Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions reach >30 gigaton per year. CO2 is known to be a greenhouse gas and partly responsible for global climate change. Society, enterprises, governmental and non-governmental institutions are sensible to this fact and are working to find remediation to the global chal-lenge of reducing CO2 emissions.

CO2 capture, storage and utilization (CCSU) technologies are becoming more and more available, but it most cases there are still societal and economic hurdles. Leading companies see this situation as a poten-tial business opportunity and are working in order to take competitive advantage by introducing new products and new technologies to transform CO2 into added-value products, and to capture and store CO2 in geological reservoirs. All these technologies, however, need to be cost-effective since enterprises need to respond to both their stakeholders and shareholders.

Total, one of the top five multinational oil and gas private majors, is working through the whole technol-ogy chain of CCSU with projects in CO2 capture and storage and projects in CO2 utilization. An analysis of the potential routes of transformation of CO2 led Total to focus on organic carbonates, since organic car-bonates and in particular dimethyl and diethyl carbonate have been repeatedly reported as good per-forming oxygenate additive for transportation fuels.

This presentation aims at providing the CO2 scientific community a snapshot of Total’s activities and strategy in CCSU, as well as the pros and the cons of one of the high potential routes for CO2 utilisation through the production of organic carbonates.