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Can CO2 be given value by using it to make plastics?
- chirantanpatel 10y agoGreat Stuff.
- teach 10y agoIt's one of the social norms on HackerNews that "low-value" comments like "Love it! Thanks!" and "Great Stuff" are discouraged. Although such comments are polite to the poster, they add nothing but noise for all the other readers of the thread. Instead, it seems to be preferred that you simply upvote the post without replying.
- piyushco 10y agoNice explanation!!
- ScarZy 10y agoI really hope this comes into fruition.There was a great radio 4 program that highlight the potential uses of CO2 in the production of various items. The problem was that the cost of production, and how we are used to low cost plastics. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081lkm1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081lkm1
- endswapper 10y agoThis is something that is currently under development and being licensed for large-scale commercial production. This is one company active in the space: https://www.newlight.com/aircarbon/ https://www.newlight.com/aircarbon/ https://www.newlight.com/newlight-technologies-signs-15-year-production-license-agreement-with-paques-holdings-bv/ https://www.newlight.com/newlight-technologies-signs-15-year... https://www.newlight.com/newlight-signs-10-billion-pound-production-license-with-ikea-2/ https://www.newlight.com/newlight-signs-10-billion-pound-pro...
- Symmetry 10y agoWell of course. Plastics are syntasized from hydrocarbons and given sufficient electric power you can turn atmospheric CO2 and water into hydrocarbons. We've known how to do this with simple methane for over a hundred years and we have pilot plants for more complex hydrocarbons. The problem is where that electric energy comes from. Here's hoping for continued progress in reducing the cost of solar panels, etc.
- thinkcontext 10y agoNewlight claims to have a new biocatalyst that is 9x more efficient than previous processes used in converting methane to plastic and that they can compete w/ petroleum based plastic on price when they scale up. http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2015/07/13/one-billion-pounds-of-carbon-negative-plastic-made-from-greenhouse-gas-and-pure-air/ http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2015/07/13/one-billion...
- fabian2k 10y agoThe one huge aspect this article doesn't even mention are the thermodynamics of the process. Of course CO2 can be used as a building block for plastic, but it contains far less energy than the plastic you want to create. That means you have to supply that energy difference somehow. The reason we use mostly oil to synthesize plastic is that someone else already put in the energy to convert CO2: the plants. Even though you can't avoid the thermodynamics here and cheat the energy difference, of course there could be more efficient, cheaper and cleaner ways to go from CO2 to plastic, and those would be interesting in terms of dealing with climate change.
- Sharlin 10y agoGiven the current solar boom, we'll probably end up using the same energy source that plants use. Perhaps even a chemical process similar to photosynthesis.
- dogma1138 10y agoIt's still would be more effective to use biomass to sequester the CO2 and then make biopolymers than it's to use an artificial process. Also solar has it's own carbon footprint, and not as small as people think. The raw materials for these panels are mined, transported, the factories in China that make those panels use likely coal as their primary energy source, then the panels are transported again and again and again, and finally installed and maintained by people who likely don't show up to work in an EV. You need to be very careful abstracting the true carbon footprint of anything and sadly too many people seem to ignore this fact. Just because the item you buy and it's use is environmentally friendly it doesn't mean that the supply chain is.
- andrewtbham 10y agoThis solar has a carbon footprint argument is absurd. If you used this logic we would never have renewable energy because it creates a chicken and egg problem. It would only make sense if the amount of energy used to produce solar panels exceeded the amount of energy it produced over it's lifetime, which is not the case.
- adrianN 10y ago> The CO2 is captured from a neighbouring facility, thought to be producing ammonia. Nobody knows what it's really producing.
- stephengillie 10y agoApparently, the facility is producing CO2, among other molecules.
- xyunknown 10y agoThis was debunked years ago. Making plastics from CO2 is possible, but an energy hungry process which does not suck up any relevant amount of carbondioxide from our atmosphere. It isn't going to be the climatesaver they claim it to be. This is not a manufacturing issue, but depends on basic thermodynamics.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoIt's also an issue of scales. The volumes of CO2 we need to store are absolutely staggering, as in tens or even hundreds of Hoover dams every year.
- worldsayshi 10y agoThat's if we don't convert into other materials?
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoThat's for supercritical CO2 as it would be transported in pipelines, at a density about 0.6 times that of water. IIRC we need to store many tens of Gigatonnes of CO2 per year. If you make it into plastic, you can divide by 5 (roughly). Total world plastic production is around 0.3 Gigatonnes
- worldsayshi 10y agoYeah, barely 10 Gigaton per year if you sum it all up [1]. But it's probably a fraction of that that is eligible for capture. 1 - https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions
- worldsayshi 10y agoIt can be feasible if we suddenly end up with an enormous abundance of energy right? Like fusion power levels of abundance.
- TeeWEE 10y agoTed Grozier, flagship programme manager on the EnCO2re initiative, explains the thinking. He says: “The idea of a hackathon is you basically lock people in a room, you give them pizza and energy drinks, and they solve problems quickly.” I always makes me sad when I see people talking about hackatons as a "tool" the can use by giving "pizza and energy" drinks. Hackatons have become a corporate tool.
- hannob 10y agoAppart from things other comments have already mentioned there's some issue that the article doesn't properly reflect: Where does the CO2 come from? You can grab the CO2 from the atmosphere and thus produce (temporary) negative emissions. But then you need even more energy in the first place. So naturally you'd get the CO2 from somewhere where you already have large amounts of CO2, e.g. a coal power plant. So you have created a justification to keep the coal plant running (with a supposedly imperfect co2 extraction process). How's that going to work out in a supposedly CO2 free energy future? Also it should be considered that the CO2 in the plastic isn't gone for good. Plastic has a limited lifetime and will eventually end up in a landfill or a waste processing plant where it'll release its stored carbon back to the atmosphere. So if your process is "burn coal -> capture CO2 -> use CO2 to create plastics -> plastic ends up in waste processing plant" you have delayed the emissions from the coal plant and you can argue that you have used the coal in a more efficient way, but the CO2 still ends up in the atmosphere.
- adrianN 10y agoThere are many processes that produce CO2. The article mentions cement. Cement production accounts for about 5% of CO2 emissions according to a quick Google.
- hannob 10y agoIt is an option to use process co2 like cement. But you end up with a similar problem: You disincentivize carbon reductions in cement production. If we ever want to get serious about climate change then cement has to reduce its environmental impact. This is a hard problem (I am actually right now researching for an article about the topic), but all models with serious carbon reductions assume that on the medium term co2 emissions have to go down ~95%. As there are other things were carbon reduction is really hard cement can't use up all the remaining 5%. There are and were some startups trying to create greener cement, but all that went nowhere. The one that made most headlines - Novacem - went bankrupt and no longer exists.
- rimantas 10y agoWhy coal? We have nuclear.
- andrewtbham 10y agoI have thought about this... and an even worse problem, if this were to be successful, would be CO2 depletion. Plants need CO2 to "breathe"
- roryisok 10y ago> The Polyol is 80% petroleum and 20% CO2 based. The 20% CO2 is great, but I'd rather see more innovation in replacing that 80% Petroleum with bioplastics. When the oil runs out we can solar up the wazoo, but if we can't find something alternative plastic sources we're going to have problems
- maxerickson 10y agoThere are reasonable plant plastic processes. The simple alcohols are pretty good chemical feedstocks and we are pretty good at making them from plants.
- mchannon 10y agoCO2 already has value, if it's concentrated enough (stack emissions, unfortunately, aren't). There are CO2 mines in multiple western US states where the CO2 is dug up, sent through pipelines, and reinjected into oil wells. "Enhanced oil recovery", they call it, and it's big business. So big, in fact, that the supply from the McElmo dome in the SW corner of Colorado, pipelined across the entirety of New Mexico, into Texas, is oversubscribed and you can't buy any. CO2 needs hydrogen, pure and simple, to become almost any other substance of value (I suppose lithium extraction could use the gas instead of trona, but not a big market there considering the supply). Any plastic, polymer, or vegetation needs hydrogen to exist. So the CO2 problem is the hydrogen problem, but on steroids. You can't get reduced atmospheric CO2 with hydrogen if making that same hydrogen molecule created 2 or 3 CO2 molecules. This leaves you with plant-based approaches (photosynthesis is ridiculously inefficient, which itself is probably a good thing considering how much we like some of the greenhouse effect), or "clean" hydrogen.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- betodo 10y agoI don't know of any process that makes plastics directly from CO2, but the gas can be used to produce several intermediates. Saudi Aramco recently acquired Novomer's Converge polyol technology, which uses CO2 to make polypropylene carbonate polyols. Polyols are a main component of polyurethanes. The Converge-based polyurethanes are used in coatings, adhesives, sealants and elastomers. Covestro is also producing polyols made from carbon dioxide. As mchannon noted, these companies cannot use the CO2 emitted from power plants. The gas needs to be pure so companies can do chemistry on it. There are also some renewable routes to making plastics from CO2. We already produce ethanol from sugar fermentation. This ethanol can be dehydrated to produce ethylene, the building block for polyethylene. Braskem is already doing this in Brazil. I believe Braskem is the ONLY company doing this, so that should tell you how cost effective the process is. A company called Proterro was in the early stages of using a cyanobacteria that consumes bacteria to produce sugar. This sugar could then be fermented to produce ethanol, which could then be the feedstock for polyethylene. Other companies have developed microorganisms that can ferment sugar to produce lactic acid. Polymerise this and you get polylactic acid (PLA), another plastic. This is one of the plastics used to make filament for 3D printers. Other companies were developing micro-organisms that could produce polyhydroxalkanoates (PHAs).
- stefanix 10y agoYes, see PLA made from corn starch.
- stefanix 10y agoYes, see PLA made from corn starch.