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
I really hate to rain on their parade, but we already have this tech. It is called “trees”, for lignin based fuels, or “algae” for ethanols.
At a concentration of 1/25th part of ONE percent it would be necessary to process 1, 000 000 kg of air in order to extract 400 kg of CO2…which would then need to be ‘converted’ into 200 kg of a useful fuel.
Nope…
Boy, there is a lot I don’t know about this idea but given what a low percentage CO2 is in the air it seems like it would take a high volume of air to get a small amount of CO2. Do they scrub a 100% of the CO2 out of the air? Don’t locate these plants near highly vegetated areas. Poor plants will start dying off. How much energy will it take to run this process? Is that economical? If this is in fact reasonable, the environmentalists just lost their best argument to demand switching to expensive, non-carbon producing energy sources.
Well assuming they do actually hit the 232 per ton (they wont, not even close) that still works out to a handsome 2.55 per gallon increase in gasoline tax for the CO2. Funny that, that is just what the progressives have been hoping for, for the past 20 years. I say BS on the 232 per ton in the first place however, and since it is NOT even necessary to remove the CO2 as so far it has been beneficial it is nothing more than a continuation of the Progressive Tax Grab scheme.
Perhaps I am missing something. Exactly how do you make gasoline out of CO2? Does CO2 actually contain all the components of gasoline? Really?
They propose reacting CO2 with hydrogen to produce hydrocarbons. The hydrogen coming from water by electrolysis.
Again, this all technically quite feasible, but cost makes it unworkable. They suggest energy (electricity) from wind and/or solar. All they need to now do is make wind and solar energy bountiful and fabulously cheap.
It’s amazing what you can imagine humans might do if you assume free money to build expensive chemical engineering plant, and then free energy to run the processes. They probably assume that the people operating it must also work for free.
Ahhh, so just more fantasy mumbo jumbo. Got it. I have a bit of a clue about making gasoline and was fairly certain CO2 was not the secret ingredient.
You have to add hydrogen to get to gasoline, it’s a hydrocarbon. Gotta split water for that.
Splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen is rather expensive, so this would be a flat out non-starter.
When they suck all the CO2 out of the air they’ll face millions of irate farmer suing them for ruining their crops.
How much fossil fuel is used to generate the electricity used to create the new fuels from atmospheric CO2 and is it any less than the fuels produced? Those are the critical numbers. They explain why converting 40% of corn crops to ethanol is a losing game except for those who grow the corn. Perhaps the authors are inspired by the artificial (magical) carbon economy that prices carbon credits as if they were fairy dust.
This proposal is not totally daft. It certainly isn’t as daft as forcing unreliable uneconomic energy into the grid. The proposers do point out that it is a way of transforming unreliable energy sources into reliable transportable energy – ie. they do not claim that they have a new source of energy.
But just how economically competitive is it? The article puts the cost at $94-232 per ton of CO2. It doesn’t state explicitly that this includes the cost of stripping the O2 from the C, but let’s suppose that it does. Let’s also take the low end of the cost range, since development and use of the system is likely to bring down the unit cost. That gives us a cost of $94*(44/12) = $345 per ton of C fuel. The current price of oil is about $65/bbl, or something like $480 per ton.
So I say – let them go for it, using their own money not mine. If they succeed in an open and fair market, then they deserve their success. It could be hugely beneficial, by (a) removing unreliable energy from the grid and (b) making renewable energy available for transport. The only downside that I can see is that if the climate does cool, then they will be making it worse by reducing the amount of greenhouse gas. But the effect of that is unlikely to be measurable. So I repeat – let them go for it, using their own money, and I truly hope they succeed. But not with any of my money.
Same old same old expensive technological solution for a non-problem.
Yes, like travelling to the moon, we can do it, but the cost remains prohibitive for all practical purposes.
Their chemistry and engineering seems fine, but it is a waste of money and human intellectual capacity, at least until such time as energy is much cheaper than it is today. But the whole point of the global-warmers and other associated environmental extremists goals, is that they want to make energy more expensive, not less.
Meanwhile, trees still do it with great efficiency almost for free, self propagating, needing almost zero management and maintenance. The cost of growing forest cellulose/lignin is thus not measured in hundreds of dollars per ton. They also look and smell nice, provide all sorts of extra benefits such as living environments for many other life forms, help ameliorate hydrological and atmospheric pollution issues, afford recreational opportunities, building materials, increase local property value, inspire artists, generally make people happier…the list goes on and on and on.
America uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day
Transportation within the USA uses about 71% of the daily use of 20 million barrels of oil or about 14 million barrels per day.
The promoters of this atmospheric CO2 extraction process suggest an “industrial sized” extraction to oil processor” as having a capacity of 2000 barrels a day.
Therefore just to cover the total daily use of 14 million barrels of oils by the USA transportation sector would require at least a minimum of 7000 of these industrialised extraction plants.
Or 10, 000 of those atmospheric CO2 extraction plants to cover all of those 20 million Barrels of oil used daily by the USA.
No numbers seem to be provided on the amount of electrical energy required to extract each barrel equivalent of oil from the atmosphere except to claim that wind turbines would be utilised to provide the energy required for all of those 7000 atmospheric CO2 extractors / converters .
As the USA is on the point of becoming an exporter of USA origin oil, oil that is becoming surplus to its own requirements and being now the second largest producer of oil in the world, the whole exercise seems rather pointless.
Pointless as is usual for this type of projected wishful thinking by innumerate academics who don’t or can’t understand the methods used to cost a process or the scale required or the power required or ther severe and crippling limitations created by their “renewable energy can power everything “and stop the hypothetical , yet to be seen and accurately measured so called Climate Change.”
So…. gasoline is now renewable? Assuming a solar powered process, have we just cut out plants and animals in the production of fuels?
Wow. Perpetual motion at last. Burn it, turn it back into fuel and burn it again.
The 2nd Law was made to be broken.
Why on Earth would anyone want to rob the air of vital plant food, rather than continue to increase its almost starvation level by burning more fossil fuels, releasing this essential trace gas from its terrestrial prisons?
Ummm,,, gosh, no they haven’t. Where do they get the hydrogen? Takes more energy to obtain hydrogen than this process could ever produce.
Yes you could strip CO2 from air with limestone, but this is a net energy loser.
Not so much…
This could be the end of a perfectly good religion.
Good one Will. But do you think this will be the end of anything? Redistributionist leftists are looking forward to a century of hundreds of trillions of $$$ (Thank you Paris Agreement) to give away to tin pot dictators, climate bureaucrats and their own pockets to “solve” the climate problem. Will they let go of all that cash that easy? Hey, maybe they’ll invent some new problem about some other naturally occurring compound. Personally I’ve always been a little suspicious of H2O.
Assuming this process isn’t too expensive, it implies that internal combustion engines do not face certain extinction by 2100 from a paucity of petroleum.
Therefore, it does not make sense to anticipate such an extinction by force-marching us toward an all-electric infrastructure and transportation system. Such a forcing is not necessarily an unavoidable step in the long run.
“By removing emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into fresh fuels” Or we can just use photosynthesis and fermentation to produce alcohol for cars, which Brazil had been doing now for decades.
OK, so this isn’t such a bright idea. For one thing, why use windmills to generate electricity to power other windmills to recreate the wind that produced the original power? How efficient is that going to be? Why not just put the reaction beds out in the wind where the windmills already are?
Talk about scalable? Have a look at J Craig Venter, Synthia and his plans to scrub CO2 to produce methane. Guess my money is on him.
Strange I didn’t see any storage tamks in picture #2.
In reading this article, I noticed several statements:
CO2 is absorbed by an aqueous solution. Does this mean that they intend to shut down when air temperatures drop much below 0° C?
The authors expect to locate these plants near cheap renewable production sites. Renewables are described by many adjectives, but “cheap” is not one of them. Any energy production method which requires massive taxpayer subsidies to be competitive is by definition not “cheap.”
These issues cause me to question the costs which they used in their analysis which lead the authors to believe that their process would be cost effective.
Just coincidentally I’m sure, this is also an extremely efficient process to suck the money out of taxpayer pockets. And isn’t that the whole point anyway.
A bit off topic, but has it been researched by what extent the growth rates of the carbon based life form species, i.e. human beings, increased as CO2 levels have increased, or has all extra growth we see in succeeding generations been attributed to nutrition.
Similarly, was the size of the giant dinosaurs due to higher CO2 levels, or is it just plants that benefited?
It’s time to quantify the amount of energy required to undo the bond between the carbon and the oxygen, i.e. the energy released when we burned it in the first place. That’s all the energy which the sun, with the help of plants, deposited in the trees, coal, gas and oil which we burned to give us a standard of living. This has to be the most exquisite put-on I have ever read. Where is Harvard?
I would not want to live down wind from a scaled up version of this. CO2 is essential for life, animal and plant.
So where is the energy coming from?