Go Inside an Industrial Plant That Sucks Carbon Dioxide Straight Out of the Air

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601490/go-inside-an-industrial-plant-that-sucks-carbon-dioxide-straight-out-of-the-air/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Go Inside an Industrial Plant That Sucks Carbon Dioxide Straight Out of the Air[/font]

[font size=4]A pilot plant north of Vancouver is testing a process to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, hoping to prove it is economically viable.[/font]

by Peter Fairley | June 6, 2016

[font size=3]Carbon dioxide emissions must decrease to nearly zero by 2040 if global warming by the end of this century is to be held to 2 °C. But we may well miss that target. A pilot plant started up last fall at Squamish, British Columbia, is testing a backup plan: sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the air.

Capturing ambient carbon dioxide is a tall order because, for all the trouble it causes, the greenhouse gas makes up just 0.04 percent of the air we breathe. The Squamish plant can capture one ton of carbon dioxide a day. Significantly reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would require thousands of far larger facilities, each sucking millions of tons of carbon per year out of the air.

The plant is the brainchild of Calgary-based Carbon Engineering and its founder, Harvard University physicist David Keith. While some scientists have estimated that direct air capture would cost $400 to $1,000 per ton of carbon dioxide, Keith projects that large plants could do it for about $100 per ton.

“We’ve taken existing pieces of industrial equipment and thought about new chemistries to run through them,” says Adrian Corless, Carbon Engineering’s CEO. The company captures carbon dioxide in a refashioned cooling tower flowing with an alkali solution that reacts with acidic carbon dioxide. That yields dissolved carbon molecules that are then converted to pellets in equipment created to extract minerals in water treatment plants. And the plant can turn those carbonate solids into pure carbon dioxide gas for sale by heating them in a modified cement kiln.

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[Warpy]

1. After they trap it, this is what they can do with it

Experiment 'turns waste CO2 to stone'

Scientists think they have found a smart way to constrain carbon dioxide emissions - just turn them to stone.

The researchers report an experiment in Iceland where they have pumped CO2 and water underground into volcanic rock.

Reactions with the minerals in the deep basalts convert the carbon dioxide to a stable, immobile chalky solid.

Even more encouraging, the team writes in Science magazine, is the speed at which this process occurs: on the order of months.

More, one sentence at a time, at http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36494501

[eppur_se_muova]

2. So they plan to resell it ... sounds like a closed loop.

Suck it out of the air, sell it, use it, and watch it go back into the atmosphere again.

Since it takes alkali to capture the CO2, this won't help much ... alkali is made by brine electrolysis, or by decomposing CaCO3 (limestone, shells, etc.) which produces ... CO2. Brine electrolysis also produces chlorine or chlorine oxoacids, and there's only so much market for them. You can't have a net removal of CO2 from the air without a net consumption of alkali, which is impossible with CaCO3, or a net production of Cl2 etc.

I've learned to be skeptical of any claim to remove CO2 using "alkali" or "base". People never seem to understand that you need a LOT of base, and making it takes a LOT of energy.

[pscot]

3. BC is also trying to turn the Northwest

into the major fossil fuels terminus to the Pacific rim. Ironies abound.

[mackdaddy]

4. Article does not start out too well..

"Carbon dioxide emissions must decrease to nearly zero by 2040 if global warming by the end of this century is to be held to 2 °C."

Maybe if they said end of this DECADE instead of century. We are already over 1.4 degree C, and are still adding CO2. Just what is already in that atmosphere we will be well above 2deg C.


If we do not put the CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place, we would not have to pull it back out. Burning 1 ton of coal puts 2.86 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (And this does not include the fossil fuels burnt to get the coal out of the ground and to the furnace.)

I have a 10kw solar array I installed exactly 3 years ago, and I have produced 38megawatt hours of electricity in that time. It would have taken 38 thousand pounds of burning coal to produce the same amount of electricity. That is also 54 tons of CO2 NOT produced by my one personal solar array.

Who do is send my $400 to $1000 per ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere to? Heck I would be happy with the $100 per ton.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. “If we do not put the CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place…”

“If we do not put the CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place, we would not have to pull it back out.”

True! By all means let’s cut emissions!

However, there is already too much CO₂ in the atmosphere. We need to lower atmospheric levels to 350 ppm (and probably less) in relatively short order. Cutting emissions will not lower atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ it will only slow the rate of increase.