Why aren’t we betting on biogas?

The clean, green fossil fuel alternative provides cheap energy by harnessing the power of food waste

By
Allison Robicelli
Tuesday 10:21AM

Photo: picture alliance (Getty Images)

It’s been such a crazy month for news that it’s hard to keep up with whatever developments each day brings. Breakfast came back to Taco Bell. Some dude shoved beans in his peen. With our brains perpetually addled by a noxious non-stop news cycle, it’s easy to forget that it was barely two weeks ago that the U.N. announced the planet is literally dying.


I know it’s hard to remember stories like that when the Girl Scouts announce a new cookie or a Dunkin’-lovin’ duck gets TikTok famous, but please, let’s try to focus on what’s important. If we can’t rein in climate change, there will be no ducks left to run on Dunkin’. So let’s take a moment to learn about another tool in the ol’ eco-arsenal that could help us save the planet: biogas.

Biogas is a fossil fuel alternative that provides cheap, clean energy by harnessing the power of... food waste. When organic materials are broken down by bacteria in in an oxygen-free environment—a process known as anaerobic digestion—it produces chemical compounds that can be used to generate heat and electricity.

How it works: organic material like food waste, lawn clippings, and dead leaves are fed into a system called an anaerobic digester, where billions of hungry bacteria gobble it up, turning it into—in technical terms—pee, poop, and farts. The resulting pee and poop are called digestate, which is often used as a natural fertilizer. The farts, or biogas, are about 50-70% methane and 30-40% carbon dioxide, with trace amounts of other gases and water vapor. Once the biogas is captured it can be used as-is as a fuel source, or it can be turned into biomethane, which can be pumped into natural gas pipelines.

Biogas may sound like a revolutionary natural solution to a modern man-made problem, but it’s not new: there’s evidence that biogas was trapped and burned to heat water in Assyria in the 10th century B.C., and in 16th-century Persia. So why are we not already biogassing it up all over the place? In an article for The Conversation, Dr. Ananya Mukherjee of the University of Surrey says one of the biggest obstacles to wide-scale adoption is “prejudice arising from poor public understanding.”

“People we spoke to [about biogas] were concerned that local digesters would produce a nasty smell, or that their industrial appearance would blight the landscape,” wrote Mukherjee. “In fact, many digesters are fairly small, and would only produce smells if the system broke down.”

Once people finally let the benefits of biogas into their hearts and minds, there’s another major stumbling block to get over: the price. Mukherjee writes that, depending on the size, digesters can cost between £12,000 and £158,000. (apx. $14,100-$21,700), and without government assistance or incentives, it’s unlikely that communities will be able to make the switch to making their own clean, green energy.

EPA Proposes Biofuel Mandate Cut In Win For Oil Refiners

By Charles Kennedy - Aug 27, 2021, 11:30 AM CDT

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a retroactive reduction in biofuel mandates, effective 2020, in very welcome news to oil refiners who have been complaining of the costly mandates.

Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the proposal, Reuters reports that the document was sent to the White House to be reviewed on Thursday, adding that it will likely deepen the rift between oil refiners and biofuels producers whose interests are at complete odds in the fuel blending department.

"The proposal aims to get the (Renewable Fuel Standard) program back on track while addressing challenges stemming from decisions made under the prior administration," the EPA said in a statement as quoted by Reuters.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg quoted other unnamed sources as saying that some lawmakers had been told to brace for relatively unchanged requirements—or even a reduction in the amount of renewable fuel that must be blended, much to the ire of the corn lobby.

While the battle between refiners and corn growers is long-running one, this year, there’s a new participant: the American Bakers Association. With rising prices for agricultural commodities amid continued supply chain disruptions, the chances are high that bread and other baked goods could also become more expensive. With corn an essential agricultural commodity used widely in the baking industry, last month the ABA started lobbying the Biden administration to either reduce or at least halt the rise in biofuel mandates.

An earlier Reuters report said the EPA was expected to propose a reduction in mandates for last year and this year but an increase for 2022. This might anger corn farmers but it would bring much-needed relief to refiners who are already having to contend with lower margins as fuel demand recovery has been uneven at best. Several smaller refiners, according to Reuters, have accumulated some $1 billion in biofuel mandate credit dues since the start of the year.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

 

China Announces Major Shale Oil Discovery

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Aug 25, 2021, 10:00 AM CDT

China announced on Wednesday the discovery of a major shale oilfield in the Daqing Oilfield cluster with expected reserves of 1.27 billion tons of oil, Chinese Xinhua news agency reported.

Daqing Oilfield is one of China's major onshore production centers, and the new discovery is expected to help it boost its oil production in the coming years, according to Xinhua. 

Daqing Oilfield, which saw the first exploration for shale oil in the 1980s, now has more than 40 wells producing crude. 

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) aims to boost shale oil production from shale formations in Daqing to reverse the decline in the production in the area, the state-held oil giant said on Wednesday, as carried by Reuters.

CNPC has increased efforts to research and drill for shale oil in the Songliao basin where Daqing is located. The company has identified shale oil bearing zones in the Gulong formation, CNPC told a media briefing carried by local television. 

"The Gulong shale oil campaign helps to cement Daqing's position as China's largest onshore oilfield as it struggles to replace reserves ... it contributes to ensure national oil supply security," said Fang Qing, general manager of Daqing oilfield, as carried by Reuters. 

Chinese oil giants are ramping up exploration for shale oil and gas as part of a mandate from authorities to raise domestic production, which could diminish China's costly dependence on crude oil and natural gas imports. 

Yet, China has struggled to develop its huge shale gas and oil resources. The challenges arise because some of the most prolific basins are twice as deep underground as the shale gas resources in some of the most extensive U.S. shale gas plays. The challenging geology leads to higher well drilling and completion costs, lower margins for exploration and production companies, and, at times, mixed results in gas flows.   

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

Reporting on the climate crisis: ‘For years it was seen as a far-off problem’

Our correspondent talks to her predecessor about how global heating went from a ‘slow burn’ to the biggest story of all

“The perception that the climate is not really news has been blown apart by the rise in extreme weather that has made the climate crisis unignorable.” Above: flooding in Rech, western Germany, this month. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images


Fiona Harvey 

Environment correspondent

THE GUARDIAN
Thu 26 Aug 2021

Devastating floods across Europe, killer heatwaves in Canada, wildfires across the US. Extreme weather has hit the headlines across the world in the past few weeks, and even climate scientists have been shocked by its severity and extent, which they say is clearly linked to human activity in heating the planet.

It all comes as no surprise to Paul Brown, the Guardian’s former environment correspondent. He was warning of the consequences of climate change nearly four decades ago, from the mid-1980s, as scientists began to raise the alarm over greenhouse gas emissions and their potential impact.

The big problem then with writing climate news was that nearly all of it was based on predictions of the long-term future. “When I was writing, we were talking about what would happen 50 years away,” he said. “It needed all our ingenuity to make it sound like a news story, because people find prospects that far into the future quite boring.”

Climate change for years was seen as a “slow burn”, a far-off prediction that changed little day-to-day, and so was unsuitable for the daily news diet of most media outlets. That perception, that the climate is not really news, has been blown apart by the rise in extreme weather that has made the climate crisis unignorable. The emergency is now on the front pages of newspapers around the world – and the price of those decades of ignoring warnings, and dismissing predictions as alarmist, is now being paid.

Paul Brown: ‘It turned out that environment stories were the second most read, after medical stories. It was much to editors’ surprise.’

 Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Yet in those early days, governments had begun to grapple with the problem in what now seems a prescient and even urgent fashion. In 1988, they set up a body of leading international scientists to assess our knowledge of climate science, and just four years later in 1992 signed the first global climate treaty. It looked as if the looming crisis was about to be solved.

That optimism of the early 1990s appeared justified – governments were fresh from wrapping up a global treaty, in 1987, that had resolved another existential threat. The ozone layer had been discovered in the mid-1980s to be rapidly thinning and a hole was growing in the protective “skin” of the planet. It was caused by chemicals commonly used as refrigerants, which the Montreal Protocol phased out.

Brown covered the signing of the treaty. He then had to persuade a reluctant newsdesk that it was worth sending him to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, at which the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was forged. “There was a recession in the early 1990s and people were losing their houses and jobs, so interest in the environment went downhill a bit,” he said.

Brown attended the first 10 Conferences of the Parties (Cops) under the UNFCCC, parent treaty to the 1997 Kyoto protocol and the Paris climate accord of 2015; I have attended 14 out of the last 16 Cops, since taking on the role of an environment correspondent in 2004, first at the Financial Times and since 2011 at the Guardian.

This year’s Cop26, in Glasgow this November, will be one of the most important of all: after decades of insufficient action, while greenhouse gas emissions have steadily risen, scientists are now sure that temperature rises of more than 1.5C would cause devastation, and that carbon emissions must be halved by 2030 to stay within that threshold. That makes this decade crucial, and at Cop26 governments must come up with plans for cutting emissions sharply in the next 10 years.

When Brown started out in the environment role – he had already been a journalist for two decades by the time he joined the Guardian, starting out as an apprentice on the East Grinstead Courier in 1961 – the climate was just one consideration among other planetary issues that seemed more pressing, such as pollution and nuclear energy. Starting at the Guardian on 1 January 1981, after two years in the feverish tabloid atmosphere of the Sun (“you learned to keep a toothbrush in your pocket, because every day when you went into work you didn’t know where you might be sent and where you might end up that night”), he quickly found environment stories most appealing.
A clunky satellite phone enabled the paper to run his stories with a unique dateline: Paul Brown in Antarctica

Brown still needed his toothbrush: in 1983, he went to report on a Greenpeace blockade of a pipeline at Sellafield, the UK nuclear plant, which allowed discharges of radioactive waste into the North Sea. “At that time, the UK was labelled the dirty man of Europe,” he noted, for the pollution that was poured into the sea from sewage outlets around the coast, the coal-burning that caused acid rain, and other pollution.

Sewage is still a problem for the UK’s now-privatised water companies – investigations by Sandra Laville, another of Brown’s successors, have revealed the shocking extent of the problem, raising a national outcry.

In 1988, Brown was sent to Antarctica, reporting from a Greenpeace base. For three months, he kept in touch via then cutting-edge technology, in the form of a clunky satellite phone – a key selling-point for his visit to the technology-mad editor at the time, Peter Preston. It enabled the paper to run his stories with a unique dateline: Paul Brown in Antarctica. “They loved that dateline!” he recalls.

He was formally made environment correspondent in 1989, and continued until his retirement from the Guardian in 2005. Over that period, Brown sometimes struggled to get stories past a newsdesk that often seemed more interested in sport or daily political wrangling. But he got strong backing when in the late 1990s the Guardian undertook in-depth research on what stories readers spent most time with. “It turned out that environment stories were the second most read, after medical stories,” he said. “It was much to their surprise, but it certainly made a substantial difference to the editors’ attitude.”

That is mirrored today, when environment stories are some of the best-read on the Guardian’s website and frequently cited by readers, subscribers and supporters as a key reason for their enthusiasm for the Guardian. The environment team has now increased to seven members in London alone, with additional journalists dedicated to the Age of Extinction and Seascape, along with colleagues around the world.

Brown is still a regular contributor to the Guardian, in the much loved Weatherwatch and Specieswatch columns. The job of environment correspondent still involves warnings about the future, but climate breakdown and the crisis in nature can no longer be regarded as “slow burn” – they are emergencies happening now and must be treated as such.

As Brown tells me wryly: “The fact that catastrophic climate change is happening on a weekly basis makes your job a lot easier today.” We would all rather that were not so.

YELLOWKNIFE
NWT eyes geothermal energy at Con Mine for industrial park

Published: August 25, 2021 

EMILY BLAKELAST 

Researchers are looking into whether water at the bottom of the former Con Mine could be used to heat and cool an industrial park on the site. An aerial view of Con Mine in July 1980. Terry Foster/NWT Archives

Con Mine, the first gold mine in the Northwest Territories, operated between 1938 and 2003. As part of its decommissioning, the underground mine was flooded with water, which – due to its depth – is naturally warmed by geothermal energy, or heat from the sub-surface of the Earth.

The NWT Geological Survey and researchers at Institut National de la Reserche Scientifique in Quebec, are now looking into how much heat is produced and whether it could be extracted for use.

“Geothermal is a renewable resource and it can be exploited continuously, so seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” explained Jasmin Raymond, a professor at the institute. “We could replace a heating system that is based on fossil fuels with a geothermal heat pump system and reduce greenhouse emissions.”

Viktor Terlaky, manager of energy sciences for the NWT Geological Survey, said the research project touches on two of the territorial government’s mandates: to diversify the economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Con Mine in 1945. Eric Kettlewell/NWT Archives

“Hopefully it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and move toward a greening economy,” he said.

This is not the first time researchers have examined Con Mine’s potential as a geothermal heating source. The City of Yellowknife previously commissioned three geothermal energy evaluations of the site with plans to develop a district heating system.

While preliminary studies found geothermal energy from Con Mine could reduce energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions in Yellowknife, each subsequent assessment reduced the amount of heat available. The city ultimately abandoned the plan, saying it was not worth the cost of extracting the heat and developing pipelines to distribute it.
‘Not trying to put the cart before the horse’

Raymond and Terlaky said the current research uses a different methodology to provide a more accurate resource estimate.

Over the summer, researchers measured water temperatures both in and outside old ventilation shafts at the mine, and examined the thermal and hydraulic properties of rocks. Raymond said that information is being used to develop a digital model simulating the geothermal system.

“The science has come a long way,” Terlaky said, noting that preliminary results suggest higher resource estimates than previous studies.

He added researchers are “not trying to put the cart before the horse,” and instead are focusing on first assessing the geothermal potential before considering any development.

An industrial park has come up as a possibility, Terlaky said, as the mine site is located near Kam Lake, but it’s not the only option. If the final resource assessment is favourable, he said the next step will be to work with the City of Yellowknife and the current owner of the property to start a pilot project to demonstrate the viability of a geothermal heating system.

Geothermal energy has been explored as a renewable energy source elsewhere in the NWT. The Department of Industry, Tourism, and Investment says geothermal potential has been identified in Fort Liard, Fort Providence, Fort Simpson, and Hay River.

A proposed geothermal power plant in Fort Liard fell through in 2013 after Borealis GeoPower, a Calgary-based corporation that was working with the Acho Dene Koe First Nation on the project, failed to reach a power purchasing agreement with the NWT Power Corporation, which was a condition of federal funding.

 

India Won’t Be Giving Up On Fossil Fuels Any Time Soon

By Haley Zaremba - Aug 24, 2021, 3:00 PM CDT

India’s population is projected to grow to 1.52 billion people by 2036, expectedly surpassing China to be the world’s most populous country around 2031. Despite the fact that India’s growth rate is slowing considerably -- this decade’s growth rate is estimated to be the lowest since the nation’s independence from Britain -- it is growing all the same. The monumental size of the subcontinent means that India’s trajectory for development will have a massive impact on the rest of the world as the global community struggles to come together to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

In addition to the overall growth in population, there are important demographic changes taking place in India which will considerably increase the country’s role and impact in global greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the struggle to curb them and to develop new climate-smart technologies. More than half of the Indian population is on track to join the middle class. “In fact, because India’s demographics are much younger compared to China and the US, India’s middle class could be the largest in the world (in terms of numbers of people) by 2025,” the Financial Express reported earlier this year. While this bodes well for the livelihoods of millions of people, it also means an increased demand for a wide range of goods and services from legions of people. This translates to greater energy use and greater emissions. At present, India is the third-biggest carbon emitter in the world, following China and the United States. 

Unfortunately, India is not yet in a position to fulfill its growing energy needs with clean and renewable energy. As it stands, it will barely be able to keep pace with its increasing energy needs using all of the fuel sources, clean or unclean, available to it. “The sharp growth in energy demand anticipated over the next decade will make it imperative for India to ensure that oil and coal supplies grow accordingly, as renewable energy on its own may not be able to cater to the entire incremental demand, creating challenges in lowering emissions at the desired pace” S&P Global Platts reported last week. 

At present, petroleum represents around a quarter of India’s energy mix, while coal -- the dirtiest fossil fuel and the first fuel source that needs to be completely eradicated in the struggle to curb climate change -- represents nearly half of India’s energy consumption. The rate of consumption of oil and coal are only expected to grow in the coming years. India is currently investing in increased production capacity for oil, gas, and coal and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. "Global energy outlooks by agencies across the board, post and prior to the pandemic have pointed out that India would be the leading energy and oil demand growth driver over the long term,” Indian Oil Corp. chairman Shrikant Madhav Vaidya was quoted by S&P Global Platts. “And none of these have been changed by the pandemic. There is a need to bridge the energy access deficit in the country."

Related: ‘Skimming Stones’ Pattern Shows Wall Street Is Wrong About Oil

In addition to representing a potentially outsized threat to climate goals, India also stands to suffer disproportionately from the adverse impacts of climate change. In South Asia, many human-created weather changes have now become “locked in” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These irreversible impacts include increased heat waves and humid heat stress which pose a threat to human life as well as their greater ecosystems. India is already on the list of 17 severely water-stressed countries, and will likely acutely suffer from climate refugees as people are forced to leave untenable living conditions. 

In a cruel irony, many of the poorest countries which have contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions stand to carry the burden of global warming’s heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events earlier and most acutely. India is no exception. While the subcontinent’s impact on climate change is growing and worrying, it continues to have a smaller relative ecological impact than many developed countries. Per capita, India’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions pales in comparison to the United States, for example.

At the same time, India can and must do more to mitigate its impact and refocus the trajectory of its development in a more climate-smart direction. While India has met its climate targets as proposed at the Paris climate agreement, this confirms that those targets were not sufficiently ambitious. India must set -- and keep -- much more stringent climate goals as this month’s UN climate change report sounds a code red for humanity. 

Petroleum liquids account for 25% of India's energy basket, and coal as much as 45%. Analysts told S&P Global Platts that India will be looking to pursue its planned refinery expansions as well as its coal-fired power projects, a sign that there is still scope for demand growth for both oil and coal in the foreseeable future.

"Global energy outlooks by agencies across the board, post and prior to the pandemic have pointed out that India would be the leading energy and oil demand growth driver over the long term. And none of these have been changed by the pandemic. There is a need to bridge the energy access deficit in the country," Indian Oil Corp. chairman Shrikant Madhav Vaidya told Platts recently.

S&P Global Platts Analytics expects India's oil products demand to grow by an average of around 250,000 b/d every year over the next decade, supported by population growth and a steady rise in disposable personal incomes.

The International Energy Agency recently said that India could witness the biggest increase in energy demand in the world over the next 20 years, with the potential for oil consumption rising as high as 4 million b/d to 8.7 million b/d by 2040. The group also said that a stronger push for electrification, efficiency and fuel switching could limit oil demand growth to under 1 million b/d over the same period.

Indian policy makers have said that the country's oil demand is expected to double by 2040 and it will look to boost refining capacity from the current 250 million mt/year to 450 million mt/year.

Some key challenges

Roman Kramarchuk, Platts Analytics head of scenarios, policy and technology analytics, said a key challenge for India is the fact that 70% of its CO2 emissions come from burning coal, predominantly in the power sector.

"India is clearly not facing the situation in some Western economies and regions where power demand is flat or even dropping," he said.

Platts Analytics Global Integrated Energy model expects India's annual electricity demand growth to average 4.4% over 2020-2030.

"Building non-emitting new capacity to meet this new demand will be a challenge, with these strains further exacerbated if India were to push to cut back generation from coal plants," Kramarchuk added.

The country's coal power capacity, presently at 203 GW, is projected to grow to 220-230 GW by 2025 or sooner with the commissioning of under-construction plants being offset by end-of-life closures, said Vibhuti Garg, Energy Economist at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. The growth in coal consumption is meant to meet rising demands from industries, a per capita rise in energy consumption and increased connectivity of villages to the grid, industry sources said.

Industrial coal demand is expected to remain firm as cement, power and steel companies are dependent on coal with a lack of affordable alternatives, sources said.

With the power load factor -- a measure of efficiency of electricity use -- in India below 60% since 2018-2019, coal-powered plants would run their plants for longer to make up for the cost of setting them up, sources said.

"A set up power plant has a shelf life of 25-30 years and currently power load factor is less than 60%. So, when one considers plants set up in last few years and [those] already being set up, the dependence on coal is not going to come down drastically," said Vasudev Pamnani, director at Lavi Coal Info Private Ltd.

The carbon factor

India's reliance on coal is also dependent on the affordability of renewable energy and the availability of energy storage technology as power purchase agreements start expiring, Garg said.

The country's dependence on coal has a unique impact on the generation of carbon credits.

As calculation of credits takes into account baseline emissions, a solar or hydro power project in India has more potential for credits due to the factor of additionality -- emissions reductions that would not have occurred in the absence of the market for carbon credits.

"Because our power is so dependent on coal, when a company into electric mobility starts getting into carbon credits, then global carbon standards like Verra say your credits will reduce as your electricity is coal-generated and so the source isn't clean," said Vasudha Madhavan, Founder, Ostara Advisors, an Indian electric-mobility-focused investment bank.

As per EIA studies, one metric ton of coal with a carbon content of 78 percent and a heating value of 14,000 Btu per pound will generate 2.86 metric tons of carbon dioxide when burnt completely.

Ashish Govil, co-investor at CO2TKN, a carbon credit blockchain tech company, said India needs to move towards renewable energy quickly to attract ESG funding at very attractive rates in order to build green energy projects.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

The Dream of Carbon Air Capture Edges Toward Reality


Fans draw air into Climeworks’ direct air capture plant in Zurich, Switzerland. CLIMEWORKS

Next month, an industrial facility in Iceland will join a growing number of projects to remove CO2 from the air and put it underground. But major hurdles, including high costs, remain before this technology can be widely deployed and play a key role in tackling climate change.

BY JON GERTNER • AUGUST 25, 2021

In early September, at an industrial facility located about 25 miles southeast of Reykjavik, Iceland, the Swiss company Climeworks will mark the opening of a new project named “Orca.” At least in a conventional sense, Orca doesn’t actually make anything. It is comprised of eight elongated boxes that resemble wood-clad tanks. Each of these boxes — known as “collectors” — is roughly the size of a tractor trailer, and each is festooned with 12 whirring fans that draw a stream of air inside. Within the collectors, a chemical agent known as a sorbent will capture CO2 contained in the air wafting through. Periodically, the surface of the sorbent will fill up. And at that point the CO2 trapped within it will need to be released. At Orca, this task is accomplished with a blast of heat, which is sourced from a nearby hydrothermal vent. The extracted CO2 will then be piped from the collector boxes to a nearby processing facility, where it will be mixed with water and diverted to a deep underground well.

And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.

Climeworks maintains that Orca, once it’s running around the clock, will remove up to 4,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. And there isn’t much reason to doubt the facility can achieve this feat. For one thing, the technology for the plant, known as direct air capture, or DAC, is a variation on ideas that have been utilized over the course of half a century in submarines and spacecraft: Employ chemical agents to “scrub” the excess CO2 out of the air; dispose of it; then repeat. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that Climeworks has already built smaller, less sophisticated plants in mainland Europe, which have in turn pulled hundreds of tons of CO2 per year from ambient air.

“We are out of academic research and feasibility and into engineering reality,” says one company executive.


What seems most significant about Orca, then, is how it represents the possibility that direct air capture has moved closer to something resembling a commercial business. Climeworks now has dozens of customers — individual consumers who have purchased carbon removal services directly from the company, as well as corporations, like the insurance giant Swiss Re — who will pay for the permanent carbon offsets that will be buried underneath Icelandic soil. What’s more, the Orca facility will be the largest functioning direct air capture plant in the world to date — by the company’s estimation, it represents a “scale-up” of its carbon removal efforts by about eighty-fold over the course of four years.

And yet, Climeworks and Orca will likely soon be eclipsed. Plans for even larger DAC plants — one in the U.S. Southwest, slated for completion at the end of 2024; another in Scotland, to be finished about a year after the American project — will be built by a competitor, Carbon Engineering, of British Columbia. Employing a somewhat different technology, Carbon Engineering’s facilities, as initially planned, will be powered by renewable energy and will eventually each remove, on net, about a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere.

“In our view, this will decisively answer the question: Is direct air capture feasible at large scale and affordable cost,” Steve Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, told me recently. “As I see it, we are out of academic research and feasibility and now into engineering reality.”



Climeworks’ Orca plant under construction near Reykjavik, Iceland. CLIMEWORKS


One way to consider the global value of these efforts is to place them within the humbling math of climate change. In the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a number of models were used to chart possible future emissions scenarios, and to make sense of how we might experience a rise of, say, 1.8 degrees C or 2.5 degrees C (3.2 degrees F to 4.5 degrees F) by the year 2100. Last year, about 31 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere. Probably that number will rise even higher this year, as the global economy begins to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. But to have a chance at limiting warming to 2 degrees C we would have to effectively bring our emissions near to zero by around the middle part of this century.

Without question, the best way to begin doing so is to drastically transform our electrical, transportation, and industrial systems to emissions-free energy sources and processes. However, we may need to actively compensate for economic sectors — air travel, for instance, or steel production — that prove too hard to rapidly decarbonize. This would mean we would have to actively take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the same time. Our carbon removal efforts could involve natural means, such as sequestering atmospheric CO2 in soil or new forests. But we could also utilize more technological approaches, such as DAC or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage — known by the acronym BECCS—which involves growing plants, burning or fermenting them for energy, and then capturing the CO2 emissions and burying them.

And here the numbers get daunting. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth involved in charting possible emission pathways for the IPCC report, told me that in one of the most optimistic scenarios, which limits temperature rises to 1.5 degrees C by 2100, the conditions require massive mitigation efforts as well as about 17 gigatons — that’s billions of tons — of CO2 removal per year by the end of the century. And as much as planting trees might seem an ideal solution to help us reach such a goal, new forests are likely not a sufficient or durable carbon removal solution, especially in the wake of huge wildfires in Siberia and the American West. “Natural ways of removing CO2 are generally less desirable than long-term geologic storage through BECCS or DAC,” Hausfather says, adding that this is because storing carbon above ground in biomass is most likely temporary.

Whether direct air capture “scales up” and makes a significant climate impact depends mainly on its expense.


Whether DAC can make a meaningful contribution to carbon removal goals remains a lingering question. But the new Climeworks and Carbon Engineering plants suggest significant progress, not just hype. “You’ve got these two companies that are ready to go today,” Jennifer Wilcox, an official at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and an expert in carbon capture technologies, told me. “But the question is, how do they get from thousands of tons to millions of tons?’” After that, of course, comes an even bigger question: Could they actually get to billions?


In several instances over the past few years, in the course of reporting on climate solutions and carbon removal strategies, I’ve been told by venture capitalists — investors I respect for their grasp of technology, and who have a deep understanding of climate change — that direct air capture could turn out to be among the world’s biggest industries by midcentury. I would not be shocked if this turns out to be true. On the other hand, even modest growth of the DAC industry seems entirely conditional. Reducing emissions — a Herculean task for the world’s governments and industries as they begin to phase out fossil fuels — remains the primary challenge. And beyond that, whether DAC “scales up” and makes a significant climate impact depends mainly on its expense. Or to put it another way: How much will it ultimately cost to separate a metric of ton of CO2 from the air and put it into the ground, or into a long-lasting product like concrete or carbon fiber? It seems a matter of consensus that if it can get nearer to $100 per ton, direct air capture might become an essential and useful technology.

But we’re still not sure. A few years ago, Climeworks executives told me their cost of direct air capture was somewhere between $500 and $600 per ton. The company is not publicly estimating — and indeed may not yet know — how much the Orca plant will improve on that measurement. Still, there are physical and thermodynamic limits, according to the DOE’s Wilcox, that can help serve as a lower bound. Wilcox surmises that scientific constraints may make it difficult for Climeworks or Carbon Engineering plants to get much below $100 per ton to remove carbon from the air. And this may remain the case no matter how hard engineers work in the future to bring down expenses through cheaper materials and assembly-line industrialization. A recent analysis of the industry, authored by scientists at Carbon Engineering, predicts a similar outcome: An eventual cost range for DAC of between $94 and $232 per ton. That could be decades away — or it may never come to pass.



A rendering of Carbon Engineering's direct air capture plant planned in West Texas, which would be the largest such facility in the world. CARBON ENGINEERING LTD.


The point of new plants like Orca or Carbon Engineering’s mammoth project in the Southwest, however, isn’t to perfect the carbon removal process. The point is to take a large technological and commercial step forward. We can only speculate on what DAC technology may achieve next based on the future targets of executives at carbon removal companies. But if costs reach, say, $400 or $350 per ton in the next few years, it would suggest this remains a promising tool in need of further refinement. It may indicate this could prove to be a viable option for companies like airlines, say, or fertilizer manufacturers (or even for government entities) that may eventually be compelled to buy offsets so as to compensate for their carbon emissions.

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Climate solutions: Is it feasible to remove enough CO2 from the air? Read more.


It’s probably best to interpret the opening of the new plants as the start of a complex, multi-decade, global deployment process that follows years of research and development. “We’re confident our costs will continue to fall,” Oldham, the Carbon Engineering CEO said. “But only if we deploy. If you never deploy, your costs never go down.”

Oldham’s view, moreover, is that the world might, through epic efforts at mitigation, be able to eliminate 70 to 80 percent of emissions by 2050. “But that would leave about 20 to 30 percent of the carbon footprint we’re going to have to remove,” he says — probably the equivalent of about 10 to 12 billion tons per year of CO2. As a thought experiment, that would require 10,000 Carbon Engineering plants like the ones the company is now planning. “I think if the world sets its mind to it, we can produce many of these plants,” he said. “And we’ve done this in the past. Look at the way we scrambled for Covid vaccines. Or look at the way we scrambled for wars and got into the mass production of planes.”

A key question is whether direct air capture eventually mimics the astonishing cost declines of solar PV panels.


One concern is that DAC might prove increasingly controversial if it erodes global efforts at mitigation. If carbon can effectively and affordably be removed from the air, in other words, it may slow the rush to eliminate fossil fuels. For now, at least, that remains a hypothetical risk. And Oldham and colleagues in his field told me they believe new state and government policies are moving his industry in the right direction. A U.S. tax credit for companies called 45Q, for instance, is helping to subsidize some of the high costs of carbon capture and sequestration. The possible passage of a federal infrastructure bill in the coming months may likewise allocate as much as $3.5 billion to help construct large DAC plants. Meanwhile, a push from the private sector has been a boon to fledgling DAC firms. A slew of tech companies interested in becoming carbon neutral or carbon negative — Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify are the most prominent — have invested substantial sums in Climeworks and Carbon Engineering. Their commitments have, in turn, helped the companies move forward with planning and construction.

At the same time, investment dollars are beginning to flow into “next generation” DAC ideas. The U.S. Department of Energy recently invested more than $12 million in a slew of early-stage approaches and component technologies. A number of venture firms, notably Breakthrough Energy and LowerCarbon Capital, have placed tens of millions more into startups. One new firm, San Francisco-based Noya, utilizes existing power plant cooling towers to create a “distributed” system of direct air capture stations that the company hopes will prove cheaper than building DAC plants from scratch; another, a Detroit-based startup known as Remora, fits carbon-capturing sorbent technology on trucking rigs to vacuum up CO2 on long hauls. As a sweetener, a new $100 million X-prize, sponsored by Elon Musk, involves a four-year global competition that will reward the most promising young carbon removal firms for ideas that can be scaled up to gigatons per year.

So within the industry, there is plenty of money and plenty of enthusiasm. What is in short abundance, in light of the hottest month on record and near-term projections for future global temperatures, is plenty of time.

At this stage in DAC’s evolution, it’s worth recalling that it can be notoriously hard to predict how long it takes for technologies to mature. In the mid-1950s, just after the first practical photovoltaic solar cell was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey, one of its inventors, Daryl Chapin, calculated it would cost around $1.5 million to deploy the devices as an electricity source on a typical American house. Nowadays, you can outfit a home with solar panels for around $20,000, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association — and that investment pays off over time through the benefit of cheaper electric bills. In some locations, solar PV is now the cheapest source of energy on the planet.



Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture pilot plant in British Columbia. CARBON ENGINEERING LTD.


The future challenge for direct air capture technologies — the uncertain, downward arc of its cost — is therefore a familiar one. One possible future is that the DAC industry will continue to reduce expenses but may not get near enough to a price structure, such as $100 per ton, that makes it economically appealing as an offset. To Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in the direct air capture field who runs the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University, an essential question is whether DAC, as it evolves, mimics the astonishing cost declines of solar photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, or whether it remains a boutique technology that crashes into inherent economic limits.

“My opinion is that if it behaves like many other mass manufactured technologies, it is not unreasonable to assume that by growing roughly 300-fold, we should be skirting $100 per ton for carbon removal,” Lackner says. “Beyond that, my crystal ball is a little cloudy. But if this keeps growing a thousand-fold, we should be at $50, or maybe $70 or $80 per ton.”

Lackner believes that DAC may actually be at a better stage than solar photovoltaics were during, say, the 1970s, when prices were prohibitively expensive. For widespread adoption, solar technology needed to reduce costs by about 100 times, he says. DAC needs only to reduce costs by 10 times to make it desirable. He acknowledges there is no guarantee that DAC will succeed in the same way as it scales up. And he warns that even if direct air capture costs drop dramatically, the world will still need a regulatory framework for its application, so as to make a significant impact on the climate. As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up.

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Why green groups are split on subsidizing carbon capture technology. Read more.

In light of this, the next few years should be telling. We may soon know whether DAC is a go—or whether the technology, often viewed by its critics as quixotic, will hit a wall of inefficiency. If it’s the former, we will have a useful tool in the climate toolbox. But if it’s the latter, it will almost certainly make the goal of achieving a livable world more complicated. The work ahead of us, already monumental in its political, technological, and economic challenges, would become even more difficult.


Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003, he has worked mainly as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine. His new book, The Ice at the End of the World, chronicles 150 years of exploration and discovery on the Greenland ice sheet. Gertner lives with his family in New Jersey. MOREABOUT JON GERTNER →

AUSTRALIA

Santos sued for ‘clean fuel’ claims and net zero by 2040 target despite plans for fossil fuel expansion

Australian oil giant is being accused of trying to ‘greenwash’ their operations to appeal to investors

An activist group says they believe Santos, Australia’s second largest independent oil company, ‘intends to produce oil and gas beyond 2040’ despite its net zero emissions claims. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters


Royce Kurmelovs
@RoyceRk2
Thu 26 Aug 2021 

A shareholder activist group is taking Australian oil company Santos to court over its claims it produces “clean fuel” and plans to reach net zero emissions by 2040.

Papers were filed against Santos – Australia’s second largest independent oil company – on Thursday by the Environmental Defenders Officers acting on behalf of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility.

Court documents make two claims against the company; the first concerning statements Santos made in its 2020 annual report where it claimed natural gas is a “clean fuel” that provides “clean energy”.


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ACCR argues this is a misrepresentation as the extraction of natural gas involves the release of “significant quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere”.

The second part of the lawsuit takes aim at statements by Santos that it had a “clear and credible” plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2040 by relying on carbon capture and storage (CCS).

ACCR argues reliance on CCS to achieve net zero is not credible as Santos has made “a range of undisclosed qualifications and assumptions about CCS processes” while also seeking to massively expand the extraction of fossil fuels over time.

Dan Goucher, ACCR’s Director of Climate and Environment, said the litigation was important to challenge oil and gas companies where it appears they are trying to “greenwash their operations”.

“We read annual reports and sustainability reports from a range of companies every day. And some of these claims are completely unjustified,” Gocher said. “The key point for us I guess is that it’s become very difficult for any investor to differentiate between companies making genuine claims and companies that are not genuine.”

“This litigation is trying to debunk those more spurious claims.”

Gocher said that both institutional investors and retail investors implicitly trust statements made by companies in their corporate documents and that it was important these are truthful.

“I’d say there’s a fairly significant number of Santos shareholders that are convinced its actions are genuine. We don’t believe they are genuine,” Gocher said. “They intend to produce oil and gas beyond 2040.”

Santos was contacted for comment but a spokesperson for the company said “it would not be appropriate for Santos to comment on matters before the court”.

Dr Laura Schuijers, a senior research fellow with the University of Melbourne, said the direct challenge to Santos makes it “one to watch” following a string of recent climate change related litigations.

“Big oil and gas companies are in the spotlight at the moment,” Dr Schuijers said. “The risk of being sued, litigation risk, is already significant enough. People don’t want to invest in companies that are potentially seen to be a liability.”

As the legal pressure mounts others are now calling on the finance sector to step up.
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On Thursday, environmental finance group Market Forces published an analysis showing Australian super funds have pulled $2.5bn from high carbon emitting companies like BHP, Woodside and Santos since 2018.

The figure was obtained by calculations using disclosure documents from 10 of the largest 30 super funds to check their equity holdings for investments in 23 fossil fuel companies.

Extrapolated across the entire sector, it was estimated $5bn had been pulled from oil companies since 2018 – a figure Wil van der Pol from Market Forces said was a good start but needed to happen faster.

“Any company pursuing fossil fuel expansion doesn’t deserve any support from Australian super funds,” van der Pol said. “We’d like to see the flight of capital from these companies turn from a solid trickle to a raging torrent.”