After decades of lack of progress in direct-air CO2 capture, the idea has suddenly set fire to it. Recently, U.S. Transportation agreed $ 447 million for R&D projects, United Airlines announced a multi-million-dollar venture, and Microsoft launched a billion-dollar fund to invest in carbon removal technologies.
What is driving the new commitment? In a word, angst. “The world cannot get to 1.5 ° C without carbon removal,” Microsoft argues in a thoughtful white paper detailing its strategy. However, after examining the options, the company concluded that “there is no specific carbon transfer market today. ”
A Nature Communications paper published in January and covered by Anthropocene, as well as an inspiring article in WIRED, analyzed the potential of “wartime-like accident use” of capture systems air just to reduce global warming and eventually put it back. The results can be used to make hard cases both for and against a major effort to introduce direct air capture projects now, although the technology is still unconventional, expensive and underdeveloped.
We will briefly consider the arguments for and against.
The case for going big now
1. Emissions are not coming down fast enough. We can’t wait any longer to start building negative spreads. In an eye-opening report on 26 February, the United Nations set out its latest emissions reduction commitments submitted by countries under the Paris agreement. To limit global warming to 2 ° C or less, net CO2 emissions must fall by about 25% from 2010 levels by 2030. But the commitments so far have pushed us to reduce by less than 1% by 2030.
A study in Nature Communications concluded that a large scale of air capture plants could remove just about 2 billion tonnes of CO2 annually by 2050 – a good chunk of the 6 gigatons or so of net removal. necessary to make it possible for us to stay within the warming limit of 2 ° C. to take out the pool. If we wait too long to start, the production capacity will not be there in time.
2. Concept testing projects show that some approaches work and could scale in the 2020s. United Airlines funds the Carbon Engineering construction plant in Texas and expects to draw a million tons of CO2 annually from the air once it goes online in 2025 or later. Climeworks is working with Carbfix and an Icelandic georegulatory facility on a much smaller project that will add 4,000 tonnes a year of CO2 to basalt, starting this year. But in many parts of the world, appropriate geological formations (Carbfix has made a neat map of them) could wake up billions of tons of the gas. And instead of pushing CO2 down into the rock, basalt dust could be taken up into the air and spread over large areas of farmland, using existing technologies and infrastructure, such as Anthropocene. reported.
The case for waiting
1. To meet the crisis of the problem, we now need to spend limited budgets on the most cost-effective ways to reduce emissions. American Science politely demonstrated the results of a meta-analysis that compared methods for scavenging carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, from reforestation and soil conservation to life and bio-energy by capture. CO2. The costs per ton removed were 3-4 times higher for capturing air just than it was for the other options. In fact, the Nature Communications study estimated that massive deployment of DAC systems would cost 1–2% of global GDP – many trillion dollars – over the next few decades. That is a huge opportunity cost.
2. Future carbon transfer systems are likely to be far more energy efficient and profitable than they are today. Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Energy spend almost all of their budget for this technology on R&D and start-up initiatives. That’s smart, because the carbon removal machines we have today are too expensive and inefficient to build large volumes. They consume so much energy, cement, and steel that they generate a lot of emissions themselves. In addition, scientists have been making rapid progress designing new ways to convert CO2 into useful – and profitable – products such as fuels, plastics and fiber. Today, most air capture schemes would not simply issue over-expensive carbon certification.
What to keep an eye on
1. Microsoft’s package of carbon removal contracts. The company has currently made its case in scouting for – and investigating – carbon removal schemes. It looks to sink millions of tonnes of CO2 and has set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to make it. So far, only 0.1% of their package captures direct air; look for that to grow in the coming years.
2. Elon Musk $ 100 million award for new carbon removal technology. The billionaire has teamed up with the XPRIZE Foundation to create a $ 100 million four-year global competition to acquire advanced technologies for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that can scale to remove 10 gigatons before 2050. By October 2022, the top 15 teams will be selected. Look for clever ideas to emerge as teams emerge working prototypes capable of removing at least a ton of CO2 each day.
3. How successful BP and other oil giants are at multi-million-dollar carbon sequestration projects. Carbon dioxide makes up just 0.04% of air, so it is much easier to capture dense currents at chemical plants. But the project in England led by BP to collect CO2 from many factories and refineries and then pipeline it 90 miles out to porous rocks beneath the North Sea, will test government forces, market and industry that will be critical to underground success. carbon sequestration – whether it is aerial or from other sources.