Direct Air Capture: The Key to Reversing Climate Change

by Graciela Chichilnisky (Global Thermostat) ...A few companies are building “direct air capture” (DAC) plants that use chemical agents to scrub trace amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, allowing them to sell the gas to industrial customers or bury it underground.

For example, Global Thermostat (GT) has created, developed and patented a proven breakthrough technology that can cost-effectively remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. GT’s technology is now commercially available and has the potential to fundamentally change the way we manage and utilize carbon on a global scale, including the use of carbon dioxide instead of petroleum, which represents an economic revolution of sorts. Since these emissions are considered a leading cause of climate change, and current concentrations in the atmosphere (400 ppm) are at their highest level in the last 3 million years, GT has the power to turn this major liability into a valuable commodity that can serve a carbon dioxide market spanning a wide range of industries, including water desalination, biofertilizers, food and beverages, production of polymers and carbon fibers, synthetic fuels, enhanced oil recovery, and more — a rapidly growing carbon dioxide market that McKinsey, the global consultancy, anticipates can generate $1.1trillion annually.

In high-level terms, the technology consists of a unique, proprietary, low-cost process to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (at concentrations of 400 parts per million). It can also capture the gas from industrial flues or chimneys (with 5% to 7% concentration or more), or from any combination of the two. As of 2019, GT has been awarded 61 patents in the U.S. and internationally, and by treaty it is protected in 152 nations. These patents cover the entire process for the low- cost loading and unloading of carbon dioxide from a porous block monolith coated with proprietary sorbents to produce >98.5%–99% pure carbon dioxide gas stream at atmospheric pressure.

It can be built next to an oil field or a food processor, and it can be located anywhere there is air, thus eliminating the need to truck or pipe the CO2 over a long distance.

Conventionally, carbon dioxide in ambient air, which is now about 400 parts per million and uniform throughout the planet’s atmosphere, has been considered too dilute to be captured economically. As a result, the focus of carbon dioxide capture applications has been on flue gas and other point sources in which there is up to 300 times more carbon dioxide concentration than in the atmosphere. GT’s ability to capture unlimited amounts of the gas from ambient air creates efficiencies by allowing more mass to pass through a larger surface area. GT also blends flue gas with ambient air, optimizing carbon dioxide concentration and temperature. READ MORE