What it will take to get affordable carbon removal

A couple of companies have begun designing what could be Europe’s largest direct air capture plant, capable of capturing one million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and burying it under the North Sea floor.

Kidnapped climate pollution will be sold as carbon credit, reflecting growing demand for carbon removal, as many nations and corporations set zero emission plans based on the use of trees, machinery or other resources directly or indirectly. CO2 from the air.

Climate researchers say the world may need it to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide every year By the middle of the twentieth century, we have not been able to clean up “residual emissions” from things like airplanes and agriculture and to get rid of dangerous levels of global warming.

The critical and unanswered question, however, is how much it will cost to capture live air, and whether it will determine whether companies and nations can afford it.

The facility, proposed by Carbon Engineering and Storegga Geotechnologies, is likely to be located in the north-east of Scotland, allowing a wide range of renewable energy and trapped carbon dioxide to reach offshore sites, the companies said. It is expected to join the line by 2026.

“We can’t stop them all [source of] emissions, “says Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, which is based on British Engineering.” It’s too difficult, too expensive and disturbing. That’s where removing carbon is. We’re seeing more and more of it as essential. “

Getting $ 100 a ton

Oldham has refused to charge for carbon removal and they still don’t know the tonne costs they will get with the European plant.

But he said the company is confident that it will finally reach the levels of direct air capture costs identified in a 2018 study at Joule, led by Carbon Engineering founder and Harvard professor David Keith. It put the range Between $ 94 and $ 232 per ton when the technology reaches commercial scale.

Achieving $ 100 per tonne is economically viable, as large U.S. customers pay between $ 65 and $ 110 for carbon dioxide used for commercial purposes, which has been little noticed. May paper by Habib Azarabadi and pioneering Klaus Lackner takes the air live, both at the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at the University of Arizona. ($ 100 doesn’t have a separate but relatively lower cost of carbon sequestration.)

At that point, it will be a sensible way to channel 10% to 20% of emissions that will continue to be difficult or expensive to capture direct air, and it can also compete with the cost of capturing CO2 before it leaves power. plants and factories, the authors say.

But the best intention is that the sector today is not close to that level. In 2019, Climeworks, a Swiss direct air capture company, announced its costs they ranged from $ 500 to $ 600 per ton.

Azarabadi and Lackner have found that it will take a whole bunch of plants to reach that $ 100 threshold.

Specifically, based on the “learning rates” of successful technologies, or the extent to which costs have decreased as manufacturing capacity has increased, the study estimates that the direct air capture industry will need to grow more than 300 times to achieve costs. $ 100 per ton. It only takes between $ 50 million and $ 2 billion in federal funding to cover the difference between the actual cost of CO2 and market rates.

Lackner says the key question is whether the study applies the right learning curves from successful technologies like solar (costs fell roughly 10 times as the scale increased 1,000 times) or whether direct air capture falls into more isolated categories of technology. learning does not reduce costs quickly.

“Hundreds of millions invested in buying the cost can tell if the hypothesis is good or bad,” Lackner said in an email.

Dream catcher

The UK has set a plan to zero emissions by 2050, which will require the removal of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide to balance emissions sources that may already be polluting. The government does starting to give Millions of dollars to help achieve these various technical development goals, about $ 350,000 for Carbon Engineering and Storegga efforts Project Dreamcatcher.

The plant will probably be located around the so-called Acorn project, A subsidiary of the Scottish Storegga, developed by Blue Dot Energy. The plan is to produce hydrogen from the natural gas extracted from the North Sea while the emissions from the process are captured. The project would also relocate oil and gas infrastructure in the far north-east of Scotland to transport carbon dioxide and inject it into areas below the seabed.

Oldham says the direct air capture plant could use the same infrastructure to store carbon dioxide.

The companies expect to build a facility capable of catching 500,000 tonnes a year, but may eventually double the scale depending on market demand. The low end would also surpass the largest European facility in operation, Climeworks’ Orca facility in Iceland, is expected to remove 4,000 tons per year. Just a few more small-scale plants they are built around the world.

The planned capacity of the Scottish plant is essentially the same as other full-size facilities planned for Texas by Carbon Engineering. It will also start as a half-million-tonne plant a year with a capacity of up to a million. Construction on this plant is likely early next year and is expected to be operational by 2024.

Much of the carbon dioxide trapped in the plant, however, will be used for what is known as improved oil recovery. inject underground oil to release additional oil From oil wells in the Permian Basin. By doing so carefully, this process can produce “carbon-neutral” fuels that do not add more emissions than at least those released into the atmosphere.

Oldham agrees that building more plants will be key to reducing costs in the sector. Carbon Engineering will see major declines from its first plant to its second. As the curve bends, it will depend on which governments implement other climate policies that generate more carbon prices or demand for carbon sequestration, essentially forcing them to start areas like aviation, cement and steel that are difficult to fix. paying someone to clean up their pollution, he added.