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Chemical potential: turning carbon dioxide into fuel

With traded CO2 prices as low as they are and the challenge of achieving international policy agreements, niche market-driven CO2 utilisation technologies like these seem one obvious way forward. No matter how well geological CCS works technically and suites big-picture national policy plans, it won't happen unless all the companies in the supply chain can make sufficient money out of it. What other economic alternatives are there for a real world in which no one is yet willing to pay for CO2? Fuel cells for one - there is a real industry out there building, selling and installing distributed high-efficiency power generation systems running on commodity fossil fuels - not hydrogen - that already separate out pure CO2. Another one is mineral carbonation - a process in use industrially that stabilises and recovers valuable minerals and metals from chemical, mining and metal processing wastes - and at the same time happens to sequester dilute CO2 as solid carbonates. Policy makers really ought to look at where innovators, industry and the market have already begun to find economic solutions to CO2 sequestration, and - as they did reasonably well with renewables - develop financial policies that will deliver fast scale-up, competition, new jobs, technology improvement and cost-reduction.

13 Aug 2012

11:51 am