Michael Carus founder and CEO of nova-Institute and Renewable Carbon Initiative, is delivering the first talk in a three-part SCItalks series on sustainability on 26 February. Here he talks to Steve Ranger, SCI Editor in Chief, providing an overview of what to expect.
Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is seen as one of the key elements of diminishing the impacts of climate change.
Much of the fossil carbon extracted from ground in the form of oil and coal is used for fuel, and some of that is now at least beginning to be replaced with alternatives like solar, wind, hydro-electric and hydrogen energy. But decarbonisation like this won’t work for industries which rely on carbon as a fundamental building block.
“For the chemical factories it is a different story; you can't decarbonise the chemical industry because it is based on carbon,” explains nova-Institute and Renewable Carbon Initiative founder and CEO Michael Carus, who points out that even as you decarbonise energy, all the molecules in all the products around us will still need carbon.
Currently 90% of this carbon comes from fossil sources, 6%-8% from biomass and 4% from recycling. The challenge is to create a renewable carbon economy which allows industries to shift away from fossil feedstocks while remaining competitive and to create a regulatory framework where the companies benefit from the transition, says Carus. If we are to achieve a net-zero chemical industry in 2050 there will have to be significant changes to the feedstock shares with biomass, carbon capture and utilisation and recycling growing rapidly, as fossil carbon as a feedstock declines.
So, can this be done? Carus points to the growth of new sources of energy like wind and solar as creating new opportunity; in future there is likely to be a lot of free, green, electricity available - at least some of the time. With too much wind in winter and too much solar in summer he argues, in the future it will be possible to produce very cheap green hydrogen and then use that to make methanol, one of the basic building blocks for all sorts of chemistry.
“If you want to go to a net-zero chemical industry you have to change the carbon source of industry,” Carus said.
Michael Carus is delivering the first talk in a three-part SCItalks series on sustainability, on 26 February 2025, titled ‘Building a renewable carbon economy’. To register for this free online event, visit the SCItalk registration page.
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