Liquid Light tests CO2 conversion commercial viability
Based in the New-Jersey, USA, the technology company Liquid Light Corporation (Liquid Light) presented a successful demo-case to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into mono ethylene glycol (MEG) in viable commercial conditions.
Carbon dioxide is well known as superabundant waste emitted in nearly every industrial transformation or energy combustion with dramatic consequences on the atmosphere greenhouse effect identified as the main source of the global warming.
In chemical laboratories it is known for long time that CO2 could be used as a feedstock to produce energy or for chemical conversion.
So far the technical conditions of such operations prevented them to get out the laboratories as too complex to handle and unrealistic costs wise.
Anyway high-tech companies are working on these topics to explore viable solutions such as Liquid Light.
Located in Monmouth junction, New Jersey, Liquid Light is one of these high-tech companies investigating how to take the best value of low costs chemicals.
On the top of that list of low costs chemical materials, the carbon dioxide offers the advantage to be everywhere in addition to be cheap.
Therefore Liquid Light is focusing developing CO2 conversion at acceptable costs given the market prices of the building blocks of the chemical supply chain.
BP Venture supports Liquid Light CO2-MEG conversion
To finance it research and development efforts, Liquid Light is backed up by solid investors:
– VantagePoint Capital Partners
– Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital
– Osage University Partners
As a first step, Liquid Light selected the mono ethylene glycol (MEG) as a first target to be produced out of CO2.
With a market of $27 billion per year, MEG presents a price ranging between $700 and $1,400 per tonne.
In these conditions, MEG offers a spread large enough to give a chance to Liquid Light to cover the costs related to the CO2 conversion.
Liquid Light core expertise relies on low-energy catalytic electrochemistry dedicated to CO2 within hydrogenation and purification processes.
The production cost reduction results also from the long-lasting performances of Liquid Light catalysts.
The process developed by Liquid Light to convert CO2 into MEG has been scaled up step by step.
It started first in the laboratory, where Liquid Light could test the process performances in measuring the conversion ratio of CO2 into MEG compared with expectations.
These first measures confirmed that only $125 of CO2 were needed to produce one tonne of MEG, nearly ten times more expensive.
By comparison, in the conventional way this tonne of MEG requires from $617 to $1,113 of oil or gas feedstock.
At the scale of 400,000 tonnes per year (t/y) conversion unit of CO2 into MEG, the corresponding facility would generate $250 million additional added value compared with conventional processes using oil or gas.
Through this innovative low-energy catalytic technology, Liquid Light is demonstrating with the support of solid investors such as BP Ventures how the reduction of the carbon footprint can become a source good profits.
