2 days ago

Is carbon capture a solution to the climate crisis?

By this point, we know the importance of cutting back on our greenhouse gas emissions, but the science says it's not happening quickly enough. "We're currently emitting about 6 million tons per hour," said Lori Guetre. "It's like pulling a warm blanket over us, that's causing climate change."

Guetre runs commercial strategy for 1PointFive, a company with a radical idea: Sucking CO2 molecules out of the air, with a technology called Direct Air Capture. It sounds like magic, but actually, it's just chemistry. Huge fans blow outside air across a liquid that absorbs carbon dioxide molecules. The clean air returns to the outside, while the trapped CO2 is converted into pellets. When you heat those pellets up, you get pure carbon dioxide gas flowing into collection tanks.

What happens to that trapped CO2? "Today, people are simply burying the CO2 underground," Guetre said. "They're also turning the carbon into synthetic fuel, so we can put it into an airplane or a truck or a ship – some of those hard-to-decarbonize sectors. People are putting the carbon dioxide into concrete. People are making diamonds. People are making fizzy drinks."

A demonstration plant in British Columbia, Canada, can pull four tons of carbon dioxide out of the air every day. It was built by Carbon Engineering (a sister company of 1PointFive). Its next project, opening this summer, will be a much bigger deal – a commercial plant being built in Texas, about 300 times bigger than the British Columbia plant.

According to Guetre, it will be able to pull about 500,000 tons of CO2 per year.

So, how many plants would be needed to avoid a climate disaster?

"Climate experts believe that by 2050, we would need to build 10,000 to 20,000 of those one-megaton building blocks to be a complement to all of the other work that we're doing to solve climate change," said Guetre. "So, it's a big build-out … basically just like the water treatment industry. Now you're going to have an air treatment industry."

A carbon capture plant, to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.  / Credit: CBS News

Well, direct air capture sounds like a perfect solution. We can save the planet with chemistry! But there's one little problem, according to Mark Jacobson, a professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University: "Direct air capture is not a real solution. We do not have time to waste with this useless technology."

Jacobson thinks that direct air capture is a huge boondoggle, for one key reason: "You need these big fans, and you need the chemical, and it takes a lot of electricity to do this," he said. "Even in the best case, when renewable electricity is used to run it, it's preventing that renewable electricity from reducing more carbon dioxide by replacing a fossil fuel power plant or a fossil fuel heating source."

In other words, we get about 60% of our electricity from dirty fuels. So, why would we use our renewable sources to remove the pollution from gas and coal? Wouldn't it be simpler, easier, and more effective to use that clean energy directly, and then just eliminate the whole fossil-fuel infrastructure?

"You have to think about who's proposing this technology," Jacobson said. "Who stands to benefit from carbon capture and direct air capture? It's the fossil-fuel companies."

And sure enough: most air-capture companies are funded by the oil industry. For example, Occidental Petroleum owns 1Point5 and Carbon Engineering.

"They're just saying, 'Well, we're extracting as much CO2 as we're emitting. Therefore, we should be allowed to keep polluting, keep mining," Jacobson said.

He hasn't made friends: "Oh, yeah, diesel people hate me, gasoline people hate me, ethanol people hate me, nuclear people hate me, coal people hate me. They do, because I'm telling the truth. We don't need any of these technologies."

I asked Guetre if the oil and gas companies' motivation, by promoting carbon capture, is to allow emissions to continue. "We get that question a lot," she replied. "We need to get ourselves off fossil fuels, and that will dry up the market for those fossil-fuel producers. And we need to create the market for them in doing what they call carbon management, which is really taking carbon out of the air and putting it underground, or creating carbon products."

But big chemical plants aren't the only way to pull carbon out of the air. Experiments are under way with algae (since algae breathes carbon dioxide and provides oxygen in return), and smaller, more efficient plant designs.

With funding from the Department of Energy, the National Carbon Capture Center, in Alabama, is nurturing new technologies that can remove carbon from our air, and bring down the cost. "Today's costs for direct air capture range anywhere from $500-600 a ton, and we're working to drive that cost down to where we're in the neighborhood of less than $200 a ton," said director John Northington. "And it could go lower."

In the meantime, controversy or not, the carbon-removal industry is charging ahead. One-hundred-and-thirty air-capture plants are in the works around the world.

Lori Guetre emphasizes that they won't be a silver bullet, but they will be an important part of the answer: "When we put all the tools together – wind, solar, electric vehicles, and carbon dioxide removal at scale – we have everything. We actually know how to get to net zero. We need to roll up our sleeves and get to work."

For more info:

1PointFive Carbon Engineering Mark Jacobson, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University National Carbon Capture Center, Wilsonville, Ala.

Story produced by Amol Mhatre. Editor: Emanuele Secci.