Event Details

World circular economy is linked through two main cycles: water and energy storage; during the 20th century water management was one of the best successes of this century, we are sure that carbon recycling for energy storage will be the challenge of the 21st century.

Our goal is to point out the specific role of the carbon cycle in our human activities that mean industrial, agricultural or social ones everywhere.

That is why the new challenge for decarbonized energy development, from nuclear power sources and more recently through erratic sources such as wind turbines or photovoltaic to “replace coal, oil and gas” opens the main question: how to develop a sustainable civilization without large energy power sources and large energy storage in agreement with the increasing of electrical consumption(20.000 TWh in 2017) such as electro intensive processes, data bank, new computers for simulation and telecommunication etc. (around 2.000 TWhfor ICT). Today large energy storage are mainly produced from CO2 by photosynthesis phenomena during the spring and the summer period (63 Gt of CO2 conversion ), it gives us sugar, cellulose and wood, and the biomass production permit a storage of the sun energy. However an industrial breakthrough requires to develop new strategy in order to close the carbon loop (40 GT of CO2 in excess) and open the carbon circular economy in agreement with our world consumption (200.000 terawatth). Carbon dioxide appears as the unique commodity for an industrial revolution and the goal is to draw the new ways which are able to mix renewable energy sources including nuclear plants and the energy storage processes which are starting around the world. The first one is about the clean coal development ( 50% of the CO2 world emission )for a direct coal extraction in the coal mine with a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen; and at last a capture of the carbon dioxide outside of the power electrical station. The second one is a modification of the petrochemical processes to rebuilt the well-known carbon synthesis from CO2 and bacteria for a new concept such as biodegradable polymers and new composite materials to replace aluminium or steel alloys( aeronautic development ). The third one are the wind to gas program including the methane production and connected with the syngas process through Fisher -Tropsch plant; but the technic needs more knowledge on new catalysts, cheaper and without rare earths .

However the main breakthrough is coming from biomimetic processes which are able to control new bacteria species such as cyanobacteria for methane cluster or specific one for C3 or C4 direct synthesis from CO2 in sea water; and to imagine new photo- catalyst reactor which can synthetic directly methanol or syn fuel from a mixture of CO2 and water. At last microalgae open the way of food production for fish sea farm, cosmetics, and biogas. Our future needs to close the loop of the carbon for a world circular economy from the carbon dioxide capture; we call that a” sustainable development“ or a recycling strategy.