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Is removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a solution?
25/10/15
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[Website editor's note: See the cautionary book review about such schemes that follows.]
Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
Three startups, Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat and Climeworks, are making strides with technology that can directly remove carbon dioxide from the air. What they need now is a viable business model
In Squamish, British Columbia, a Canadian town halfway between Vancouver and Whistler where the ocean meets the mountains, a startup led by Harvard physicist David Keith – and funded in part by Bill Gates – is building an industrial plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air.
Carbon Engineering aims to eventually build enough plants to suck many millions of tons of CO2 out of the air to reduce climate change. Its technology could help capture dispersed emissions – that is, emissions from cars, trucks, ships, planes or farm equipment – or even to roll back atmospheric concentrations of CO2.
The Calgary-based company is one of a crop of startups placing bold bets on technology designed to directly capture CO2 from the air. Lately, at least three have shown signs of progress. New York City-based Global Thermostat, which is led by Peter Eisenberger, a Columbia University professor and former researcher for Exxon and Bell Labs, tells me it has recently received an infusion of capital from an as-yet-unnamed US energy company. As part of a demonstration project financed by Audi, Swiss-based Climeworks in April captured CO2 from the air and supplied it to a German firm called Sunfire, which then recycled it into a zero-carbon diesel fuel.
All three companies talk about a hypothetical future in which CO2 will be harvested from the sky and transformed, using renewable energy, into low-carbon fuels. “How do you power global transportation in 20 years in a way that is carbon neutral?” asks Geoff Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering. “Cheap solar and wind are great at reducing emissions from the electricity. Then you are left with the transport sector.”
Beyond that, if direct air capture of CO2 gets cheap enough – or if the climate crisis becomes dire – carbon extracted from the air could also be sequestered in the ocean or underground.
Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat and Climeworks all sprung up during the mid-to-late-2000s, when it looked as if the world’s governments might take aggressive action to curb climate change. Mostly, they haven’t. Since then, the three startups have been refining their technology, raising capital and very gradually bringing CO2 capture closer to a commercial reality.
But all three startups lack a practical business model. At this time, no one will pay them just to take CO2 out of the air. And the market for CO2 – which has a variety of uses, from injecting bubbles into fizzy drinks to recovering hard-to-get-oil from tapped-out wells – is limited.
What’s more, if direct air capture of CO2 is to emerge as a meaningful climate solution, it would have to be built out at a global, industrial scale, costing billions of dollars.
Still, while direct air capture won’t be ready for deployment any time soon, climate experts say negative emissions technologies merit more attention. In a detailed review of climate intervention technologies published in February, The National Academies of Sciences described direct air capture as “an immature technology” and called on the government to invest in research “to improve methods of carbon dioxide removal and disposal at scales that would have a significant global climate impact”.
“Scientists are increasingly convinced that we are going to need large scale removal systems to fight climate change,” says Noah Deich, who recently started the Berkeley, California, nonprofit Center for Carbon Removal. “I’m excited about direct air capture. It could be a really important technology to add to the portfolio.”
That’s because evidence is mounting that even a rapid buildout of low-carbon energy sources like solar and wind won’t keep global temperatures from rising beyond the 2C limit to which governments have agreed. “The climate policy mantra – that time is running out for 2C but we can still make it if we act now – is scientific nonsense,” Oliver Geden, head of research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, wrote recently in the Nature journal. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere will be needed to stay within the 2C limit.
But until governments are willing to pay for carbon removal and storage, the three air-capture startups will need commercial customers that can keep them afloat in case they are needed, potentially decades from now, as a climate solution. All are aiming to make low-carbon fuels, using recycled CO2 and renewable energy to power the process.
“We’re really getting excited about .direct fuel synthesis,” Holmes says. The Squamish demonstration plant, built on an abandoned industrial site, will capture only about 500 tons CO2 per year, which is barely enough to offset the emissions of 33 average Canadians. That’s so little that it’s being released back into the air. “We’re not claiming any environmental benefit, yet,” Holmes says.
But Carbon Engineering would like to be able to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then combine the hydrogen with CO2 to make a diesel fuel that could power local buses or be exported to California, which subsidizes low-carbon fuels.
Working with Audi, Climeworks has already produced a small batch of what the auto company calls zero-carbon e-diesel. Climeworks is also building a plant to collect CO2 from the air and supply it to a nearby greenhouse to grow plants. But “the reason we come to work is to make synthetic fuels”, cofounder Christopher Gebald says.
As for Global Thermostat, Graciela Chichilnisky, the CEO and a co-founder with physicist Eisenberger, says the company will soon have news about a multimillion dollar investment from a US energy company. Edgar Bronfman Jr, the former chairman and CEO of Warner Music, has been Global Thermostat’s biggest investor to date.
The open question for all three startups is whether any can raise enough money – and sustain enough cashflow – in the short term for their efforts to matter in the long term.
[End of this article; see http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jul/14/carbon-direc... ]
‘Atmosphere of Hope’ bets on ‘geo-engineering lite’
Book review: Tim Flannery’s ‘third way’ proposes techno-fixes for climate change that suppress some symptoms while leaving the disease alone.
ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE
Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
Tim Flannery
Text Publishing, 2015
reviewed by Phil Shannon
Green Left Weekly
Australian scientist Tim Flannery became fascinated with proposals to extract excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and oceans when the billionaire aeronautics carbon-polluter Richard Branson, in response to Flannery’s first book on climate change, The Weather Makers, invited Flannery to be a judge on Branson’s £25 million Virgin Earth Challenge prize for methods of carbon withdrawal and storage.
Amongst the entrants, writes Flannery in his latest book,Atmosphere of Hope, he found a dozen that could become “indispensable tools for our survival.” He calls these the “Third Way” of tackling global warming. He says they are superior to adaptation to a dramatically warmed world, and safer than geo-engineering plans to reflect solar radiation back into space — a dangerous “cure” potentially worse than the disease.
Flannery believes that some climate engineering techniques are more acceptable because they simply accelerate natural processes of atmospheric and hydrological carbon management.
Using photosynthesis to grow vegetation, for example, that dines on CO2 and stores the waste carbon as plant matter, but this process is only 1% efficient. We can force nature to do better, Flannery says, by dramatically boosting the pace of the natural carbon cycle and storing the extracted carbon in biological (forest, seaweed, biochar) form or in synthetic products, or by sequestering it through deep or frigid (South Pole) burial.
“Third Way” techniques range from the unobjectionable – reforestation and wetlands reclamation — to the more problematic. The problematic techniques include ocean fertilization, chemically-enhanced weathering of rocks, production of carbon-negative cement and plastics, and carbon capture that is not designed simply to prolong the life of fossil fuels.
Flannery is excited by the technical possibilities and challenges of his “Third Way” carbon-suckers and his desperate desire to resurrect a habitable world is genuinely passionate. But his “Third Way” project is unconvincing and, in the end, self-defeating.
To be fair to Flannery, he does temper his enthusiasm with an acknowledgement of the problems that beset “Third Way” climate salvation. These include scientific complexity, environmental risk, intimidating cost, problems of scale and decades-long lead-times.
But he argues that these issues necessitate embarking on the “Third Way” now to overcome such difficulties in time to avoid climate catastrophe.
This approach, however, detracts attention and resources from the urgency for economic and political campaigning to tackle global warming and its fossil fuel industry culprits now.
Although Flannery argues that “Third Way” de-carbonization must not be used as an excuse for the failure to cut fossil fuel emissions, his Pollyanna view of a capitalism-friendly techno-fix to bypass political failure on climate change is most likely to contribute to the global warming inertia of business-as-usual — no matter how bad the climate gets.
Human ingenuity, coupled with market mechanisms such as carbon pricing and trading, Flannery believes, will triumph through technological innovation, propelling market economics to a greener future by making renewable energy cheaper and fossil fuels (and uranium) more expensive to energy capitalists.
At best, this plan to skirt the major roadblock of the economic power and political influence of fossil fuel interests through science, green entrepreneurship and the market is doomed to be, at best, too gradual and ineffectual. At worst, it is counter-productive.
By not scaring the sacrosanct GDP horses, by not challenging the capitalist god of economic growth, Flannery obscures the link between global warming and the capitalist economic system that has given rise to it. This link, as Canadian author and climate activist Naomi Klein has argued, is grasped by smokestack-hugging political conservatives better than most, and which underlies their climate denialism and their fierce and extremely well-funded resistance.
Flannery’s “Third Way” is the grand, and risky, illusion of geo-engineering, albeit shorn of its dangerously wilder fantasies, that will keep capitalism humming all the way up to environmental Armageddon.
The “Third Way” is predicated on the inviolability of economic growth with its imperative of making more profits by selling more stuff to more people. Flannery’s future of low-carbon, “Third Way” cement, plastics and electric cars would colonize ever more of the biosphere in a victory for the capitalist growth principle over a livable planet.
[From Climate and Capitalism, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/10/24/atmosphere-of-hope-bets-on-ge... ]
