from recaptured CO2 and renewable energy, and working toward the first commercial demonstration flight in the United States powered... Read more →
The EU is investing more than €1.8 billion in 17 large-scale innovative clean-tech projects with a third round of awards under the Innovation Fund. Grants will be disbursed from the Innovation Fund to help bring technologies to the market in energy-intensive industries, hydrogen, renewable energy, carbon capture and storage infrastructure,... Read more →
The UK government is awarding £54 million to 15 projects to develop technologies that remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere. The money will help projects further develop their greenhouse gas removal technologies, which include a machine that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air, a plant to convert household... Read more →
Researchers from the University of Michigan and McGill University in Canada report photochemical syngas synthesis using a core/shell Au@Cr2O3 dual cocatalyst in coordination with multistacked InGaN/GaN nanowires (NWs) with the sole inputs of CO2, water, and solar light. Their paper is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences... Read more →
Sundsvall Energi will partner with Liquid Wind to be the host and provide carbon dioxide for the second commercial-scale—100,000 t—electrofuel facility in Sweden. Biogenic carbon dioxide from the Sundsvall energy facility will be captured and combined with renewable hydrogen to generate green electrofuel, eMethanol. The fuel is intended for the... Read more →
Power-to-Liquids technologies are on their way to commercialization in scale. E-fuels offer a way to expand the carbon-neutral transport fuel pool beyond biomass-based renewable fuels to replace fossil fuels in existing internal combustion engines. The end product is a transportation fuel suited for aircraft, ships as well as heavy and... Read more →
United and United Airlines Ventures (UAV) announced an investment in and commercial agreement with Dimensional Energy. Dimensional Energy, which recently received a $3.1-million award from ARPA-E (earlier post), has developed a reactor and catalysts to convert CO2 and hydrogen from water into syngas for use in the Fischer-Tropsch process. Under... Read more →
A consortium, including LanzaTech and Danone, has developed a new route to monoethylene glycol, (MEG), which is a key building block for polyethylene terephthalate, (PET), resin, fibers and bottles. The technology converts carbon emissions from steel mills or gasified waste biomass directly into MEG. The carbon capture technology uses a... Read more →
A research team from Tokyo Tech has used an alumina-supported, iron-based compound to develop a catalyst that can efficiently convert CO2 into formic acid (HCOOH) with ~90% selectivity. An open-acess paper on the work is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. An et al. A wide-spread soil mineral, alpha-iron-(III) oxyhydroxide,... Read more →
A team of researchers from North Carolina State University, SINTEF in Norway and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has developed a polymer membrane technology that removes carbon dioxide from mixed gases with both high permeability and high selectivity. A paper on their work is published in the journal... Read more →
Carbon dioxide capture company AirCapture and carbon dioxide conversion company OCOchem, along with other partners, have won a $2.93-million grant from the US Department of Energy to design and engineer an integrated carbon dioxide capture and conversion plant co-located at Nutrien’s Kennewick Fertilizer Operations plant in Kennewick, Wash. AirCapture develops... Read more →
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Infinium, an electrofuels company (earlier post). The agreement, which builds on MHI’s 2021 investment in Infinium (earlier post), will focus on exploring the deployment of Infinium’s proprietary electrofuels technology in the Japanese market. Infinium electrofuels are classified as ultra-low... Read more →
Estonian startup UP Catalyst, a company developing a method to produce sustainable carbon nanomaterials and graphite from CO2, has closed a successful pre-seed round of €500,000, in addition to €1.59 million in grant funding secured earlier this year. The pre-seed round was led by Sunly, a developer of wind and... Read more →
Mexico-based global construction materials company CEMEX is partnering with integrated chemicals and energy company Sasol ecoFT and renewable energy company ENERTRAG to combine CO2 with hydrogen to produce sustainable aviation fuel. This project is part of CEMEX’s Future in Action program to reduce its carbon footprint and contribute to a... Read more →
Landsvirkjun, The National Power Company of Iceland, and German investment company PCC SE have agreed to explore the possibility of capturing and utilizing carbon emissions from PCC’s silicon metal plant in northeast Iceland. Carbon emissions will be utilized to produce green methanol that can, for example, replace fossil fuel in... Read more →
United Airlines Ventures (UAV) and Oxy Low Carbon Ventures (OLCV) announced a collaboration with Houston-based biotech firm Cemvita Factory to commercialize the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) intended to be developed through a new process using carbon dioxide and synthetic microbes. UAV also announced an equity investment in Cemvita... Read more →
Researchers at the University of Surrey (UK) are developing a process to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air and then use dynamic catalysis to create methanol—a valuable chemical that, made this way, could be carbon-negative. Its value could offset the cost of direct air capture. The carbon negative chemicals... Read more →
LanzaTech, a company that has developed gas fermentation technology to transform waste carbon into materials such as sustainable fuels, fabrics, packaging and other products that people use in their daily lives, will go public through a merger with AMCI Acquisition Corp. II (AMCI), a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).... Read more →
Carbon transformation company Twelve and biotechnology company LanzaTech have transformed CO2 emissions into ethanol as a part of an ongoing research and development partnership. Ethanol is typically produced using biological processes or as a petrochemical, through ethylene hydration, using fossil fuels. It’s also often produced using corn and other crop... Read more →
Electrofuels innovator Infinium (earlier post) has entered into a strategic alliance with US independent energy company Denbury to collaborate on developing ultra-low carbon electrofuels projects in the state of Texas. Infinium electrofuels facilities being developed in Brazoria County will convert renewable power into green hydrogen and combine it with industrial-sourced... Read more →
A team of scientists from LanzaTech, Northwestern University and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have engineered a microbe to convert molecules of industrial waste gases, such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, into acetone and isopropanol (IPA). These widely used chemicals serve as the basis of thousands... Read more →
Researchers at Stanford University have shown that porous polymer encapsulation of metal-supported catalysts can drive the selectivity of CO2 conversion to hydrocarbons. Using this technique, they report orders of magnitude higher turnover frequencies for hydrocarbon formation compared to conventional catalysts. A paper on their work is published in Proceedings of... Read more →
The US Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management’s (FECM’s) Carbon Utilization Program (CUP) announced up to $19 million in federal funding for the advancement of technologies that utilize waste carbon... Read more →
Infinium, an electrofuels company, is partnering with ENGIE to develop a facility that will produce ultra-low carbon Infinium electrofuels at scale for the local transportation industry. The new Reuze project includes the development of one of Europe’s largest announced CO2 conversion hubs, located in France, which will enable the conversion... Read more →
Dry reforming of methane (DRM) is one promising approach to converting methane and carbon dioxide into chemical feedstock or syngas. However, DRM needs a stable and highly active catalyst for its commercialization. Metal-supported zeolites are widely used for this purpose, due to their microporous structure and chemical stability. In particular,... Read more →