[semi-extrinsic]

How do you see the scaling up to multiple gigatonnes per year?

For me that has alwayd been the hard part to understand about CCU, where is there a market large enough to absorb that volume? And where the product does not get burnt or emitted anyway in the end?

[DavidPBL]

The short answer is with great difficulty!

If you do some back of napkin math on petrochemicals, which accounts for roughly 20% of oil usage there is a huge opportunity to displace petroleum using recycled carbon.

Global oil consumption is roughly 100 million barrels / day (today). 1 barrel is 160 kg, so annual petrochemical volumes are roughly 1.1 billion tons of product (20 million * 160 kg / 1000 (to get tons) * 365 days). That is at todays consumption. Chemical usage is expected to grow over the next several decades. Of course this is ignoring recycling carbon into e-fuels. There will be a need for those too.

In terms of actually scaling the technology, heavy industry is widespread and is a source of large scale point source emissions, ranging from as little as 10,000 tons of CO2 emissions / year all the way up to 10 million tons of CO2 / year. It is all about retrofitting these industrial sites with this type of technology to supply local markets the chemicals they need. This ignores the other sources of carbon that will become available via carbon capture (stationary or mobile) as well as direct air capture. It's tough to imagine exponential growth, but things can be very different by 2040.

[PaulHoule]

There is a huge amount of talk about things like this or CarbFix which all seem secondary to the "capture CO2 at some generic capture point and pump it into a saline aquifer" approach which seems to be pretty scalable.

Even though the technology is on the shelf it's not being deployed largely because there is no financial incentive to do so... Yet the widespread use of this technology really needs to be happening now if we want any of these carbon capture things to happen.

[DavidPBL]

I find it ironic that carbon capture and storage technology was originally (might be wrong here) developed for enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

But yes we really need better systems to incentivize the capture and storage or utilisation of CO2. Carbon taxes a great place to start.

[PaulHoule]

You can drill in Texas and find CO2 underground and people used this for advanced oil recovery before it was captured at power plants. It is a use of CO2 that people will pay for.

[DavidPBL]

Didn't know that! I assumed it was always captured elsewhere.

As we find new profitable uses for CO2 the demand for it will increase, which should help create new carbon value chains.