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.
https://www.eib.org/en/stories/estonia-carbon-capture-graphite