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Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

May 17, 2024

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

The direct air capture industry got a boost last week with the opening of Mammoth, the largest plant yet for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but questions remain about whether the technology can scale up.

Humanity has spent the past few centuries releasing ever greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – a state of affairs that must be reversed if we are to get to grips with climate change. Removing such CO2 in a process called direct air capture (DAC) has been on the cards for some time, but finally, after years of research and small-scale pilot projects, giant carbon-sucking facilities are becoming a reality. The question is, will the industry grow large enough, fast enough?

The Mammoth direct air capture plant in Iceland is the largest in the world
Climeworks

DAC got a big boost last week when Swiss company Climeworks switched on a new plant called Mammoth. This can extract up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere – living up to its name, at least when compared with its predecessor Orca, which boasted a maximum capture capacity of just 4000 tonnes per year.

The new plant instantly quadrupled global capacity for DAC and is a sign of a step change under way in the industry. Mammoth will only hold the title of world’s largest DAC plant until next year, when the Stratos plant, built by a subsidiary of energy firm Occidental Petroleum using technology from Canadian DAC company Carbon Engineering, comes online. It will be able to extract half a million tonnes of CO2 a year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

May 16, 2024

Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?

The direct air capture industry got a boost last week with the opening of Mammoth, the largest plant yet for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but questions remain about whether the technology can scale up.

Humanity has spent the past few centuries releasing ever greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – a state of affairs that must be reversed if we are to get to grips with climate change. Removing such CO2 in a process called direct air capture (DAC) has been on the cards for some time, but finally, after years of research and small-scale pilot projects, giant carbon-sucking facilities are becoming a reality. The question is, will the industry grow large enough, fast enough?

The Mammoth direct air capture plant in Iceland is the largest in the world
Climeworks

DAC got a big boost last week when Swiss company Climeworks switched on a new plant called Mammoth. This can extract up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere – living up to its name, at least when compared with its predecessor Orca, which boasted a maximum capture capacity of just 4000 tonnes per year.

The new plant instantly quadrupled global capacity for DAC and is a sign of a step change under way in the industry. Mammoth will only hold the title of world’s largest DAC plant until next year, when the Stratos plant, built by a subsidiary of energy firm Occidental Petroleum using technology from Canadian DAC company Carbon Engineering, comes online. It will be able to extract half a million tonnes of CO2 a year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Capturing Carbon With Machines Is a Failure—So Why Are We Subsidizing It?

June 9, 2023

Capturing Carbon With Machines Is a Failure—So Why Are We Subsidizing It?

Human activity—mostly the burning of fossil fuels—has raised Earth’s atmospheric carbon content by 50 percent, from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 420 ppm. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve released approximately 950 billion metric tons of carbon into the air. Every year, humans emit more than 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, as of 2021 measurements. Even if we stop burning fossil fuels now, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere will cause Earth’s climate to continue warming for decades, triggering heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme weather.

Climate scientists warn that if we want to avert catastrophe, a significant amount of excess atmospheric CO2 must be captured and sequestered. The process is called carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and it has been receiving more attention as nations, states, and industries strive to meet their climate goals. But how should we go about doing it?

There are two broad strategies: biological and mechanical. Nature already absorbs and emits about 100 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year through the natural processes in the biosphere—including plant growth—an amount 2.5 times humanity’s annual carbon output. So, according to advocates for biological carbon removal, our best bet is simply to help the planet do a little more of what it is already doing to absorb carbon. We could accomplish this through reforestation, soil-building agricultural practices, and encouraging kelp growth in oceans.

On the other hand, advocates for mechanical carbon removal point to technologies that successfully capture CO2 in the laboratory; if these machines were scaled up, those advocates tell us, we could create an enormous new industry with plenty of jobs while removing atmospheric carbon and reducing climate risk…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Carbon capture is a fairytale solution to the climate crisis

February 11, 2023

Carbon capture is a fairytale solution to the climate crisis

Billions of dollars for CCUS are gifts to the oil and gas industry — to keep the profits rolling in while distracting from real solutions

Scientists have long been clear: this is the most critical decade for climate action. We must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Fortunately, we have the tools to achieve this. It has never been easier or more affordable to start putting climate solutions into practice — tools like renewable energy, electrifying our homes and transportation, and making our buildings and industries more energy efficient.

Of course, this represents a major threat to powerful fossil fuel companies, who for decades have failed to act responsibly when faced with climate science. Historically, fossil fuel companies have worked to cast doubt on climate science.

In recent years, as outright climate denial has become increasingly indefensible, fossil fuel companies have pivoted towards a politics of delay. Their latest scheme: pushing carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS).

Oil and gas companies are now trying to paint a picture of a future where we can still have just as much — or more — oil and gas production, but where power plants and oil refineries can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and bury the emissions deep in the ground.

However, despite what the oil and gas industry wants us to believe, CCUS is not a climate solution. It’s a distraction from the need for a rapid transformation away from fossil fuel use that is required to keep global warming below catastrophic levels within this decade…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing

January 22, 2022

Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing

A new Global Witness report found that it has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million gas-powered cars.
Shell's Quest carbon capture and storage facility in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta.
SHELL’S QUEST CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE FACILITY IN FORT SASKATCHEWAN, ALBERTA. THE CANADIAN PRESS/JASON FRANSON

A first-of-its-kind “green” Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it’s capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found.

Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage facility captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the hydrogen produced at its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. Scotford refines oil from the Alberta tar sands.

But a new report from human rights organization Global Witness found the hydrogen plant emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in the same timeframe—including methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and accounts for about a quarter of man-made warming today.

To put that in perspective, the “climate-forward” part of the Scotford plant alone has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million fuel-powered cars, Global Witness said.

“We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story,” said Dominic Eagleton, who wrote the report. He said industry’s been pushing for governments to subsidize the production of fossil hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas) that’s supplemented with carbon capture technology as a “climate-friendly” way forward, but the new report shows that’s not the case.

In an email, Shell said the facility was introduced to display the merits of carbon capture technology, but didn’t directly respond to the allegation that its hydrogen component emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The world’s biggest carbon-removal plant just opened. In a year, it’ll negate just 3 seconds’ worth of global emissions.

December 22, 2021

The world’s biggest carbon-removal plant just opened. In a year, it’ll negate just 3 seconds’ worth of global emissions.

Climeworks carbon capture plant orca iceland
‘Orca,’ Climeworks’ new facility in Iceland, can capture 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Business Wire via AP

Framed by a backdrop of volcanoes, a semi-circle of gigantic fans in Iceland are sucking in air, super-heating it, then filtering out the carbon dioxide.

This carbon capture and storage facility, named Orca, turned on two weeks ago after more than 18 months of construction. The fans are embedded in shipping container-sized boxes, and once the carbon dioxide is separated, it gets mixed with water then travels through snaking, fat tubes deep underground, where the carbon cools and solidifies.

Through this process, Orca can trap and sequester 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year – making it the largest facility of its kind in the world (though there are currently only two running).

“Think of it like a vacuum cleaner for the atmosphere,” Julio Friedmann, an energy policy researcher at Columbia University who attended the plant’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, told Insider. “Nothing else can do what this tech does.”

According to the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), carbon capture and storage is a necessary part of our best-case climate scenarios. But currently, facilities like Orca only negate a sliver of global emissions.

Climate scientist Peter Kalmus has done the math: “If it works, in one year it will capture three seconds worth of humanity’s CO2 emissions,” he wrote on Twitter.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Net zero policies are ’emperor’s new clothes,’ academics warn

October 27, 2021

Net zero policies are ’emperor’s new clothes,’ academics warn

factory pollution
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Net zero targets are a “fantasy” that often just protect “business as usual,” a leading expert in environment and sustainability has said.

Dr. James Dyke, Assistant Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, criticized net zero targets as a “great idea in principle” but which “help perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminish the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.”

The excoriating critique is published in “Negotiating Climate Change in Crisis,” a new essay volume on the  featuring prominent social scientists and humanities scholars from around the world, co-edited by the University of Exeter Business School’s Professor Steffen Boehm.

In a chapter titled “Why net zero policies do more harm than good,” Dr. Dyke and his co-authors Dr. Wolfgang Knorr and Professor Sir Robert Watson argue that the discourse around net zero hinges on deploying potentially dangerous ‘fairytale’ technologies such as carbon capture.

Their essay looks at how projecting a future with more trees was first used by the US to “in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now.”

They go on to argue that the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree Celsius emissions target allowed “untested carbon dioxide removal mechanisms” to be included in climate-economic modeling.

They describe Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) as a “savior technology,” saying “the mere prospect of  and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much-needed immediate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.”

The authors say: “It has been estimated that BECCS could demand an area of land approaching twice the size of India. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding eight to 10 billion people around the middle of the century, or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Huge carbon capture pipeline network proposed: Industry’s ‘delay-and-fail strategy’ rises again

July 25, 2021

Huge carbon capture pipeline network proposed: Industry’s ‘delay-and-fail strategy’ rises again

An astute journalist I know once described carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a “delay-and-fail strategy” devised by the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s ploy was utterly obvious to him: Promise to perfect and deploy CCS at some vague point in the future. By the time people catch on that CCS won’t work, the fossil fuel industry will have successfully extended the time it has operated without onerous regulation for another couple of decades.

And because huge financial resources (mostly government resources) will have gone to CCS projects instead of low-carbon energy production, society will continue to be wildly dependent on carbon-based fuels (giving the industry further running room).

The trouble is that the cynical CCS strategy has already been under way and failing for more than two decades already. And yet, it is seeking a renewed lease on life with a proposal for a vast network of carbon dioxide pipelines “twice the size of the current U.S. oil pipeline network by volume.” The public face of the effort is a former Obama administration secretary of energy with a perennially bad haircut, Ernest Moniz.

Moniz has a partnership with the AFL-CIO to push the idea. No doubt unions like the project because it would create a lot of jobs regardless of whether it actually addresses climate change.

Just for the record, here’s a list of reasons that CCS doesn’t work and likely will not work in any time frame that matters for addressing climate change:

  1. It’s very costly. Many of the pilot projects have been shut down because they are uneconomical.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Carbon capture could require 25% of all global energy

December 8, 2019

Carbon capture could require 25% of all global energy

Preface.  This is clearly a pipedream. Surely the authors know this, since they say that the energy needed to run direct air capture machines in 2100 is up to 300 exajoules each year. That’s more than half of global energy consumption today.  It’s equivalent to the current annual energy demand of China, the US, the EU and Japan combined.  It is equal to the global supply of energy from coal and gas in 2018.

That’s a showstopper. This CO2 chomper isn’t going anywhere.  It simply requires too much energy, raw materials, and an astounding, impossibly large-scale rapid deployment of 30% a year to be of any use.

Reaching 30 Gt CO2/yr of CO2 capture – a similar scale to current global emissions – would mean building some 30,000 large-scale DAC factories. For comparison, there are fewer than 10,000 coal-fired power stations in the world today.  

The cement and steel used in DACCS facilities would require a great deal of energy and CO2 emissions that need to be subtracted from whatever is sequestered.

Nor can the CO2 be stored in carbon capture sorbents – these are between the research and demonstration levels, far from being commercial, and are subject to degradation which would lead to high operational and maintenance costs.  Their manufacture also releases chemical pollutants that need to be managed, adding to the energy used even more. Plus sorbents can require a great deal of high heat and fossil fuel inputs, possibly pushing up the “quarter of global energy” beyond that.

As far as I can tell the idea of sorbents, which are far from being commercial and very expensive to produce, is only being proposed because there’s not enough geological storage to put CO2.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Developing Country Issues at COP24 … and a Bit of Good News for Solar Power and Carbon Capture

December 19, 2018

Developing Country Issues at COP24 … and a Bit of Good News for Solar Power and Carbon Capture

Photo Source Doman84 | CC BY 2.0

We humans are an interesting species … instead of seeing eye-to-eye, we are inclined to see eye-to-nose.  We focus on the present and ourselves, particularly where our comfort is concerned, no matter how dire the predictions for the future.

Although these are now over, such has been evident at the climate change talks in Katowice, Poland.  An effort to mandate the Paris agreement, in light of the dire 1.5C report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been stymied repeatedly by Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait.  Particularly disturbed are island countries like the Maldives that are literally disappearing with sea-level rise.  One of the last spats was on the word “welcoming” as in welcoming the IPCC 1.5C report.  It has been changed to “welcomes the timely completion of … ” in the final draft thereby not endorsing its conclusions, stark warnings or more ambitious goals.

The serious sticking point has been Article 6.  It deals with country plans and is of special concern to the poorer countries promised financial support.  But to obtain it Measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of carbon emissions reduction is sought by donor agencies and private sector groups.

Thus Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is an international organization promoting balanced economic growth, that is without harming the environment.  It can help prepare a low emissions development strategy by assisting in developing viable MRV schemes.   It has for Colombia, Fiji and Mongolia, and is pursuing the same for others like Laos, Mozambique, Nepal and Senegal among others,  Sri Lanka, a vulnerable island nation, has prepared MRV systems for energy and transportation but requires help in other areas like agriculture, animal husbandry and industrial emissions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Carbon Capture – Does it Work?

November 26, 2018

Carbon Capture – Does it Work?

Photo Source Nicholas A. Tonelli | CC BY 2.0

Harken! Good news (maybe) “encouraging news” is a better description, as Negative Emissions Technology (“NET”) starts coming into focus. Conceptually, carbon removal or direct air capture removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which would be great for suppressing climate change.

In that regard, Elizabeth Kolbert recently interviewed (Yale Environment 360) Stephen Pacala (Princeton professor) chairman of the US scientific panel studying carbon removal under the auspices of the National Academies. Which means the project has top-notch clearances, in fact, blue chip.

Of course, the big question about direct carbon capture is whether it can fix a very big problem created by humans burning fossil fuels like crazed Madhatters portending an ecological disaster-in-waiting because of excessive levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, possibly leading to human extinction way ahead of schedule, too early, or looked at another way, extinction occurring well ahead of scientists’ models. But really, honestly and truly who in his/her right mind “models” human extinction?

Negative Emission Technology -NET- that removes carbon dioxide (“CO2”) from the atmosphere would be a dream come true, assuming it happens fast enough to prevent already-collapsing ecosystems from further total collapse, e.g., permafrost throughout the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the East Siberian Arctic Sea, ESAS, where subsea permafrost covers massive quantities of methane (CH4) in extraordinarily shallow waters. It’s the world’s largest reservoir, and CH4 is the most potent of the greenhouse gases. Problem: The subsea permafrost protective cap is rapidly thinning because of global warming. Already a Russian/American research team has witnessed alarmingly large columns of methane escaping into the atmosphere in the ESAS.

Therefore, the crucial question of the 21st century: Does technology for carbon removal ultimately measure up to the task at hand, meaning, long-term survival of Homo sapiens?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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