The Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, setting goals to achieve a balance between emissions and absorption of greenhouse gases (including CO₂) in the second half of the 21st century. Since then, the call for decarbonization has become more prominent worldwide and most countries and companies are taking specific measures to achieve this goal.

In 1972, Chiyoda advocated the philosophy of ‘Energy and Environment in Harmony’ in a company’s booklet ‘Legacy for the 21st Century’ and committed to resolving energy and environment-related challenges through engineering and technological development. We have continued to advance this mission for over 50 years.

In 2019, we established the Frontier Business Division to contribute to solving social issues by utilizing our engineering expertise and providing new systems and solutions. The Frontier Business Division consists of the Technology Development Department, responsible for research and development and the Business Innovation Department, responsible for business development. The two departments collaborate with each other from the initial stages of technological development, including commercial feasibility, and create new businesses to contribute to environmental conservation.

With the growing transition to a carbon-neutral society, we have positioned decarbonization technology as a growth strategy to create new businesses. We are developing decarbonization technology to separate and recover low concentration CO₂ from natural gas power plant exhaust gas, synthesis of ethylene by electrolytic reduction of CO₂, synthesis of paraxylene from CO₂ and hydrogen and production of hydrogen as power generation fuel from ammonia. These projects were adopted by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO)^*.

• An institution that creates innovation and promotes research and development for the realization of a sustainable society as an ‘innovation accelerator’ through the development and demonstration of high risk innovative technologies and promoting social implementation.

Ethylene is a basic chemical derived from fossil fuels such as petroleum and natural gas and is used in chemical products. We are a member of NEDO's moonshot R&D program and have been working on developing technology to synthesize ethylene through electrochemical reduction of CO₂ diffused in the atmosphere, in collaboration with industry, academia and government, such as The University of Tokyo, Osaka University, RIKEN, Shimizu Corporation, Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd., UBE Corporation, and Maxell, Ltd.

The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is low, about 0.04%. To capture the CO₂, large quantities of air needs to be passed through the equipment which requires upsizing and a large areas for installation (generally suburban areas). We also propose a new ‘urban Direct Air Capture (DAC) system’ to use the air conditioning system of a building for DAC. In collaboration with Shimizu Corporation, we are developing small-scale equipment that fits into air conditioning equipment in buildings and are endeavoring to integrate the CO₂ recovery process and electrolytic reduction process in the system.

The manufactured ethylene is collected at the factory and transformed into products such as ethylene glycol, an automobile antifreeze, or butadiene, a synthetic rubber to meet market demands. Ethylene has the potential for use in many chemical products and we will continue case studies focusing on commercial viability.

We plan to demonstrate experiment at the laboratory in 2025, followed by scaling-up and commercialization planning, aiming to enter into the pilot demonstration phase in 2029. We are advancing towards social implementation, aiming for the total amount of recovered CO2 to exceed the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and exhaust gases, and wish to promote this initiative to realize a decarbonized society.

Paraxylene is a basic chemical widely used as a raw material for plastic bottles and polyester fibers. Paraxylene is a crude oil-based chemical, but we are developing the world's most advanced technology to produce it using CO₂ and ‘green hydrogen’; hydrogen derived from renewable energy.
Let me explain in more detail. We synthesize paraxylene from CO₂ and hydrogen under high temperature and high pressure and pass them through an independently developed catalyst. The key feature of our technology is a higher synthesis ratio of paraxylene compared to conventional methods. We currently plan to utilize CO₂ recovered from factory emissions but, in future, are willing to also use CO₂ captured directly from the atmosphere.

This technology is being developed in collaboration with the University of Toyama, Nippon Steel Corporation, HighChem Co., Ltd., Mitsubishi Corporation and ENEOS Corporation. Chiyoda is responsible for process development (scaling up from the laboratory level to commercialized equipment). We constructed a small pilot plant in Chiyoda’s Koyasu Office Research Park in 2022 and successfully manufactured compounds, mainly composed of CO₂-derived paraxylene. A third party successfully isolated (manufactured and extracted) paraxylene from these compounds using conventional techniques.

We formed a partnership with Goldwin Inc., in 2024, a company renowned for brands such as THE NORTH FACE, and established a supply chain in collaboration with seven companies across five countries for more sustainable polyester fiber utilizing CCU technology. In this initiative, the CO₂-derived paraxylene produced from our small pilot plant has been used as a raw material for the polyester fiber. It is the world's first attempt to produce CO₂-derived paraxylene in collaboration among upstream material companies and downstream apparel companies. The polyester fiber was used for the uniforms of Japanese and Korean climbers and T-shirts.

The project has been extensively covered by the media. Providing information and products into the market and popularizing them according to public reaction is required for investigating business partners, funding and increasing the feasibility of the business plan. The apparel industry, in particular, has a high affinity with this technology due to its strong awareness of sustainability. We aspire to use the CO₂-derived paraxylene as a raw material for plastic bottles and engineering plastics (plastics with superior strength and heat resistance).

Ammonia is expected to be an energy carrier for low-cost transportation and storage of hydrogen. Although technologies for synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen and transporting ammonia have already been commercialized, plant based on the technology for generating hydrogen by cracking (decomposing) ammonia on a large scale is hardly used. If the technology to generate hydrogen at low cost through large-scale ammonia cracking is completed, we can produce low-cost hydrogen domestically using inexpensive ammonia imported from overseas and use hydrogen as an energy source for industries such as power generation. It is therefore essential to improve ammonia cracking technology and reduce costs.

In ammonia cracking, ammonia is decomposed into hydrogen and nitrogen through heat. Cracking technology is divided into two categories: external heating and Autothermal Reforming (ATR). In the external heating method, mainly used by overseas licensors, a temperature of approximately 1,000℃ is required to facilitate the decomposition reaction, and external heating, provided by electricity or burning fossil fuels, is required. For the ATR method, adopted by Chiyoda, the required heat is self-supplied by burning ammonia on a catalyst with oxygen. There is no need to install a burner in the heating furnace and no need to prepare a combustion furnace for external heating. Using this method, the temperature of the reactor can be maintained at 700℃ or lower to reduce CAPEX and OPEX.

This technology development is conducted in collaboration with JERA Co., Inc. and NIPPON SHOKUBAI CO., LTD. Catalyst performance verification has been executed on laboratory equipment under identical temperature and pressure conditions as the commercialized equipment, repeating using ‘trial and error’ because there are many issues to be resolved for large-scale commercialization. Chiyoda is also executing evaluation on; 1) process performance to raise the temperature and pressure required for the decomposition reaction of ammonia, 2) the performance of the heat recovery process, 3) the thermal efficiency of the entire system of the plant and 4) economic efficiency. Comments and proposals from JERA Co., Inc. are reflected in the technology development and the goal is to scale up the technology to generate large amounts of hydrogen to produce power generation fuel.