Europe and China do not need to compete on the development of defossilization technologies.Credit: Florian Gaertner/Photothek/Getty
Last month, we described some of the nascent steps a number of European countries are taking towards defossilization — that is, to find sustainable sources of carbon (Nature 649, 267; 2026). Under net-zero emissions scenarios, carbon-based compounds will still be needed for the manufacture of everyday consumer products, including detergents, medicines and plastics. However, they cannot continue to come from fossil sources such as coal, natural gas and oil.
Defossilize our chemical world
Companies can make carbon-based molecules without exploiting fossil hydrocarbons by reacting carbon dioxide with hydrogen. The CO 2 can be captured from existing fossil-based energy production or directly from the air, and hydrogen atoms can be extracted from water molecules, separating them from the oxygen atoms using a source of renewable energy. However, these chemical reactions are difficult to achieve, because both water and CO 2 are highly stable molecules. This is one of the reasons why rising concentrations of CO 2 in the atmosphere are such a problem.
Many European nations have active defossilization research programmes, but scaling up the technology is not a high priority for their governments. By contrast, China is forging ahead with such projects. Although opportunities to collaborate continue to shrink (see Nature https://doi.org/qrx4; 2026), defossilization is not an area in which Europe and China need to compete. Both the European Union and China are committed to reducing emissions, albeit on different timescales. Defossilization is key to these ambitions.
Bring me sunshine
China’s researchers use different terms for their defossilization programmes. ‘Green carbon science’, for example, denotes sustainable carbon-based technologies (Z. Xie et al. Natl Sci. Rev. 10, nwad225; 2023). Another term, ‘liquid sunshine’, means making carbon-based chemicals, such as methanol, using solar energy. Methanol is a common feedstock for olefins, a class of petrochemicals (such as ethylene and propylene) that are used as fuels for applications that are difficult to decarbonize, and can also be used in the manufacture of plastics, rubber and adhesives.
This September, the China Coal Ordos Energy Chemical Company’s Liquid Sunshine project, located in Inner Mongolia, is due to start producing methanol. It is one of the world’s largest such projects, and aims to produce around 100,000 tonnes of methanol per year. The estimated saving in CO 2 emissions would be about 500,000 tonnes per year — admittedly only a fraction of the 12.6 billion tonnes that China emitted in 2024.
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The Liquid Sunshine project will not be the largest such project globally, however — it will take joint second place alongside another Chinese initiative, based in Jiangsu. These come in close behind the biggest facility, located in Anyang, also in China; this produces 110,000 tonnes of methanol from CO 2 per year.
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