CO₂ as a raw material for sustainable chemistry

In order to stop further global warming, greenhouse gas emissions must be urgently avoided through savings in resource consumption and increased efficiency, but also by replacing fossil raw materials with renewable alternatives. One possibility is to use the greenhouse gas CO₂ itself as a raw material for carbon-based products. At Fraunhofer IGB, we are pursuing various technological approaches to activate the inert CO₂ molecule and subsequently use it to produce a variety of chemical products – from bulk to fine chemicals, from fuels to plastics.

Carbon is ubiquitous in the biosphere and a central building block of all organic matter. But carbon is also the basic element of numerous materials in everyday products – from fuels and plastics to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Currently, these are mainly produced from fossil raw materials such as oil and natural gas.

Due to the advancing climate change with increasingly dramatic consequences, greenhouse gas emissions must be avoided urgently, through savings in resource consumption and increased efficiency, but especially by replacing fossil raw materials with renewable alternatives. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and raw materials is known as defossilization or defossilation. 

Fraunhofer IGB – Partner for the defossilization of your processes

Fraunhofer IGB supports you in developing processes and process cascades that can be used to produce fuels, platform chemicals, plastics and other chemical products from renewable resources in a climate-neutral way.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is increasingly seen not only as a climate-damaging greenhouse gas, but also as a promising carbon source for the synthesis of a wide range of chemical products – in other words, as a raw material. The corresponding general approach of Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) is about binding the carbon in CO₂ in products through technical conversion processes. 

Circular carbon economy through recycling CO₂ 

CO₂ is produced during all combustion and oxidative degradation processes of organic materials, such as microbial decomposition of biogenic substances, our respiration and alcoholic fermentation. The greenhouse gas CO₂ is therefore unlimitedly available and can be utilized as raw material for innovative process technologies, driven by renewable energy. Reuse of carbon in the form of CO₂, known as chemical carbon recycling, helps build a sustainable circular carbon economy and reduce the use of fossil resources. 

Fraunhofer IGB pursues various approaches to convert CO₂ and offers intelligent solutions for the production of a wide variety of products from CO₂ through advantageous combination of (electro-)chemistry, process engineering and synthetic biotechnology. Our goal is to further develop these technologies into economically viable processes in collaboration with our industrial partners.