But the technology is attracting critics as well as supporters
Author of the article:Marisa Coulton
Published Aug 25, 2023 •
Carbon capture is gaining steam, with the global carbon capture and sequestration market expected to grow to US$7.49 billion by 2030.
Natural gas power plants will likely need to start capturing their carbon-dioxide emissions soon since it might be the only way they can meet the federal government’s proposed Clean Electricity Regulations (CER), which cap CO2 emissions for natural gas plants at 30 tonnes per gigawatt hour annually.
It’s a big ask. The best-performing natural gas plants emit 350 to 420 tonnes of carbon dioxide per gigawatt hour. Coal plants normally emit 1,000 tonnes. The regulations released on Aug. 10 exempt companies from capturing emissions during emergencies and peak periods.
It’s a big ask. The best-performing natural gas plants emit 350 to 420 tonnes of carbon dioxide per gigawatt hour. Coal plants normally emit 1,000 tonnes. The regulations released on Aug. 10 exempt companies from capturing emissions during emergencies and peak periods.
It’s up to electricity producers to figure out the “least costly and most practical pathway to comply” with the regulations, the federal government said. Carbon capture is one option. If a plant manages to capture and store its emissions, they won’t count toward the plant’s total emissions.
Carbon capture gaining steam
Carbon capture is gaining steam, with the global carbon capture and sequestration market expected to grow to US$7.49 billion by 2030 from US$2.1 billion in 2022, according to Vantage Market Research.
That has caught the attention of some big names. For example, Warren Buffett-backed oil producer Occidental Petroleum Corp. recently purchased Canadian carbon-capture startup Carbon Engineering Ltd. for US$1.1 billion. And Elon Musk’s XPRIZE, which is running a US$100-million carbon-removal competition, will allow teams in the final round a chance to pilot their solutions using Montreal-based Deep Sky’s carbon-capture facility.
Workers calibrate equipment at Carbon Engineering Ltd.’s direct air capture plant in Squamish, B.C. The Canadian company was recently bought by Warren Buffett-backed oil producer Occidental Petroleum Corp.
PHOTO BY DARRYL DYCK /THE CANADIAN PRESS
Deep Sky is the latest venture from Frederic Lalonde, chief executive and co-founder of the travel app Hopper. He raised $10 million in funding from venture-capital firm Brightspark Financial Inc. and the Quebec government to fund Deep Sky, which aims to capture carbon from the ocean and sky and inject it deep underground, a process the company said is “proven, uncomplicated and clean.”
Not exactly, said Louis-César Pasquier, a professor at the National Institute for Scientific Research in Quebec City. Carbon-capture companies often underestimate how expensive and complex the process of direct-air capture can be, he said. He advises companies new to carbon capture to ensure they do not make promises to investors they cannot keep.
Companies can capture carbon in a plant’s smokestack as it is being emitted, or once it has already been released into the air, Pasquier said, but the latter is much harder than the former. By the time the carbon dioxide is dispersed into the air, the concentration is so low that it becomes expensive to extract.
Carbon dioxide in the air is 300 times less concentrated than the CO2 in a smokestack, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pasquier believes the direct-air capture that Deep Sky plans to do is not a viable climate-change solution in the short term. Capturing the carbon dioxide before it leaves smokestacks would make more sense, he said.
But successfully capturing emissions is only the first step in the process, he added. Once you have it, “What do you do with it?”
One option is to turn it into rocks, or “mineralize” it. That’s what Deep Sky plans to do. It recently partnered with Exterra Carbon Solutions, a Montreal-based carbon-storage company, which will take the carbon captured by Deep Sky and combine it with asbestos waste.
This waste is left over from the days of mining asbestos, a material that is particularly good at holding onto heat and was once used as insulation for homes. It was banned in Canada in 1980 when asbestos fibres were found to be extremely hazardous to human health, causing lung cancer and lung disease.
But carbon dioxide neutralizes asbestos, turning it into harmless, stable minerals. Exterra will extract asbestos, combine Deep Sky’s carbon dioxide with it, and then put the combination back where the asbestos originally was. Drilling into the asbestos will, however, be risky.
“The major health risk from asbestos is the inhalation of airborne fibres,” Deep Sky spokesperson Brooks Wallace said in an email. “This makes the use of water to suppress dust … a key mitigation strategy.
Carbon credits
For every tonne of CO2 Deep Sky and Exterra sequester, they will be granted a carbon credit, which they plan to sell to governments, financial institutions, and energy, technology and aviation companies, which will use them to “meet ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions,” Wallace said.
A hypothetical: Company A (a natural gas plant) emits 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and government regulations limit emissions from natural gas plants to 750 tonnes to meet the country’s green goals. Company A can then buy 250 carbon credits to comply, since one tonne of carbon dioxide equals one carbon credit.
On paper, Company A will be able to say it only emitted 750 tonnes, because it cancelled the other 250 tonnes of emissions with the credits it purchased. Company A can use the credits to offset its own emissions or to support environmental projects. Purchasing the credits will be costly, so companies will, in theory, be motivated to not pollute.
Critics believe this process merely gives these companies an excuse to continue to emit greenhouse gases, as politician and environmental activist Al Gore pointed out in a recent TED Talk.
“It’s not credible,” he said. “They’re using it to gaslight us, and we can’t fall for it.”
But Lalonde said carbon credits are a way to make oil and gas companies pay for their historic emissions. He expects governments, however, to be the main buyers of carbon credits.
Deep Sky is the latest venture from Frederic Lalonde, chief executive and co-founder of the travel app Hopper. He raised $10 million in funding from venture-capital firm Brightspark Financial Inc. and the Quebec government to fund Deep Sky, which aims to capture carbon from the ocean and sky and inject it deep underground, a process the company said is “proven, uncomplicated and clean.”
Not exactly, said Louis-César Pasquier, a professor at the National Institute for Scientific Research in Quebec City. Carbon-capture companies often underestimate how expensive and complex the process of direct-air capture can be, he said. He advises companies new to carbon capture to ensure they do not make promises to investors they cannot keep.
Companies can capture carbon in a plant’s smokestack as it is being emitted, or once it has already been released into the air, Pasquier said, but the latter is much harder than the former. By the time the carbon dioxide is dispersed into the air, the concentration is so low that it becomes expensive to extract.
Carbon dioxide in the air is 300 times less concentrated than the CO2 in a smokestack, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pasquier believes the direct-air capture that Deep Sky plans to do is not a viable climate-change solution in the short term. Capturing the carbon dioxide before it leaves smokestacks would make more sense, he said.
But successfully capturing emissions is only the first step in the process, he added. Once you have it, “What do you do with it?”
One option is to turn it into rocks, or “mineralize” it. That’s what Deep Sky plans to do. It recently partnered with Exterra Carbon Solutions, a Montreal-based carbon-storage company, which will take the carbon captured by Deep Sky and combine it with asbestos waste.
This waste is left over from the days of mining asbestos, a material that is particularly good at holding onto heat and was once used as insulation for homes. It was banned in Canada in 1980 when asbestos fibres were found to be extremely hazardous to human health, causing lung cancer and lung disease.
But carbon dioxide neutralizes asbestos, turning it into harmless, stable minerals. Exterra will extract asbestos, combine Deep Sky’s carbon dioxide with it, and then put the combination back where the asbestos originally was. Drilling into the asbestos will, however, be risky.
“The major health risk from asbestos is the inhalation of airborne fibres,” Deep Sky spokesperson Brooks Wallace said in an email. “This makes the use of water to suppress dust … a key mitigation strategy.
Carbon credits
For every tonne of CO2 Deep Sky and Exterra sequester, they will be granted a carbon credit, which they plan to sell to governments, financial institutions, and energy, technology and aviation companies, which will use them to “meet ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions,” Wallace said.
A hypothetical: Company A (a natural gas plant) emits 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and government regulations limit emissions from natural gas plants to 750 tonnes to meet the country’s green goals. Company A can then buy 250 carbon credits to comply, since one tonne of carbon dioxide equals one carbon credit.
On paper, Company A will be able to say it only emitted 750 tonnes, because it cancelled the other 250 tonnes of emissions with the credits it purchased. Company A can use the credits to offset its own emissions or to support environmental projects. Purchasing the credits will be costly, so companies will, in theory, be motivated to not pollute.
Critics believe this process merely gives these companies an excuse to continue to emit greenhouse gases, as politician and environmental activist Al Gore pointed out in a recent TED Talk.
“It’s not credible,” he said. “They’re using it to gaslight us, and we can’t fall for it.”
But Lalonde said carbon credits are a way to make oil and gas companies pay for their historic emissions. He expects governments, however, to be the main buyers of carbon credits.
“I think the carbon-removal industry needs to be in collaboration with oil and gas, but it needs to be independent from that industry, and it needs to be state-backed,” Lalonde said.
Carbon-capture technology is so expensive and energy-intensive that it constitutes a “moral hazard,” Gore said. He cited a University of Oxford study that characterized carbon capture as a “non-improving technology,” the cost of which has not declined “despite significant effort over its 50-year commercial history.”
While carbon capture is indeed expensive, “with all this money that’s going into it, especially from the U.S. government, it’s reasonable to expect that the cost will come down as the technology matures,” said Paul McKendrick, author of Scrubbing the Sky: Inside the Race to Cool the Planet, a book that recounts the history of carbon-capture technology and the individuals who pioneered it.
He expects the technology to become a major industry. The United States government recently committed US$1.2 billion to build two direct-sky carbon-capture plants.
The carbon-capture industry can’t just be big, Lalonde said. It will need to dwarf oil and gas.
“As a reminder, it took 200 years to build up the oil and gas industry,” he said.
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Carbon-capture technology is so expensive and energy-intensive that it constitutes a “moral hazard,” Gore said. He cited a University of Oxford study that characterized carbon capture as a “non-improving technology,” the cost of which has not declined “despite significant effort over its 50-year commercial history.”
While carbon capture is indeed expensive, “with all this money that’s going into it, especially from the U.S. government, it’s reasonable to expect that the cost will come down as the technology matures,” said Paul McKendrick, author of Scrubbing the Sky: Inside the Race to Cool the Planet, a book that recounts the history of carbon-capture technology and the individuals who pioneered it.
He expects the technology to become a major industry. The United States government recently committed US$1.2 billion to build two direct-sky carbon-capture plants.
The carbon-capture industry can’t just be big, Lalonde said. It will need to dwarf oil and gas.
“As a reminder, it took 200 years to build up the oil and gas industry,” he said.
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Deep Sky management sees an “enormous urgency to reach scale,” he said. “We’re seeing all this real-world evidence that we have this completely wrong; that we’re way too optimistic.”
Examples of climate-change impacts include wildfires, impending global food insecurity and rising sea levels, he said.
“It’s going to be very bad,” Lalonde said, but “we have not been beaten yet; we will through technology, through innovation, figure this out.”
• Email: mcoulton@postmedia.com
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