Abstract. Scientific studies of the last decades prove that to reduce the rise in global average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius over the preindustrial baseline, (1750) of our industrial civilization needs to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) at around 350 parts per million (ppm). In the last decades the CO2 atmospheric concentration was about 400-415 ppm causing a dangerous climate overheating. This year, Earth’s CO2 in atmosphere reached about 415 ppm (6.4.2020). Global CO2 emissions continue to rise (in particular from burning fossil fuels) and hundreds of gigatons of CO2 every year concentrate in the air. Every model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that to reach the desired climate change we must bury large amounts of CO2, so-called “negative carbon emissions” by removing CO2 directly out of the air and bury it underground in saline aquifers, a process known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). A number of negative emission technologies (NET) have been proposed in the last decades but all of them have some fundamental problems or are expensive. Also, scientists and synthetic organic chemists have been aware for many decades of the potential economic and environmental benefits of using CO2 as a feedstock for the synthesis of commodity chemicals and renewable fuels. Despite the large amount of fundamental research that has been performed regarding the conversion of CO2 into valuable chemical products there are relatively few examples of industrially viable processes.The conversion of CO2 faces an important obstacle, its kinetic and thermodynamic stability. CO2 cannot be converted into commodity chemicals or fuels without significant inputs of energy and catalysts since it contains strong bonds that are not particularly reactive. As a consequence, many of the available transformations of CO2 require stoichiometric amounts of energy-intensive reagents. This can often generate significant amounts of waste and can result in large greenhouse gas footprints. This review collected some of the most interesting studies and technological applications for the sequestration of atmospheric CO2. Also, the review contains advanced methods for converting CO2 by catalytic hydrogenation into useful commodity products, feedstock chemicals, and hydrocarbons (urea, methanol, dimethyl ether, formic acid, ethanol, ethylene, dimethyl and diphenyl carbonates, polymers, fuels, etc).
