Recycling CO2 into valuable products or fuel is a relatively new concept quickly gaining attention as an alternative to Carbon Sequestration. 

“Energy intensive,” “geologically risky” and “prohibitively expensive” are all phrases used to describe Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), the technique of capturing CO2 and storing it somewhere other than the atmosphere. Still, hope remains that these challenges will be overcome and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), along with the International Energy Agency (IEA), continue to champion CCS as the key line of immediate defence against rising CO2 emissions. 

In the U.S., President Barack Obama included $2.4 billion in the 2009 federal stimulus bill for research, development and deployment of carbon capture and sequestration projects and established an interagency CCS Task Force to develop a coordinated and comprehensive plan for expediting CCS deployment with hopes that CCS will deliver.

A small portion of this, $70.6 million, was designated to fund innovative concepts for beneficial CO2 re-use. The concept of re-using CO2 to make valuable materials or fuel has been around for a while, but with greenhouse gas reduction becoming a top priority, the newly coined ‘carbon recycling’ is gaining rapid popularity.

A growing number of scientists and private companies around the world are investigating the most efficient, economic and ingenious way of recycling CO2. Emerging technologies include the biochemical conversion of CO2 into algal biofuel, the thermochemical conversion of CO2 into methanol, the mineralization of CO2 via aqueous precipitation, and the biocatalytic or solar photocatalytic conversion of CO2 to fuels.

In Vancouver, Canada, the company Mantra Energy has been developing an electro-chemical technology (named ERC) since 2007 with the aim of taking CO2 directly from industrial waste gases and reducing it to formate salts and/or formic acid. Both of these products are valuable chemicals used in a variety of industrial applications. Formic acid also has the potential to play a leading role in fuel cell development, both as a direct fuel and as a fuel storage material for on-demand release of hydrogen.

Like any other CO2 recycling project, the drawback of the technology is that the conversion of CO2 requires energy.  If this energy comes from fossil fuels then more CO2 will be generated than is converted.

Mantra’s CEO Larry Kristof solves this conundrum by explaining his vision of how carbon dioxide could be transformed on-site at power plants using off-peak renewable energy from the grid, and the resulting fuel could be used during the daytime peak to produce electricity or to fuel light commuter vehicles.

Kristof concedes that this Utopian vision is still years in the making as developing a commercial scale electrocatalyst requires significant financing and typically takes six months or more of continuous testing. Plus, the design and installation of a commercial plant could take at least one year or more.

Over the last three years Mantra has subsequently found it challenging to find investors ready to commit to more than just R&D, but that climate is changing. 

ERC Machine

“It is only recently that the public and private sectors are starting to realize there are viable, economically advantageous options out there besides CCS,” notes Kristof. “As we approach crunch time, both government and industry are progressively opening their doors to alternatives.”

“Now we are working hard at finding partners ready to take the leap with carbon recycling,” says Kristof. “We know our technology has the rationale behind it, what we need are the right people and the right capital to move the project forward.”