There’s a gold rush under way today as firms try to realise the potential value in CO2 waste streams. But one US company has made notable progress and is poised to launch its waste-to-resource technology in central China. Christian Annesley spoke to Synata Bio’s Tim Cesarek about the journey so far
Carbon dioxide is a crucial industrial gas, of course, but today the molecule is most widely known as a waste stream that’s affecting our global climate patterns. In this context, and given CO2 ’s potential value in industry, one of the keys to making the collection of previously vented-to-the-atmosphere CO2 a viable high-volume intervention is to make it stack up in economic terms – and that’s made especially possible when the collected CO2 is put to some value-added purpose.
Many, many companies are now going after this broad opportunity on different terms, using CO2 as a feedstock in a variety of ways, and usually with CO2-abatement incentives (or penalties for leaving it as waste) in the financial mix. But while the list of plays in this space is long and growing fast, one outfit that’s notably far along, to the extent that its first full-scale commercial project is poised to go live, is a relatively little-known Illinois company, Synata Bio.
