Carbon Capture

[magneze]

Swiss climate tech company Climeworks announced yesterday that it has broken ground on its biggest facility yet for capturing carbon dioxide from the air. The new Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant, named Mammoth, will significantly scale up the company’s operations in Hellisheiði, Iceland.

That’s where Climeworks built Orca, which was the largest DAC plant in the world when it came online last September. Orca can capture up to 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to how much climate pollution 790 gas-guzzling passenger vehicles release annually. Mammoth, in comparison, can capture about nine times as much CO2 as Orca.

MAMMOTH, IN COMPARISON, CAN CAPTURE ABOUT NINE TIMES AS MUCH CO2
There are fewer than 20 such plants in the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), and they don’t yet have the capacity to make a serious dent in the greenhouse gas emissions humans have dumped into the atmosphere. The IEA says that to do that, the direct air capture industry has to grow to be able to draw down 85 million metric tons of CO2 by the end of the decade. For comparison, it captures just 0.01 million metric tons today. (The Verge visualized the scale of the task earlier this year, which you can check out here.)

That’ll likely require a new generation of DAC plants, each capable of taking in 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year. So in the grand scheme of things, Mammoth — with the capacity to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 a year — isn’t quite so mammoth. Even so, Mammoth is an important test case for scaling up Direct Air Capture tech.

One of the usual drawbacks to Direct Air Capture as a climate fix is how much energy it takes to power this kind of facility. Luckily, both Mammoth and Orca are located within the ON Power Geothermal Park at Hellisheiði, so they can use nearby renewable geothermal energy and waste heat to separate CO2 from air. (You can read The Verge’s story about how Climeworks’ tech works here.)

There’s a larger plant under construction in Texas that’s supposed to be able to capture up to 1 million tons of CO2 by the time it’s operational in 2025. But that uses a different kind of filtration process that requires much hotter temperatures to take CO2 out of the ambient air. As a result, that operation is likely to rely on a combination of renewable energy and natural gas and will have to capture emissions from its own gas consumption. That project is backed by petroleum company Occidental, and some of the carbon it captures is expected to be used in a process that retrieves harder-to-reach oil reserves by injecting CO2 into the ground.

Construction begins on “Mammoth” direct air capture plant

It’ll capture nine times as much CO2 as its predecessor.

www.theverge.com

Huge investment is being made in carbon capture but as the figures in the article show, much more is needed if it's actually going to make a dent.

Is this going to help? Or is it an excuse for the world to keep consuming fossil fuels with impunity?

 

[Pickman's model]

We need a diversity of tactics to bring us to net zero so no

 

[magneze]

This bit is somewhat concerning:

There’s a larger plant under construction in Texas that’s supposed to be able to capture up to 1 million tons of CO2 by the time it’s operational in 2025. But that uses a different kind of filtration process that requires much hotter temperatures to take CO2 out of the ambient air. As a result, that operation is likely to rely on a combination of renewable energy and natural gas and will have to capture emissions from its own gas consumption. That project is backed by petroleum company Occidental, and some of the carbon it captures is expected to be used in a process that retrieves harder-to-reach oil reserves by injecting CO2 into the ground.

 

[weltweit]

It is very promising stuff, not so much Occidental's scheme which seems self serving.

 

[DaveCinzano]

I used to work for a large company which whilst loudly proclaiming its CCS projects was simultaneously ploughing on with huge lignite- and gas-fired plants across 4 continents

 

[Signal 11]

Carbon capture is not a solution to net zero emissions plans, report says

“Many international bodies and national government are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to net zero, and it simply won’t work,” Bruce Robertson, the author of the IEEFA [Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis] report, said.

 

[DarkStars]

Construction begins on “Mammoth” direct air capture plant

It’ll capture nine times as much CO2 as its predecessor.

www.theverge.com

Huge investment is being made in carbon capture but as the figures in the article show, much more is needed if it's actually going to make a dent.

Is this going to help? Or is it an excuse for the world to keep consuming fossil fuels with impunity?

Hi there. I'm fairly new, used to pop in a long time ago. A lecture was given by Professor Kevin Anderson (deputy director of Tyndall climate research centre, Manchester uni) on this and various relating issues. In general, CCS has very limited use cases due to two factors.

1. Correct geology required for carbon storage.
2. And this is the main one... a circa 45% efficiency penalty. Meaning sure, you can capture the carbon in your coal or gas plant IF you meet the first point, but you will have to burn 45% more materials to get the same energy out as you would without CCS, which worsens ecological impacts from getting the fuels, vastly increases the rate of resource depletion, and makes the plant entirely economically unviable requiring massive subsidies. And this is after 25 years and billions in R&D. So anyone who suggest CCS is any form of an answer that could be applied even moderately to our needs, I am genuinely sorry to say, is not being realistic and has gone into the land of blind optimism, and there be dragons my friend, there be dragons.

p.s. If you wish to view the lecture yourself, it was uploaded to YouTube here and well worth it, 45 minutes is all:

 

[Indeliblelink]

Climate change: New idea for sucking up CO2 from air shows promise

A new way of sucking carbon from the air is up to three times more effective than current technology.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[stavros]

The Danes are planning to put a load under the North Sea (sorry the link's in French).

 

[Signal 11]

Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative

I have spent my career studying the natural carbon cycle and, in recent years, developing methods for checking that CDR works. [...] I don’t deny the need to develop CDR methods over the longer term. [...] But it’s clear to me that deploying them to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is pointless until society has almost completely eliminated its polluting activities.
[...]
[snip details comparing capture rate with current emission rate - tldr: it can't capture anywhere near enough]
[...]
In the meantime, research is needed to seek CDR methods that minimize land use and energy consumption, and can be scaled up rapidly and cheaply. Doing that now is essential, so that we have the technology available in the future, when it will be effective

 

[Idris2002]

Clutching at straws latest: this company proposes to convert atmospheric carbon into algae, grown in large open pools, before chucking it out into the hot desert air of North Africa, where it will dry into flakes that can then be shallow-buried. Thus ending the atmospheric carbon threat forever. Or perhaps not.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/18/africa/brilliant-planet-algae-carbon-removal-climate-morocco-scn-spc-intl/index.html

If it works, this can only be a good thing. But see also the post by Signal 11 there. No decarbonisation without lifestyle and system alteration.

 

[Aquamarine]

World’s biggest carbon storage project off WA coast burying only a third of what it promised

What was to be the showpiece of the emissions reduction Australia’s gas giants need at Chevron’s Gorgon project is at just one-third capacity after seven years.

www.theage.com.au

 

[flypanam]

Tad Delay who has a book on denialism coming out wrote this for Protean mag. Pretty staggering the size of carbon reserves but also how useless current practice is

The Guilted Age of Carbon • Protean Magazine

Tad DeLay writes on the futility of carbon offset programs. The exaggerated promises of carbon sequestration allow corporations like Delta Airlines, BP, and Tesla to make absurd claims of neutrality and launder ever-worsening emissions.

proteanmag.com

ETA wrong thread but I’ll leave it here.

 

[Signal 11]

The feasibility of reaching gigatonne scale CO2 storage by mid-century

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) projects subsurface carbon storage at rates of 1–30 GtCO2/yr by 2050. These projections, however, overlook potential geological, geographical, and techno-economic limitations to growth. We evaluate the feasibility of scaling up CO2 storage using a geographically resolved growth model that considers constraints from both geology and scaleup rate. Our results suggest a maximum global storage rate of 16 GtCO2/yr by 2050, contingent on the USA contributing 60% of the total. This reduces to 5 GtCO2/yr if projections are constrained by government roadmaps, mostly because this limits deployment in the USA to 1 GtCO2/yr.

In practice, the actual deployment of CCS has fallen short of near-term projections from [integrated assessment models]. Across the world, around 70% of the 149 projects that are proposed to be operational by 2020 (commensurate with storing 130 MtCO2/yr) were not implemented. Of the existing actively operational CCS projects, only around 9 Mt/yr of a total capture capacity of 45 Mt/yr is injected for dedicated storage with the rest used for enhanced oil recovery.