How to suck carbon dioxide from the sky for fuels and more
Someday, the gasoline you buy might trace its heritage to carbon dioxide pulled straight out of the sky rather than from oil pumped out of the ground. By removing emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into fresh fuels, engineers at a Canadian firm have demonstrated a scalable and cost-effective way to make deep cuts in the carbon footprint of transportation with minimal disruption to existing vehicles. Their work appears June 7 in the journal Joule.
“The carbon dioxide generated via direct air capture can be combined with sequestration for carbon removal, or it can enable the production of carbon-neutral hydrocarbons, which is a way to take low-cost carbon-free power sources like solar or wind and channel them into fuels that can be used to decarbonize the transportation sector,” says lead author David Keith, founder and chief scientist of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian CO2-capture and clean fuels enterprise, and a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard University.
Direct air capture technology works almost exactly like it sounds. Giant fans draw ambient air into contact with an aqueous solution that picks out and traps carbon dioxide. Through heating and a handful of familiar chemical reactions, that same carbon dioxide is re-extracted and ready for further use–as a carbon source for making valuable chemicals like fuels, or for storage via a sequestration strategy of choice. It’s not just theory–Carbon Engineering’s facility in British Columbia is already achieving both CO2 capture and fuel generation.
The idea of direct air capture is hardly new, but the successful implementation of a scalable and cost-effective working pilot plant is. After conducting a full process analysis and crunching the numbers, Keith and his colleagues claim that realizing direct air capture on an impactful scale will cost roughly $94-$232 per ton of carbon dioxide captured, which is on the low end of estimates that have ranged up to $1,000 per ton in theoretical analyses.
That price-point is low enough to use direct air capture to start tackling the roughly 20% of global carbon emissions that result from driving, flying, trucking, and other ways of getting people and goods around. “Electricity from solar and wind is intermittent; we can take this energy straight from big solar or wind installations at great sites where it’s cheap and apply it to reclaim and recycle carbon dioxide into new fuel,” Keith says, adding that “Making fuels that are easy to store and transport eases the challenge of integrating renewables into the energy system.”
The resulting fuels, including gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, are compatible with existing fuel distribution and transportation infrastructure. Thanks to ultra-low life cycle carbon intensities, they are a promising route for reducing carbon emissions in heavy transportation and other sectors of the energy system that are demanding and difficult to electrify.
Centuries of unchecked human carbon emissions also mean that atmospheric carbon dioxide is a virtually unlimited feedstock for transformation into new fuels.
“We are not going to run out of air anytime soon,” adds Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. “We can keep collecting carbon dioxide with direct air capture, keep adding hydrogen generation and fuel synthesis, and keep reducing emissions through this AIR TO FUELSTM pathway.”
Keith and Oldham are optimistic that they have reduced scale-up risks by implementing direct air capture at reasonable costs using standard industrial equipment. That means that all the pieces are in place to move on to full-size plants capable of manufacturing 2,000 barrels of fuels per day– totaling over 30 million gallons per year across plants.
Commercialization of such plants would allow direct air capture to make a dent in transportation emissions by connecting low-cost renewable energy to low-carbon transportation fuels using Carbon Engineering’s AIR TO FUELSTM pathway.
“After 100 person-years of practical engineering and cost analysis, we can confidently say that while air capture is not some magical cheap solution, it is a viable and buildable technology for producing carbon-neutral fuels in the immediate future and for removing carbon in the long run,” says Keith.
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In addition to funds raised by Carbon Engineering, this work was supported by the British Columbia Innovative Clean Energy Fund, Sustainable Development Technologies Canada, the Industrial Research Assistanceship Program, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
The paper:
Joule, Keith et al.: “A process for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere” https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
Another green energy fantasy. All it needs is cheap, unlimited, carbon-free energy to be practical. But if we had a cheap, unlimited, carbon-free energy why would we need it?
Given inevitable miniaturization, drivers will soon fuel their rides by blowing into a tube.
“This image shows Carbon Engineering’s clean fuel, synthesized from carbon dioxide captured from the air and hydrogen split from water. CREDIT Carbon Engineering”
There’s the gotcha. Where is the power coming from to liberate the hydrogen used in the process? By their own admission, wind and solar are intermittent at best.
Is there anything too silly to get through peer review?
IG Nobel. I mean, this is serious science, just ask why it was done.
The natural photosynthesis machine, at 90% efficiency, well beyond anything we can build (so far), is still not a perpetum-mobile. There is an exiton quantum process at work which is extremely interesting. We are already making quantum computers, quantum machines are surely next.
I would not rule out a “PhotonSynth Inc” someday. For sure its devices will not look like a pile of crude stone-age ventilators, with its products covering the entire gamut of organics and more…
So yes to real science of photosynthesis, living processes, instead of this diversion…
For serious energy, neutron and proton machines please.
This giant sucking sound is dumbing-down, as if some do not want us to master living machines.
Meanwhile the indefinitely surprising natural machines are busily humming on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
For actual sunlight, where only 45% of the light is in the photosynthetically active wavelength range, the theoretical maximum efficiency of solar energy conversion is approximately 11%. In actuality, however, plants do not absorb all incoming sunlight (due to reflection, respiration requirements of photosynthesis and the need for optimal solar radiation levels) and do not convert all harvested energy into biomass, which results in an overall photosynthetic efficiency of 3 to 6% of total solar radiation.
3-6%. I’m sure we can do better. And maybe we will have to – while we don’t know if e-batteries will ever be good enough, the option to produce an optimal hydrocarbon fuel out of thin air might be possible. Maybe chemically, maybe through GMO bacteria or algae. All of this for the post-oil times of course.
I’m thinking maybe Mars might be a better test bed.
Whaddya say Mr. Musk?
And just how much energy does this magical process take?
Another hare-brained boondoggle from the green scamsters.
Why do these megalomaniacs want to CO2 starve all of the plants on planet earth, in a vainglorious attempt to solve a non-problem with monumentally stupid non-solution?
I suppose when you burn this superfuel, the CO2 is returned to the atmosphere, not lost.
Now that we are at the 30th anniversary of Hansen’s famous 1988 climate model forecasts, a few things come to mind.
Remember the Scenario A, B and C? “A” was for “business as usual”, while “C” was with drastic GHG cuts.
Some Hansen apologists claim that Scenario B is what has verified. The reality is that emissions have been far higher than imagined and definitely a Scenario A+. But a funny thing happened. The atmosphere has removed far more of the CO2 than anticipated. So, in 1988, they assumed that concentrations would be much higher than 407ppm given the emissions.
So, Hansen was wrong about a lot of things, including the amount of CO2 that would stay in the atmosphere. Apparently, plants are hungry and eat that stuff up leading to global greening.
Anyway, the atmospheric concentration now is apparently slightly less than Scenario A despite the “more than business as usual” emissions.
Instead of acknowledging that Hansen 1988 was wrong on CO2 staying power and climate sensitivity, the apologists instead claim Scenario B verified and then use the wildly adjusted GISS data and then claim that the forecast was “pretty good”
But an honest forecast minus observed verification yields a hot bias of 2 to 1.
This is definitely worth a column!
So, in 1988, they assumed that concentrations would be much higher than 407ppm given the emissions.
Hansen’s Scenario B projected 404 ppm CO2 for this year
Emissions were far higher than expected and dispersion of CO2 from the atmosphere was higher than expected… two wrongs actually made a right. But hardly a promising forecasting technique going forward.
“So, in 1988, they assumed that concentrations would be much higher than 407ppm given the emissions.”
You need to write the basis for that claim. It isn’t true; as Phil. says, the numerical data from the time gives expected concentrations, and they were almost exactly in line with Scenario B.
The usual error here is interpreting Hansen’s “1.5% increase” in emissions. He didn’t mean 1.5% of the measured emissions; he didn’t have a figure for measured emissions. He meant a 1.5% increase in the observed concentration increment, as you can see from his arithmetic. And that turned out right.
You will all get a chance to look at more figures CO2 emission is on target to go up 3.7% this year (1st quarter was 4%) and most are forecasting the same next year.
Perchance, is it April 1st on the planet where these folks come from?
And how much of my tax money was splurged on this stupidity by the US DOE?
AND THIS is a perfect, if but only 1, example of why Trump got elected: Carbon Engineering, a CANADIAN CO2-capture and clean fuels enterprise. Hey, Canadians, if you can’t come up with enough money to funded this kind of stupidity, go put your hand in someone else’s pocket. STAY OUT OF MINE!
my gosh if this works so well where are all the retrofits for cars to connect this directly to the exhaust and to the gasoline fill tube….. the cars will be able to run forever on one tank of gas!!!! hmmmmm not sure why but I am thinking of 2 words…. Rube Goldberg
Cheers!
Joe
Lil’ Abner did a spoof on just that sort of perpetual motion scam decades ago.
One acre of Paulownia trees require all the CO2 from 5 cubic kilometers of air per year to grow at current rates. Do the math on that and it becomes apparent that for plant growth, the component of air that’s critical for their survival (0.05% CO2) is not exactly abundant. Of course they *can* survive all stunted and decrepid, but in the carbon cycle we call life, that doesn’t bode well for the other life forms connected to Paulownia sp.
I’ve made an offer to one of these firms before and I stand by it – I’ll pay for a greenhouse set up pre-intake and post-treatment to monitor how well plants do under ‘polluted’ air versus the “clean” stuff they pump out. Of course they never responded..
And wait, how much did they say their fuel will cost?? Good lord no. Let me guess – would part of that cost be to pay for the massive amount of coal powered electricity they’ll be using to run this conversion? Egads – I thought we’d finally left perpetual motion machines behind.
“Giant fans…”
Well, there’s no need to read any further, then.
Is this all a joke? Have these Canadians ever heard of thermodynamics?
I hope that their paper contains some actual practical numbers including the full energy analysis.
“Have these Canadians ever heard of thermodynamics?”
I’m sure they acknowledge that there is an energy cost. Conversion to fuel is an incidental to their scheme, which is basically air capture. As I understand it, the argument would be that making fuel, using presumably renewable energy, could be economic relative to burying CO₂, and would fill the gap in renewables about powering aircraft etc.
Biomass from multiple sources can be produced with a cost of roughly $70/MT. This is about $140/ton of Carbon. Removing CO2 from air costs a minimum of $345/ton carbon or roughly 2.5X the cost of using biomass. If the biomass is from landfills, the cost is only the cost of separation of carbonaceous feeds from non-carbonaceous fees (rock, dirt, metals, etc.).
The next step is to convert CO2 into something useful which is most often syngas (CO + H2 in some ratio). With CO2 as a feed, this requires reduction using some form of energy. Methane reforming of CO2 is probably the most cost effective, but people are also considering electrolysis using fuel cells operated in reverse which consumes huge amounts of electricity. (for example, see: https://www.ems.psu.edu/~elsworth/courses/egee580/2010/Final%20Reports/co2_electrochem.pdf)
Next is conversion into fuel. Fischer-Tropsch technology would make paraffinic hydrocarbons, and copper catalysts can make alcohols of various types, mostly methanol, but ethanol and others are possible. Hydrocarbon fuels are the most energy dense and useable storage vehicle for any energy source, which is why crude oil is the ideal source of low cost transportation energy.
Trying to remove CO2 from the air is only slightly less fanciful than trying to remove CO2 from sea water, which is also under consideration.
Locate these in high CO2 environments (like exhaust from coal plants) and you should get an even better ROI.
I’m skeptical of the numbers, but if they’re going to do the testing, do it where the circumstances favor success, so that further analysis can show if it’s widely applicable.
All these processes are very energy intensive, further increasing their carbon footprint to fix a non-problem. The electricity they propose to use is also more expensive than traditional power plants. The laws of thermodynamics are still operative and there is no magic way to turn CO2 into fuel besides letting nature take her course. More energy is required to reverse the reaction than you got out of it because the increase in entropy also has to be reversed. Photosynthesis is a win-win-win.
Oh my!! I wonder how much fossil fuel generated electricity was sucked up in this test!! It has to be more than any fuel produced!!
We are into perpetual motion machine crap here!!!
The US Navy is working on just such a scheme for the Ford Class Carriers to make jet fuel on board. The easiest way to reduce the effectiveness of carriers is to interrupt their supply chain delivering jet fuel. Key is that the reactors on the Ford class were designed to provide an excess of energy beyond what is needed to propel the ship so are also capable of powering “rail gun” catapults, energy weapons to defend the ship from hypersonic missiles, and still have some capacity to make fuel. Considering the cost of having refueling ships shuttling back and forth to the carriers and the ongoing costs of operating a carrier if air operations cannot be conducted, onboard manufacturing is a small cost to maintain operational status.
That Giant Sucking Sound is actually coming from your Wallet, not from fuel creation.
They don’t say how much energy they put into the process, but it has to be a lot more than they get out or we would have a perpetual motion machine. So how many pounds of carbon is required to extract each pound of carbon?
The best and cheapest method of carbon capture is to stop cutting your grass and let the weeds grow. Might need to change a few zoning ordinances to make that to happen, though.
I did a back of the envelope calculation for my group on this a few years back, comparing modern petrol to pure electric cars powered directly by nuclear electricity and synthetic fuels created using the same nuclear electric energy source, probably at night to shed load from a nuclear grid. David MacKay helped with insight from his solar paper and a quick sanity check of the numbers. I liked how much that rational solution would annoy green irrationals by fueling gas guzzling SUVs with wholly sustainable and renewable IC fuel made by “decarbonising” the atmosphere using nuclear power. It’s about 7 times the current manufacturing cost of petrol (not price, note), whereas electric cars have an equivalent cost of 50% more than petrol per KWh. Please feel free to check the numbers. Here are some abstracts from the full document. Enjoy and criticise away, with alternative verifiable facts such as I employ.
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Hope this is of interest, and even useful to some as intended. I will publish any corrections based on independently verifiable facts. I have not seen anything that attempts this before, it may be out there.
I have used Prof David MacKay’s Solar energy adequacy work – abstract and reference at the end – to cost the progressive ways we could use abundant nuclear energy to manufacture synthetic chemical fuel to power our personal transport when fossil fuels and oil feedstock become an uneconomic and rationed resource.
Obviously other synthetics can replace plastic feed stock, ethylene C2H4 and Propylene C3H6. Things are chemically sustainable, the required molecules are still all out there, just add energy.
We have the science and some of the technology to put them together as required. It’s really a question of affordable deliverability, the real delivered costs per kWh to the bill payers, that opinionated ideologists and politicians invariably ignore the practical reality of, if they have the formation to understand it, and if they are ever are told the facts by Humphrey as he presents the lobbyist’s legislation to sign and whip through.
So, I offer some answers re petrol, immediately for the hard of time/science/attention. These results are expressed as the directly comparable costs of delivering energy to the vehicle’s transmission using retail prices. The details follow.
1) Powering a Vehicle Directly with Electricity = 30p/kWh (no tax)
2) Powering a vehicle with synthetic petrol manufactured using the same Electricity = 135p/kWh (no tax)
3) Current Petrol Cost = 19p/kWh before tax (45p/kWh after tax @ur momisugly £1.30/l)
DETAILS:
The Calculations: It’s quite simple.
On enquiring of this group I was guided to a recent paper by Prof David MacKay – who advises the DECC
MacKay DJC. 2013 Solar energy in the context of energy use, energy transportation
and energy storage. Phil Trans R Soc A 371: 20110431.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2011.0431
David has addressed this question as part of research into the supply realities of solar energy that can be applied in this context. I validated his energy intensity figures other ways.. The paper is interesting for its approach to the realities of powering developed economies with real time solar derived energy sources in various latitudes. Roughly all the solar energy incident on the entire UK land surface is about a match with our current energy use, if I read it right. Of course that isn’t always available when required and can’t be collected without covering the entire UK land surface in renewables”
I use his approach on page 23 which is also copied below to scope an answer to the real question for our competitive and still developed economy…
– How much would synthetic petrol cost, and when is its use economically justified versus electric propulsion?
Here’s the summary:
HOW? We can use all you can eat affordable zero carbon electrical energy from nuclear power to manufacture relatively light liquid or gaseous synthetic fuel to combust to liberate energy at the time of use, as we mainly do now. WE have the technology to replace natural feedstocks with synthetics, given plentiful nuclear eenrgy.
This process captures CO2 from the atmosphere plus water as feed stock, and effectively recycles the CO2 emissions of its own product, so is operationally carbon neutral. This is as sustainable as our Sun. Only nuclear binding energy is used, to restore chemical molecular binding energy. We could also make Methane, Methanol and Ethylene (Plastics feed stock)
HOW MUCH? I have simply compared the direct costs of an electric vehicle with one powered by liquid fuel manufactured using the same electricity.
Start off by assuming the monstrously fraudulent one bidder deal with EDF @ur momisugly 9p/kWh strike price for wholesale nuclear electricity on the grid (i), plus the current 6p/kWh paid in retail charges for all the other distribution and service provision costs, say 15p/kWh retail. This applies to both applications so affects the absolute value but does not affect the relative comparison
(i) should be 6p/kWh as it is elsewhere for new nuclear deals not done between French and British Civil servants for their lobbyists (EDF is owned by the French government).
1) Powering a Vehicle Directly with (nuclear) Electricity = 30p/kWh (no tax) :
To charge a battery is roughly 50% efficient, so in energy available to the vehicle transmission that works out at 2 x 15p/kWh = 30p/kWh.
Plus the additional costs of battery supply and management. I have not included grid losses.
2) Powering the same vehicle with synthetic petrol Manufactured Using Nuclear Electricity = 135p/kWh (no tax) :
Per the referenced paper to energise the chemical process takes 13kWh of energy per Kg and is around 38% efficient, so requires 35kWh of energy to produce 1 Kg of petrol.
This gives back 13 kWh of energy on combustion, which is converted with c.30% energy efficiency in modern IC engines for delivery to the transmission.
So 35kWh input costs 525p and delivers 3.9kWh at the transmission = 135p/kWh
3) Current Petrol Cost = 19p/kWh before tax (45p/kWh after tax):
For comparison fossil derived petrol is currently £1.30/L, which is £1.75/Kg at a density of 0.74Kg/L.
This petrol delivers 13kWh of energy, converted to 3.9kWh of motive energy at 30% efficiency, so the cost per kWh at the transmission is
175p/kg / (13 x 0.3) kWh/kg = 45p/kWh
This is after tax, before tax it is 55p/litre delivered to the forecourt, so true cost is 45p/kWh x (55/130) = 19p/kWh before tax.
NOTES:
(i) Whoever takes the lead in the inevitable mass build of nuclear power to replace fossil fuel generation could mop up some of the third world’s CO2 emissions (in net storage, as we re emit the atmospheric CO2 we use to create the fuel when burning the fuel.
This is entirely sustainable apart from the nuclear binding energy consumed.
(ii) Using a liquid, solid, or even gaseous form of intense chemical energy which can be easily transported and conveniently replenished when and where required, is a proven and much more practical way to energise transportation. Lugging pure electrical energy around in heavy chemical storage containers of limited capacity that have a high transport cost of their own, are inconvenient to swop out, and slow to charge is not. Unfortunately the economics of synthetic fuel appear to put this option at a price premium to batteries.
(iii) There are Some Progressive Ways Solar Energy could be harvested far away to make synthetic fuels where it is cheapest in terms of solar energy and land use costs and availability (Saudi/Libya when theoil runs out!) As with the ice ships of old transporting ice from cold parts of the world to cool the larders of landowner aristos, but in reverse, f as fuel made from stored chemical enrgy ..
That’s what I think. Solve the end of fossil and energy supply problems progressively with real science that can work, versus legislating green beliefs that cannot on the science fact.
You?
Surely there’s a tax credit to be had for taking all that carbon out the air?
Are these people serious that this is in any way a practical solution? Try to get investors. Oh hold on, the government will like it, so the taxpayers can invest without their permission.
Uh huh. Keep pushing that rock up that hill…
A Co2 sucker , just like a scary global warming sucker .
Let’s kid ourselves this contraption , plus millions of others like it , would regulate the exact amount of Co2 in the atmosphere . Who sets the desired amount ? Who would ever guess we will have world wars over who controls the Co2 knob ?
It may tend to dampen unreasonable fear of the potential future CO2 menace, possibly, according to my ad hoc models.