ExxonMobil and Global Thermostat (GT) have expanded their joint development agreement following 12 months of technical evaluation to determine the feasibility and potential scalability of Global Thermostat’s technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air. GT believes ExxonMobil’s financial and technological strength will enable it to scale up its... Read more →

Evonik and Siemens Energy commissioned a pilot plant—sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)—that uses carbon dioxide and water to produce chemicals. The necessary energy is supplied by electricity from renewable sources. The pilot plant is located in Marl, in the northern Ruhr area. It is... Read more →

Italy-based Snam, a leading energy infrastructure operator, and Saipem, an Italian multinational oilfield services company, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to start working together to define and to develop initiatives for green hydrogen production and transport, and for carbon dioxide capture, transport and reuse or storage (CCS and CCU).... Read more →

Scientists at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, have developed a novel heterostructured photocatalyst using titanium and copper, two abundant and relatively inexpensive metals, for the conversion of CO2 into CH4. Under illumination for 6 hours, the optimized reduced titania-Cu2O photocatalyst enables 0.13% photoreduction of highly diluted CO2... Read more →

Rice University engineer Haotian Wang has been awarded a four-year, $2-million collaborative grant by the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore how waste carbon dioxide can be converted directly into pure liquid fuels using CO2 capture, polymer engineering, DFT simulation and... Read more →

A team at UCLA is introducing a biological yet non-photosynthetic CO2 reduction mechanism that has the potential to yield environmental and economic benefits via CO2-derived high-value products. Their paper is published in the journal Joule. Most of us naturally associate biological CO2 conversion with photosynthesis in plants and algae. While... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the award of approximately $72 million in federal funding to support the development and advancement of carbon capture technologies under two funding opportunity announcements (FOAs). Under this cost-shared research and development (R&D), DOE is awarding $51 million to nine new projects for coal... Read more →

Haldor Topsoe has joined a hydrogen and sustainable fuel project based on electrolysis in the Greater Copenhagen Area. The project is expected to be executed by 2030 in three stages, achieving the capacity of 10 megawatts (MW) in 2023; 250 MW in 2027; and 1,3 GW in 2030 respectively. The... Read more →

A team of Brown University researchers has fine-tuned a copper catalyst to produce complex hydrocarbons—C2+ products—from CO2 with high efficiency. An open-access paper on the work is published in Nature Communications. The electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR), driven by renewable energy, is a promising strategy to reduce CO2 accumulation. By... Read more →

The consortium behind the WESTKÜSTE100 project received the go-ahead and funding approval from the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy that will make it Germany’s first hydrogen project included in the “real-world laboratories fostering the energy transition” program. The project is backed by an investment volume totalling €89 million... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced more than $97 million in funding for 33 projects that will support high-impact technology research and development to accelerate the bioeconomy. These projects will improve the performance and lower the cost and risk of technologies that can be used to produce biofuels, biopower,... Read more →

Inspired by naturally occurring processes, a team of Boston College chemists used a multi-catalyst system to convert carbon dioxide to methanol at the lowest temperatures reported with high activity and selectivity. A paper on the work is published in the journal Chem. Methanol is a promising renewable fuel that can... Read more →

Scientists from ExxonMobil, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new material that could capture more than 90% of CO2 emitted from industrial sources using low-temperature steam, requiring less energy for the overall carbon capture process. Laboratory tests indicate the patent-pending materials—tetraamine-functionalized metal organic frameworks—capture... Read more →

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Caltech have found that copper that was once bound with oxygen is better at converting carbon dioxide into renewable fuels than copper that was never bound to oxygen. For their study, published in the journal ACS Catalysis, the scientists performed X-ray... Read more →

Researchers at the University of Oregon have advanced the effectiveness of the catalytic water dissociation reaction in bipolar membranes. The work, published in the journal Science, provides a roadmap to realize electrochemical devices that benefit from the key property of bipolar membranes operation—to generate the protons and hydroxide ions inside... Read more →

Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, are attempting to convert carbon dioxide to fuel using energy from sunlight. Recent results have shown that it is possible to use their technique selectively to produce methane, carbon monoxide or formic acid from carbon dioxide and water. An open-access paper on the work appears... Read more →

In Germany, BSE Engineering and the Institute for Renewable Energy Systems at Stralsund University of Applied Sciences (IRES) have demonstrated the conversion of wind power into renewable methanol. Operation of this technology under dynamic conditions will be confirmed during a year-long test. The team uses green electricity to split water... Read more →

BMW i Ventures has invested in Prometheus Fuels (earlier post), a company removing CO2 from the air and turning it into zero-net carbon gasoline that it will sell at gas stations, at a price that competes with fossil fuels, starting as early as this year. The ability to create gasoline... Read more →

Representatives of the Lufthansa Group and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zürich), with ETH spin-offs Climeworks and Synhelion, have signed a joint Letter of Intent for a possible cooperation to accelerate the market launch of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF). The researchers and engineers at ETH Zurich have developed... Read more →

ARPA-E recently added five new topics to the “Solicitation on Topics Informing New Program Areas,” a funding opportunity (DE-FOA-0001953) that enables ARPA-E to investigate potential new program areas. The program is designed to support early stage, transformative energy technologies. New topics; approximate total amount to be awarded; and anticipated awards... Read more →

Professor Yutaka Amao of the Osaka City University Artificial Photosynthesis Research Center and Ryohei Sato, a 1st year Ph.D. student of the Graduate School of Science, have shown that the catalyst formate dehydrogenase reduces carbon dioxide directly to formic acid. Their work, published in a paper in the RSC’s New... Read more →

NUS scientists have discovered a new mechanism for selective electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to ethanol using copper-silver (Cu-Ag) composite catalysts. A paper on their work is published in the journal ACS Catalysis. Credit: ACS Catalysis The electrochemical reduction of CO2 to fuels and chemicals, when powered by renewable electricity,... Read more →

The European GRAMOFON Project, coordinated by AIMPLAS, the Plastics Technology Center has developed an innovative CO2 capture process based on novel nanomaterials and microwave energy. The project results therefore contribute to Sustainable Development Goal 13 on Climate Action of the UN Global Compact through decarbonization with the major advantage of... Read more →

The Swedish start-up Liquid Wind recently launched a second crowdfunding campaign and has already raised 1,000,000 SEK (US$102,000). Liquid Wind is developing its first commercial-scale eMethanol facility in Sweden and plans to establish 6 facilities by 2030 before expanding internationally. The project is supported by the expertise and technology of... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) will provide up to $22 million for research aimed at achieving breakthroughs in the effort to capture carbon dioxide directly from ambient air (DAC). The initiative encompasses two concurrent funding announcements—one by DOE’s Office of Science (SC) (LAB 20-2303) and another by DOE’s Office... Read more →

Neste, the leading provider of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, and an expert in delivering drop-in renewable chemical solutions, has acquired a minority stake in Sunfire GmbH, a developer of high-temperature electrolysis technology. The company’s patented technology allows the production of renewable hydrogen as well as the direct conversion... Read more →

A team of researchers from Canada and the US has developed a system that quickly and efficiently converts carbon dioxide into simple chemicals via CO2 electrolysis. The researchers combined a copper electrocatalyst with an ionomer [polymers that conduct ions and water] assembly that intersperses sulfonate-lined paths for the H2O with... Read more →

Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, collaborating with the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), have developed a mild and scalable synthesis route for a molybdenum carbide nanoparticle that can convert CO2 into fuel. The particles can be produced at an industrial scale at a... Read more →

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have identified a suite of technologies to help California to become carbon-neutral—and ultimately carbon-negative —by 2045. To achieve the goal of carbon-neutrality, California will likely have to remove on the order of 125 million tons per year of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the... Read more →

In a commentary in the journal Joule, Rob McGinnis, founder and and CEO of Prometheus, a company that is developing technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into fuels, discusses the technology advances that could lead to the potential price-competitiveness of renewable gasoline and jet with... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to more than $96 million in funding (DE-FOA-0002203) for bioenergy research and development. Topic areas within this FOA will advance DOE’s Bioenergy Technology Office’s objectives of reducing the price of drop-in biofuels; lowering the cost of biopower; and enabling high-value products from... Read more →

Researchers at the University of Michigan, McGill University and McMaster University have developed a binary copper−iron catalyst for photoelectrochemical CO2 reduction toward methane. The work, presented in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), offers a unique, highly efficient, and inexpensive route for solar fuels synthesis.... Read more →

Researchers at EPFL have patented a new concept that could cut trucks’ CO2 emissions by almost 90%. The EPFL system captures CO2 directly in the trucks’ exhaust system and liquefies it in a box on the vehicle’s roof. The liquid CO2 would then be delivered to a service station and... Read more →

A team from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, and Georgia Tech has developed a a wave-energy-driven electrochemical CO2 reduction system that converts ocean wave energy to chemical energy in the form of formic acid, a liquid fuel. The system, described in... Read more →

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel have created a strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli that grows by consuming carbon dioxide instead of sugars or other organic molecules. The findings point to means of developing, in the future, carbon-neutral fuels. An open-access paper on the work... Read more →

Researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China and George Washington University in the US report in a new paper in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research that a range of important carbon nanomaterials can be produced at high yield by molten carbonate electrolysis. In the Solar... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) announced $4 million in federal funding for national laboratories to collaborate with international partners on seven projects out of the 12 that were selected as a part of the Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies (ACT) Initiative. The ACT... Read more →

Researchers at MIT have developed a new, efficient way to capture carbon that addresses the inherent inefficiencies (earlier post) of incumbent technologies, due to their thermal energy losses, large footprint or degradation of sorbent material. In an open-access paper in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, they report a solid-state... Read more →

ExxonMobil said extended its support of the MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) low-carbon energy research and education mission by renewing its status as a founding member for another five years. ExxonMobil first signed on as a member of the initiative in 2014. With its renewed membership, ExxonMobil will expand its participation... Read more →

Evonik and Siemens launched phase two of their joint research project Rheticus. The goal is to develop an efficient and powerful test plant that will use carbon dioxide and water as well as electricity from renewable sources and bacteria to produce specialty chemicals. In the Rheticus I project, the two... Read more →

Velocys, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Velocys plc, signed an agreement with Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, LLC (OLCV), to capture CO2 from Velocys’ planned Bayou Fuels biomass-to-fuels project in Natchez, Mississippi, and securely store it underground in a geologic formation. OLCV, a wholly owned subsidiary of Occidental, will take,... Read more →

A new material that can selectively capture CO2 molecules and efficiently convert them into useful organic materials has been developed by researchers at Kyoto University, along with colleagues at the University of Tokyo and Jiangsu Normal University in China. They describe the material in an open access paper in the... Read more →

Enzymes use cascade reactions to produce complex molecules from comparatively simple raw materials. An international research team has now copied this principle, and used nanoparticles to convert carbon dioxide into ethanol and propanol. The scientists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany and the University of New South Wales in Australia transferred... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding $56.5 million in federal funding to 32 cost-shared research and development (R&D) projects for advanced coal technologies and research under six separate funding opportunity announcements (FOAs). The projects cover a range of topics, including carbon capture, utilization, and storage; rare earth element... Read more →

Researchers from Stanford University and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have engineered and demonstrated a solid-oxide electrochemical cell (SOC) with a porous ceria electrode that achieves stable and selective CO2 electrolysis beyond the thermodynamic carbon deposition threshold. A paper on the work is published in Nature Energy. ow electricity... Read more →

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) has announced approximately $110 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development (R&D) projects under three funding opportunity announcements (FOAs). Approximately $75M is for awards selected under two FOAs announced earlier this fiscal year; $35M is for a... Read more →

The electrocatalytic reduction of CO2 is often carried out in a liquid electrolyte such as KHCO3(aq), which allows for ion conduction between electrodes. However, as a result, liquid products that form are in a mixture with the dissolved salts, and require energy-intensive downstream separation. Now a team led by researchers... Read more →

A team of researchers at George Washington University led by Prof. Stuart Licht reports that the addition of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) produced from CO2 by low-energy C2CNT (CO2 to CNT) molten electrolysis (earlier post) to materials such as concrete or steel not only forms composites with significantly better properties, but... Read more →

Partners of the P2X Kopernikus project on the premises of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany have demonstrated the production of fuel from air-captured CO2 using—for the first time—a container-based test facility integrating all four chemical process steps needed to implement a continuous process. World’s first integrated Power-to-Liquid (PtL)... Read more →

Scientists at ETH Zürich and oil and gas company Total have developed a new catalyst that efficiently converts CO2 and hydrogen directly into methanol. Offering realistic market potential, the technology paves the way for the sustainable production of fuels and chemicals. ETH Zürich and Total have jointly filed a patent... Read more →