Imperial College London’s Communications and Public Affairs Media Manager Natural Sciences Ms Hayley Dunning wrote in Physics that a EU funded project has concluded that gases from steel processing can be used to make materials for products like insulation boards and wood coatings. The project team demonstrated that carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in blast furnace gas can be recovered and used as the raw material for chemicals called polyols, which are used in polyurethane based insulation materials and coatings and are typically derived from crude oil. Obtaining them from process gases therefore reduces the amount of crude oil that needs to be extracted and used, as well as reducing carbon emissions released to the atmosphere. The Carbon4PUR project, which ran for 3.5 years, was funded by the EU's Horizon2020 program and led by materials manufacturer Covestro with 14 industrial and academic partners from seven countries, including Imperial College London. It concluded that the new technology was beneficial both environmentally and economically. The project team identified new catalysts for the production of polyols from CO and CO2 and gas mixtures. The technology was further scaled up to a semi-industrial scale. The insulation board manufacturer Recticel in Belgium and the coatings manufacturer Megara Resins in Greece have already used the technology to advance their own product development based on the research results. Project partner Dr Arturo Castillo Castillo, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial, said "This project has made important contributions to the science and applications of CO and CO2 recycling. The team has identified effective ways to isolate the components for polyol production from process gases and has refined the process to move it beyond proof of concept. This has meant industrial partners have actually used the polyols in their product tests and shown that they perform well. It is exciting to see how emissions can be turned into products, giving one more life to the carbon that had already been used once."
Imperial College London’s Communications and Public Affairs Media Manager Natural Sciences Ms Hayley Dunning wrote in Physics that a EU funded project has concluded that gases from steel processing can be used to make materials for products like insulation boards and wood coatings. The project team demonstrated that carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in blast furnace gas can be recovered and used as the raw material for chemicals called polyols, which are used in polyurethane based insulation materials and coatings and are typically derived from crude oil. Obtaining them from process gases therefore reduces the amount of crude oil that needs to be extracted and used, as well as reducing carbon emissions released to the atmosphere. The Carbon4PUR project, which ran for 3.5 years, was funded by the EU's Horizon2020 program and led by materials manufacturer Covestro with 14 industrial and academic partners from seven countries, including Imperial College London. It concluded that the new technology was beneficial both environmentally and economically. The project team identified new catalysts for the production of polyols from CO and CO2 and gas mixtures. The technology was further scaled up to a semi-industrial scale. The insulation board manufacturer Recticel in Belgium and the coatings manufacturer Megara Resins in Greece have already used the technology to advance their own product development based on the research results. Project partner Dr Arturo Castillo Castillo, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial, said "This project has made important contributions to the science and applications of CO and CO2 recycling. The team has identified effective ways to isolate the components for polyol production from process gases and has refined the process to move it beyond proof of concept. This has meant industrial partners have actually used the polyols in their product tests and shown that they perform well. It is exciting to see how emissions can be turned into products, giving one more life to the carbon that had already been used once."