French Startup turns Greenhouse Gas Into Sustainable Fuel

As transportation sectors like shipping and aviation remain difficult to decarbonize, a French startup claims to have developed a promising solution to reduce carbon emissions in these industries. Aerleum, founded in 2023, says its technology can pull carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into methanol, which can be used to fuel cargo ships and serve as a base chemical in producing aviation fuel.

The French utility company Électricité de France recently awared Aerleum the EDF Pulse Award in the carbon capture category for this innovation, which may help offset some of the emissions from transportation sectors that depend on liquid fuels. Since 2019, EDF’s innovation accelerator, Blue Lab, has presented the awards to highlight the efforts of start-ups, innovators and entrepreneurs with new ideas that could move the energy sector towards net-zero carbon emissions.

Aerleum’s proprietary reactor, which combines CO₂ capture and conversion in a single device, uses a sponge-like material that can adsorb CO₂ concentrations as high as 15 percent, making it effective for both direct air capture and point source carbon capture, in which CO₂ is captured directly from industrial exhausts. In direct air capture, CO₂ makes up roughly 0.04 percent of the gas being filtered; for point source capture; that rises to 10 percent for something like a natural gas power plant smokestack. Aerleum’s founders say their system could be a good complement to such industrial facilities by filtering and converting CO₂ out of the exhaust before it reaches the atmosphere.

Aerleum CEO Sebastien Fiedorow says that it takes about one hour for the proprietary sponge-like material the company developed to pull in as much carbon dioxide as it can hold. “The second stage, the conversion to methanol, is completed in about 20 minutes,” says Fiedorow. After that, the reactor begins another cycle of adsorbing CO₂ from the air. How much CO₂ is captured and how much methanol is produced, says Fiedorow, will depend on the size of the reactor.

“Carbon capture is costly,” says David Sholl, the director of the Transformational Decarbonization Initiative at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennesse. “Because you’re trying to either mitigate or offset some emission, the ultimate economic question is how much will people pay to do this.” Oak Ridge employs a liquid solvent for CO₂ absorption in a 3D-printed carbon capture device they developed to perform direct air capture. Whether the mechanism is a sponge like Aerleum or a solvent like Oak Ridge, the question of cost remains.

Aerleum’s approach addresses the top economic challenges facing carbon capture and conversion. Sholl points out that converting CO₂ economically is tough. CO₂ is chemically nonreactive, making conversion both complex and expensive. But Aerleum says its reactor relies on a simplified process that eliminates energy-intensive steps that would keep the cost prohibitive.