The massive quantities of fossil fuels used by our society have led to unprecedented atmospheric CO₂ levels with widespread climate impacts. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies are being developed to mitigate CO₂ emission issues. Large-scale CO₂ capture and sequestration facilities, such as Petra Nova, have been built to store thousands of tons of CO₂ per day. However, the typical capital investment for centralized CCUS facilities is at a billion-dollar scale, making it challenging to finance. Sequestering the captured CO₂ in geological repositories often requires additional investment in CO₂ pipelines and infrastructure, which further increases the financial challenge to the rapid deployment of highly centralized facilities rapidly. More importantly, the carbon capture and sequestration process itself is not profitable without subsidies or a carbon tax. As a critical component in CCUS, carbon utilization holds the key to generating revenues that can offset the capture cost. It enables the captured CO₂ to be converted into valuable materials, such as concrete, building materials, and platform molecules for fuel and chemical productions.

Recently, significant progress has been made in low-temperature CO₂ electrolysis to carbon monoxide, formic acid, ethylene, and ethanol, which raised the demand for systematic techno-economic assessments (TEA) to evaluate its feasibility as a CO₂ utilization process. In this talk, we will present our recent TEA of four major products and prioritizes the technological development with systematic guidelines to facilitate the market deployment of low-temperature CO₂ electrolysis. We will first discuss the present state-of-the-art electrolyzer performance and parameterize figures of merit. Then, we will discuss a detailed roadmap to make C₂ product production economically viable; an improvement in an energetic efficiency to ~50% and a reduction in electricity price to 0.01 USD/kWh. We also propose industrially relevant benchmarks: the 5-year stability of the electrolyzer components and the single-pass conversion of 30% for C₁ and 15% for C₂ products. In addition to the TEA work, we will present our latest experimental efforts to establish a two-step tandem electrolysis process to convert CO₂ into ethylene and acetate with a high selectivity. We will show how operating conditions affect the performance of the tandem system and challenges associated with this system. Finally, we will discuss potential approaches to further improve the efficiency of the overall system.