Project description
From industrial waste gas to intermediates for consumer goods
The EU process industry needs to initiate the decarbonisation process while simultaneously reducing the greenhouse effect caused by the industry. To address this challenge, the EU-funded Carbon4PUR project aims to convert the flue gas streams containing carbon dioxide/carbon monoxide from energy-intensive industries into valuable intermediates for consumer products. The project will focus on developing and demonstrating an innovative process that directly converts the chemical flue gas, eliminating the need for costly physical separation methods. This will significantly reduce the industry's carbon footprint, leading to substantial economic savings. Carbon4PUR will begin by collecting and treating industrial emissions from a steel company and delivering them to a chemical company.
Objective
The EU process industry needs to become less dependent of fossils as source of carbon, and – at the same time - to reduce the greenhouse effect by decarbonizing the economy. Carbon4PUR will tackle the two challenges at the same time by transforming the CO2/CO containing flue gas streams of the energy-intensive industry into higher value intermediates for market-oriented consumer products. The industrially driven, multidisciplinary consortium will develop and demonstrate a novel process based on direct chemical flue gas mixture conversion, avoiding expensive physical separation, thus substantially reducing the carbon footprint, and also contributing to high monetary savings.
Both the consortium and the work are organized along the full value chain starting with the provision and conditioning of industrial emissions from a steel to a chemical company in line with the concept of industrial symbiosis, going through the transformation into chemical building blocks which will be further transformed into polymer intermediates and flow into desired sustainable polyurethane applications of rigid foams and coatings. LCA and technology evaluation will be done and replication strategies to transfer the technology to other applications will be elaborated. The distinctive feature of the developed process is avoiding resource-intense separation of the gas components before the synthesis, and developing a chemo-catalytic process to deal directly with the gas mixture instead. The challenge and innovation is coming up with an adjustable process in terms of on-purpose and demand tailor-made production of required products, taking into account all variables at the same time: the available flue gases characteristic from the steel plant, material and process parameters, and the market requirements for the end product, thus flexibly involving the whole value chain with best results and possibly lower the prices.
Fields of science
- natural scienceschemical sciencespolymer sciencespolyurethane
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcoating and films
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiological behavioural sciencesethologybiological interactions
- natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysis
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringcarbon capture engineering
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
51373 Leverkusen
Germany