On the heels of the EPA’s new carbon rules proposed by President Obama on June 2, I wanted to take a closer look at a potential disruptive technological breakthrough: taking CO2 waste streams and turning them into saleable, value-added feedstocks. Certainly, the deployment of renewables, energy efficiency, smart grid, and energy storage technologies offer some of the most cost-effective options for dramatically reducing emissions. But if you believe that fossil fuel power plants (along with other large-source emitters like steel and cement producers) will remain a part of our industrial ecosystem for some time to come, then capturing and utilizing C02 from these emitters is an important and critical piece of the carbon-management equation.
