![]() ![]() Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks’s director, says it hopes to bring costs down to about $100 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. What they are willing to share are cost targets. ![]() “It’s like if you asked someone in 1960 what the cost of commercial rockets would be today,” says David Keith of Carbon Engineering. The companies say it’s too early in the development of these technologies to predict what costs will be at scale. Carbon Engineering uses a liquid system, with calcium oxide and water. Typically there’s a limited supply of the absorbing material, so it will get put through the cycle once again to capture more of the greenhouse gas.Ĭlimeworks and Global Thermostat have piloted systems in which they coat plastics and ceramics, respectively, with an amine, a type of chemical that can absorb CO2. ![]() The separated CO2 can then be compressed and injected underground. Then, in a separate process, that material is manipulated to pull the CO2 out of it. Most systems to capture CO2 depend on a process called “reversible absorption.” The idea is to run a mixture of gases (air being the prime example) over a material that selectively absorbs CO2. Second, because we are on track to emit more CO2 than we need to keep under the 2☌ limit, we likely need a means of sucking back up some of that extra greenhouse gas. First, we currently don’t have any possible way to deal with CO2 released by cars, ships, and planes. Capturing it at the source-at a coal-burning plant, for example-could cost less than one-tenth of that.īut air capture still matters. A 2011 report from the American Physical Society estimated that it may cost between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton of CO2 captured from the air. Capturing the greenhouse gas at these relatively high concentrations requires less energy than capturing it from the air, where it is present at just 0.04% concentration (about one in 2,500 gas molecules). Image: Climeworks/Zev Starr-TamborĪt a coal-power plant, the exhaust flue gas contains about 10% carbon dioxide (i.e., about one in 10 gas molecules are CO2). Instead of going after the low-hanging fruit, one expert told me, these companies are taking moonshots-and setting themselves up for failure.ĭirect air capture unit along with the cooling towers of the geothermal power plant in Hellisheidi, Iceland. Experts in the field look at these direct-air-capture entrepreneurs as the rebellious kids in the class. Over the past year, I’ve been tracking the broader field of carbon capture and storage, which aims to capture emissions from sources such as power plants and chemical factories. (A fourth company, Kilimanjaro Energy, closed shop due to a lack of funding.) Three companies-Switzerland’s Climeworks, Canada’s Carbon Engineering, and the US’s Global Thermostat-are building machines that, at reasonable costs, can capture CO2 directly from the air. of Warner Music, and the late Gary Comer of Land’s End-have been working to prove those estimates wrong. That brings up the second issue: to date, all estimates suggest direct air capture would be exorbitantly expensive to deploy.įor the past decade, a group of entrepreneurs-partly funded by billionaires like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Edgar Bronfman Jr. But most experts believe that ship has sailed. First, climate scientists have hoped global carbon emissions would come under control, and we wouldn’t need direct air capture. There are at least two reasons that, to date, conversations about direct air capture have been muted. ![]()
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