LAURELIN

Description

CO₂ accounts for 60% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to global warming. However, CO₂ has impressive potential as a raw material for renewable fuels and chemical processes.
For this reason, carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) is considered a highly promising technology for reducing CO₂ emissions, as it can capture and convert residual CO₂ emissions into valuable products such as fuels, while contributing to climate change mitigation.

At the same time, there is growing interest in the use of methanol in transport fuels, given its many desirable qualities. Methanol is an excellent fuel for spark ignition engines, thanks to its high octane rating, easy distillation, lower boiling point for better fuel vaporisation and greater efficiency.

Methanol obtained from industrially captured CO₂ and hydrogen can reduce carbon emissions by 65 to 95%, one of the largest potential reductions of any fuel currently being developed to replace petrol, diesel, coal or methane.

However, the technique of hydrogenating CO₂ into methanol faces significant challenges and limitations, mainly related to chemical selectivity, process performance and energy requirements. By overcoming these challenges, the process will offer extraordinary possibilities for the use of methanol as a renewable fuel.

The main objective of the LAURELIN project is therefore to address these limitations by introducing a new generation of catalytic systems, perfectly adapted to advanced reaction processes: microwaves, magnetic induction and non-thermal plasma. The use of a conventional reaction process will serve to assess the efficiency of the new reactors.

The entire process has been completed with an advanced characterisation of the results obtained with the new catalysts in microwave, magnetic induction and non-thermal plasma reactors.
The consortium was made up of partners from five European countries: Belgium, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, as well as two partners from Japan.