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Wed 16 Jul 2025
A floating platform is being developed that can produce low-carbon synthetic fuels from a combination of wind energy, seawater and ambient air.
Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have installed a modular plant on a barge designed to act as a testbed for larger floating platforms that could eventually sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Climate experts believe that preventing additional global warming will require both slashing the use of fossil fuels and permanently removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere that have already been emitted. But technologies for carbon removal remain costly, energy-intensive – or both – and unproven at large scale.
The test platform is equipped with a direct air capture plant (DAC) for recovering CO2 from the air, a facility for the desalination of seawater, and a high-temperature electrolysis unit that generates hydrogenous synthesis gas.
The latter will be used as source material for the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis that converts green hydrogen and CO2 into fuels. The team said the entire process chain can be operated off-grid and adapted to the availability of renewable electricity from offshore wind energy.
The researchers will start test operation of the platform in July 2025, at first in the port of Bremerhaven and then continuing on the open sea off Heligoland. They also intend to investigate the maritime impacts and material properties as well as the regulatory conditions in actual operation without connection to the power grid.
Apart from the offshore production of e-fuels, the team will also explore how the platform could be used to produce liquid methane, methanol and ammonia.
“We wanted to test the entire planning process including approval, construction and real-world operation of the plant to learn how to draw up concepts for building larger production platforms,” said Professor Roland Dittmeyer.
A study from last year warned that the cost of removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere could be double that of previous estimates. The researchers from ETH Zurich warned that the technology should not be treated as a substitute for carbon reduction policies.
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