Alex Nabaum

Juergen Puetter could be labelled a shopaholic in renewable energy circles. A few years ago, the president of Aeolis Wind Power began locking up land deals in British Columbia for wind power projects, only to realize he was spending considerable time and money on a resource the province didn’t need.

Sure, B.C. could use some of it. But Puetter overshot the mark, acquiring a relatively large pipeline of projects that had a limited market to sell into, either because of a lack of power demand or insufficient grid capacity.

Then one evening, while sharing a few glasses of wine with a friend on his sailboat, it struck him: Why sell into the grid? Why fixate on electricity as the end product?

The answer, in his mind, was to use that electricity to produce renewable fuel, tapping into a resource the province and its local natural-gas industry had no shortage of: carbon dioxide—the greenhouse gas most responsible for human-caused climate change.

Puetter saw the potential of using electricity from his wind turbines (or even buying low-carbon, off-peak electricity from the provincial grid) to power electrolysers that produce hydrogen from water. He would take that hydrogen and chemically combine it with CO2 to produce methanol, an easily transportable liquid fuel that is also a building block for a variety of petrochemicals.

In other words, Puetter saw tremendous opportunity in turning what has been traditionally viewed as carbon waste, to be buried out of sight, into what is increasingly seen as carbon treasure.

“There’s a near-infinite supply of CO2 that I can get for next to nothing, and I can use that greenhouse gas as fuel,” said Puetter, who created a company called Blue Fuel Energy to commercialize the approach.

He calls his fuel “liquid electricity” and, using a process that can be licensed from Exxon Mobil, he’s also considering making a renewable form of gasoline from locally harnessed CO2.

The idea of recycling CO2 into something useful is beginning to catch on, with rising oil prices and ongoing concerns about climate change driving new innovations. Clean technology startups are seeing industrial CO2 as a key ingredient in a number of products, from methanol and formic acid to “green” cement and biofuels made from plants and algae.

Appearing to be losing momentum—if not favour—is the conventional approach that views CO2 as a pollutant that needs to be captured, compressed and pumped into deep storage underground.