Defossilisation

When fossil carbon sources are burned, CO₂ that has been trapped under the ground for millions of years is released. This is not the case with biomass. Plants such as trees grow within a period of a few years and absorb CO₂ through photosynthesis. If the wood is used as biomass at a later stage and burned, for example, the amount of CO₂ released is only the same as the quantity the plants absorbed from the atmosphere while growing. So the CO₂ is kept in circulation. To achieve a good climate balance, however, biomass may only be cultivated and used in a sustainable manner; we also have to take into account transport routes, the protection of biodiversity and potential competition as regards land use. This includes land use for growing food, as well as forestry for sequestering CO₂ over the long term and creating areas to serve as carbon sinks. Sustainably generated biomass will not be sufficient to cover the entire carbon demand of the industrial sector. Biomass must therefore be deployed in a purposeful and economical way. It is, however, a key part of the climate-neutral processes of the future for industry. The possibilities for use are manifold: biomass can be used as raw material in the chemical industry, for instance, or as fuel to produce process heat in the cement industry.

Residual material can be used as raw material in industrial processes. To this end, the idea of the circular economy envisages products, materials, energy and resources as well as waste and residual materials being fed back into the loop after their life cycle to be thus reused, repurposed and/or recycled for as long as possible. This means that carbon, which is contained in so many products and therefore also in waste, can be put back into the loop and used for new products – for example plastic waste. This conserves resources and frequently reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

CO₂ that has occurred in other processes and been successfully captured can replace crude oil as a carbon carrier in the chemicals industry. However, using CO₂ to produce serviceable products requires a lot of energy, meaning that an extremely large amount of renewable energy must be available to do this. For this reason, CO₂ utilisation technologiesare only implemented on an experimental basis in the industrial sector.