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Volker Sick and colleagues determine which products are best suited for emerging carbon capture technologies

Volker Sick and colleagues recently published a paper on the relative impacts of carbon utilization for different area of production.

“Decisions to globally scale CCU operations will require guidance on identifying products that maximize the climate benefits of using captured CO2,” said lead author Dwarak Ravikumar, a former postdoctoral researcher at U-M’s Center for Sustainable Systems who is now at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Pulling heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the air and turning it into useful products, a concept called carbon capture and utilization, has the potential to offer both environmental and economic benefits.

By some optimistic estimates, CCU could generate annual revenues of more than $800 billion by 2030 while reducing climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by up to 15%. Captured CO2 could potentially be used to make concrete and other building materials, fuels, plastics, and various chemicals and minerals used in industry, agriculture, medicine and elsewhere.

But which of these products would be most helpful to the climate? Until now, there has been no comprehensive study comparing the climate benefits of a full range of potential CCU-derived products.

A new University of Michigan study fills that critical gap by analyzing 20 potential uses of captured carbon dioxide in three categories—concrete, chemicals and minerals—and ranking them by climate benefit. Previous studies showed that using CCU to make products in those three categories has the potential to consume up to 6.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually by 2050.

The U-M researchers found that only four of the 20 “CCU pathways” they analyzed—two that use CO2 to make concrete and two that use it to manufacture chemicals—have a greater than 50% likelihood of generating a net climate benefit. A net climate benefit means the emissions avoided by using CCU technology outweigh the emissions generated while capturing the CO2 and making the final product.

The study, conducted by researchers from the Center for Sustainable Systems at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability and at the U-M Department of Mechanical Engineering, was published online Aug. 22 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

“Decisions to globally scale CCU operations will require guidance on identifying products that maximize the climate benefits of using captured CO2,” said lead author Dwarak Ravikumar, a former postdoctoral researcher at U-M’s Center for Sustainable Systems who is now at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“Our rankings will help prioritize R&D strategies toward products with the greatest climate benefit while avoiding pathways that incur a significant climate burden and that offer little hope for improvement,” Ravikumar said.

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