Researchers at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology and a member of SPIN, are developing an electrolysis process that converts recycled carbon dioxide into ethylene — one of the world’s most important base chemicals and a key building block for plastics such as polyethylene. The work is being carried out in the EU-funded project REACT (Renewable Electrochemical Advanced Conversion of CO₂ to Target products).
REACT runs under Horizon Europe for 48 months, from May 2026 to April 2030. Its goal, in the words of Corsin Battaglia, head of Empa’s “Materials for Energy Conversion” laboratory, is to build a working prototype electrolyser for the conversion of CO₂ into ethylene and to raise its technology readiness level significantly.
Recycling carbon from hard-to-abate industries
The process targets CO₂ from sectors where emissions are notoriously difficult to avoid — steel, cement and chemicals. Empa’s researchers use an electrochemical tandem process that can turn low-purity CO₂ into chemical feedstocks without costly pre-treatment. The energy it needs comes from renewable sources.
A central research question is durability: how do impurities in the CO₂ stream affect the lifetime of the catalysts inside the electrolyser? To find out, the team relies on a parallel reactor for CO₂ electrolysis developed in-house at Empa, which lets the researchers test catalyst performance under realistic conditions.
Why it matters for Power-to-X
REACT is about building circular, carbon-based value chains. Instead of releasing CO₂ or drawing on fossil feedstocks, the carbon is captured and defossilised into useful molecules with renewable electricity. That is Power-to-X thinking applied to the chemical industry — Power-to-Chemicals alongside the more familiar Power-to-Liquid and Power-to-Gas routes.
The relevance reaches beyond ethylene. As Battaglia points out, the insights gained in REACT will also help advance other CO₂ conversion technologies — including the production of synthetic, defossilised fuels. For a technology-neutral Power-to-X ecosystem, that overlap is the whole point: the same electrochemical toolbox that yields base chemicals today can help defossilise fuels tomorrow.
Source: Empa media release “EU-Projekt REACT” (empa.ch) and punkt4.info, 10 July 2026.
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