From pollution to solution

Carbon dioxide always gets a bad rap, but it is possible to make good products from CO₂ and maybe even help us live on Mars.

“Everyone sees CO₂ as just a waste product, but our researchers were interested in finding potential uses for it,” says Dr. Sebastian Pohlmann, chief technology officer at UP Catalyst, a start-up based in Estonia that is turning waste CO₂ into high-value materials for electric car batteries and the defence and construction sectors. “What we saw was that this so-called ‘waste’ could actually be turned into something quite valuable.”

Fighting climate change and acquiring critical raw materials are two of the biggest challenges facing Europe today. UP Catalyst found a way to turn climate-changing CO₂ into carbon nanomaterials and graphite, a valuable product for the battery industry that is not easily available in Europe.

In experiments that began at the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics in Tallinn, UP Catalyst’s scientists found that by using a process called Molten Salt Carbon Capture and Electrochemical Transformation (MSCC-ET), which was pioneered by NASA to create oxygen on spaceships, they could use waste CO₂ on earth to produce valuable carbon nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes and graphite that have a host of industrial applications.

Key uses of carbon nanomaterials and graphite:

• Energy devices: Carbon nanomaterials enhance the performance of batteries, fuel cells, supercapacitors, and solar cells. Graphite is a key component in batteries due to its high energy density.
• Paints and coatings: Carbon dispersions improve electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and resistance to fire and corrosion.
• Construction: Due to their high elasticity, tensile strength and yield strain, carbon nanomaterials are used to reinforce concrete, reducing the volume of material required.
• Composite materials: Their exceptional properties — including electrical conductivity, thermal and chemical stability, structural flexibility and high surface area — make them ideal for use in advanced composites.
• Filtration systems: Widely used in desalination and water purification, carbon nanomaterials serve as direct filters or membrane enhancers. In air filters, they are effective in capturing gases.
• Electronics: Graphene and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are promising materials for electronic devices. CNTs, in particular, are well-suited for use as channel materials in transistors.

While most of the graphite used in industry today is synthetic graphite imported from China, UP Catalyst’s synthetic graphite offers some important advantages. For a start, whereas most synthetic graphite is made from heating petroleum industry biproducts to high temperature and therefore entail high CO₂ emissions, UP Catalyst gets its CO₂ from biogas and its electricity from renewable sources in a process that is overall carbon negative.

“Typically, synthetic graphite is a very carbon intensive product, which is basically made from petroleum refinery residues,” explains Jonas Wolff, a senior advisor at the European Investment Bank. “But because UP Catalyst is using CO₂ emissions from biofuels, they are effectively taking CO₂ out of circulation and permanently sequestrating its carbon, which is hugely beneficial, in terms of our climate objectives.”

Another positive aspect of UP Catalyst’s process is that it could help the European Union to reduce its dependence on graphite imports from China, which currently supplies about 95% of the material. Recognising the potential of the technology, the company’s project that plans to turn a quarter of a million tons of CO₂ into graphite was recently listed as one of 47 Strategic Projects for critical raw materials by the European Commission, a designation that means it will benefit from coordinated support by the Commission, Member States and financial institutions as well as streamlined permitting provisions.

The European Investment Bank is helping to finance UP Catalyst’s new plant with an €18 million injection of venture debt, a kind of loan that provides liquidity to early-stage companies without diluting ownership. The loan, backed by a guarantee from the European Union’s budget, will help to finance the construction of two new chemical reactors in a project expected to cost a total of €46.43 million. 

“Our process is what you would call ‘deep tech’,” says UP Catalyst’s Pohlmann. “It’s not like software. It’s hardware, it’s chemistry, and it takes a lot of money and steps to scale up. What we plan to do with the EIB loan is to build the first industrial scale pilot of our third- and fourth-generation technology.”

“We’ve gone from producing grams in the lab to kilograms, but to serve the market we need to scale up to hundreds of kilograms per day,” says Pohlmann.

For the Estonian company, the sky is not the limit. UP Catalyst is also working with the European Space Agency on a project to see how it’s process could be used to help create oxygen on Mars, where the atmosphere is 96% CO₂ and just 0.1% oxygen.