Carbon dioxide utilization involves converting carbon dioxide captured from industrial or atmospheric sources into value-added products. The process plays a role in the overall carbon management toolkit. However, utilization pathways are not equal, and life-cycle CO₂ emissions vary widely. Incorporating CO₂ into durable products like cement or structural components permanently isolates CO₂ from the atmosphere but reflects a relatively small potential market. “Upgrading” highly stable free-phase CO₂ molecules into fuels using renewable energy sources incurs a heavy thermodynamic penalty but generates high-value, market-ready fuels.

PNNL and carbon utilization

PNNL  brings expertise in separations, catalysis, systems integration, and engineering to develop CO₂ utilization pathways.

Under PNNL’s BES mission, we discovered that CO₂ is much more reactive in the solvent than when it is removed at the end of the full capture process. Combining this fundamental discovery with our expertise in catalysis, we have been able to convert CO₂ in this more reactive state directly to methanol. PNNL’s team is currently collaborating with our colleagues at Southern California Gas to commercialize and deploy this integrated CO₂ capture and conversion to materials (IC³M) technology, where our first target molecules are methane and methanol.

Like sling-shotting around the moon to reduce fuel use on space missions, the IC³M approach uses thermodynamics to our advantage. Reacting the CO₂ while in its captured state eliminates the energy required to regenerate the CO₂ solvent, while also reducing the amount of energy required to upgrade the CO₂ to a high value commodity.