Mining the Sky for CO2 with Metal Trees, Towers and Pumps

January 07, 2021

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by John Fialka (E&E News) ... "Can we afford not to do this?" was the way Steve Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, headquartered in Squamish, British Columbia, put it in a recent TED Talk. He estimated that climate-related damages will eventually cost the U.S. over $500 billion a year "if we don't do something about it."

His company plans to build a commercial-size plant for direct air capture next year in the oil-rich Permian Basin in the southwestern U.S. It would capture a million tons of carbon dioxide and store it permanently underground. The company hopes to make a profit by selling some of the CO2 for the purpose of pushing more oil out of the area's reservoirs.

The company also has a pilot plant in Canada that breaks down the molecules of CO2 to obtain carbon monoxide. It blends that with hydrogen, created in part with electricity from solar and wind. The result will be low-carbon fuels for heavy trucks and jets.

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The chemistry to capture CO2 from the atmosphere was already known, (David) Keith said. So was the process of turning CO2 into synthetic low-carbon fuels, such as diesel oil and jet fuels.

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But there was a problem: The energy required for both steps was too expensive, and the rapid plunge of solar power provided a wake-up call.

"A big chunk of innovation was, in fact, not to innovate," Keith said. If the world wants to decarbonize, he explained, the possibility of extracting large volumes of CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in products will become a reality "soon after 2030."

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The year 2009 was also a pivotal point for Graciela Chichilnisky, a professor of economics and risk management at Columbia University. It was then that she put together Global Thermostat, a company whose global reach may loom larger than Carbon Engineering's.

As she explained in an interview, her idea was straightforward: Form a company to remove CO2 from the air "at a very low cost, sell the CO2 and make money." The actions were possible, she had concluded, "but probably no one else would do it unless I did it."

So she became the CEO.

Peter Eisenberger, a physicist and former director of Exxon Mobil Corp.'s research and engineering laboratory, was a co-founder of Global Thermostat and became its chief technology officer. Edgar Bronfman Jr., the head of a venture capital firm and heir to the Seagram liquor fortune, became its executive chairman and first investor.

While they use different and patented chemical processes, both companies use modules of various sizes to capture CO2 for a variety of products. Global Thermostat's first module was the size of a small building that it erected in 2010 at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

In 2014, the company built a slightly larger version and connected it to the research institute's natural gas-fired power plant, where it used waste heat to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and from the plant's smokestack. The emissions were diluted with outside air, creating what Chichilnisky calls a "carburetor effect," enhancing the separation process.

So far, Global Thermostat has attracted eight large customers for its modules and the chemicals that make them work.

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To that end, her company has a joint development agreement with Exxon to scale up the technology and a commercial agreement with Air Liquide SA, a French company that is a world leader in selling gases and gas-related technologies for industrial applications.

Global Thermostat is also working with two major German companies, Siemens Energy AG and Porsche AG. They are partnering with Exxon on a pilot project in the Magallanes province of Chile in an area that has unusually strong winds.

The idea is to use wind turbines (made by Siemens) to make electricity to split hydrogen out of water to make methanol, which Porsche says can be converted into "climate neutral" gasoline that it plans to test in racing vehicles and possibly in future sports cars.

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Cristoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher developed their own version of the process in 2017 by extracting CO2 from the air using free waste heat from a small town incinerator. They purified it and sold it to a nearby greenhouse for growing cucumbers and tomatoes (Climatewire, Feb. 19, 2019).

Climeworks has grown to 130 employees and has 10 pilot projects underway. The biggest one is removing carbon from the air and using waste heat from a geothermal power plant near Reykjavík, Iceland. There, Climeworks is building a plant designed to bury 4,000 tons of CO2 each year.

It will be mixed with water and injected into an underground formation through a process where, over two years, it will be absorbed into stone.

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This year, a fourth company has begun pursuing commercial ways to store carbon. It is an Ireland-based investment firm called Silicon Kingdom Holdings, and it has bought the rights to develop the "mechanical tree," the most recent product of (Klaus) Lackner, who pioneered the idea back in the 1990s.

He has since designed large mechanical columns containing CO2-absorbent material that can be extended as high as 32 feet. Lackner's devices use no energy to capture CO2. Like real trees, they rely on the wind to deliver CO2. The gas is periodically removed from absorbent material and concentrated.

The machines are described as being a "thousand times" more efficient at storing CO2 than real trees. READ MORE

Businesses Aim to Pull Greenhouse Gases From the Air. It’s a Gamble. A surge of corporate money could soon transform carbon removal from science fiction to reality. But there are risks: The very idea could offer industry an excuse to maintain dangerous habits. (New York Times)

1 big thing: Putting carbon removal on crisis footing (Axios)

Breaking down the case for massively scaling up carbon removal tech (Axios)

United Airlines aims to suck carbon dioxide from the friendly skies -- The company becomes the first major U.S. carrier to try to remove the greenhouse gases it spews with every flight. (Washington Post)

Businesses Aim to Pull Greenhouse Gases From the Air. It’s a Gamble. (New York Times)

We Can Capture Carbon, But What Then? Turning A Profit Will Be Key (Forbes)

Is It Time for an Emergency Rollout of Carbon-Eating Machines? Facilities that suck carbon dioxide out of the air could be powerful weapons for fighting climate change. But their deployment requires a huge wartime-style investment.(Wired)

The Icelandic Startup Transforming Carbon Dioxide Into Stone (BNN Bloomberg)

How “Mechanical Trees” Could Reverse Climate Change (PBS Peril and Promise; includes VIDEO)