Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees

In Squamish, British Columbia, there is a company that wants to stop climate change by absorbing

carbon

dioxide from the atmosphere. One of our

plant

s

does

the

work

of 40

million

trees

. We have the lowest capital cost of energy of all CO2

capture

solutions from the atmosphere. We are starting to enter the commercial market. It's called

carbon

engineering and uses a combination of giant fans and complex chemical processes to remove CO2 from the air and a procedure known as direct air

capture

. We have a huge problem with CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. but if we have a mechanism to collect it on a large scale, it will give us much more flexibility to address climate change and we will start to address all those emissions that occurred yesterday the day before yesterday until the industrial age.

Backed by Bill Gates and oil giants Chevron bhp and Occidental, it has received more funding than any other direct air capture company and just announced plans to partner with Occidental to build its first commercial

plant

, but not everyone is excited about it. partner with an oil company. It is absolutely a step in the wrong direction, they are not stopping the fossil fuel industry, they are actually promoting it, so we have a lot of equipment around us that collectively processes atmospheric air and extracts carbon dioxide, basically the carbon engineering process. It involves the use of large fans to draw in atmospheric air through a device called a contactor.

After that, it's just chemistry: the air is sent through a honeycomb structure upon which a liquid solution of chemicals constantly rains down on some of the CO2 molecules in the air. That liquid and the resulting solution are processed in a few more chemical steps to form calcium carbonate granules that are heated to very high temperatures to release pure carbon dioxide which can then be stored underground or used to create products such as fuels, all chemicals in the process. They are recycled so that the cycle can be repeated. Carbon Engineering's pilot scheme currently runs on a combination of natural gas and clean electricity and the CO2 generated from combustion is eventually captured, although the company plans to run entirely on renewable electricity, while direct carbon capture was previously thought to be possible. air be too expensive to be a viable option Carbon engineering published research last June that revealed that its process would cost between ninety-four and two hundred and thirty-two dollars per ton of CO2. interest in the technology, especially after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC released its special report on global warming last October, which stated that some form of carbon dioxide removal would be necessary to keep global warming below of 1.5 degrees Celsius and thus avoid the worst effects. of climate change we were actually evaluating many different pathways to reach 1.5 degrees C, but none of them could reach the temperature target without removing CO2 from the atmosphere every year we wait, we actually become more dependent on removal directly from carbon in the air.

Capture is one of the few technologies that can permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Another is called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Basically, this involves burning biomass like

trees

and storing carbon dioxide emissions underground. This is currently done in five facilities around the world. The problem is that it takes a lot of land to grow all that biomass and, like direct air capture, it's difficult to finance these projects, so there are dozens of companies

work

ing in the carbon capture space in general, while these companies they do not have the potential to eliminate it. Co2 that is already in the air, they can capture it at the source and recycle or bury it.

For example, Shale operates a carbon capture project called Quest that has sequestered a total of 4

million

tonnes of Co2 from one of its plants in Alberta. and many oil companies. Companies recycle the carbon dioxide they produce to help them extract more oil from the ground, but one of the simplest ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is actually just to plant more trees, then there are other agricultural and land-based ways as well. more advanced. use techniques that could help capture and store CO2 in soil and vegetation given the urgency of climate change many say we have to do it all we need more renewable energy we need more direct data capture we need more carbon capture and storage we need more solutions nature-based We need more informed policy developments because the challenge of climate change means it is no longer the time to pick winners.

It's about taking an all-inclusive approach because the challenge is so big. Bill Gates is an investor in carbon engineering and as of this year, so our three major oil companies, Chevron bhp and Occidental, which helped the company raise $68 million in its most recent funding rounds in May, Carbon Engineering announced it is working with Occidental to design its first commercial plant that will capture approximately half a megaton. of co2 per year to be used in enhanced oil recovery operations in the Permian Basin in Texas basically this means that the captured carbon dioxide will be injected underground to extract more oil from oil wells.

This is a common use case for carbon capture technologies. some definitely see it as counterintuitive for a company that aims to address the climate crisis. Oil companies love this because they can actually take the CO2 and then increase their oil production, which means we will burn more oil for transportation and other uses, and that will result in even more air pollution and global warming. It seems like a crazy idea. Oil is true, but in Patras, these are not businesses, usually on the street, they would never do it because of the regulatory force that comes from California, so they go to. they will pay us a lot more per time and they will pay normally for CO2 and the only reason it works is to produce fuels that are truly carbon neutral.

California requires a 20% reduction in the carbon intensity of the state's transportation fuels by 2030, boosting the market. Seeking cleaner fuels and using captured carbon dioxide for oil recovery is cleaner than the way the process is done, estimates indicate that by 2040 still 50 percent of the energy needed will come from oil and gas. gas, so it's really important. so that we think about our current portfolio, as well as future portfolios and the overall carbon intensity or footprint of them. Carbon engineering is also using captured CO2 to produce synthetic fuel that it hopes can reach the market in as little as five years, provided that the price of solar hydrogen falls because it is also needed to create the fuel, so compared to conventional fuels that we use today and transportation, these fuels emit 70 or even 90 percent less carbon, so it's a big step in the right direction and then with more technological innovation we can get even closer to zero , so we will get even closer to totally carbon-neutral fuels.

Private sector partnerships with oil and gas companies will allow Carbon Engineering to bring its technology to market, but some energy experts worry this will create perverse incentives that will ultimately lead to it. It is harder to wean the world off fossil fuels. Partnering with an oil company is absolutely a step in the wrong direction and there is no way to soften that story if you say that you are part of the solution and that your technology will not be an accomplice, a cover, a fig leaf for fossil fuels, then you can't partner with that same industry, or you need to be part of the effort to grow the green energy economy without perpetuating dirty energy, which needs to be gotten rid of and Right now, unfortunately, carbon engineering is on the side wrong of that equation.

The problem is that without public investment or stricter carbon pricing initiatives, there is simply no monetary incentive for carbon engineering to permanently bury carbon underground without creating a product like crude oil or synthetic fuel, governments They do not do it. funding this technology right now they are not funding the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, just like those critics, they want us to wait or they want to bring our technology to market using the mechanisms that are available, why wouldn't we do that? Kaman. believes the carbon price simply needs to be higher before direct air capture makes any sense.

There is a business model for direct capture and it is called carbon pricing. That price worldwide is between $15 per ton in California and $5 per ton in China to $20 per ton in Europe and those figures are not enough to make direct air capture financially viable today, while they are more than enough to make clean energy options like wind solar, wind energy storage viable today unless we get a decent price. price of carbon the business case for storing it actually and permanently is not there yet some countries are doing better Norway has had a carbon tax since 1991 that is $50 or more per ton for the combustion of natural gas this is incentivized a series of carbon capture and storage projects have been operating there for decades and Switzerland's current rate is $99 per ton, a price that adjusts based on whether the country is meeting its emissions targets.

Federal tax regulations passed last year provide a $50 per ton credit for capturing and sequestering CO2 and a $35 per ton credit for using captured carbon dioxide and enhanced oil recovery, but experts say the U.S. . is still insufficient if you really want to reduce emissions at the speed at which people talk about these IPCC projections of emissions cuts needing carbon prices of $100 per ton or more is a difficult position if the engineering of the. carbon

does

n't work It may not get the resources to test its technology and catalyze policy change and investment, but with its current partnerships, carbon engineering is hooking corporations with an excellent Angell incentive to favor fossil fuels if A certain amount of money spent on a technology like direct air capture means it is not spent on another technology like renewable energy, for example wind turbines or solar panels, they also remove carbon from the air because they avoid to reach the air, but the IPCC says that wind and solar alone will not be enough and we need some form of carbon dioxide removal;

However, this does not mean that direct air capture itself is necessary; We have other ways of extracting carbon from the air and they are called trees and trees. They are cheap and abundant and have many co-benefits and the more we invest in preserving our forests, expanding our wetlands and making agriculture smarter, we get all the benefits of direct air capture at a fraction of the cost, some of climate stabilization. Models predict that if we invest in these land use measures and manage to achieve significant near-term emissions reductions, we can keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius without technologies like direct air capture or bioenergy. with carbon capture and storage, but carbon engineering says it is technology. be much more effective than agricultural or forestry solutions plans to build plants that capture a mega ton of CO2 per year one of our plants does the work of 40 million trees so if we are going to plant trees instead of making our plants, it will be better let's go ahead and plant a lot of them so you know we think we have a much more scalable solution because we're going to run out of land and time to grow trees.

An expanded plant could do the work of 40 million trees. but only if carbon were sequestered underground, not used to extract oil or create fuels in the ideal world, what would be the best way to use that technology to make a dramatic impact on climate change? The short answer is: they would establish plants all over the world. capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere and burying it back where it came from, but that requires a lot of government money. The federal funds are not there yet and while there may never be some who will arguethe notion that investment in one technology has to come at the expense of another, so there is often confusion between carbon removal and conventional and mitigation that supports renewable energy such as wind or solar, there is the misunderstanding that it is an option, although with ambitious climate goals we are late with mitigation. actually we need both each year the world emits almost 40

bill

ion tons of CO2 at this rate it would take 40,000 carbon engineering plants capturing one mega ton of CO2 per year to absorb all of the world's annual emissions from the air, but others direct air capture companies could lend a hand Swiss company Klein Works opened the world's first commercial direct air capture plant in Zurich in 2016.

It sells the captured carbon dioxide to greenhouses, but it costs $600 per ton of CO2 removed . Other company. The global thermostat manages what is currently the largest shopping center in the world. world's largest direct air capture plant in Huntsville, Alabama, claims it can eventually reach $50 per ton by selling CO2 to soft drink companies, and Santa Cruz-based Prometheus recently received an initial $150,000 investment. dollars from Y Combinator and also plans to use its captured CO2 to produce fuels. Carbon engineering says that, in addition to its low cost, its advantage comes from its easy scalability. When you look at our plant, all of that equipment is available at scale in other industries, which makes scaling easy for us. at a very, very large size, so if you think the CO2 problem is very large scale, then our solution is best suited as construction of the first commercial plant will begin in 2021 and Carbon Engineering estimates that it will be operational about years later.

That will hopefully help drive the public policies and funding this technology needs to really make a difference. We have seen it again and again if we look at the fight over ozone-depleting chemicals. If we look at the fight over air pollution, what we find is that there are new technologies that reduce pollution and regulators capable of double down on stricter regulations. The technology Keith says is ready. This is not a technical problem. It is a political problem. There are tons of technical solutions. The issue is the political will to fight entrenched interests, including some of the fossil fuel companies that are promoting lies to allow us to reduce emissions.

If governments make decisions to reduce emissions, there are many technical ways to reduce them.