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36 min ago 3 min read
The European Commission has awarded €7m ($8m) to a new Horizon Europe project aimed at accelerating the industrial deployment and market uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) utilisation technologies.
The four-year ‘Uncover’ project, which begins this month, brings together 19 partners from eight European countries to demonstrate six CO2 conversion technologies (CCTs) and one secondary conversion technology.
The technologies will use CO2 emissions from three industrial sources including a biogas upgrading unit at a waste management plant, a biomass boiler at a wood manufacturing facility and a clinker kiln at a cement plant.
The project will seek to convert the captured CO2 into 10 marketable products, including pigments, microalgal biomass, biomethanol, bioformaldehyde, microbial protein, polyhydroxybutyrate and carbonated cementitious materials.
Uncover said these products will be assessed for applications across the chemicals, fuels and construction sectors, with the aim of demonstrating their ability to replace fossil-based and resource-intensive feedstocks.
The project will also use life-cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis to evaluate the environmental performance, energy requirements, costs and scalability of the different technologies.
Pablo González, Uncover project coordinator at Instituto Tecnológico de Aragón, said the project would seek to demonstrate that CO2 could become a feedstock for products including biodegradable plastics, wood-panel resins, low-carbon fuels and cement-based materials.
“By demonstrating seven CCU routes at industrial scale across three real industrial emission sources, we are building the evidence base European industry needs to scale up CO2 utilisation and accelerate industrial decarbonisation,” said González.
Moving beyond demonstration
The project is designed to address several barriers that continue to limit wider deployment of carbon capture and utilisation (CCU), including high energy demand, technology costs, reliance on virgin critical raw materials and the relatively low technology readiness of some conversion pathways.
Uncover will also examine how individual technologies can be integrated across the wider CCU value chain, with the project targeting improvements in both sustainability and economic viability.
By 2032, the consortium aims to support the deployment of three large-scale CCTs, with three to five CO2-based products beginning to displace fossil and resource-intensive feedstocks.
Looking further ahead, the project estimates that 31 Uncover CCTs could be deployed by 2040, capturing around 100,000 tonnes of CO2 and generating an estimated €180m ($205m) in profit for CCT developers.
According to the developers, by 2050, the wider deployment of Uncover technologies could contribute to the capture of up to 250 million tonnes of CO2 across Europe, including 1.6 million tonnes through technologies developed directly under the project.
