CO2 utilization

The default is storage, and it wins on ordinary grounds. Two CO2 markets existed before climate policy: enhanced oil recovery, which most of the 5,000 miles of US CO2 pipeline is dedicated to, and food and beverage, covering meat processing, dry ice, beer and fizzy water. Both are small against climate-scale volumes. What exists for climate is 47 facilities capturing about 60 million tons a year: not gigatons, Friedmann insists, but far more than the science experiment critics describe. Scaling that up mostly means putting CO2 back where it came from, into geological formations, because conversion takes energy and money and storage largely does not. His analogy is recycling: we recycle only a fraction of our glass, aluminum and paper, and CO2 will be the same. Run the numbers he cites from the IPCC and storage takes around 90% of it.

So why divert any at all? Kann asks the question directly, and the answer turns on two things. The first is thermodynamic. Friedmann’s screening test, which he credits to Jennifer Wilcox, is that the second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable and everything else is negotiable, so the first cut is whether you are simply wasting energy. Some uses pass trivially, because turning CO2 into concrete, aggregate or sand needs no added energy and in fact releases some, against a world market of 30 billion tons of concrete a year. That is a gigaton-scale opportunity with no magic in it. The second reason is where the episode actually turns. Friedmann grants that for fuels the pure optimum is to keep burning fossil jet fuel and separately capture and bury an equivalent amount, and then says nobody decides that way. He does not know a policymaker or a chief executive who wakes up asking what the thermodynamic and economic optimum is, and points out that we already pay wildly above the optimum routinely: tap water at about 50 cents a ton against around $7,000 a ton for the bottled kind. Airlines could buy removal at a few hundred dollars a ton, but they would rather buy a physical fuel whose carbon content, supply chain and economics they can understand, source and invest in. And the rules are arriving regardless. Europe’s ReFuelEU rules require e-fuels to be 0.7% of jet fuel in 2030, and the International Civil Aviation Organization’s CORSIA standards become mandatory in 2027 for all countries. He adds the detail that makes it bite: if every announced sustainable aviation fuel plant were built there would still not be enough fuel for the 2027 target, and there is no time to permit and build more, so removal ends up as a compliance option alongside the fuels rather than instead of them.

That produces a ranking rather than a verdict. In the money today: concrete and aggregates, ethanol, carbon monoxide, and urea, where CO2 already goes into fertilizer at scale, though he expects that market to saturate quickly. Pulled by policy: jet fuel and methanol, the latter because shipping is 2% to 2.5% of global emissions and methanol is one of the fuels it will run on, with the maritime deadlines landing closer to 2035 or 2040 and the industry therefore a step behind aviation. Hard but known: ethylene, which he calls wicked hard while Kann adds the harder problem, that ethylene is a cheap high-volume commodity, so a company like Dow knows exactly how to make it from CO2 and is waiting for a customer willing to pay a green premium. Over the horizon: material substitution, using polycarbonate where glass is used now or carbon fiber rebar in place of some structural steel, which is straightforward engineering at thin commodity margins. And far out, graphene at around $100,000 a ton, which we can make today in gram quantities in a laboratory and cannot yet spin into a usable fiber. Across all of it the recurring question is not whether but who pays, where and when, which in practice means where cheap clean power and cheap CO2 sit together. That is why production hubs and industrial strategy keep entering the conversation.

Two things could undo the fuels case, and Friedmann concedes both. His optimism runs on renewables and capture getting steadily cheaper, which is what would bring e-jet down from roughly ten times the price of conventional jet fuel to five, three or two. Kann pushes directly on the premise: he accepts cheap renewables over the long arc but says the delivered cost of electricity is heading the other way and will for a while, and Friedmann agrees rather than defending the assumption. The other is infrastructure. Moving CO2 at scale needs pipelines, and the proposed Midwest lines drew the same local opposition that transmission does. His examples of how it gets solved are real but partial: a repurposed gas pipeline carrying CO2 from Nebraska to Colorado storage, paired with a negotiated community benefits agreement covering transparent monitoring, money for local groups, first responder training and landholder royalties, which he calls a template for saying yes in a field short of such templates. Where that fails, volumes move by more expensive routes, as blocked oil pipelines moved oil onto trains, and as Europe now barges CO2 down the Rhine to the North Sea because a pipeline through Germany is not happening. He states plainly that he is not cavalier about this and that it is not an inevitable glide path.