CO2 to biofuels at Argos
To address the urgency of the climate crisis, a wide range of CCUS technology pathways are being explored by the cement industry. One of these options is the use of microalgae to capture CO2 and transform it into valuable products. Over the past 10 years, Argos has been researching and scaling up the use of microalgae. Recently, the company has been testing a group of technologies to capture CO2 directly from the cement plant smokestack using photobioreactors (PBRs) and transform the resulting microalgal biomass into biofuels. By Daniel Duque, Gabriel Jaime Vargas, Cementos Argos, Colombia, and Lucas Moreno Kristiansen, Argos USA.
Figure 1: current carbon capture utilisation and storage projects (CCUS) around the world5
Climate change is quickly becoming one of the most crucial challenges we face as a society. As consensus continues to grow, the scientific community, business, community leaders and politicians from across the ideological spectrum agree that the potential consequences of an increase of 1-2˚C in global average temperatures would be catastrophic. Rising temperatures will put our planet in dangerous territory in terms of biodiversity, ecosystems, severe weather events both measured in frequency and amplitude, economic impact and increasingly on human life losses.1
