CO2-Recycling – How A Vision could Become Reality

(Picture: Wikimedia Commons)

CO₂-Recycling: One of the big aims for the chemical and energy industries: ACHEMA addressed this topic during an expert round table on Tuesday, where officials of BTS, Evonik, Siemens or RWTH discussed, how CO₂ could be used for industrial processes.

CO₂ – A cheap C1–source? The idea sounds great but the process proves to be a difficult task: CO₂ is hard to activate with catalysts. Using this gas as a raw material for the industry is nevertheless only if the energy for the carbon synthesis is lower than conventional approaches.

Now Evonik plans to spend seven million Euro during the next three years for projects that use hydrogen for carbon dioxide activation. Dr. Martina Peters, project manger for chemical CO₂ utilisation at BTS, who work on the project with Evonik, and her team already reports a partial success: Last year, a pilot plant was build at Leverkusen to demonstrate the inclusion of CO₂ in polyoles. A partner of both Evonik and BTS is the German university RWTH Aachen.