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
https://www.google.at/search?q=california+dreaming+lyrics&oq=California+dreaming&aqs=chrome.
The problem is that, if they were somehow successful, they would be sued by leftist cities and states for the damage caused by reduced plant growth and increased poverty due to lower CO2 levels.
(This would in no way reduce the number of suits they would still file against fossil fuel makers for supposedly increasing global warming.)
“Centuries of unchecked human carbon emissions also mean that atmospheric carbon dioxide is a virtually unlimited feedstock for transformation into new fuels.”
Our 100s of years of emissions have nothing to do with today’s atmospheric CO2 concentration. Right here, they are showing their ignorance and lack of depth of knowledge.
There is simply no way that reforming CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels can be anywhere as cost efficient as extracting them from the ground as natural gas and oil. Converting electricity from wind or solar to chemical energy will have several steps, all of which must lose energy to be accomplished, per the laws of thermodynamics.
Also, as the Sun sets and the wind dies, this industry would be inherently sporadic and there is no way, without a horribly cost ineffective collection grid to bring energy for different regions together to create a reliable energy source.
Another non-starter brought to us by the Boondoggle Climate Change Alarmist Industry of Crony Capitalism. Another total waste of money, as useful as biofuels from algae. Both do not pass the smell test.
1. So their machine can recognize the difference between a CO2 molecule produced by anything transportation related, and all other CO2 molecules?
2. By “cost-effective” I assume they mean they have a product that some willing buyer someplace is willing to pay them an amount that will be greater than the cost it takes them to produce, market and deliver that product? ‘Cuz iffen they don’t, it ain’t “cost-effective”.
3. So what’s that in $/gal of gasoline? (See 2. above WRT “cost-effective”.) Will it have the same BTU/gal as gasoline?
4. Last, but possibly most importantly, WHY?!?!?! This Earth has been near to starvation of CO2 for several thousand years, it needs more CO2, not less. Maybe this is something I don’t need to worry about, the graphics from the satellite clearly show CO2 produced by/from masses of civilization is inconsequential for all intents and purposes, our efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will undoubtedly have an even less noticeable effect.
So, yeah, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
We need more CO2 to increase the plant life that we all depend on for life. There is not an overabundance of it in the air, so if it is sucked up to produce energy, then there will be less for plants and life. However, there may be a way to get around this. There is lots of CO2 in the oceans. There is lots to learn yet.