Direct Air Capture 🏭
Capturing and removing CO2 from the air.
Welcome to a new episode of Year 2049, your weekly guide to the events, discoveries, and innovations shaping the future of tech, climate, science, and more.
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Happy Friday!
Thank you for the great responses to last week’s special edition. Talking about climate change is hard, but we have to accept the current reality we’re in and understand what needs to be done to create a better future for us all.
As promised, this week’s edition is about one of these solutions: carbon capture tech!
What you’ll learn today:
What carbon capture is and how it works
The different types of carbon capture
Applications and benefits
A look at the biggest direct air capture plant in the world
Current challenges
The importance of carbon capture to achieve our climate goals
Hope you enjoy this one.
This week’s comic
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The backstory
What’s Carbon Capture?
Carbon capture, officially known as carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), represents a group of technologies that can be used to capture CO2.
There are 2 types of CCUS:
Direct Air Capture (DAC): Capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS): Capturing CO2 directly from the emission source such as a power station or industrial plant before it’s sent into the air
Once that CO2 is captured, we can either use it or store it:
Utilization: reusing CO2 for a range of applications including enhanced oil recovery (to get more oil out of the ground, ironically), manufacturing synthetic fuels, and producing building materials like cement.
Storage: storing CO2 in geological formations, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Think of how you store all the stuff you can’t completely get rid of in your basement (am I the only one who still has his baby clothes?).
Benefits of CCUS
The IEA outlines four main benefits of CCUS that can help bring us closer to net-zero emissions:
It can be used to retrofit existing power plants. Power plants that are powered by coal or fossil fuels can be retrofitted so the CO2 emitted can be captured before it’s sent into the atmosphere.
It can help produce low-carbon hydrogen. Hydrogen is hailed as the “fuel of the future” but producing it requires an emissions-heavy process that relies on coal and natural gas. CCUS can help reduce the net emissions that come from producing this sustainable energy source.
It’s a solution for sectors with unavoidable emissions. Some industries have no way of reducing their emissions either because it’s expensive, impractical, or simply impossible. Industries like cement production, aviation, and natural gas processing cannot realistically achieve net-zero emissions without CCUS. Capturing and storing CO2 is their only option.
It can remove existing carbon from the atmosphere. We’ve been emitting more and more CO2 into our atmosphere over the past 200 years. DAC offers us a way to remove that carbon straight from the air and help reverse our past negligence.
The world’s biggest DAC plant
BECCS has existed for decades, but DAC is the newborn of the CCUS family who’s stealing all the attention away from its older sibling.
Let’s take a look at the biggest DAC plant in the world at the moment and the star of today’s comic: the Orca DAC plant from Swiss startup Climeworks.
The startup, who has Bill Gates as an investor, officially launched the Orca DAC plant in September 2021 in Iceland.
It will capture 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, which makes up for the annual emissions of less than 1,000 vehicles.
A simple explanation of how the Orca plant works:
Orca has 8 collector containers that act as big fans to capture air
Once the air is sucked into the collector, CO2 is captured on the surface of an internal filter
When the filter has captured enough CO2, the collector is closed and heated to 100°C (212°F)
The heating causes the pure CO2 to be released and stored
The CO2 is transported and stored deep underground. Climeworks partnered with another startup, Carbfix, to make this happen.
The heat and electricity required to power the Orca plant are supplied from a geothermal plant nearby.
More money, more carbon
For all its potential, DAC’s main challenge is that it’s expensive. Some numbers:
Cost to build the Orca DAC plant: $10-$15 million
Cost to remove 1 ton of CO2: $500-$600
DAC is “very expensive because the CO2 in the atmosphere is only 0.04%” says Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative. The lower concentration makes the entire process more expensive because it takes longer to fill up the collectors and the DAC plant needs a constant supply of energy. It’s also expensive to build and set up the plant.
But, the high costs shouldn’t be too alarming. We’re still in the early days of this and costs will eventually go down with scale, technical improvements, public and private funding, and subsidies provided.
You can even buy a Climeworks subscription to help them remove CO2 from the air. Something worth mentioning to your school or company if they’re looking for ways to help. Check it out here. (This is not sponsored, btw)
Final thoughts
Carbon capture is a technology that has existed for decades, but it’s never been more important for our future than today.
The value of CCUS sparks a debate because some argue that captured CO2 will be reused for enhanced oil recovery and not help reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. While this is a valid concern, it’s a technology we must use because it’s a vital part of solving the climate crisis according to the experts:
Out of 90 scenarios considered by the IPCC to keep global warming under 1.5ºC, 88 scenarios required “net-negative emissions”, aka capturing and burying CO2.
Climeworks is already setting a great example by not working directly with fossil fuel companies or selling their captured CO2 to be reused for enhanced oil recovery.
If you’re looking for something to do this weekend or something to think about during your shower, Elon Musk has a challenge for you:
I want to hear from you
What do you think of carbon capture and its role in achieving our climate goals?
If you missed the previous episode
Help me spread the word ❤️
Doing the research, learning about new topics, drawing comics, and writing this newsletter has been an absolute joy for me every week.
This edition took 9 hours to make, so I would appreciate it if you took 1 minute to invite your family and friends to subscribe to Year 2049 and stay informed about the events, discoveries, and inventions shaping our future.
Recommendations
My super smart friend and Futurist Rachelle Bugeaud put together a list of recommended Strategic Foresight books that are worth reading. See the full list here.
She also founded Avenear, a foresight-driven studio, and writes the Speculative Space design blog!
If you missed last week’s edition
Next week
I haven’t picked next week’s topic yet, so if there’s something specific you want to learn more about, email me at fawzi@year2049.com and let me know!
Much love,
Fawzi
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