Carbon Capture a Key Strategy to Achieve Negative Carbon Emissions

At the end of last year, the world had 65 commercial carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) facilities of which 26 were removing 40 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere annually. Sounds like a lot, but it is a drop in the water when it comes to combating the amount of CO2 accumulating in the air (421.21 parts per million according to the latest figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii).

CCS was deemed nice to have thirty years ago when global climate scientists were first educating the world about anthropogenic climate change and CO2 atmospheric levels. But now the United Nations sees CCS is critical to keeping global atmospheric warming to no more than 1.5 Celsius (2.4 Fahrenheit).

To achieve a state where we are drawing more CO2 out of the atmosphere than contributing to it, in other words, negative carbon emissions, the installed capacity of CCS facilities must grow by a factor of 100.

In recent days, billionaire Elon Musk, launched a contest under the umbrella of the XPrize, a $100 million US competition to come up with innovative technologies and solutions to remove CO2 from the air and oceans. Lasting four years, teams will be asked to demonstrate solutions that pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere or oceans that can scale to gigaton levels, locking away carbon permanently. Appropriately the contest competition guidelines will be fully revealed on Earth Day this coming week, April 22, 2021. The Grand Prize winner will receive $50 million. Second and third-place finishers will earn $20 and $10 million respectively. There are also milestone awards, $1 million to go to the 15 top teams after 18 months in the competition, and 25 $200,000 scholarships to student teams competing.

The reality of our modern global economy suggests that we will continue to live with fossil fuels for the products we can create from them, and the energy we derive from them. Hence CCS is essential to carrying on our 21st-century economy and lifestyle.  Whether we apply the technology at the emission source (think smokestacks) or draw it from the atmosphere, we have backed ourselves into an environmental corner requiring CCS to get us out. We can switch transportation from internal combustion engine vehicles but the conversion cycle is not a decade. It is much longer. Capturing CO2 from tailpipes isn’t feasible. But capturing it from the air around us can become that. And certainly, capturing it from smokestack emissions regardless of the energy or industrial source must become mandatory.

Driving down costs is the key. The engineers who built Quest, the Shell CCS project in Northern Alberta that has sequestered 5 million tons of CO2 to date, have stated that they can build a future similar project for half the cost. They are not alone in finding cheaper ways to reduce CCS costs.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, along with Fluor Corporation, and the Electric Power Research Institute, have developed a solvent they call EEMPA, the captures CO2 using 17% less energy and at a cost reduction of 19% per ton. They recently published their findings in the March edition of the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control. They plan to continue working on the solvent’s chemistry to refine it and increase its scalability to meet a U.S. Department of Energy goal of commercial CCS capable of capturing CO2 at a cost of no more than $30 per ton by 2035. Current costs of smokestack CCS are estimated between $43 and $95 Per ton according to a  2018 study by Harvard and Yale researchers. Direct air capture is more expensive with Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company, pulling CO2 out of the air at a cost of $100 to $150 per ton captured.