CCU: Turning captured CO2 into paints and adhesives

BY STEVE RANGER

Global chemicals and speciality materials company Celanese is working with partners to turn CO₂ emissions into useful products like paint and adhesives.

In January 2024, Celanese launched its carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) project at its Clear Lake, Texas, US site as part of its Fairway Methanol joint venture with Mitsui & Co. At the time, Celanese said the project was expected to capture 180,000t of CO₂ industrial emissions – and produce 130,000t of low-carbon methanol per year.

The CCU project – one of the largest in the world – takes CO₂ industrial emissions from Celanese and third parties (which account for 80% of the captured emissions) and then applies reduced-carbon-intensity hydrogen to convert the captured CO₂ into a methanol building block used for downstream production.

This low-carbon input can be used to reduce traditional fossil fuel-based raw materials.

For example, methanol forms 35% of vinyl acetate monomer – a crucial element to produce polymers used in adhesive formulations - and Celanese is now working with Henkel on a project which will see that carbon dioxide captured from industrial processes turned into useful adhesive products.

Through this new collaboration, Henkel will produce water-based adhesives made from captured CO₂ emissions, which it says creates new opportunities for customers in the packaging and consumer goods sector to increase the renewable content of their products. As consumers demand products with lower environmental impact, these CCU-based adhesives can play a crucial role in driving sustainability across a wide range of applications, the companies said.

Celanese is also working with Cloverdale Paint to use its CCU project to provide the coatings company with sustainable paint options again by converting captured CO₂ into a methanol building block, which makes up part of vinyl acetate-based emulsions used as a raw material in the manufacturing of paints.

‘This process reduces input fossil fuels, promotes a circular economy, and significantly reduces carbon emissions, compared with traditional processes,’ the companies said.

CCU and fossil-fuel based feedstocks are commingled but tracked through mass balance accounting. This collaboration is expected to utilise more than 453t of CO₂ emissions/year in products Cloverdale Paint manufactures, the two companies said.

Unlike the carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, where captured CO₂ emissions are injected into and stored in the ground, CCU supporters argue that their projects better supports circularity and sustainability by using CO₂ emissions to create products that can reduce the need for fossil fuels.

Kevin Norfleet, Global Sustainability Leader at Celanese told C&I that a huge array of chemistries are made from methanol. ‘If we can successfully demonstrate the value of making chemicals from carbon capture, our hope is to be able to create the conditions where we can do more of that.’

He said: ‘As a company we have an incredible platform to turn CO₂ into methanol and then turn methanol into this huge array of downstream products. It’s a really interesting opportunity from a platform perspective, but the challenge is building awareness – building that understanding of carbon capture as an opportunity and how it fits in with some of the other ways that people think about sustainability.’

Talking about the Celanese CCU project more broadly, Norfleet said: ‘A lot what we did was economic innovation. There’s definitely some technology innovation, but the bigger part here for this project was economic innovation – being able to make the commercial pieces work especially for a project of this scale. We’ve learned that there was a lot of infrastructure that needed to be created around getting carbon capture recognised and that’s still very much a work in progress.’

Industry experts are calling for a more circular approach to chemicals manufacturing which requires rapidly introducing new sources of carbon beyond fossil fuels.