Author 丨 Qiu Xiaofen, Editor 丨 Qiao Qian
Is it possible that carbon dioxide, the culprit of the warming of the earth's environment, turn waste into treasure?
The answer is yes. This time, Musk opened his mind.
In mid-December, Musk, founder of Space X, announced a plan to separate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into rocket fuel.
Of course, this plan may not necessarily be driven by environmental awareness, but more driven by commercial sensitivity - SpaceX launch rocket to reach Mars, a planet with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if this technology can really be established, it can also solve the most critical fuel problems in situ.
This is not the first time Musk has shown interest in carbon dioxide modification. Earlier this year, Musk had launched a special fund and poured 800 million yuan in prize money. Musk, who spent money on ideas, has distributed 40 million of the prize money to multiple student teams.
Environmental pioneer Bill Gates is more simple and direct in reflection. Beginning in 2020, Bill Gates has purchased a certain amount of carbon offset from a company that can absorb carbon dioxide from the air to offset the high fuel carbon emissions of a family that often travels in private jets.
Whether it is business considerations or personal environmental awareness, the warming of carbon dioxide greenhouse gases is no longer necessary. How to control carbon dioxide emissions while taking into account sustained economic growth is a topic that needs to be repeatedly questioned.
But people who want to have both fish and bear paws have used their wisdom early on and began to try to "transform" carbon dioxide. Absorbed, transported, stored and utilized from the air, this is often referred to as "CCUS technology".
Pull your eyes back home. After double carbon, as a key technology of carbon neutrality, related carbon replenishment projects are in full swing this year.
Not long ago, the National Energy Group's Jiangsu Taizhou Power Plant just announced that it will build the largest carbon dioxide replenishment demonstration construction device in the field of thermal power in China, collecting as much as 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Statistics show that since the beginning of this year, more than 100 CCUS facilities construction plans have been announced in China.
Since the beginning of this year, CCUS technology has come back to the front of the stage, proving that this is being re-emphasized as the most direct and effective way to reduce carbon. But at this stage, it is undeniable that this is still a technology in the cradle and creeping forward in the controversy.
The way to collect carbon dioxide is currently usually with amine solutions, or membrane separation. How to collect carbon dioxide is a technical problem, but how to consume it is a more complex market problem.
A phenomenon that is not uncommon is that some carbon dioxide capture devices fall into a state of deactivation after completion, and even if a demonstration project is really formed, it is difficult to talk about making money.
The industry's full consumption and utilization of carbon dioxide has been explored earlier than expected.
As early as the 1920s, carbon dioxide was used in the development of natural gas reservoirs in the United States. After another 50 years, in the 1970s, some U.S. oil fields began to use carbon dioxide to improve oil recovery.
Specifically, carbon dioxide is injected into the oil field, and this part of the carbon dioxide is mixed in crude oil, which expands the volume of the oil and extrudes more crude oil. Under the effect of the connector, the oil is produced at one end and the carbon dioxide filled by the other end is also naturally sealed in the oil field.
This seems to be a clever idea that can recover more oil and sequester greenhouse gases, so it has become the most widely used method after carbon dioxide is collected.
Schematic diagram of carbon dioxide storage
Although the oil flooding is good, scientists have not given up on finding a more suitable place to place these carbon dioxide - after all, there is carbon dioxide at the bottom of the crust, and this storage method is very sure to completely eliminate the problem of escape, because the oil field, the earth's crust and the brackish water layer itself are not a completely airtight closed system.
Whether it's oil flooding with carbon dioxide, replacing coal-bed methane, or switching to saltwater reservoir storage, these current common options are simply to store carbon, and carbon dioxide is still carbon dioxide.
How to use carbon dioxide more efficiently is the biggest problem in front of the promotion of CCUS technology, which is known as the "carbon price ceiling".
The industry has not given up thinking, and in addition to thinking, including Musk, the capital in the CCUS field is gradually in place this year.
Bezos, who has long been criticized for being environmentally conscious, invested in CarbonCure Technologies, an Amazon Climate Promotion Fund earlier this year, focusing on how to play a role in new building materials;
It didn't take long for Temasek to lead a $75 million Series D funding round for Svante, a Canadian developer of solid sorbent technology, to think about how to reduce emissions in the cement industry; chevron, an automotive company, also invested in a company that researches the manufacture of carbon dioxide into carbonate polymers; and in China, 36Kr also reported on "carbon energy technology" led by sequoia China Seed Fund a few days ago.
How to amplify the value of carbon dioxide? There is no clear and unified answer yet.
But the good news is that since the beginning of this year, there have been all kinds of attempts in the industry.
One of the more interesting explorations is the synthesis of starch from carbon dioxide. Starch is currently the main component of human food, but also a key industrial raw material, but in general, starch generally needs to rely on plant photosynthesis to produce.
Not long ago, news from the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biology was that researchers had constructed an artificial route that synthesized carbon dioxide and hydrogen produced after electrolysis into starch (molecular formula (C6H10O5)n).
Cai Tao, an associate researcher at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biology, mentioned in a Xinhua report that the significance of artificial starch creation is more efficient. Preliminary laboratory tests show that the artificial rate is 8.5 times the natural rate, if the energy supply is sufficient, the theoretical annual output of starch of the bioreactor of 1 cubic meter is equivalent to the annual output of starch in 5 mu of corn land in China.
That is to say, in the future, there is no need to free up too much land and waste too much water resources to grow crops, and there will be a steady stream of starch on the petri dish on the laboratory side. What is even sexier is that the intermediate products of synthetic starch can also ferment and produce platform compounds such as alcohols/acids/ketones for the production of high value-added products such as plastics and rubber.
In line with Musk's thinking, BMW and Audi, the car companies that have vigorously chosen to transform carbon dioxide routes, are to make it into fuel. Audi also gave the fuel a rather innovative name, "e-diesel."
As can be seen from the schematic diagram previously released by Audi, hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis of water, which is combined with carbon dioxide under a certain catalytic action to form hydrocarbons, and then separated out for the production of synthetic diesel fuels, as well as waxes that can be used in the cosmetics and chemical industries.
Schematic diagram of Audi electronic diesel
Fuel, starch or wax, these are all carbonaceous and hydrogen-containing compounds. From the elemental point of view alone, carbon dioxide can have this possibility of chemical transformation.
At present, another idea is to use the physical properties of carbon dioxide to generate electricity, that is, to use supercritical carbon dioxide under certain conditions to replace the water vapor in the traditional thermal power generation process to drive the generator to generate electricity.
On December 8, China Huaneng Group Co., Ltd. officially announced that the first large-scale carbon dioxide cycle power generation test unit independently developed and built in China has completed 72-hour trial operation and was officially put into operation at Xi'an Huaneng Test Base. According to CCTV, compared with traditional steam power generation, the advantages of carbon dioxide power generation are small size, high efficiency and low pollution.
However, at present, carbon dioxide starch, fuel, wax and power generation are still a stage of envisioning. The imagination is very beautiful, the reality is very bone, and the actual landing still needs to overcome layers of technical and equipment obstacles.
But these divergent thinking is not without value, in ccUS technology, carbon replenishment is a few links in the cost of larger, and the current domestic technology breakthrough is weak link, if the downstream can have more than the storage of more innovative carbon dioxide application scenarios, can create higher value-added products, then carbon dioxide can really have a positive economic effect, driving the upstream to produce more technological breakthroughs.
From this perspective, the more ideas around carbon dioxide transformation, the better.
However, carbon replenishment and application technology have not developed rapidly, also because there is a hidden worry in the industry.
Some industry insiders told 36Kr that if it is no longer expensive to draw carbon dioxide directly from the industrial field in the future, is there still a need to continue to develop zero-carbon clean energy, or does this make the research and development of clean energy lazy?
This human-nature-based speculation is not empty. But a more appropriate position is that the two are not antagonistic — CCUS is more like a technology that can decontaminate a lot of human industry, an emergency means after "breaking glass".
In some industrial scenarios where it is absolutely impossible to eliminate the production of carbon dioxide, the only way to achieve zero carbon is to rely on CCUS. According to a research report, the International Energy Agency has predicted that by 2050, the global steel and cement industry still has about 34% and 48% of carbon emissions, so the significance of CCUS technology is reflected.
In addition, some industry insiders analyzed to 36Kr, taking the shipping scenario as an example, in 2023, the relevant organizations have made regulations on the carbon emissions of ships, and it is clear that the use of carbon-containing energy cannot be avoided before all ships successfully switch to clean energy.
Thus, CCUS can serve as a transitional scenario before the spread of clean energy. Some studies have also shown that by 2050, fossil energy will still account for 10%-15% of domestic energy consumption, and the combination of thermal power with CCUS will be a technical means to coordinate the composition of multiple electric power in the future.
Wei Yiming, vice president of Beijing Institute of Technology, helped CCUS set the right position in an interview.
He outlined several important roles that CCUS will play in the future: it is a carbon-neutral option for net zero emissions of surplus fossil fuels; it is a competitive technical means for the thermal power industry;
It is one of the few solutions for net zero emissions in industries with difficulties in reducing emissions such as steel and cement; it is also the main source of green carbon for future energy systems and chemical processes; and the negative emission technology coupled with new energy in CCUS is the technical guarantee for achieving carbon neutrality.
On several occasions, he also mentioned the urgency of developing CCUS - if the commercialization of CCUS technology is not accelerated as soon as possible, resulting in large-scale technology roll-out lag, low-cost development opportunities will be missed, an additional cost of $100 billion to $300 billion will be paid, and the cost of mitigating climate change will increase by an average of 138%.
Since the Second Industrial Revolution, there has been no de-deduction between industrial acceleration and carbon emission growth – there are data showing that while the Second Industrial Revolution has brought about the rapid rise of the secondary industry, the temperature has risen by 1.5 °C so far, and the limit that humans can bear is 2 °C.
2°C is a catastrophe for all coastal cities, when Shanghai and the Maldives will be immersed in water. The transformation of carbon dioxide is a great and resolute adventure for mankind.