SCI-FI-TEK

Carbon removal is the latest way to fight climate change — but will it take off in time to save the planet?

Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Wed, November 22, 2023

A handful of companies have begun to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store it underground in an effort to fight climate change. But challenges remain in ramping up the technology to a large enough scale that will make it affordable and effective enough to start to halt the rise of global temperatures.
How carbon removal works

Like giant stationary vacuum cleaners, machines suck CO2 from the air.


At the Orca plant operated by Climeworks in Iceland, the gas is then mixed with water and added to porous rocks underground, where it transforms into carbonate minerals.


At the new Heirloom plant in California, calcium oxide powder is combined with the extracted carbon dioxide to make limestone.

Offsets vs. carbon capture vs. carbon removal

Carbon offsets, like those people buy to mitigate carbon-intensive activities like air travel, claim to reduce CO2 through measures such as protecting forests or planting trees, but many have been exposed for inflating claims of averted emissions.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, refers to capturing CO2 emitted from smokestacks.

Carbon removal, known as “direct air capture” or DAC, isn’t tied to an emissions source and can be built anywhere. Unlike offsets, it provides a precise, easily measurable carbon reduction.

“I buy the gold standard of funding Climeworks to do direct air capture that far exceeds my family’s carbon footprint,” Bill Gates said when asked about his private jet use in February.

A direct air capture and storage facility operated by the Iceland-based Climeworks company. (Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg via Getty Images) (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
How to purchase carbon removal

Climeworks sells a range of monthly subscriptions, the cheapest of which costs $28 per month and removes as much carbon every month as roughly 11 grown average trees (20 kg of CO2), and they can create customized plans.


“We wanted to make our technology available to everyone,” Anna Ahn, a spokesperson for Climeworks, told Yahoo News.


The Orca plant removes roughly 4,000 tons of CO2 annually and the service is so popular it is sold out. If you buy a credit from Climeworks, you are prepaying for carbon removal that will occur when a new plant opens next year that will remove 30,000 tons of CO2 per year.


In 2021, the U.S. emitted 6.34 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents.


Heirloom is selling custom plans, mainly to companies. Both companies also have major corporate customers, including Microsoft.


“Carbon removal can be a lot more expensive than offsets, but what you’re paying for in terms of climate impact is radically different,” Brian Marrs, Microsoft’s senior director of energy and carbon, told the New York Times.

Recommended reading

Reuters: Climate tech company Heirloom opens U.S. commercial carbon capture plant

Independent: Carbon capture startup Climeworks removes CO2 from open air in ‘industry first’

Yahoo News: What Iceland's landmark carbon removal project means for the fight against climate change

Two samples of stones, one without CO2 injection (lower) and one with CO2 injection (upper), from a pilot project lead by ETH Zurich at a power plant near Reykjavik, Iceland. (Anthony Anex/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) (ANTHONY ANEX/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
But will it solve climate change?

Heirloom’s plant removes just 1,000 tons of CO2 per year, about 200 cars’ worth.

Heirloom says it wants to grow to millions of tons annually, and Climeworks says its goal is a gigaton per year by 2050.

Worldwide, scientists project the need for 10 billion gigatons of carbon removal per year by 2050.

Last week, Climeworks announced a partnership with Canadian firm DeepSky to build plants in Canada capable of removing up to 1 million tons per year of CO2, with the first to open before 2030.


The Biden administration has earmarked $3.5 billion for developing direct air capture hubs around the country, with the first grant recipients — a Texas project led by Occidental Petroleum and a Louisiana project from a technology contractor — announced in August.

A flux chamber, used to give a reading of how fast carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere, at the laboratory at Heirloom Carbon in Brisbane, Calif. (Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images) (AFP via Getty Images)

Canada is looking at a package of carbon removal subsidies worth $20 billion over five years.

Carbon removal may be impractical because of its high costs: Experts estimate that DAC costs more than $600 per ton of CO2 today and needs to drop below $200/ton by mid-century to adequately address climate change.

Heavy energy demands reduce environmental benefits, unless the electricity used to power carbon removal is all renewable (as it is in Iceland and at the Heirloom plant in California)

Fossil fuel companies could try to remove the carbon they produce to stay in business. ExxonMobil is investing in carbon removal.

Climeworks predicts that the cost will come down as the industry achieves economies of scale, just like the costs of solar energy and battery storage have dropped dramatically.

“There's a big, big scale-up that lies ahead of us,” Ahn said. “And with the scale-up, the costs will also reduce due to economies of scale, due to technology development.”

Why carbon capture is no easy climate solution

Reuters Videos
Wed, November 22, 2023

STORY: As the world tries to avoid a climate catastrophe, technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions have become central to many countries' climate strategies.

“...need to pursue the new technologies whether it's hydrogen or ammonia, or direct carbon capture...”

“We're working on decarbonisation... we're interested in carbon capture...”

“...essential that in the meantime we deploy the latest carbon capture, use and storage technology...”

So, what’s the state of the carbon capture industry now, and what are the challenges it faces?

The most common form of carbon capture collects the gas from a point source, such as a power plant.

The CO2 can then be moved to permanent underground storage.

Or, more commonly, it’s used for another industrial purpose first.

Currently, most of the CO2 captured this way is injected into oil wells to free trapped oil.

Drillers say this "enhanced oil recovery" method can make petroleum more climate-friendly, but environmentalists say it's counter-productive.

Industry data shows there are over 40 commercial point-source-capture projects operating around the world, with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

That’s about 0.13% of the world’s annual energy- and industry-related CO2 emissions.

Another form of the technology is “direct air capture”.

With some companies trying more creative solutions, like this one using ballooning to capture the gas in high altitudes.

Data from the International Energy Agency shows that only 27 direct air capture hubs have been commissioned globally, capturing just 10,000 metric tons of CO2 a year.

But some 130 facilities are planned around the world, with the U.S. announcing in August, $1.2 billion in grants for two, in Texas and Louisiana.

One key challenge is the tech’s high cost.

The price tag for point-source-capture projects range from $15 to $120 per metric ton of captured carbon.

With direct air capture, it can cost up to $1,000 per metric ton.

Some countries are trying to use public subsidies to get the projects going.

Such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, that offers tax credits for every ton captured.

The cost is a tough sell when there’s little proof to show the technology is ready to be deployed at scale.

But developers of the tech say funding is crucial to push it further.

Here’s Shashank Samala, CEO of one of the firms that just won a federal grant for a capture hub in Louisiana.

“Two years ago, we were at a petri dish where we were removing grams of CO2 from the air. In two years, we went from grams to kilograms to hundreds of kilograms to tons, to soon hundreds of tons."

Where captured carbon can be stored is limited by geology.

And getting the carbon to storage sites could require extensive pipeline networks, or even shipping fleets, posing potential new obstacles.

Here’s U.S. climate envoy John Kerry summing up the concerns over carbon capture:

"'The jury's out on whether or not you're going to be able to capture enough emissions and contain them, and get the permissions you need to deploy the infrastructure and all the other things. Will it be competitive? Will it come online in time?"

But as countries gather for the 28th United Nations climate change conference, where they will look to hammer out ways to cut carbon emissions, many say it’s important to try every means possible.

Explainer-Why carbon capture is no easy solution to climate change

Wed, November 22, 2023 





: View of a model of carbon capture and storage designed by Santos Ltd, at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference in Brisbane


By Leah Douglas

(Reuters) - Technologies that capture carbon dioxide emissions to keep them from the atmosphere are central to the climate strategies of many world governments as they seek to follow through on international commitments to decarbonize by mid-century.

They are also expensive, unproven at scale, and can be hard to sell to a nervous public.

As nations gather for the 28th United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates at the end of November, the question of carbon capture’s future role in a climate-friendly world will be in focus. Here are some details about the state of the industry now, and the obstacles in the way of widespread deployment:

FORMS OF CARBON CAPTURE

The most common form of carbon capture technology involves capturing the gas from a point source like an industrial smokestack. From there, the carbon can either be moved directly to permanent underground storage or it can be used in another industrial purpose first, variations that are respectively called carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS).

There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Some 30 of those projects, accounting for 78% of all captured carbon from the group, use the carbon for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), in which carbon is injected into oil wells to free trapped oil. Drillers say EOR can make petroleum more climate-friendly, but environmentalists say the practice is counter-productive.

The other 12 projects, which permanently store carbon in underground formations without using them to boost oil output, are in the U.S., Norway, Iceland, China, Canada, Qatar, and Australia, according to the Global CCS Institute.

Another form of carbon capture is direct air capture (DAC), in which carbon emissions are captured from the air.

About 130 DAC facilities are being planned around the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), though just 27 have been commissioned and they capture just 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

The U.S. in August announced $1.2 billion in grants for two DAC hubs in Texas and Louisiana that promise to capture 2 million metric tons of carbon per year, though a final investment decision on the projects has not been made.

HIGH COSTS

One stumbling block to rapid deployment of carbon capture technology is cost.

CCS costs range from $15 to $120 per metric ton of captured carbon depending on the emissions source, and DAC projects are even more expensive, between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton, because of the amount of energy needed to capture carbon from the atmosphere, according to the IEA.

Some CCS projects in countries like Norway and Canada have been paused for financial reasons.

Countries including the U.S. have rolled out public subsidies for carbon capture projects. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, offers a $50 tax credit per metric ton of carbon captured for CCUS and $85 per metric ton captured for CCS, and $180 per metric ton captured through DAC.

Though those are meaningful incentives, companies may still need to take on some added costs to move CCS and DAC projects ahead, said Benjamin Longstreth, global director of carbon capture at the Clean Air Task Force.

Some CCS projects have also failed to prove out the technology's readiness. A $1 billion project to harness carbon dioxide emissions from a Texas coal plant, for example, had chronic mechanical problems and routinely missed its targets before it was shut down in 2020, according to a report submitted by the project’s owners to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Petra Nova project restarted in September.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Where captured carbon can be stored is limited by geology, a reality that would become more pronounced if and when carbon capture is deployed at the kind of massive scale that would be needed to make a difference to the climate. The best storage sites for carbon are in portions of North America, East Africa, and the North Sea, according to the Global CCS Institute.

That means getting captured carbon to storage sites could require extensive pipeline networks or even shipping fleets – posing potential new obstacles.

In October, for example, a $3 billion CCS pipeline project proposed by Navigator CO2 Ventures in the U.S. Midwest - meant to move carbon from heartland ethanol plants to good storage sites - was canceled amid concerns from residents about potential leaks and construction damage.

Companies investing in carbon removal need to take seriously community concerns about new infrastructure projects, said Simone Stewart, industrial policy specialist at the National Wildlife Federation.

"Not all technologies are going to be possible in all locations," Stewart said.

(Reporting by Leah Douglas; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

ExxonMobil Sees a $4 Trillion Opportunity to Make Oil Cleaner

By Matthew DiLallo - Jun 4, 2022 - MOTLEY FOOL

KEY POINTS
Exxon sees an enormous market opportunity for carbon capture and storage.

That's leading the oil giant to invest billions of dollars into the market.

It's one of several energy companies working on carbon capture and storage solutions.

The oil giant is pumping billions of dollars into a plan to clean up the oil patch's emissions profile.

ExxonMobil (XOM 1.45%) doesn't believe fossil fuels will become extinct. It sees oil and gas playing a vital role in fueling the economy in the future, even as the adoption of cleaner alternatives accelerates. That's partly due to their lower relative costs and the huge technological leaps needed before replacement fuels like green hydrogen become commercially viable.

Another reason Exxon sees a future for fossil fuels is that it can lower its carbon emissions profile through carbon capture and storage. The oil giant foresees a $4 trillion market opportunity by 2050 for cleaning up the oil patch.

What is carbon capture and storage?

Carbon capture pulls carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion and industrial processes out of the air so that it doesn't get into the atmosphere and negatively impact the climate. The captured carbon dioxide then moves on pipelines or ships to underground geological formations for storage. There's also the potential to reuse captured carbon dioxide for other purposes.

One potentially major market for captured carbon dioxide is a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Oil companies, including Exxon, Occidental Petroleum (OXY 1.43%), Denbury Resources, and Kinder Morgan, pump carbon dioxide into legacy oil formations to increase pressure, resulting in higher production. Many of these companies currently use carbon dioxide produced from underground reservoirs for EOR. However, they're increasingly seeking out captured carbon for EOR purposes.

In addition to EOR, potential uses of captured carbon include manufacturing other fuels like synthetic jet fuel and making building materials like concrete.

Betting big on carbon capture and storage

While carbon dioxide has a range of potential uses, the initial focus of Exxon and others in the energy sector is on sequestering it underground. The company is investing more than $15 billion over the next six years to lower greenhouse gas emissions through carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and biofuels. It's already the world leader in carbon capture, pulling more carbon dioxide out of the air than any other company.

However, it has grand ambitions to build an even larger carbon capture and storage business. For example, Exxon is working on an up to $100 billion plan to capture carbon produced by petrochemical plants, power generating facilities, and other heavy industries along the Houston Ship Channel. The plan would see industrial facilities install devices to capture carbon dioxide before it leaves their plants. They could either use it to develop products or transport it via pipelines to the Gulf of Mexico, where it will get injected into sub-sea formations.

Exxon is also looking into developing a large-scale carbon capture and storage hub in Australia. It would capture emissions produced by industries in the Gippsland Basin and transport the carbon dioxide to a depleted oilfield off the country's coast via existing pipelines.

Growing interest in capturing carbon

Exxon is one of many energy companies working on developing carbon capture and storage projects. EnLink Midstream (ENLC -0.09%) and Talos Energy (TALO 3.19%) are working to jointly develop a complete carbon capture, transportation, and sequestration solution for industrial-scale carbon dioxide emitters along the Mississippi River. The proposed project would use significant portions of EnLink's pipelines in the region to transport captured carbon dioxide and move it to Talos' River Bend sequestration site in Louisiana.

Meanwhile, EnLink and Enterprise Products Partners (EPD -0.14%) are working with a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum on potential carbon capture and storage solutions. EnLink's project with Occidental would focus on another section of the Mississippi River corridor, while Enterprise Products Partners is working on developing a project along the Houston Ship Channel. The midstream companies would provide existing and new pipelines to transport captured carbon to sequestration hubs operated by Occidental Petroleum.

Carbon capture could keep the oil patch from going extinct

ExxonMobil believes carbon capture and storage is an answer to the world's energy problem. It can make fossil fuels much cleaner while keeping the costs low compared to alternative fuels. That's leading the oil giant to bet big on the future of carbon capture. If it's correct, that wager could pay big dividends by enabling it to continue producing oil and gas while earning meaningful income from carbon capture and storage.

GREENHOUSE GASES
The life-or-death race to improve carbon capture
The technology works, but we’ll need better chemistry and engineering to reach the scale required to avoid a climate disaster

by Craig Bettenhausen
July 18, 2021 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 99, Issue 26

C&EN | Chemistry news from around the world (acs.org)

Credit: National Carbon Capture Center | A solvent tower at the National Carbon Capture Center, a research facility near Birmingham, Alabama


Carbon capture isn’t about saving Earth. Earth is a wet rock floating through space; it doesn’t care if we drown our coastal cities or turn our farmland into desert. Rather, carbon capture is one of the technologies we will need if we want Earth to continue to be a tolerable place for humans to live.

IN BRIEF


The carbon-capture chemistry we have today is too expensive. It works, and it makes economic sense in a few settings. But to meet the global-consensus goal of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 and dodge the worst consequences of climate change, we need to deploy more than 150 times as much carbon-capture capacity as we have now. That means reducing costs and making more options available for a wide range of CO2 emission sources. Read on about the growing number of businesses, government labs, nonprofits, and academic researchers racing to bring the next generation of carbon-capture technology up to scale and into the market.


In 2020, we sent 40 billion metric tons (t) of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere. We need to cut that number to 0 by 2050 if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If we don’t, the natural systems that keep Earth’s climate relatively peaceful and comfortable will start to tip. The shift will be chaotic, and the new normal might not be conducive to life as we know it.


To reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, we need an all-of-the-above approach. Efficiency improvements can reduce our energy needs, and renewable and nuclear power may eventually be able to supply enough electricity for our homes, offices, and cars. But nuclear power is expensive and lacks public support, and renewables are struggling to find the land they need to be deployed at scale. On top of that, activities such as aviation and iron smelting are currently impossible to carry out commercially without releasing CO2.


That’s where carbon capture comes in. Removing carbon dioxide from point sources such as the flue gas of power plants and locking it away underground can be a big part of the path to net zero. Related technologies known as direct air capture can remove CO2 that is already in the ambient air. But all of it depends on carbon capture getting a lot bigger, cheaper, and more efficient—and doing so quickly.

SLOW START


Capturing the CO2 from power plants’ flue gas is where most of the action is. “Decarbonization of the power sector becomes the backbone that the decarbonization of the rest of the economy happens on,” says John Northington, director of the National Carbon Capture Center, a research facility near Birmingham, Alabama.

WHAT’S YOUR GAS STREAM?

Different emission sources require different carbon-capture methods.

Ammonia, ethanol, natural gas processing: Emit gas streams with more than 80% CO2. The CO2 is captured with compression and dehydration, membranes, or physical solvents.

Chemical plants, iron, steel and paper mills: Emit gas streams with 15–80% CO2. The CO2 can be captured with physical solvents, solid sorbents, or membranes.

Coal and natural gas power plants and boilers: Emit gas streams with less than 15% CO2. The CO2 can be captured with chemical solvents.

Ambient air: Has a CO2 concentration around 0.041%. The CO2 can be captured with metal-organic frameworks or chemical systems.

Sources: Global CCS Institute, National Petroleum Council.


But just one commercial power plant has carbon capture: the coal-fired Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan, which captures 1 million t of CO2 per year on one of its four generators. Carbon capture elsewhere on other industrial processes, such as natural gas production, adds another 27 plants and gathers 25 million t per year. Not nearly enough.


The people developing the technology that will make capturing carbon practical have gained unlikely allies in the past couple of years: the oil and gas companies responsible for the lion’s share of CO2 emissions. Though these firms have had their eyes on carbon capture for some time, Northington says, they’re investing serious money in it now.


Data from the patent research firm Patent Seekers bear that notion out. Oil companies have gotten the largest number of carbon-capture patents in recent years, followed by government agencies and research institutes, universities, and engineering and technology companies.


Klaus Lackner, an engineering professor working on direct air capture at Arizona State University, says the change in attitude is a result of pressure from two directions: competition from cheap renewable energy and public demand for low-carbon options. Major changes are coming to the energy market, Lackner says. “The question isn’t ‘Will we have a transition?’ We will. The Exxons and Shells and other companies have to figure out how to make it through that transition. Their business model falls apart if you can’t have liquid fuels.”


Lackner says he’s been pushing fossil fuel companies on this point for years, telling them, “Your societal license to dump CO2 into the air will go away. You need to figure out how to operate without needing that license.”


Matt Steyn, a senior adviser with the advocacy wing of the Global CCS Institute (GCCSI), a carbon-capture-and-storage think tank, says the change is also driven by the scientific consensus expressed by the IPCC and the International Energy Agency. “The target has been set; the timeline has been set,” he says. The conversation has shifted from “What do we do?” to “How do we do it?”
As we deploy more plants, costs will come down, just as they have done in every other sector.
Steve Oldham, CEO, Carbon Engineering


Carbon capture of all types is a gas-separation problem. The goal is pure CO2, ideally at high pressure so it can go into a pipeline and be injected safely underground. For some industrial processes, the capture technology available today works fine. In ammonia and corn ethanol plants, for example, the gas exiting exhaust pipes is 80% or more CO2 and just needs to be dried and compressed for transport.


As the CO2 in emissions gets more dilute, the energy required to extract it rises. The emissions coming from steel plants and many chemical processes tend to be between 15 and 80% CO2. The flue gas from fossil fuel combustion in air, such as in coal or natural gas–fired power plants, is generally less than 15% CO2.

CAPTURE WITH SOLVENTS

Carbon dioxide–rich flue gas flows up a contact tower and mixes with a solvent that is trickling down (left). Reduced-CO₂ gas vents from the top, while CO₂-rich solvent exits at the bottom and flows to the top of a stripping tower. There, the solvent is heated, usually by steam, as it trickles down. The heat forces the CO₂ out of solution and up to a collection system. The refreshed solvent heads back to the contact tower to start again

.
Credit: Adapted from CO2CRC


Ironically, oil companies are some of the biggest practitioners of carbon capture today because they use solvents, membranes, and other technologies to remove CO2 from natural gas deposits found in locations such as Russia and west Texas. When they use or sell that CO2 instead of venting it, that counts as carbon capture. That’s why ExxonMobil can claim to capture more CO2 than any other company, even if it uses most of that to push more oil out of the ground.


Amine-based extraction systems developed for natural gas processing have been adapted for other CO2 sources, such as the power plant in Saskatchewan, but the energy cost of using such systems on more dilute streams is crushingly high. Second-generation solvent systems are poised to come to market next, followed by membranes and solid sorbents. And numerous innovative and experimental approaches are racing to catch up.


Syrie Crouch, vice president for carbon capture and storage at Shell, which built the Saskatchewan plant, says deploying capture where it’s simple is an important start. US ethanol makers, for example, capture only 3 million t of the 43 million t of CO2 their plants produce each year. “The key is to capture that lowest-hanging fruit first and then work on down the cost curve,” she says.


INCUMBENT AMINES


The most mature carbon-capture technologies today use solvents. These systems pump emissions through a solution that absorbs CO2 but lets through other gases, such as nitrogen. The CO2-rich solvent then flows into a boiler, where heat drives the pure CO2 back out of solution. That stripping step is the energy hog.


Though the terminology is harsh to a chemist’s ears, carbon-capture solvents are considered either chemical or physical. Chemical solvents, mostly amines such as the industry standard 30% monoethanolamine in water, get a CO2-solubility boost through reversible chemical reactions with water and CO2 that form carbonates, bicarbonates, and carbamates.


Physical solvents such as methanol rely on intermolecular interactions to dissolve CO2. Companies including Linde, Air Products, and UOP offer such systems commercially. They use less energy than chemical solvents but require high pressures and low temperatures. They’re not suitable for combustion flue gas but have been used for many years to remove CO2 from natural gas.

ALMOST LIKE A FILTER

Membranes separate gas mixtures on the basis of size or chemical properties. Some molecules can pass through, and others cannot.

Credit: Adapted from CO2CRC


Amine solvents have the advantage of being mature technology. The systems are well understood, with well-characterized economics and risk profiles that investors know how to analyze. Dow, Shell, Fluor, and others offer monoethanolamine solutions for carbon capture. Boundary Dam Unit 3 uses amines, as did NRG Energy’s Petra Nova plant in Texas, which captured more than 1 million t of CO2 per year from 2017 until NRG shut it down in 2020.



BASF, Linde, General Electric, and the start-up Carbon Clean are among those working on advanced amines. These systems use chemicals such as piperazine alongside or instead of monoethanolamine to get better stability, kinetics, and thermodynamics. The US Department of Energy recently awarded Linde and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign $47 million to build a 200 t per day pilot facility using an advanced amine solvent from BASF at a coal-fired power plant near Springfield, Illinois.


But capturing CO2 with amines comes at a steep cost. Fitted onto a power plant’s systems, they consume 30–50% of the plant’s energy output. Most experts, including Shell’s Crouch, expect that amine systems can get only 10–20% more efficient. At the same time, amines can seem like a safe bet compared with a next-generation technology. “If you’re making your first investment in carbon capture and storage, you don’t necessarily want to be taking massive risks on something new and untested,” the GCCSI’s Steyn says.

THE NEXT GENERATION


At the National Carbon Capture Center (NCCC) and the Wyoming Integrated Test Center (ITC), two next-generation carbon-capture technologies that look promising are solid sorbents and membranes.

Credit: Saipem
CO2 Solutions, now part of Saipem, engineered carbonic anhydrase to fit the demands of carbon capture.


The NCCC and ITC sites are essentially coal-fired power plants that can pipe their flue gas into a series of testing bays. The NCCC tests systems at scales from less than 1 t per day up to about 25 t per day; tests at the ITC run between 25 and 450 t per day. The sites, which use a combination of public and private financing, serve as technology development bridges between lab-scale carbon-capture concepts and pilot-scale tests on commercial power plants.


The NCCC’s Northington says the incumbent amine systems can capture carbon at a cost of $60–$65 per metric ton. Advanced amines and other second-generation solvents are about $40 per metric ton. A handful of commercial installations that will use advanced amines are in early-stage engineering now, he says. Solid sorbents, membranes, and other transformational technologies will reach $30 or less per metric ton, he predicts.


“We want choice in the marketplace,” says William Morris, technical director of the ITC. “People are really trying to figure out what works for them, not only in their industry but in their specific circumstance.”


Solid sorbents include zeolites, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), activated carbon, and porous silica particles. They’re often functionalized with amine groups to increase their activity and make them more selective for CO2.
MERRY-GO-ROUND

In Svante's solid-sorbent capture system, flue gas first flows down (left) through a rotating disk loaded with a sorbent material that removes the carbon dioxide. At the next station (right), steam flows through the sorbent, stripping the now-pure CO2 out for collection. A third station (rear) refreshes the sorbent on the way back around to the flue gas station.

Credit: Svante


Generally, solid sorbents have faster absorption kinetics than amines and require less energy to release the CO2 again. They can also hold more CO2 per unit volume than most solvents. That means that solid-sorbent systems can be smaller, reducing capital costs, and can be stripped of their CO2 using vacuum or modest heat.


The start-up Svante forms solid sorbents into large, nanoporous disks divided into slices like a pizza. On a giant turntable, the disk slowly rotates each slice through a flue gas stream, a CO2-stripping module, and one or two sorbent preparation stations. The firm has a 10,000 t per year demonstration plant on a natural gas–fired boiler in Canada. It raised $75 million in February to advance a design for cement plants.


In addition to Svante, ExxonMobil, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, TDA Research, and others are testing solid-sorbent systems for flue gas capture. Shell, which is shifting its R&D to solid sorbents, tested a system that uses amine-functionalized solid sorbents on a wood-burning power plant in Austria; it is now readying a scaled-up test at a manure-to-power plant in the Netherlands. After these trials, Crouch says, Shell will offer the technology on the open market.


Membranes are even further along than solid sorbents, Morris says. Membrane systems use selectively permeable materials that exploit the small chemical and physical differences between CO2 and the rest of a gas mixture to achieve separation. Like amines, membranes are already being used in natural gas processing and other areas where CO2 pressure and content are high.


“The next technology outside of amines that will deploy will be membranes,” Morris predicts. He says membranes are coming fast for capturing CO2 from flue gas at power plants. And Northington expects membranes will play a big role in carbon capture for the chemical industry and heavy manufacturing, which have moderate to high CO2 concentrations.




Getting any new carbon capture technology to market won’t be cheap. Morris says getting a robust set of data from testing at the ITC can cost seven figures. One membrane maker, Membrane Technology and Research (MTR), won $52 million in funding in May from the US Department of Energy to do just that. MTR ran a 20 t per day version of its system for 1,400 h at the NCCC in 2015 and will use the funds to scale it up to 150 t per day in Wyoming. The company expects to demonstrate capture at less than $40 per metric ton.


MTR’s membrane polymers are isoporous, meaning their pores are uniform in size and arranged geometrically, unlike the randomly arranged, multisize pores in most gas-separation membranes. The regular pore pattern lets molecules flow more smoothly through the material, lowering the amount of pressure needed relative to conventional membranes. And a tighter distribution of pore sizes increases selectivity for CO2.


Another membrane maker, Compact Membrane Systems (CMS), also seeks to decrease costs by reducing pressure. CMS uses facilitated transport membranes, which are specialized fluoropolymers coated onto a porous substrate. CEO Erica Nemser likens the mechanism to Tarzan swinging through the jungle on vines. The CO2 is Tarzan, and fluoropolymers decorated with activating groups act as the vines, passing CO2 along, with minimal pressure needed.


The firm’s systems are already being used to separate olefins from paraffins and to remove water and dissolved gases from solvents, oils, and lubricants. The system that will capture CO2 in flue gas will be a modification of one that’s in field trials now for removing CO2 from biomethane. Chemical changes to the fluoropolymer make the membrane selective toward different chemical species, Nemser says.


CMS’s units are built around membrane cartridges about twice the size of a can of spray paint—hence the “compact” in the company’s name. The bigger the gas stream to be treated, the more cartridges the system uses. Chief Technology Officer Hannah Murnen says such modular systems will make carbon capture accessible for a wide range of CO2 point sources. In contrast, the towers needed to mix amine solvents with a gas stream and strip the CO2 out later make economic sense only at enormous scales, she says.


CMS says it will be able to deliver carbon capture for as little as $20 per metric ton. “It’s time for membranes. It’s membranes’ day in the sun,” Murnen says.

TOMORROW’S TECH


Amines may dominate carbon capture today, and membranes and solid sorbents may be right on their heels, but a need this serious—and a market this big—is attracting plenty of other contenders. And a good-enough concept could leap ahead if the people behind it can show it works and is scalable.


Saipem and Chart Industries both hope to adapt technology and equipment already in use in other chemical processes.


In January 2020, Saipem, an energy technology and engineering firm, acquired CO2 Solutions, a start-up that is using enzymes to boost the carbon-capture kinetics of aqueous potassium carbonate. K2CO3 reacts with CO2 and water to form potassium bicarbonate, KHCO3. The bicarbonate solution releases its CO2 at relatively low temperatures—around 75 °C under reduced pressure—meaning it can tap low-grade heat that most industrial processes would waste.


That chemistry has been used to scrub CO2 from the air in submarines and other closed environments and in some high-CO2-concentration settings. The trouble is that the absorption kinetics are too slow for it to work well at flue gas concentrations and pressures; the contact towers would have to be even bigger than those used with amines.


To solve that problem, Saipem catalyzes the reaction with the enzyme carbonic anhydrase. Natural carbonic anhydrase is already one of the fastest enzymes, speeding up the formation of HCO3– by a factor of 107. The team at CO2 Solutions modified the enzyme to make it even faster and keep it active at higher temperatures.


“The first time I saw carbon capture with the enzyme, my jaw just dropped, because the catalyst is magic,” says Richard Surprenant, who came to Saipem from CO2 Solutions and is now commercial manager for carbon-capture technologies.


Any industrial or postcombustion application is fair game for the firm’s technology, Surprenant says, and anywhere with low-grade waste or geothermal heat is an opportunity, because it doesn’t need the high-grade heat, a resource many plants already use in other ways. The firm is in the midst of restarting CO2 Solutions’ first commercial plant, a 30 t per day facility in Quebec that extracts CO2 from a paper mill and sells it to a nearby greenhouse.


Chart Industries, an energy and industrial gas equipment firm, is also moving into carbon capture through acquisition and investment. In late 2020, Chart acquired Sustainable Energy Solutions, a start-up making cryogenic carbon-capture systems for combustion flue gas. In June of this year, it invested in Earthly Labs, which uses cryogenics to capture CO2 from breweries.

Credit: Mosaic Materials
Mosaic Materials' carbon-capturing metal-organic frameworks.


In the simplest terms, both cryogenic systems chill their target gas streams until the CO2 condenses into a solid or liquid. Nitrogen, still a gas at those temperatures, is pumped off. The basic process, often called cryogenic distillation, is already used to purify other industrial gases, such as oxygen and nitrogen.


The challenge for flue gas is in the engineering, not the chemistry, according to Chart CEO Jill Evanko. If water and CO2 freeze in the wrong places, they can clog pipes and block heat exchangers. But with clever heat management, system design, and integration with the rest of the equipment, Chart and its partners can deliver carbon capture of flue gas at half the cost of conventional amines, Evanko says, and make brewery carbon capture profitable enough to pay off the equipment in 18 months.


Several other technologies are in early-stage development. Solvents that use less water or no water at all, including organic solvents and ionic liquids, could reduce the amount of mass that needs to be heated to release the purified CO2. Allam cycle power plants burn hydrocarbons in a mix of O2 and CO2, sidestepping the need to separate CO2 from nitrogen. And FuelCell Energy is commercializing its molten carbonate fuel cell, which can capture flue gas carbon while generating additional electricity from natural gas.


It’s an exciting time for technology development, the ITC’s Morris says. “Decarbonization is going to be very, very difficult, and it’s probably not going to be possible without technologies that are currently in the development stage.”
STATE OF PLAY

Carbon capture is in its early days, especially for combustion flue gas, such as the emissions of a coal-fired power plant. Researchers are working on each of the technologies below to make them cheaper and more efficient and to get them to work on a wider variety of gas streams. A single commercial-scale installation could let a new technology pass its competitors or even take the lead.
Sources: Global CCS Institute, National Petroleum Council, International Energy Agency, C&EN reporting.

DIRECT AIR CAPTURE


Point-source carbon capture won’t be enough. The technology still lets 2–10% of the carbon through. And it’s hard to deploy on sources with diffuse or mobile emissions, such as airplanes, sprawling petrochemical plants, and wide-open wastewater treatment facilities. Besides, the atmosphere has too much carbon already. The goal of net-zero CO2 emissions will require methods to remove carbon from the air.


This direct air capture, or DAC, works on chemical principles similar to those for point-source capture. The big difference is that our ambient air, although overloaded, is still only 410 ppm, or 0.041%, CO2, much lower than even the most dilute industrial point sources. And that changes a lot about the devices and their economics.


Because flue gas and other point sources are releasing new carbon into the atmosphere, the goal is to capture as much of it as possible—90% is a common target. In DAC, the amount of carbon left behind isn’t important; it’s all about how much CO2 can be removed per dollar spent. “My goal is not to make CO2-free air. My goal is to take CO2 out of the air, and I can choose where the optimal efficiency is,” says Lackner, the Arizona State engineer, who is also developing DAC technology.


But however you look at it, DAC is expensive. Carbon capture at an ethanol plant can cost as little as $10 per metric ton. At a coal-fired power plant, the cost is around $60. DAC companies don’t like to talk about their costs, but industry insiders estimate they are around $500 per metric ton. Lackner and other experts generally peg $100 as the point at which DAC will become cost competitive with other decarbonization methods.


Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, a carbon-reduction subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, thinks it can reach that level in partnership with the start-up Carbon Engineering. The firms plan to build in the southwestern US what they say will be the world’s first commercial-scale DAC plant. It will capture 1 million t of CO2 per year, to be used mainly to boost production in Occidental’s oil wells in the region. The largest existing DAC plant captures a mere 2,000 t per year, according to Ryan Edwards, low-carbon policy adviser for Oxy Low Carbon.


Carbon Engineering uses chemical looping to capture carbon from the air. In its process, intended to run on renewable energy, giant fans blow air over plastic surfaces that have aqueous potassium hydroxide flowing over it.


The KOH reacts with CO2 to form potassium carbonate, K2CO3, which then flows into a pellet reactor containing aqueous calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)2. The calcium and potassium switch places to form CaCO3, which precipitates out as solid pellets, as well as KOH, which is ready to cycle back to the plastic surfaces. The pellets then pass into a calciner, a heater that decomposes the CaCO3 into solid CaO and pure CO2. The CO2 is cooled and pressurized, and the CaO heads back to the pellet reactor, where it mixes with water and re-forms Ca(OH)2.


The system sounds complicated, but it’s built mostly out of reactions and equipment already in use in industry. The pellet reactor is adapted from papermaking. Calciners running the same chemical reaction are central to cement production, and other versions come into play in glass, uranium, petroleum coke, and gypsum processing.

Credit: Wyoming ITC
The Dry Fork power station in Wyoming sends some of its flue gas to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, where users test new carbon-capture technologies.


Carbon Engineering published its process in 2018, projecting costs between $94 and $232 per metric ton (Joule, DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2018.05.006). CEO Steve Oldham says the firm is “extremely confident” its costs will be in that range and expects that second and third generations will ensure a cost of $100 or less. “As we deploy more plants, costs will come down, just as they have done in every other sector,” Oldham says.


Mosaic Materials, a developer of MOFs and one of C&EN’s 10 Start-Ups to Watch in 2019, pivoted to DAC from point-source capture 2 years ago, according to CEO Thomas McDonald. In the past 3 months, McDonald says, he’s seen a sharp increase in interest in DAC.


The firm’s MOFs use a flavor of CO2-amine chemistry that McDonald calls cooperative binding, in which the CO2 inserts itself between a magnesium ion and an amine ligand. The mechanism gives the material high capacity and fast kinetics, and it reverses at relatively low temperatures to release the CO2, according to McDonald.


MOFs are more expensive than other solid sorbents such as silica or activated carbon. Mosaic researchers are working to improve the materials’ capacity and stability to reduce operating costs, McDonald says. But the firm is focused more on lowering manufacturing costs and optimizing complete systems around its materials.


Mosaic worked with ExxonMobil on flue gas capture in 2017 and 2018 and has some ongoing work in that area, along with collaborations with NASA and the US Navy on life-support systems, McDonald says. But he sees DAC as the best way to build his company. “We see the fastest, least-capital-intensive, least-risky path is by achieving early scale on projects through direct air capture.”
We will require something roughly the size of the current oil and gas industry, but with the molecules going in reverse.
Syrie Crouch, vice president for carbon capture and storage, Shell


Lackner says DAC is a good fit with renewable energy. If a natural gas power plant is off because of low demand, so is any point-source carbon-capture device attached to it. DAC, on the other hand, can run on renewable energy and stabilize electricity prices by being a customer of last resort.


In addition to his academic work, Lackner is working to commercialize his own DAC concept, which he calls MechanicalTrees. The “trees” eliminate the cost of running fans by relying on wind to move air across sorbents loaded onto disks arranged in a tower. When saturated with CO2, the towers drop into a chamber where heat and vacuum remove the CO2 at roughly 95% concentration.


PAYING FOR IT


All cool ideas, but who’s putting up the cash? A provision of the US tax code called 45Q offers tax credits for capturing carbon. When the provision is fully in place in 2026, carbon that is captured and sequestered will be worth $50 per metric ton. CO2 used to extract more hydrocarbons, a widespread and controversial practice called enhanced oil recovery, gets $35.


That $35 credit plus the $40 per metric ton that enhanced oil recovery operators pay for CO2 on average make that market the most profitable for non-food-grade CO2, even with the lower credit (Front. Clim. 2019, DOI: 10.3389/fclim.2019.00005).


That makes the economic rationale for carbon-capture products dependent on the price of oil. That dynamic is what doomed the Petra Nova carbon-capture facility when the price of oil got too low during the pandemic. Still, Oxy Low Carbon executives are prepared to depend on enhanced oil recovery for their southwestern US DAC project.


Despite such bumps, carbon capture offers a way to decarbonize combustion and other CO2-emitting processes so they can remain part of a net-zero world. That’s both a selling point and a point of criticism. Critics such as Greenpeace say carbon capture diverts resources away from renewables and keeps polluters in business.
Your societal license to dump CO2 into the air will go away. You need to figure out how to operate without needing that license.
Klaus Lackner, engineer, Arizona State University


Critics also point out that almost all the CO2 captured to date has been used in enhanced oil recovery. In the best cases, enough CO2 stays permanently in the ground after such oil extraction that the resulting fuel has net-negative CO2 emissions. But many enhanced oil recovery projects don’t meet that goal (Energies 2019, DOI: 10.3390/en12030448).


“To put it very brutally, in the beginning, I don’t care” where the captured CO2 goes, Lackner says. The technology needs to start scaling up now. He points to a recent report from the International Energy Agency detailing a path to net zero by 2050. In that scenario, point-source capture has to scale up from about 40 million t per year today to 6.6 billion t in 2050, and DAC has to grow from a few thousand metric tons per year to almost 1 billion t in 2050.


If enhanced oil recovery operators are willing to be early adopters that get carbon capture down to a cost that the market will bear, Lackner says, that’ll have to do. “The only way you get there is by learning. Most industries gain 10–20% in cost reduction for every doubling of cumulative output,” he says. “If we follow normal learning curves, I’m allowed to be optimistic. If it turns out we derail from that, the sooner we know, the better off we are.”


Shell’s Crouch agrees that industry needs to start deploying carbon capture now to reach the necessary scale. “We will require something roughly the size of the current oil and gas industry, but with the molecules going in reverse,” she says.


Building all those plants will cost $655 billion to $1,280 billion over the next 3 decades, according to a recent analysis by the GCCSI. That’s a lot of money, but Brad Page, CEO of the GCCSI, points out in a press release that “investing around one trillion dollars over almost 30 years is well within the capacity of the private sector which invested almost two trillion dollars in the energy sector in 2018 alone. Government decisions hold the key to enabling the requisite private sector capital being allocated for [carbon capture and storage] deployment.”


One proposal the US Congress is considering now would add a higher credit for carbon captured from the air. The idea has broad bipartisan support, according to Oxy Low Carbon’s Edwards. At a recent panel discussion hosted by the nonprofit OurEnergyPolicy, he expressed confidence that enhanced incentives, R&D and deployment support, and funding for infrastructure for CO2 transport and storage could all become law in the current session of Congress.


Jeremy Harrell, the managing director for policy at the energy-transition nonprofit ClearPath and another OurEnergyPolicy panelist, said he expects the Biden administration to launch a 50:50 cost-sharing initiative to deploy a first wave of carbon-capture facilities. “We think that sends a really important market signal to the private sector as they look to invest in these technologies,” he said at the event. “The politics here are going to play out well over the next 18 months, and people should stay tuned.”


The administration’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year includes a 61% increase in spending at the Department of Energy on carbon capture, use, and storage, though the $368 million total is far short of what many climate activists would like to see.


Edwards says 45Q has opened the door to commercial-scale carbon-capture projects. Since Congress extended 45Q in 2018 and removed the cap on the number of credits available, 30 to 40 new projects have been publicly proposed, he says, which would more than double the global number. Between projects that are being kept quiet for now and new ones that will be unlocked if Congress expands 45Q, that increase is “just the tip of the iceberg,” Edwards says.


It’ll need to be. Right now, 28 point-source capture and DAC plants are active, including at Boundary Dam and nonpower installations, according to the GCCSI. The world will need 2,000 large facilities by 2050, along with transportation and storage infrastructure, to reach net zero by then.


“The reality is, we’ve only got a certain amount of time left,” the GCCSI’s Steyn says. “We’re now pushing against the clock.” Considering how long it takes to finance, engineer, and build a trillion dollars of industrial equipment, he says, “If you’re going to actually make inroads toward net-zero 2050, it’s got to happen this decade. This is the make-or-break decade.”

Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2021 American Chemical Society

Carbon capture gains steam as natural gas power plants face emissions cap

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 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.

“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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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

NOT CLEAN NOR GREEN
Big Oil is just one industry hoping carbon capture will help it survive the new green economy

IT WILL BE USED TO FRACK OLD WELLS & HARD TO GET AT SHALE OIL



NBC SPECIAL NEWS SERIES CLIMATE IN CRISIS

Big Oil is just one industry hoping carbon capture will help it survive the new green economy
“There’s the thought that we should spend whatever it takes to keep global warming below 2 degrees C," one environmental expert said.

Carbon capture is a new kind of business many companies believe will help their industry survive in the net-zero economy.J. David Ake / AP file

April 23, 2021, 
By Leticia Miranda and Denise Chow

From Big Oil to Big Tech, companies are rushing in to a new kind of business they believe will keep their industry surviving in the new net-zero economy: carbon capture.

So-called carbon capture initiatives typically involve actively drawing carbon dioxide out of the air or scrubbing the heat-trapping greenhouse gas out of the emissions from factories and power plants. While the technology has been used for decades by oil manufacturers to pump more oil, only in the last several years have other industries started to embrace the technology as a way of combating climate change.

With the oil market still fragile after inventories reached historic highs early in the pandemic, carbon capture has become a major draw for fossil fuel titans as they scramble to stay afloat in a new green economy.

Darren Woods, chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, told investors in March the company expects the market for carbon capture to grow by 35 percent each year, reaching $2 trillion by 2040. The company this week proposed a $100 billion carbon capture hub in Houston that it estimates would capture and store about 50 million metric tons of carbon a year by 2030 and possibly 100 million metric tons by 2040.

ExxonMobil is urging President Joe Biden to introduce tax breaks and a price on carbon that will help create a market for the company's new carbon capture business.

BP plans to capture up to 10 million tons of carbon each year through its carbon capture project in North East England called Net Zero Teesside.

“CCUS technology (carbon capture, utilization and storage) is ready to deploy now,” Joshua Hicks, a spokesperson for BP, told NBC News in an emailed statement. “We will continue to work with governments and corporations to create the business models essential for scaling up carbon capture deployment.”

Microsoft is exploring carbon capture through a negative emission project at a biomass plant in Denmark, the company announced last month. Tide, owned by Procter & Gamble, is studying carbon capture technology as part of its commitment to halve greenhouse gases at its plants by 2030.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton director Antoine Arnault told investors last week that it will reduce its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2026 through using 100 percent renewable energy and helping to “improve the soil's ability to capture carbon.”

“This is an ambitious project, but we need to have a holistic approach,” Arnault said.

The demand for carbon capture technology has boomed since 2018, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report that said the world would need to take “unprecedented” steps to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change. The report warned that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 will require “large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal measures.”


It may be necessary to remove up to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year by 2050 to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Climate models have suggested that even after transitioning to renewable energy and adopting other mitigation measures, it may be necessary to remove up to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year by 2050 to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

That stark realization has fueled something of a paradigm shift, said Peter Kelemen, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. f

“People’s thinking has evolved in terms of assessing the value of mitigation,” he said. “It comes from a clear-eyed assessment of what it takes to get global warming below 2 degrees C. There’s the thought that we should spend whatever it takes to keep warming below that level.”

But some scientists and industry watchers say that without carbon pricing, capturing carbon can become too costly and difficult to scale up. By one measure, an estimated 2,000-plus large-scale carbon capture facilities must be deployed by 2050, requiring hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and a hundredfold increase in the number of carbon capture and storage facilities in operation, according to Guloren Turan, general manager of advocacy with the Global CCS Institute, a climate change think tank.


To capture carbon from flue gas, a liquid solvent is used to absorb the carbon dioxide. Then the mixture is heated to remove the carbon dioxide for storage, which requires staggering levels of energy, said Joan Brennecke, a professor of chemical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

“We need to have cap-and-trade or a carbon tax,” she said. “There needs to be incentives for companies to invest money in this.”

At the federal level, Biden aims to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half, compared to 2005 levels, by 2030. To reach that goal, the administration announced a new international climate finance plan on Thursday that would spur the private sector to contribute to climate solutions across the country and developing nations.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday the agency has requested $1.2 billion from the administration for the green climate fund to spur private investment and $485 million to fund multilateral climate initiatives.

"We need to ensure that the financing will be there, both public and private, to meet the moment on climate change, and to help us seize the opportunity for good jobs, strong economies and a more secure world," Biden said Thursday.

Whether more clean energy policy at the state and federal levels will be enough to decarbonize the grid by 2035 remains to be seen, said Adam Wilson, U.S. renewable energy analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“Current market forces will take the industry a long way on the path of a clean energy sector,” he said. “But it will likely take breakthroughs in emerging technologies to get to the finish line.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-myth-of-carbon-capture-and-storage.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CCS

THE CONTINUING DISTRACTION OF CCS

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

What is carbon capture and how much of a solution is it after COP28?

Michael Phillis

The Clarion Ledger
Wed, December 13, 2023 

An agreement at the United Nations-led climate conference to transition away from fossil fuels brought a measure of relief for climate activists, even as many said it doesn't go far enough. They also saw something to like in what the agreement said about carbon capture.

Skeptics have said carbon capture has been oversold as a climate change solution so that the fossil fuel industry can keep burning lots of oil, coal and natural gas.

The agreement approved at COP28 in Dubai said the technology could be helpful particularly in “hard-to-abate sectors” like steel manufacturing that are expected to have a difficult time eliminating their emissions. But it wasn’t held up as a way to eliminate the climate impact of fossil fuels.

The agreement “effectively marked the death of (carbon capture and storage) as an energy sector climate solution,” said Ed King, who works with governments and others seeking to speed up action on climate change.

A liquid carbon dioxide containment unit stands outside the fabrication building of Glenwood Mason Supply Company, April 18, 2023, in the Brooklyn borough of New York.

Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, said COP28 prevented carbon capture from being touted as a technological savior.

“Carbon capture pipedreams were exposed as a massive and dangerous distraction,” she said.

WHAT EXACTLY IS CARBON CAPTURE?

Lots of industrial facilities like coal-fired power plants and ethanol plants produce carbon dioxide. To stop those planet-warming emissions from reaching the atmosphere, businesses can install equipment to separate that gas from all the other gases coming out of the smokestack, and transport it to where it can be permanently stored underground. And even for industries trying to reduce emissions, some are likely to always produce some carbon, like cement manufacturers that use a chemical process that releases CO2.

“We call that a mitigation technology, a way to stop the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Karl Hausker, an expert on getting to net-zero emissions at World Resources Institute, a climate-focused nonprofit that supports sharp fossil fuel reductions along with a limited role for carbon capture.

The captured carbon is concentrated into a form that can be transported in a vehicle or through a pipeline to a place where it can be injected underground for long-term storage.

Then there's carbon removal. Instead of capturing carbon from a single, concentrated source, the objective is to remove carbon that's already in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for example, but there's a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air passes through.

For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to fully decarbonize.

“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads the federally supported Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative in the U.S., the world's second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

HOW IS IT GOING?

Many experts say the technology to capture carbon and store it works, but it’s expensive, and it’s still in the early days of deployment.

There are about 40 large-scale carbon capture projects in operation around the world capturing roughly 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s a tiny amount — roughly 0.1% — of the 36.8 billion metric tons emitted globally as tallied by the Global Carbon Project.

The IEA says the history of carbon capture “has largely been one of unmet expectations.” The group analyzed how the world can achieve net zero emissions and its guide path relies heavily on lowering emissions by slashing fossil fuel use. Carbon capture is just a sliver of the solution — less than 10% — but despite its comparatively small role, its expansion is still behind schedule.

The pace of new projects is picking up, but they face significant obstacles. In the United States, there’s opposition to CO2 pipelines that move carbon to storage sites. Safety is one concern; in 2020, a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured, releasing carbon dioxide that displaced breathable air near the ground and sent dozens of people to hospitals. The federal government is working on improving safety standards.

'Foaming at the mouth': First responders describe scene after pipeline rupture, gas leak

This photo provided by the Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency shows the site of a 24-inch pressurized pipe rupture that happened on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2020 in Yazoo County.

Companies can also run into difficulty getting permits. South Dakota regulators this year, for example, rejected a construction permit for a 1,300-mile network of CO2 pipelines in the Midwest to move carbon to a storage site in Illinois.

The technology to remove carbon directly from the air exists too, but its broad deployment is even further away and especially costly.

WHO’S SUPPORTING CARBON CAPTURE?

The American Petroleum Institute says oil and gas will remain a critical energy source for decades, meaning that in order for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, rapidly expanding carbon capture technology is “key to cleaner energy use across the economy.” A check of most oil companies' plans to get to net-zero emissions also finds most of them relying on carbon capture in some way.

The Biden administration wants more investment in carbon capture and removal, too, building off America's comparatively large spending compared with the rest of the world. But it’s an industry that needs subsidies to attract private financing. The Inflation Reduction Act makes tax benefits much more generous. Investors can get a $180 per ton credit for removing carbon from the air and storing it underground, for example. And the Department of Energy has billions to support new projects.

“What we are talking about now is taking a technology that has been proven and has been tested, but applying it much more broadly and also applying it in sectors where there is a higher cost to deploy,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry advocacy group.

Investment is picking up. The EPA is considering dozens of applications for wells that can store carbon. And in places like Louisiana and North Dakota, local leaders are fighting to attract projects and investment.

Even left-leaning California has an ambitious climate plan that incorporates carbon capture and removing carbon directly out of the air. Leaders say there’s no other way to get emissions to zero.

WHO’S AGAINST IT?

Some environmentalists argue that fossil fuel companies are holding up carbon capture to distract from the need to quickly phase out oil, gas and coal.

“The fossil fuel industry has proven itself to be dangerous and deceptive,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at Center for Biological Diversity.

There are other problems. Some projects haven’t met their carbon removal targets. A 2021 U.S. government accountability report said that of eight demonstration projects aimed at capturing and storing carbon from coal plants, just one had started operating at the time the report was published despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Opponents also note that carbon capture can serve to prolong the life of a polluting plant that would otherwise shut down sooner. That can especially hurt poorer, minority communities that have long lived near heavily polluting facilities.

They also note that most of the carbon captured in the U.S. now eventually gets injected into the ground to force out more oil, a process called enhanced oil recovery.

Hausker said it's essential that governments set policies that force less fossil fuel use — which can then be complemented by carbon capture and carbon removal.

“We aren’t going to ask Exxon, ‘pretty please, stop developing fossil fuels,’” he said.

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This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: What is carbon capture and how much of a solution is it after COP28?