How Carbon Engineering plans to make a fortune out of thin air
David Keith has an idiotically simple-sounding solution for our problematic habit of belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: Take it out again. Don't just focus on capturing the CO2 as it escapes a smokestack. Make the atmosphere cleaner by running all of our air through a filter that extracts greenhouse gas.
From article, (David Keith has an idiotically simple-sounding solution for our problematic habit of belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: Take it out again. Don’t just focus on capturing the CO2 as it escapes a smokestack. Make the atmosphere cleaner by running all of our air through a filter that extracts greenhouse gas. Simple, right?
Here in Squamish, there’s just a single “gas-liquid contactor.” It looks and sounds like a monster air conditioner, with a powerful fan stack on top and intakes at either end that suck the surrounding air through “packing,” a honeycomb of corrugated plastic. As this happens, a constant flow of a liquid solution, potassium hydroxide, runs over the honeycomb. The solution bonds with the CO2 in the air to create a salt solution called potassium carbonate. Efficiency ranges from 70% to 80%, Holmes says. “Air goes in with about 400 parts per million [of carbon dioxide, or 0.04%] and comes out with something like 100”—less carbon, in other words, than the earth’s atmosphere had prior to the Industrial Revolution.
That, of course, is far from the end of the story. Pumps and pipes take the carbonate solution to a large vessel, known as a pellet reactor, protruding from the top of the metal shed. Here, liquid calcium hydroxide is added, which causes the carbonate to transform into a solid called calcium carbonate. Further processing transforms the solid into pellets the size of a dry grain of rice. Those pellets are eventually fed into an enclosed furnace called a circulating fluid bed calciner.
Amid an inferno of natural gas and pure oxygen, the solid pellets break down, producing three things: pure CO2, water vapour and solid calcium oxide (also known as quicklime). When the last two are combined and cooled, they reconstitute as calcium hydroxide (or slaked lime) and get sent back to the pellet reactor in a perpetual closed loop.
The carbon dioxide, meanwhile, can be cooled and compressed into a liquid, suitable for a number of uses. It could be piped to an underground salt cavern for permanent storage, as it is with most CCS projects. It could be injected into oil or gas wells to push out more hydrocarbons, a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). As it is, the Squamish plant doesn’t have the capacity to do either of these things. The tonne of CO2 it collects per day—about what your car would emit in three months—ends up vented back into the atmosphere. Still, operating less than a year, the pilot is “absolutely a success,” says Corless, who founded Vancouver fuel cell company Cellex Power Products and went on to serve as chief technology officer of Plug Power, the American company that acquired it. Carbon Engineering has an appreciable lead over rivals such as Climeworks of Switzerland and American startup Global Thermostat at demonstrating the feasibility of direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide.
Now, though, it’s undertaking a new round of financing and forging industry partnerships to pursue the vital next step that would truly set it apart from the competition. It aims to build out the system in Squamish so that it uses the captured atmospheric carbon dioxide to manufacture effectively low- or even zero-emission hydrocarbon fuel that you could burn in your car’s engine.
Basically, the company aims to take its carbon dioxide and combine it with hydrogen extracted from water (using a tried-and-true industrial process known as electrolysis) to make hydrocarbons like synthetic diesel or kerosene. “And if that’s atmospheric CO2, and you’ve used renewable electricity to make the hydrogen, then in principle you can make fuel that is fully carbon-neutral,” Holmes enthuses.
He estimates the all-in cost of producing this fuel in a commercial plant at between US$1 and $1.50 a litre—and a little more than that if you make it really carbon-neutral by replacing natural gas–burning equipment with something running on clean electricity. That can’t touch the pre-tax price of gasoline.
Carbon Engineering has funding in place to continue running its direct air capture plant for 18 months, while finding ways to optimize the process, Corless says. By the second quarter of this year, he expects to have the next round of funding completed. He won’t say how big it will be, but he estimates the cost of adding the fuel-synthesis capability to the Squamish plant at $6 million to $8 million. Gates and Edwards, acquaintances and admirers of Keith since before Carbon Engineering’s founding, have participated in every equity fund-raising round so far, and Corless expects this one will be no different.
Should the fuel pilot turn out as successful as the air capture, the company’s next step would be to identify early markets for commercial application—places with access to cheap renewable energy or surplus industrial hydrogen and that are still able to benefit from low-carbon regulatory jurisdictions. “We’re going to be looking for those opportunities where there’s the pull,” Corless says.)
Me, "While I am a big fan of electric cars and believe they will dominate the future of the automobile, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and creating some kind of hydrocarbon resource from it, is important. The more we reuse and reduce our CO2 emissions the less problems we will have with Global Warming.
Whether that is as diesel or kerosene that can be used for building heating or airplane use, remains to be seen. But Carbon Engineering has shown it is possible to recover measurable quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere."
