A breakthrough in sucking carbon dioxide out of the air?

A Canadian clean energy company backed by Bill Gates has said that it can capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere for less than $100 per tonne, and turn it into synthetic fuel.

This is dramatically less than the $600 per tonne cost estimate of ‘direct air capture’ (DAC) technology made by the American Physical Society in 2011. The world may become reliant on such technologies to hit climate change goals.

The company, Carbon Engineering (CE), has, together with Harvard Professor David Keith (who is also a board member), published what it calls a viable solution for the commercialisation of large-scale DAC technology. The research was published in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Joule. It says the levelised cost for capture could be as low as $94 (but it also says that it could reach $232).

The company says that the technology will enable both the removal of existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to counteract emissions too difficult to eradicate at source, and also enable the production of clean fuels to reduce transport emissions.

Other solutions have been proposed to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the most common of which is bioenergy and carbon capture and storage working together (BECCS – see Energy World November 2017). But BECCS would require significant land use to grow crops that are then burned for the carbon dioxide to be sequestered underground.

The paper’s findings are based on three years’ research from CE’s pilot plant located in Squamish, British Columbia. The company says that the work is a breakthrough in the fight to reach net zero emissions to reach climate change goals.

Last year another DAC company, the Swiss Climeworks, announced what it called the world’s first commercial DAC plant, which is capturing 900 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year that is being sold to a greenhouse. It also announced a project to combine the capture with permanent storage in deep underground basalt, via a pre-existing geothermal plant.

The CE paper can be accessed at bit.ly/2sDlLe3