Nicholas Flanders is standing in front of a shiny metal box in a warehouse laboratory in Berkeley, California. The metal plates are similar to a club sandwich, but the filling is a black plastic material coated with a metal catalyst. He calls the leaf the black leaf.
A $57m funding boost was given to Twelve, a startup founded in 2015. It wants to take air and convert it into something useful by taking the carbon dioxide in it. A metal box houses a new type of electric device that converts CO2 into synthesis gas, a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that can be used to make a range of familiar products. Oxygen is the only product that can be used. The syngas that went into the world's first carbon neutral, fossil-free jet fuel was made by the pilot scale equipment. He says that this is a new way of moving carbon through the economy.
Twelve is one of many companies that are making stuff out of CO2 captured from the air or industrial emissions. High-end goods such as vodka, diamonds and activewear, industrial materials such as concrete, plastic, foam and carbon fibre, and even food, are all beginning to be created using CO2. Twelve has been using its syngas to explore making parts of car interiors with Mercedes-Benz, laundry detergent ingredients with Tide and sunglasses with Pangaia. Online marketplaces such as SkyBaron are selling goods made with CO2 emissions.
You can make so many different things with carbon.
The mechanical engineer is Volker Sick.
The Urban Future Lab at New York University has a new program to help budding carbon tech companies get a foothold. The industry is still only emerging, but the Lab estimates there are about 350 startup hoping to deliver carbon-to-value. The investment in venture capital has gone up. According to the research and consulting firm Cleantech Group, this year has flowed in more than in the previous five years.
The University of Michigan's Global CO2 Initiative believes that the sector could reduce the world's CO2 emissions by more than 10%. Advocates argue that carbon utilization is part of the suite of technologies we need to reach net zero commitments governments and corporations have been making and which, it is becoming clear, can't be met by renewable electricity alone. Richard Youngman is the CEO of the Cleantech Group.
The Air Company has alcohol.
Premium running shoe brand On realised that if it was going to reach its aggressive net zero targets it would need to rethink its materials. Half of its shoe bottom foam will be made from captured carbon. Last month, it announced plans to team up with US-based startup LanzaTech, which uses a patented fermentation process to make ethanol out of waste carbon monoxide collected from factories which would otherwise be burnt to emit CO2 The first pair of shoes made from captured carbon will be unveiled sometime next year. The first pair of shoes will cost $1 million, according to the co-founder and executive co-chairman. He doesn't expect the shoes to cost much more than a regular pair when it scales.
CO2 is already used in beverages. Enhanced oil recovery, where CO2 is injected into the ground to push out oil, still perpetuates the production of new fossil fuels if the gas is put back into the atmosphere. The waste CO2 is transformed into new products. Some, such as building materials, eliminate emissions by locking the carbon away permanently; others, such as jet fuel, prevent new emissions by recycling already emitted carbon. CO2 sequestration is often grouped with utilization, but the two are not the same, as advocates point out. The Global CO2 Initiative is directed by a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. You can make so many different things with carbon.
Air Company, a New York-based startup, is selling CO2-made vodka and perfume, and produced hand sanitiser during the Pandemic. It starts with CO2, water and renewable energy, and combines them in a reactor to make alcohols. A pound of CO2 can be removed with a liter of vodka, and it may even use CO2 captured from the heating systems of Manhattan office buildings.
A SkyBaron watch has a face made from concrete.
The Air Company is interested in jet fuel that can be produced from corn. The field of CO2-made jet fuel is crowded with others, including SynHelion, which uses solar energy to transform CO2 to syngas.
Ian Hayton, a materials and chemicals analyst at Cleantech Group, says jet fuel is usually small amounts. Quotas for sustainable aviation fuels could move things forward. The advantage of making it from CO2 is that it uses less land.
Canadian company CarbonCure is one of the pioneers on the building materials side. Bill Gates's investment firm, Bill Gates's investment firm, has invested in the technology that injects CO2 into concrete. The injected CO2 reacts with the wet concrete and becomes a mineral, the same one as in limestone. CarbonCure licenses its technology to concrete manufacturers. CarbonCure retrofits their systems, transforming them into carbon tech companies. It gives them a green sales advantage, but the concrete producers like the economic benefit, says co-founder and CEO Robert Niven. It means less cement is needed to make the concrete, and the addition of CO2 strengthens the final material.
It's hard to imagine that food in the form of a substance like a molecule of carbon dioxide could be mass produced, but that's exactly what some carbon tech companies are working on. Some, such as Solar Foods in Finland, and Air Protein in California, use the slogan "meat made from air", while others, such as UK- and Netherlands-based Deep Branch, are focusing on animal feed ingredients. Their proteins are produced in bioreactors from naturally occurring microbes with inputs such as CO2, water and renewable electricity. The microbes grow and are dried out to make a powder with all the essential amino acids. Solar Foods co-founder and CEO, Pasi Vainikka, says that Solein is between dried meat, dried soy and dried carrot. Vainikka says that the taste comes in the final product and Solein is versatile. It could be used as a substitute for pea and soy in processed foods. It can be eaten like a slab of steak or tofu. The product made from two kilograms of CO2 has been submitted to food regulators in Europe and the UK for novel food approval.
Deep Branch made a single-cell protein from recycled CO2. The Deep Branch bio is pictured.
The field has many challenges to overcome. If the technology is going to serve the climate, it needs to be scaled up quickly for mass production and offer good prices. Allison Dring is the CEO of Made of Air, a German startup that is focused on plastic replacements. Twelve, for example, has designed its equipment to be modular so it can easily be added to increase capacity, a bit like a solar farm, and hopes to have its first shipping container-sized plant by next year. It takes time to scale up.
Finding customers is a roadblock. It can be hard for startup companies to break into established supply chains because they need bigger companies to buy their raw materials. The C2V Initiative, which is run out of the Urban Futures Lab, is focused on making inter-industry connections, but more early movers like On are needed. CarbonCure is proud of the fact that 450 concrete plants have been retrofitted with its technology, accounting for virtually all the carbon utilisation project deployment to date, but it is only a tiny fraction of the more than 100,000 concrete plants there are worldwide. He says that they need partners right now.
It may be difficult to provide large and low-cost quantities of CO2 needed. CO2 capture from industrial sources is only done on a small scale at the moment. Direct air capture is more expensive and less technologically developed. Infrastructure will be needed to move the CO2 if it is being captured in a different place than where it is being used.
Massive government intervention and support are required for rapid growth, say advocates, be that by setting a carbon price, through procurement policies in government contracts that require CO2-based alternatives, or by infrastructure investment. Peter Styring is the director of the Centre for Carbon Dioxide Utilisation at the University of Sheffield. The US infrastructure bill includes over $8 billion for direct air capture and CO2 transportation and storage, but there is space for governments to be braver.
Detailed guidelines for carbon accounting might be needed to aid consumer acceptance. The whole supply chain needs to be taken into account in life cycle analyses, but companies can set boundaries that exclude some processes. In some cases, concrete production was worse than just making regular concrete. He and Styring are working on improving how companies can perform their assessments.
Aether Diamonds uses excess carbon dioxide to make their ring. Aetherdiamonds.com
It's not clear how controversial carbon utilisation will be. Some people are not gung-ho. Mike Childs, head of policy at the environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth, says that innovation has a role to play in curbing climate change, but that such "wonder technologies" are "unproven" to work at the massive scale envisioned and are therefore a " huge gamble" He says that driving down emissions at source is the best and cheapest way to limit global heating.
The advocates of CO2 utilization say that the transition away from fossil fuels is necessary. If we want modern life to continue without sacrifice, we will need to find new ways to produce fossil fuels. They argue that this industry will help mitigate climate change and provide carbon-based products. There are a lot of climate don'ts, but you can still use products that you like.
The article was amended in December of 2021. Syngas is not synthetic gas as was stated in an earlier version.
