Direct Air Capture of CO2 Is Suddenly a Carbon Offset Option: Canada’s Largest Company Is Funding Machines that Suck CO2 from the Atmosphere to Offset Its Own Emissions

by Corbin Hiar (E&E News/Scientific American) ... Shopify Inc.’s agreement is the largest publicly announced corporate purchase of direct air capture, or DAC, for carbon offsets, according to Carbon Engineering, a Canadian firm seeking to commercialize the nascent climate-change-fighting technology.

Carbon Engineering promised Shopify it would store the e-commerce company’s carbon offsets—roughly equivalent to the emissions from 132 tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline—in a DAC facility it expects to bring online in 2024.

Shopify, which is worth about $140 billion, is the first company to use Carbon Engineering’s new DAC service. The offsets company said yesterday that it is now accepting DAC carbon offset purchases from other customers, including ones as small as 100 metric tons.

“We’re on the brink of large-scale deployment of our technology and the next critical step is accumulating market interest and securing customers,” said Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham in a separate release. “This new service allows us to do that. It also makes it easy for companies and governments to include permanent carbon removal in their net-zero plans.”

Last October, Shopify made its first multiyear DAC investment, purchasing 5,000 metric tons from Climeworks, a DAC company based in Zurich. Climeworks is planning to start operating a plant in Iceland later this year that will be capable of capturing 4,000 tons annually.

The Shopify spokesperson said 23% of the company’s sustainability fund in 2020 went toward DAC and confirmed that the Carbon Engineering deal will count toward this year’s efforts.

Shopify’s latest sustainability report shows the company has purchased enough carbon offsets over the years to offset all the emissions associated with its operations and energy use dating back to its 2004 founding. Its platform also runs on the renewable energy-powered Google Cloud.

Despite those efforts, Shopify’s carbon footprint continues to grow. READ MORE

Excerpt from Green Biz: Remora’s trajectory started with a simple idea that Gross (Paul Gross, Remora’s co-founder and chief executive officer) just couldn’t shake while he was a student at Yale University: capture carbon at the source.

"It seemed crazy to me that we have all of these very rich sources of carbon dioxide coming out of vehicles and buildings, and we’re going to instead wait for that carbon dioxide to scatter into the atmosphere and then try to collect it again," he said.

Gross’s dream of capturing emissions at the tailpipe was far from a pipe dream. He came across a doctoral dissertation from Christina Reynolds at the University of Michigan, who had done extensive research on the possibility of mobile source carbon capture. Paul convinced her to join him as chief science officer, so that she could take her research from theory to practice.

They rounded out the founding team with Eric Harding, an engineer who had experience building and maintaining next-generation trucking technologies.

Now the team has grown to 15 people. One thing that stands out about this group is their young age. Gross is just 24, and most of the team is under 30.

Reynolds’ doctoral research explored how to isolate carbon dioxide from that waste stream. First, the exhaust needs to be made cooler and dryer, and then it gets passed over a material that selectively absorbs CO2. There are several options for this material, each with its own pros and cons.

"The world can’t really wait around for the perfect material to show up, and we can’t wait around for the perfect conditions for carbon capture on the vehicle," Reynolds said. "So we do our best with what’s available."

The Remora team went with a type of zeolite, a porous mineral-like substance. They picked this material because it was already commonly used to remove excess CO2 emissions caused by human activity, albeit in a much more limited context: for spaceships and submarines. CO2 needs to be constantly removed from those vessels so that the crews can continue to breathe.

"People don’t really think about how common it is, in a closed space, to have that technology," Reynolds said. "We’re just taking it to a much more aggressive level."

After the CO2 is captured, it can be released by applying heat, much of which comes from the exhaust itself. Remember that the exhaust came out hot and needed to be cooled. Remora recycles much of this heat for the release of CO2. In this sense, Remora is making productive use of an otherwise wasted resource.

Another wasted resource that Remora puts to good use is the CO2 itself. Remora’s devices wind up with pure CO2 that can be sold directly into both existing and nascent markets. The weight of the CO2 reduces the fuel efficiency of the truck, but the proceeds from selling the CO2 make up for this cost, so the process is neutral or even beneficial to the customers’ bottom line.

Then there’s the matter of logistics. Given that no CO2 collection network exists, Remora is building one from scratch. Commercial trucks travel along predictable, heavily trafficked routes, so Remora can offtake the CO2 at a limited set of facilities along major highways. The infrastructure for this part is relatively simple: a tank that can be bought off the shelf and a means of transporting CO2 to end users, such as greenhouses and beverage carbonators.

"The advantage for us is that we’re doing a distributed approach, so we’re going to have carbon dioxide much closer to our end users," Gross said.

Some CO2 can also be turned into useful products such as concrete, plastic and fuel. A slew of companies is working on the latter, such as Twelve (formerly Opus12), which recently raised Series A funding of $57 million (a founder of Twelve is also an investor in Remora). Of all the uses for CO2, the Remora team is particularly enthusiastic about fuel, because it could create a conveniently circular process.

"If we can offload [carbon dioxide] at a truck stop, turn it into fuel, and then sell it back to the truck, for us, that’s the ideal," Gross said. READ MORE