Carbon Engineering’s air contactor passes ambient air through liquid to produce a carbon dioxide-rich solution.
Posted on 10/11/2015 6:49:54 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
On Friday a group of government officials, environmentalists, and local bigwigs gathered in the coastal town of Squamish, British Columbia, about an hour north of Vancouver, to mark the onset of what could one day be a new industry: creating carbon-neutral transportation fuel made from carbon dioxide captured from air.
The company that built the plant, Carbon Engineering, was founded by a Canadian scientist named David Keith. A Harvard professor of applied physics, Keith has made headlines before for his outspoken advocacy for more research into geoengineering (specifically, seeding the lower stratosphere with sulfuric acid to reflect sunlight and cool the planet). With the carbon capture venture, though, Keith is being careful not to overhype his company’s technology: while Carbon Engineering’s process should be able to strip carbon dioxide out of the air at a rate of around one ton per day, Keith emphasizes that it’s not designed for or capable of measurably reducing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Rather, the motivation is to produce fuels for transportation applications, such as jet aircraft and heavy-duty trucks and buses.
The process uses a large wall of fans, known as a contactor, to push air through a liquid that reacts with the CO2. That carbon dioxide-rich solution is then put through several processing steps to create a purified stream of CO2 gas and the liquid that is returned to the contactor. Keith and his team have cleverly combined industrial processes that are already in use in existing industries, for instance in paper mills.
“This is not new technology,” says Keith.
It’s also only half the process needed to actually make fuel. The recovered CO2 must then be combined with hydrogen to make hydrocarbon fuels. Supported by funding from British Columbia’s provincial government, Carbon Engineering plans to install an electrolyzer to split water to obtain hydrogen that it will then use to supply fuel for BC Transit buses. That’s at least a year down the road.
The full system is relatively energy-intensive, which means that cheap, low-carbon power generation, most likely from solar power, will eventually be needed to make the energy economics work.
Carbon Engineering, which has been funded by a series of investors including Bill Gates, is one of several companies, including the German firm Climeworks, working on carbon capture systems. (Most of them employ systems in which the CO2 is absorbed by a solid, rather than a liquid.) In the past these technologies have been touted as having the potential to significantly reduce the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere, thus slowing down global climate change. For now that’s a pipe dream; for one thing, as with systems that capture carbon from the smokestacks of fossil fuel power plants, it’s simply too expensive for the massive scale-up that would be required. What’s more, the systems require much energy to operate.
An active market for fuels made with air-captured CO2 would go a long way toward making the economics work out, at least for small-scale systems. Burning the fuel made in this way would, of course, release carbon, but unlike the combustion of fossil fuels it would not add to the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The cost of producing fuel at the Squamish pilot plant, once it’s fully operational, will be much higher than that of conventional fuels, but Keith says that, once the process is scaled up using solar power, he hopes to produce fuel for $1 a liter. (Jet fuel currently sells for around 37 cents per liter; diesel, for just under $1 per liter.) That could happen in a few years, or it might never happen; but the plant opening in Squamish will begin testing the possibility.
“This whole topic has been polarized more than anything else I’ve worked on,” Keith says. “I hope we can move to a world where people treat this like a normal technology. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s not B.S. either.”
sigh....
OH NO ive just created MORE Carbon DIoxide
run away run away
Someone should study plant growth in the immeadiate area. Then rub their noses in it when it decreases.
Stop this immediately! This is going to make global cooling worse.
Too many hands on the global thermostat.
Oh, no! The scientist’s life is in danger, just like the guy they killed that invented the Fisch carburetor...
I’ve got a whole bunch of fuel-creating carbon-capture facilities in my back yard.
They’re even solar-powered.
Good idea - what do these carbon nuts have against trees and plants and other chlorophyll-based life??? There oughta be a law to prevent such cruelty.
Somebody or several somebodies are going to make a crapload of money redemonstrating one or two of Newton’s laws of thermodynamics or Kekule’s law or some combination of already known laws of physics.
It will take LOTS more energy to run the intake fans and synthesize the fuel from atmospheric CO2 than comes out when you burn whatever is made from the gathered-up CO2, probably methane, a lowish power fuel. But if you get free solar panels and free batteries and free land and free employees and tax benefits and ignore the cost of getting the fuel to market and what the fuel can deliver to work-producing gears or wheels, then you can bite my Solyndra.
Every time they start using those Atmosphere Processors, bad things happen.
They make great Nesting places for some Species I hear.
There’s a word that keeps echoing in my mind. Although the process described is not related to solar or electricity, per se, the thought that this could become a paying proposition any time soon, brings that echoing word to my mind....SOLYNDRA.
I’m glad it’s Canadian tax money that’s going up in smoke in this situation, and not American greenbacks,
Sounds like a Forest inside a Box.
Paging Bruce Dern.
Bunch of plant murderers!
“The full system is relatively energy-intensive, which means that cheap, low-carbon power generation, most likely from solar power, will eventually be needed to make the energy economics work.”
This is such claptrap.
I’d like to contribute but I don’t want to be crude. It is but a fleeting opportunity.
Wait till the trees start dying.
They’ll put co2 in fertilizer and charge double.
I have a whole bunch of those devices in my back yard. They’re called TREES!
CC
Finally! Now maybe the price of pencils will come down.
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