https://www.wacotrib.com/news/trending/we-literally-farm-the-sky-a-climate-change-solution-slowly/article_2940b133-669b-5961-bc51-d93183a44f09.html
[images in online article]
'We literally farm the sky': A climate change solution slowly gains ground
By Steven Mufson / The Washington Post
2019-04-20
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — At the end of a cul-de-sac called Fresh Way, two
bright green structures the size of shipping containers gleam in the
warm sunlight, quietly sucking from the air the carbon dioxide that is
warming the planet.
One structure houses computer monitors and controls. Atop the other,
large fans draw air through slabs made of honeycomb-style ceramic cubes.
The cubes hold proprietary chemicals that act like sponges, absorbing
carbon dioxide at room temperature. Every 15 minutes, the slabs rotate
and the cubes are heated, releasing a stream of 99 percent pure carbon
dioxide into a shiny steel pipe.
This is Global Thermostat, one of just three companies at the leading
edge of the hunt for ways of skimming carbon dioxide from the air. It is
a tiny step, but a hopeful one, toward reducing global warming. Amid a
steady drumbeat of grim news about climate change, more and more people
are captivated by the idea that a feasible process can help offset
decades of damage to the atmosphere.
Some big deep-pocketed corporations — including oil companies — are
looking, too. They are lured not so much by the virtues of fighting
climate change but by the prospects of making money. Though long a
prohibitively expensive technology, carbon capture has become a
tantalizing possibility thanks to technological advances — and new
generous government incentives.
There’s little time to spare. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change has written that any hope to meet the 2 degree Celsius goal for
global warming “will require measures to reduce emissions, including the
further deployment of existing and new technologies.”
For a decade, the three companies — Carbon Engineering, Climeworks and
Global Thermostat — have experimented with technologies such as the
shape and chemical makeup of the spongelike membranes in an effort to
reduce the towering cost of capturing carbon dioxide directly from thin air.
Now their work is poised to move beyond the lab tables and prototypes.
“Our business plan is to show that cleaning the atmosphere is a
profitable activity,” said Graciela Chichilnisky, a Columbia University
economics professor and one of the co-founders of Global Thermostat who
estimates that CO2 could become a trillion dollar market.
Over the past several years, the firms have vied to make technological
progress. The cost of carbon capture has fallen from $600 a ton to as
low as $100 a ton — and lower if a cheap or free source of heat or
energy is available.
Federal subsidies are just as important. New U.S. federal tax credits
provide as much as $50 for every ton of carbon dioxide captured and
stored underground in well-sealed geological formations.
Oil companies can use the credits to pay for turning captured carbon
dioxide into transportation fuels, essentially recycling the CO2. That
would help Big Oil meet California regulations requiring lower amounts
of carbon in motor fuels.
And the oil giants can also claim a $35-a-ton credit for enhanced oil
recovery — injecting carbon dioxide into the ground to increase well
pressure and boost oil production in old fields like the Permian Basin
in west Texas. Oil companies currently extract natural carbon dioxide
from natural reservoirs before pumping it back into the ground.
The federal tax credits, known as 45Q credits, were slipped into the
2018 federal budget in the wee hours of Feb. 9, 2018, after a nine-hour
government shutdown. It attracted support from both parties, with
leading roles played by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., whose state relies
heavily on oil, gas and coal production, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse,
D-R.I., who has spoken almost weekly on the Senate floor about the
urgency of climate change and the danger of burning fossil fuels.
One reason they agree: It’s politically more appealing to give away
money through a tax credit than it is to impose a carbon tax that takes
money away. A carbon tax is levied on the carbon content of hydrocarbon
fuels such as coal, oil or natural gas that emit carbon dioxide and it
raises prices for products such as gasoline or electricity.
Environmentalists are divided on the tax credits. Most want to bury
captured carbon dioxide in geological formations underground rather than
using it to produce more fossil fuels.
“We concluded that it was not possible to square it with our work to end
fossil fuel subsidies,” said David Hawkins, director of climate policy
at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which stayed neutral on the
measure.
But of the 65 million tons of carbon dioxide that is pumped underground
in the United States every year, about 60 million tons is for enhanced
oil recovery, said Sally Benson, co-director of Stanford University’s
Precourt Institute for Energy. And demand is growing.
Whitehouse said “at this point, the only revenue proposition for carbon
capture is enhanced oil recovery.”
“As angry and frustrated I am at the behavior of these companies,” he
said, “if that’s what it takes to save the planet I’m willing to make
that investment.”
And Republican senators joined in the name of “innovation,” and seemed
unbothered that by putting a price on the credits they were flouting the
Trump administration’s effort to stymie any form of carbon tax.
“People now understand the need for addressing climate change,” Carbon
Engineering’s chief executive Steve Oldham said in an interview after
testifying before a Senate committee. “When you don’t have a solution,
it’s a scary thought.”
“We’re trying to get the message out that there is a solution here,” he
added, “and it is not forcing everybody to buy a new car or stop taking
airplanes.”
Oldham himself is a sign that carbon capture is closer to becoming a
business. He only recently took the helm at the 10-year-old Carbon
Engineering, which has built a prototype on a scenic spot near an old
lumber town about 30 miles north of Vancouver. Oldham wasn’t an expert
on carbon capture, but he had worked at a big Canadian tech company
raising money from government and commercial sources for complex
projects such as large satellites and robotics.
Carbon Engineering “has been R&D focused,” Oldham said. “Now, they need
a different skill set.”
The Squamish, British Columbia-based firm’s early investors included
Bill Gates. And Carbon Engineering recently raised $68 million with
investments from tar sands financier and Calgary Flames co-owner Murray
Edwards, Occidental Petroleum’s Low Carbon Ventures, Chevron Technology
Ventures, and BHP, an international mining and resources giant.
Oldham said the firm will use the money to design a full-size commercial
plant and that it has already identified fives sites in the United
States and two in Canada.
Drawing on research at the University of Calgary and Carnegie Mellon
University, Carbon Engineering converts carbon dioxide into
transportation fuels. It does that by combining CO2 with hydrogen —
creating a carbon neutral cycle. That could help oil companies meet
California’s requirement to reduce the carbon intensity of motor fuels
by 20 percent by 2030.
Harvard University engineering and public policy professor David Keith,
acting chief scientist and a board member at Carbon Engineering,
estimated in a paper last year that using current know-how and existing
components, the company could capture carbon dioxide at $94 to $232 a
ton. Even if Carbon Engineering’s technique is expensive, it might still
be cheaper than alternative methods of meeting the California standards.
In addition, by producing fuel, Carbon Engineering could make air travel
carbon neutral without having to turn to biofuels or electrification
that would be difficult to use in aircraft.
“It gives you choices,” Oldham said.
Climeworks, based in Switzerland, was founded by two engineering
graduate students, Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher. It became the
first company to extract CO2 from the air and sell it to a commercial
customer, albeit on a tiny scale. It sells about 900 tons a year — the
equivalent of emissions from 200 cars — to a commercial greenhouse near
Zurich that grows vegetables. The company has erected a vertical array
of 18 fans, each the size of a full-grown adult that helps speed the
capture process. The CO2 increases the greenhouse’s crop yields by 20 to
30 percent.
Climeworks has also forged an agreement to sell carbon dioxide to
Coca-Cola HBC in Switzerland for sparkling drinks. Economics could drive
future decisions. Last year Europe suffered carbon dioxide shortages
when some British fertilizer plants that produce CO2 as a byproduct
unexpectedly closed down for maintenance and Coke’s CO2 supplies were
threatened.
Like Global Thermostat, Climeworks traps CO2 simply by exposing a filter
to air. The filter contains amines, a derivative of ammonia. Once the
filter is saturated, it is heated with steam past the boiling point of
100 degrees Celsius, hot enough to free the carbon dioxide so it can be
pumped into pipes or storage tanks. Currently, the Climeworks uses free
waste heat from a local incinerator, reducing its costs.
Global Thermostat has a somewhat different model than the other two.
The company is the brainchild of two Columbia University professors:
Chichilnisky, an economist and mathematician who took part in the 1990s
climate conference in Kyoto, and Peter Eisenberger, an applied physicist
who has worked at Bell Laboratories, Exxon, Princeton and now Columbia
University. With his flyaway hair, he bears a passing resemblance to Dr.
Emmett Brown from the film “Back to the Future.”
“When Peter and Graciela first talked about this, people thought it was
crazy,” said Miles Sakwa-Novak, the plant’s young engineer. He says that
Carbon Engineering essentially takes two mature processes and combines
them in a new way, but that Global Thermostat is developing something new.
“We literally farm the sky,” Chichilnisky says in a company video.
The company’s early investors included the Canadian tycoon Edgar
Bronfman and the utility NRG, one of the biggest U.S. emitters.
The company’s process uses devices called monoliths that look like
sponges to maximize surface area. That area is covered with amines, the
nitrogen based chemical that naturally absorbs carbon dioxide from the
air. The monoliths are similar to those used in catalytic converters and
Chichilnisky says that the manufacturer Corning has provided key materials.
The next step — prying the carbon dioxide loose — is harder and more
expensive. Yet Global Thermostat only needs to heat up its amine cells
to 80 degrees Celsius, less than what it takes to boil a cup of tea,
lower than its competitors and thus relatively cheaper.
This is the dark secret of virtually all carbon capture techniques: They
tend to use large amounts of energy, which adds to carbon emissions and
costs. Some say they can be combined with solar installations. So far,
Carbon Engineering has tapped into cheap Canadian hydro power.
Many analysts wonder why the direct air capture companies don’t place
their devices near the exhaust of a natural gas or coal plant.
Chichilnisky explains that sometimes lower concentrations work better,
just as gasoline in a combustion engine needs oxygen. She said that
their process requires less energy and works best at concentrations
found in the air at 400 parts per million, 300 times more diffuse than
in power plant smokestacks.
The compact size of the Global Thermostat project could be part of its
appeal, Chichilnisky says. Companies with modest CO2 needs — such as
soft drink bottlers or oil field service firms — can move Global
Thermostat’s equipment to a site without having to worry about building
pipelines. Global Thermostat is already in talks with a soft drink maker
and a major oil company.
Chichilnisky is optimistic about Global Thermostat, but she’s worried
carbon capture will be too little too late. “The real problem with
climate change is time,” she says.
Time and scale. The carbon capture enterprises are minuscule compared to
the global crisis.
In 2018, mankind pumped about 37.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the
air. One of Global Thermostat’s container size units would capture just
4,000 tons; to offset all global emissions would take 9 million of the
units.
Climeworks says it can manufacture 100 to 150 CO2 collectors a year,
each one capable of sucking up the emissions of 250 cars. A unit with
six Climeworks filters would fit in a shipping container. In order to
meet its goal of capturing 1 percent of growing global emissions,
Climeworks would need to fill up 750,000 shipping containers.
Arguing that is doable, Climeworks notes that it is equal to the number
of shipping containers that pass through Shanghai harbor every two weeks.
Carbon Engineering is planning on much bigger projects, each costing
close to $600 million, about the same as a coal-fired power plant.
Oldham estimates that it would take 5,000 of his company’s plants to
offset U.S. carbon emissions — 5.3 gigatons — at a cost of $3 trillion.
That’s why, he says, “the real answer is a combination” or cutting
emissions and building carbon capture.
What that means, Chichilnisky says, is that the fight to reduce
emissions must continue. The danger of progress on carbon capture is
that people will see it as a reason to relax their efforts.
Until now, carbon capture has been a bad bet financially. Since 2010,
the Energy Department spent about $1.1 billion to help nine carbon
capture and storage demonstration projects, the General Accountability
Office said in a report. Private industry chipped in $610 million. But
most found the cost way too high and abandoned the projects; only one
power plant was still active at the end of 2017, GAO said.
Many coal companies see the federal carbon credits as a new lease on
their lives. “The coal lobby was always in our office” seeking credits,
said a former Energy Department official from the Obama administration
who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But, he said, “carbon capture
and storage makes coal more expensive, not less.”
Dan Kammen, professor of energy and public policy at the University of
California at Berkeley, says that carbon capture is diverting attention
from cheaper and more scalable ways to taking carbon dioxide out of the air.
“The prices [of carbon capture] would have to fall a huge amount for it
to be part of our near-term portfolio, meaning 2050 or sooner,” Kammen
says. Carbon capture from the air “can be an arrow in the quiver,” he
says. But he adds that changing land use and forestry, using known
techniques for taking CO2 from the air and storing it, “would be the
best investment in carbon capture today.”
“I recommend the boring Charlie Brown strategy,” he says. “When is the
best day to plant a tree? Yesterday. Second best? Today.”
New carbon capture technology is “the shiny new object on the table,” he
says, but “with the 30-year clock more than ticking we have to scale up
technology. We absolutely need to invest in carbon capture because we
will have to do a good deal more of it.”
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