The US state of Wyoming is set to welcome the world’s largest direct air capture plant for the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Called Project Bison, the facility is slated to swing into action next year and, all going to plan, will scale up its operations by the end of the decade to suck up five million tons of CO2 each year, and safely lock it away underground.
Project Bison enters the fray as the first massively scalable direct air capture plant in the US, according to the company behind the technology, Carbon Capture. The LA-based outfit has teamed up with Dallas-based company Frontier Carbon Solutions on the venture, which will lock the captured carbon away underground to prevent it from re-entering the atmosphere.
Carbon capture activity is expected to kick off at Project Bison in 2023
For its part, Carbon Capture describes its system as “deeply modular.” The reactors slot into shipping-container-sized modules that can be stacked into tiers. This enables upgrades to individual reactors, for example, or for different types of plug-and-play sorbent cartridges to be slotted in to suit different climates or seasons. These modules can be grouped together in clusters to share resources like power and heat, with those clusters then able to be scaled up to form gigantic arrays.
Wyoming was chosen as the site for Project Bison owing to its ready access to renewable energy sources and friendly regulatory conditions for carbon storage. Pending approvals, it will be the first direct air capture plant to use Class IV wells for carbon sequestration, injecting it into deep saline aquifers. Phase 1 carbon capture operations are expected to begin next year, removing around 10,000 tons annually.
Carbon Capture says there are no practical limits when it comes to scaling up the project, however, and plans to do just that to remove 200,000 tons a year by 2026, one megaton a year by 2028 and then five megatons a year by 2030. At this point, it expects Project Bison to be the largest single atmospheric carbon removal project in the world.
When that time comes, it may have some competition, however. Aside from Clime works’ efforts in this area, we’ve seen London startup Brilliant Planet outline plans to offer gigaton-scale carbon capture using algae, and Australian startup Southern Green Gas’s vision of capturing billions of tons each year. The US government is also investing billions of dollars into carbon capture, with the aim of developing regional hubs that can help drive down the considerable cost of the technology.
This is no small sticking point when it comes to making carbon capture a viable weapon in the fight against climate change, considering the size of the problem. Clime works’ first plant captured carbon at around US$600 a ton, but it aims to do so at around $100 a ton as it scales up, while others are aiming even lower.
Carbon Capture will be betting big on the effects of the Biden government’s recently passed Inflation Reduction Act to make its carbon capture commercially viable. The act sees tax credits for carbon capture plants increase from $50 per ton to as much as $180 if the carbon is stored underground, and is designed to accelerate innovations in the carbon removal sector.
“With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the proliferation of companies seeking high-quality carbon removal credits, and a disruptive low-cost technology, we now have the ingredients needed to scale DAC (direct air capture) to megaton levels by the end of this decade,” said Adrian Corless, CEO and CTO, Carbon Capture Inc. “We plan to have our first DAC modules fielded by the end of next year and to continue installing capacity as quickly as modules come off our production line. Our goal is to leverage economies of scale to offer the lowest priced DAC-based carbon removal credits in the market.”
Algae biofuel stakeholders have been stuck in the doldrums for years, but in an odd twist of fate, the fossil fuel industry could help algae make a comeback. Apparently the new plan is to pair algae farming with waste carbon from gas power plants and other industrial operations. In addition to biofuel, algae farming can also produce animal feed, fish food, nutritional supplements and toiletries for people, and bioplastic products.
Why Algae Biofuel?
CleanTechnica spilled plenty of ink on the area of algae biofuel research some years ago, during the Obama administration. Unlike other energy crops, algae can be grown in ponds or human-made structures without taking arable land out of circulation, and it has a rapid growth-to-harvest cycle. The high oil content of certain strains of algae is another leading attraction, and the algae R&D pathway can lead in a carbon negative direction.
On the down side, figuring out an economical way to cultivate algae and extract the oil at an industrial scale is a challenging endeavor, especially when the over-arching goal is to reduce carbon emissions rather than adding them.
The picture was looking bright in the early 2000s, up through the Obama administration. However, by the time former President Obama left office in 2016, oil prices were crashing. The relatively low cost of petroleum seemed to put the idea of a bioeconomy fueled by algae biofuel to bed.
Nevertheless, the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory was among those continuing to invest in algae research projects, and the algae field continued to branch off into new angles. In 2018, for example, the Energy Department was funding the algae bioplastics angle. In 2020 researchers were exploring the idea of hooking up with high speed 3-D printing. The Mars mission has also sparked a new burst of interest in the algae biofuel field.
Algae biofuel could have another moment in the sun, now that more federal dollars are pouring into carbon capture-and-recycling technology (photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL).
Carbon Capture To The Rescue
In January of this year the Energy Department’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) launched the new AlgaePrize competition for students, aimed at developing “the next generation of bioeconomy professionals by expanding novel solutions to production, processing, and new product development on the way to gigaton-scale algae commercialization for fuel, food, products, and carbon dioxide utilization/sequestration.”
If you caught that thing about carbon dioxide, that’s where the happy dance for natural gas stakeholders comes in. Carbon capture from flue gas could turn out to be a value-added element that improves the bottom line for algae farming.
That’s where BETO seems to be heading. Last week the office announced a $16.5 million round of funding for six algae projects related to carbon dioxide capture.
The six projects were selected for their potential to demonstrate an improvement in carbon capture by algal systems leading to biofuels and other products, while also cutting costs and decreasing overall greenhouse gas emissions.
“Algae can grow on waste CO2, functioning as a carbon sink. This algae biomass can then be used to create low or no-emissions biofuels and bioproducts which displace GHGs,” BETO noted.
Natural Gas Hearts Algae Biofuel
Not all six of the new BETO-funded projects are focusing on carbon captured from flue gas. The Colorado School of Mines, for example, plans to put its pond-grown algae system through its paces using concentrated carbon dioxide from direct air capture.
Another awardee, Colorado State University, is working on an algal system that functions efficiently on atmospheric carbon.
Three of the other awardees are focusing on carbon dioxide from industrial fossil energy users including power plants: Dioxide Materials, MicroBio Engineering, and the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Sciences. A fourth awardee in the point source class is Global Algae Innovations, which is focusing more specifically on flue gas from a naphtha-fired power plant.
If the biofuel angle doesn’t work out at commercial scale, other aspects of the algae biofuel market could come into play.
Market analysts are forecasting growth in the algae market in the coming years. Consumers are on the prowl for healthy diet supplements, especially among the up-and-coming generation.
“Rise in the acceptance of algae-based food products and a growing popularity of vegan food are expected to emerge as trends in the algae market. Algae are already widely employed in bioplastics, cosmetics, food, bio-packaging, biofuel, and pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products,” observes the firm Transparency Market Research.
The Long Algae Biofuel Game Of ExxonMobil
All this activity puts the on-again, off-again algae biofuel journey of ExxonMobil into perspective.
ExxonMobil spearheaded the charge into shale gas after the Bush Administration lifted Clean Water Act regulations in 2006, and the company continued to double down on gas acquisitions even as prices plummeted.
Next Steps For Algae
ExxonMobil, for one, is excited. The company lists the following benefits compared to corn ethanol and other biofuels made from land-based energy crops:
Unlike making ethanol and biodiesel, producing algae does not compete with sources of food, rendering the food-vs.-fuel quandary a moot point.
Because algae can be produced in brackish water, including seawater, its production will not strain freshwater resources the way ethanol does.
Algae consume CO2, and on a life-cycle basis have a much lower emissions profile than corn ethanol given the energy used to make fertilizer, distill the ethanol, and to farm and transport the latter.
Algae can yield more biofuel per acre than plant-based biofuels – currently about 1,500 gallons of fuel per acre, per year. That’s almost five times more fuel per acre than from sugar cane or corn.
That’s all well and good, but it’s about time for ExxonMobil and other fossil energy stakeholders to stop digging more carbon up from the ground and start taking giant steps towards a more sustainable energy profile.
Capturing carbon dioxide at power plants is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t change anything in terms of the local environmental impacts of fossil energy extraction, and it doesn’t make a dent in the amount of fugitive emissions escaping from drilling sites, transportation networks and storage facilities.
To the extent that algae farming at gas power plants enables more gas extraction, it’s just another form of greenhouse gas whack-a-mole.
Either way, it looks like algae farming at power plants has a window of opportunity. Last November ExxonMobil re-upped its collaboration with Synthetic Genomics, under the new name of Viridos. If you have any thoughts about that, drop us a note in the comment thread.
In 2020, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) committed to reducing net emissions across its value chain by 30% by 2030, before bringing them to net-zero by 2040. At the time, CCEP said in a statement that it is ready to go further and faster after reducing value chain emissions by 30.5% since 2010.
Going further and faster has seen its Ventures arm (CCEP Ventures) collaborate with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) to explore novel methods of capturing carbon and then using it as a feedstock.
Speaking exclusively with edie, Craig Twyford, Head of CCEP Ventures, stated that this project (which will originally last three years) would enable the firm to support scientists and experts to hopefully deliver a viable, onsite method to capture carbon emissions from facilities and then use them in products in a bid to drive down emissions.
“I think this is incredibly exciting,” Twyford told edie. “It’s a big picture idea, but if we start thinking of carbon as not just a problem but also as a feedstock, then there’s a lot of things we can start to change.
“The way I envisage it, but obviously there’s many twists and turns along the way, is that we’d ideally be able to fit direct air capture units to each of our sites that draws down the carbon in a cost-effective and efficient way. The biggest impact will probably be if we can use this to carbonate our drinks and produce sugar, but it could have impact elsewhere.”
Sugar focus
CCEP is financing the three-year research programme that will be led by the Peidong Yang Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, which will first and foremost focus on the production of sugar from onsite carbon at an industrial scale. CCEP and Twyford believe that lab-scale prototypes could be the first step in making raw materials and packaging more sustainable and with a lower carbon footprint in the long run.
Sugarcane is not only the source of most of the world’s sugar, but is also the most produced food crop in the world. Sugarcane production has increased by more than 10% in the last 10 years with the crop now being utilised outside of the food space, namely in the creation of biofuels and controversial bioplastics.
Research from food analytics company Spoonshots found that the average water footprint used to produce 1kg of refined sugar is the equivalent of two years of drinking water for one person. Additionally, firms like British Sugar have calculated that 0.6g of CO2 equivalent is produced for every gram of sugar made.
As the population continues to grow, land becomes more contested and forests burned down for agricultural processes, it is clear that innovating the agri-sector is key to combatting key megatrends like land loss and degradation, deforestation and the climate crisis.
For companies like CCEP, agricultural ingredients, including sugar, can account for around 25% of the firm’s overall carbon footprint. Tackling emissions associated with agri-ingredients will be key to reaching net-zero.
Twyford points out that this innovation could also assist in reducing “some of the largest carbon contributors” across the value chain, namely by saving on raw and finite materials for things like packaging – by turning carbon into PET plastic and reducing the need for crude oil – and fuel and reducing transportation and logistics costs due to the onsite aspect of the project.
Supply chain innovation
Given that the majority of CCEP’s Scope 3 emissions are in the supply chain, the company is aiming to help all of its strategic suppliers set science-based targets and transition to 100% renewable electricity. For ingredient and packaging-related emissions, the company will accelerate plans relating to sustainable agriculture and 100% recycled plastics. Some life-cycle analyses have found that soft drinks bottles made using 100% post-consumer-recycled plastic generate 40% less CO2e than virgin plastic bottles.
Twyford stated that this innovation would likely have the biggest impact on its Scope 3 aspirations, but that there were still plenty of challenges to overcome.
“There are some hurdles but it think [the research team] can overcome them,” Twyford said. “The challenges are around selectivity and efficiency and creating the right glucose. So the first three years will be seeing how these challenges can be overcome. But [the team] has a roadmap for this and 2025 will come around quickly, at which point we’ll start asking ‘where do we go from here’?”
While the success of the initial research hinges on overcoming barriers, the long-term ambition for this project is scalability. Twyford believes that having an organisation as large as CCEP, which serves 1.75 million customers across 29 countries, will create some confidence in the carbon capture market which, to date, has looked at larger projects between a cluster of organisations and sites.
Crucially, CCEP believes that this vision could be shared across the industry, helping other firms to decarbonise at a pace on the road to net-zero.
“Everyone needs to learn off everyone,” Twyford said. “So if these direct air capture systems can really be used to help us view carbon as a valuable feedstock then this can be a solution that will help a lot of industries. I think these types of solutions will be industry-wide eventually.
“For us, we think that if we can take on a leadership role to back this, then others may look at us and view this as something that is serious and can be scaled.”
CCEP is not the only firm with this view. Carpet manufacturer, Interface, for example i forging ahead with its Climate Take Back strategy, which is also filled to the brim with moonshot goals. It focuses on “bringing carbon home and reversing climate change” and to “stop seeing carbon as the enemy, and start using it as a resource”. Indeed, many industrial firms have switched their mindset to stop “demonising” carbon and instead realise the potential that is could have as a key material building block.
Twyford ends by reiterating that this will not see the company become sugar manufacturers and that any success will require the expertise of its existing supply chain to help share advice and best practice.
To this end, earlier in the week, CCEP confirmed the creation of a sustainability-linked supply chain finance programme that will be operated by specialist food and agri-bank Rabobank.
The new finance programme will reward suppliers that make improvements on sustainability across the business and will feature sustainability-linked KPIs that, if met, will create discounts against the initial funding rate.
Air Vodka is made of greenhouse gas emissions – specifically, captured carbon dioxide.
The Air Company is backed by Toyota Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Parley for the Oceans and Carbon Direct Capital Management.
At Bathtub Gin, a reinvented speakeasy in lower Manhattan, patrons may be pining for the past but they are drinking a vodka specifically invented for a cleaner future. Air Vodka is made in part from greenhouse gas emissions – specifically, captured carbon dioxide.
It is just one of a bevy of new products designed to make use of CO2 emissions that can be captured from various types of industry.
“We work with partners that capture that carbon dioxide before it’s emitted into the atmosphere, and then we use that CO2 in our process in creating the alcohols that we create,” said Gregory Constantine, Co-founder and CEO of Air Company, which is also producing perfume and hand sanitizer from those emissions. “It’s obviously far better for the planet in that we’re removing CO2 for every bottle that we’re creating.”
Distilling alcohol the old fashioned way not only releases its emissions, but it uses a lot of water — about 35 liters of water to make one liter of distillate. Air Vodka is made of just two ingredients, CO2 and water. It separates hydrogen out of the water through electrolysis, releasing the oxygen. The hydrogen is then fed into a “carbon conversion reactor” system with the captured CO2. That creates ethanol which, when combined with water, becomes a type of vodka.
The scientific process in the Air Company’s laboratories is valuable to the environment, but the results are not cheap. The three-year-old start-up’s vodka is a luxury brand, costing about $65 bottle. But at Bathtub Gin, the vodka is getting high praise.
A bartender pours a jigger of Air Vodka, a spirit made of CO2 emissions. Nathaniel Lee | CNBC
“Once we tell them, ’hey, this is how it’s made and it’s got a negative carbon footprint, all those really beautiful things, is what happens to make them want it even more. And then they go looking for [it[, going, ‘where can we get it?’” said Brendan Bartley, beverage director and head bartender at Bathtub Gin.
The company’s sights are set beyond just vodka and perfume. Constantine said he expects to offer new products made of CO2 as it opens its third production facility.
“Vodka for us is really a gateway towards all the other products and then the industrial applications of where our technology can go,” he said.
Carbon capture is fast becoming big business, as companies look not just to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but to keep necessary emissions from getting into the atmosphere. Captured carbon is being used to make everything from vodka to eyeglasses, laundry detergent, Coca Cola and even jet fuel.
The Air Company is backed by Toyota Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Parley for the Oceans and Carbon Direct Capital Management. It has raised just over $40 million to date.
A California-based start-up has found a way to use limestone — a cheap and widely available material — to remove carbon dioxide directly from the air, potentially overcoming a major hurdle in scaling up the technology needed to avoid catastrophic global warming.
Heirloom Carbon Technologies said Thursday it raised $53 million from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a clean-technology fund led by Bill Gates, and the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund.
As a growing number of companies have set goals to reach net-zero emissions in the coming decades, demand has surged for ways to offset their ongoing pollution. However, experts warn that cheap credits based on avoiding deforestation or building renewable energy projects tend to exaggerate their climate benefits. Technologies that actually remove carbon from the atmosphere can more credibly back the promise of capturing and storing a set amount of greenhouse gas.
But those technologies are still nascent and often require complex machinery, making them tens of times more expensive than carbon credits from projects that plant trees or build wind farms, which can cost as little as $3 per ton.
One reason for the high cost is that direct-air capture technology has so far relied on the use of expensive solvents that can separate CO₂ from the air, like iron filings to a magnet. Once the gas is bound to the solvent, it needs to be heated to a high temperature to release the CO₂, which can be captured, compressed, and buried deep underground in rock formations similar to those that hold oil and natural gas.
Heirloom uses a similar process, without the expensive solvents. The company starts by heating limestone, also known as calcium carbonate, to more than 600°C in an electric furnace that’s powered by renewable electricity — the most energy-intensive and expensive step. The process releases CO₂ — which is captured — and the leftover calcium oxide is spread out in hundreds of trays that are stacked 20-feet high and exposed to the air.
“It looks like cookies in a baking tray,” said Heirloom Chief Executive Officer Shashank Samala. “We’re trying to simplify as much as possible.”
Over months or years, calcium oxide gets converted back to limestone as it absorbs CO₂ from the air. But Heirloom says that by turning the material into a fine powder and carefully placing the trays to maintain the right conditions, it can shrink the process down to a week. Once calcium carbonate is created, the cycle is repeated 15 times or so before the material isn’t able to effectively capture CO₂.
Samala declined to provide more details on the company’s approach because some of the tweaks it has made to accelerate the capture process are quite simple and yet to be patented. The engineering work “could be easily replicated by others, even with a couple of clues,” said Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct Capital Management, another fund that contributed to Heirloom’s latest investment round.
Heirloom has so far only tested the different steps in its process individually. The new money will be used to build a pilot plant by next year that will put them all together and attempt to capture a few tons of CO₂ every day. Unlike some other direct-air capture start-ups, Heirloom does not need to overcome basic science challenges, such as whether the capture process can actually work quickly, said Friedmann. The technology is based on peer-reviewed research published in 2020.
The most advanced direct-air capture companies include Switzerland-based Climeworks, which has sold credits to Gates for as much as $600 a ton, and Canada-based Carbon Engineering, which has been working for a few years with Occidental Petroleum to build a plant that could capture as much as 1 million tons each year.
Even though Heirloom has yet to build a facility of that size, technology companies Stripe, Shopify, Klarna Bank, and Wise have already paid for CO₂ it may capture in the future. Stripe said that it paid more than $2,000 a ton with the understanding that the cost will come down rapidly as the technology is scaled up. Heirloom aims to eventually lower the cost of its captured carbon to as little as $50 a ton.
Petra Nova, once billed as the largest U.S. project to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power plant, opened to considerable publicity in Texas in late 2016.
Less than four years later, owner NRG Energy Inc. NRG -0.20% shut down the carbon-capture system, which cost $1 billion—not because the technology wasn’t working but because the expected end use for the carbon was no longer economically viable. The coal plant continues to generate electricity and emit carbon.
Carbon-capture projects are attracting renewed attention from investors and governments world-wide as concerns mount about the greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change. But the initiatives have a dismal record.
More than 80% of proposed commercial carbon-capture efforts around the world have failed, primarily because the technology didn’t work as expected or the projects proved too expensive to operate, according to a 2020 study by researchers at Canada’s Carleton University, the University of California, San Diego and other institutions.
The U.S. has spent $1.1 billion on carbon-capture demonstration projects since 2009, with uneven results, according to a December report from the Government Accountability Office. None of the eight coal projects selected for $684 million of the funding during that time is operating, the researchers found. Projects to capture carbon from heavy industries met with some success.
While some early projects have demonstrated that it is technologically possible to collect carbon from power plants and industrial sites—or even directly out of the air—they have generally been very expensive. Many face a fundamental problem: there is no economic use for the carbon they capture.
Currently, the only large-scale use for captured carbon is for pushing more oil and gas out of declining reservoirs, which in turn leads to additional emissions when the fossil fuels are burned for energy. In the U.S., there is no federal requirement that companies capture carbon emissions, or carbon taxes or other fees aimed at discouraging them from releasing the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
As a result, most carbon-capture initiatives don’t save companies money or generate profits, and they represent an added business expense. Still, some companies are pursuing the projects to reduce their carbon footprint under pressure from investors and activists concerned about climate change.
A fresh round of U.S. carbon-capture projects is in the works, bolstered by around $12.1 billion in funding in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed into law last year by President Biden. Oil, power, chemicals and biofuels companies are kicking off a wave of new proposed carbon-capture investments, including carbon-transport pipelines in Iowa, a coal-power plant in North Dakota and a hydrogen plant in Louisiana.
Large fossil-fuel companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM -2.59% and Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY -4.02% are touting carbon capture as a part of their future plans to reduce emissions—and lobbying Congress to increase a tax credit to make the projects more economically sustainable.
New carbon-capture projects are bolstered by the infrastructure bill President Biden signed into law last year. PHOTO: SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Many companies and climate activists say governments need to nurture innovative technologies to capture emissions that would otherwise be hard to cut. Accelerating such projects, they argue, is the only realistic way to reach the targets of the international Paris agreement, which seeks to keep rising temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
“To meet the goals of the Paris climate accords, there’s no way we can do it without direct-air capture,” Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub said in an interview. The company, which uses carbon to extract oil, plans to build facilities to capture it straight from the air, but considers the potential tax-credit expansion vital to its efforts.
Exxon is proposing a project with other companies in Houston to capture and bury the carbon from an array of industries. But it would be difficult to launch at its proposed size without policy changes such as a larger tax credit, said Erik Oswald, a vice president at Exxon.
Congress is considering boosting the credit for collecting carbon emissions from smokestacks by 70% to $85 for a metric ton if the carbon is stashed in saline geologic formations, or $60 if it is sent down oil wells. Direct air projects would get $180 for a metric ton if the carbon is stored, or $130 for oil.
Less generous tax credits have been on the books since 2008 but have failed to create a real carbon-capture industry. “There’s been little material impact on the deployment of carbon capture and storage,” said Scott Anderson, senior director of energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S.-based advocacy group.
The infrastructure bill included funding for pipelines and storage to help build a missing puzzle piece: a spider’s web of infrastructure that could gather and ship carbon from multiple sites.
“That’s a massive step forward for carbon capture and carbon storage,” said Cindy Crane, chief executive of Enchant Energy Corp., which plans to retrofit a coal-fired power plant in New Mexico with carbon-capture equipment for around $1.3 billion. The project would also require up to roughly $390 million in plant improvements, a pipeline and storage field.
Globally, industries will have to raise carbon-capture capacity by a factor of 50 to 100 times over what is in the development pipeline to achieve what the International Energy Agency estimates is needed to reach “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2070, said John Bradford, professor of geophysics and vice president for global initiatives at the Colorado School of Mines.
Building those projects—and keeping them running—can be costly. Petra Nova was a joint venture of NRG and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. that captured some emissions from a coal plant near Houston and piped them about 80 miles to an oil field, where they were used to push more crude out of the ground. The government awarded the project around $195 million in a proof-of-concept grant.
Petra Nova closed in 2020 after the pandemic reduced demand for fuel and led to a collapse in oil prices, which made the oil that the captured carbon was helping produce less economically viable. It remains in mothball status, though NRG said it proved the technology could work on a coal-fired plant.
“We continue to explore options to improve the economics,” said NRG spokesman Chris Rimel.
Mississippi Power’s plant in De Kalb, Miss. The company is the utility arm behind the Kemper project. PHOTO: ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In Mississippi, a carbon-capture initiative by utility Southern Co. SO 0.35% has turned into a white elephant. The project known as Kemper aimed to use locally mined lignite coal to fuel a power plant, and capture the resulting carbon emissions, which were then to be sent to oil fields to prime crude production. The Energy Department invested $387 million.
Forecast to cost $3 billion in 2010, Kemper’s costs spiraled above $7 billion. Once constructed, the coal-gasification technology never quite worked as intended, and Southern abandoned its initial plans, burning natural gas in the power plant instead.
The company imploded coal and carbon-capture equipment that couldn’t be dismantled for resale last October. Coal conveyors from Kemper are now available for sale online.
“It was the end of a long, bad experiment,” said Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley, a Kemper critic. Mr. Presley said he favors innovation but believes government and business should bear the risk instead of utility ratepayers.
Mr. Presley and other regulators didn’t allow Southern to pass Kemper’s full cost on to customers. The company, which had to assume some $6 billion on the project’s cost, is paying for demolition of the carbon-capture part, estimated at $10 million to $20 million annually through 2025, said a spokesman for Mississippi Power, the utility arm behind the project.
The federal government is now funding a $24 million feasibility study that includes the same plant—this time for capturing and storing carbon emissions from natural gas.
Recreating the process of natural photosynthesis in which plants turn sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into energy is a long-pursued goal in science. Often described as an “artificial leaf,” these systems could play a key role in the fight against climate change, and a team of engineers has just picked up the pace with a solution that captures carbon dioxide at 100 times the rate of current technologies.
We have looked at quite a number of artificial leaf systems over the years that use sunlight to turn water into liquid fuels and electricity. One interesting example came from engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in 2019. It had a unique design the creators say made it suitable for use in the real world, unlike other laboratory solutions that could only work with carbon dioxide from pressurized tanks.
The solution consisted of a standard artificial photosynthesis unit that was encased in a transparent capsule filled with water, and featured a semi-permeable outer layer. As sunlight struck the device, the water evaporated through the pores in the outer layer and carbon dioxide was drawn in to replace it, where the unit inside turned it into carbon monoxide. This CO could in turn be captured and used to make synthetic fuels.
Through some key tweaks to the design, the scientists have now taken its performance to new heights. The team used inexpensive materials to integrate an electrically charged membrane that acts as a water gradient, with both a dry and wet side. On the dry side an organic solvent attaches to the captured carbon dioxide and turns it into concentrated bicarbonate, which builds up on the membrane.
A positively charged electrode on the wet side then draws the bicarbonate across the membrane and into the watery solution, where it is converted back into carbon dioxide to make fuels or in other applications. Altering the electrical charge can speed up or slow down the rate of carbon capture, which the scientist found at its optimum could capture 3.3 millimoles per hour for each four square centimeters (0.6 sq in) of material.
Diagram depicts the design of a novel “artificial leaf” device that captures carbon dioxide with great efficiency Aditya Prajapati/UIC
This “flux rate” is described as very high, and more than 100 times better than existing systems. Importantly, only a negligible amount of energy was required to power the reactions, at 0.4 kilojoules per hour, less than what it takes to run a one-watt LED lightbulb. Equally impressive, the team says the system can capture carbon dioxide at a price of US$145 a ton, which is within the Department of Energy’s guidelines that these technologies should cost $200 per ton or less.
“Our artificial leaf system can be deployed outside the lab, where it has the potential to play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere thanks to its high rate of carbon capture, relatively low cost and moderate energy, even when compared to the best lab-based systems,” said Meenesh Singh, assistant professor of chemical engineering in the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author on the paper.
The device is small enough to fit in a backpack and is modular by nature, meaning multiple units can potentially be stacked on top of one another to build out devices suited for different settings.
“It’s particularly exciting that this real-world application of an electrodialysis-driven artificial leaf had a high flux with a small, modular surface area,” Singh said. “This means that it has the potential to be stackable, the modules can be added or subtracted to more perfectly fit the need and affordably used in homes and classrooms, not just among profitable industrial organizations. A small module of the size of a home humidifier can remove greater than 1 kg of CO2 per day, and four industrial electrodialysis stacks can capture greater than 300 kg of CO2 per hour from flue gas.”
The research was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
A new decarbonization technology developed by RMIT University researchers in Australia instantaneously turns CO2 into solid carbon, a press statement reveals.
The team claims their method is commercially viable and that it could soon be deployed in aid of global efforts to reduce the ongoing effects of the climate crisis.
A ‘radically more efficient’ method
The new method is based on an existing experimental carbon capture technique that utilizes liquid metals as a catalyst. “Our new method still harnesses the power of liquid metals but the design has been modified for smoother integration into standard industrial processes,” explains Associate Professor Torben Daeneke, a co-lead researcher of the project. “As well as being simpler to scale up, the new tech is radically more efficient and can break down CO2 to carbon in an instant,” he continues.
The RMIT team’s technique uses liquid metal heated to between 212-248°F (100-120°C). This heated metal is then injected with CO2 to kickstart the required chemical reaction. The CO2 gas bubbles up to the surface of the liquid metal, leaving flakes of solid carbon behind in a reaction that only takes a second. “We hope this could be a significant new tool in the push towards decarbonization, to help industries and governments deliver on their climate commitments and bring us radically closer to net zero,” Daeneke continues.
“It’s the extraordinary speed of the chemical reaction we have achieved that makes our technology commercially viable, where so many alternative approaches have struggled,” Dr. Ken Chiang, a co-lead researcher, adds.
Is the rise of commercial carbon capture a good thing?
The team of researchers has filed a provisional patent application and RMIT has signed a 2.6 million dollar agreement with environmental tech startup ABR, aimed at commercializing the technology. It is one of many carbon capture methods in the process of being commercialized globally.
Another team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, recently announced that it had developed a technique that mimics the seashell forming process to suck carbon out of the oceans. This would have a positive knock-on effect, as the less carbon there is in the ocean, the more it can absorb from the atmosphere. In Scotland, meanwhile, a new carbon capture facility will remove up to 1 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year.
While carbon capture technology does have the potential to help in efforts towards carbon neutrality, scientists do caution that it must not be viewed as a replacement for widespread initiatives aimed at curbing the emissions of the fossil fuel industry. In July last year, for example, the U.S. Center for International Environmental Law wrote that carbon capture could act as a “dangerous distraction” that could delay the transition away from fossil fuel consumption.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is Time magazine’s current Person of the Year, is often accused of neglecting problems on Earth in favor of conducting his private space program. The accusation is unfair on a number of levels. After all, Musk also runs an electric car company. Now, the space entrepreneur has announced on Twitter a new initiative that may prove flying into space could also benefit the Earth.
“SpaceX is starting a program to take CO2 out of atmosphere & turn it into rocket fuel. Please join if interested,” he tweeted.
Human-caused climate change, created by the emission of greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is an obsession with many both in government and in the media. Musk’s proposal has interesting implications for the issue and the accusations that he wants to abandon Earth to go live on Mars. The project will not only help alleviate climate change on Earth but will be instrumental to Musk’s desire to build a settlement on Mars.
Making rocket fuel with CO2 is the easy part of the proposal. A century-old process invented by a Nobel Prize-winning chemist named Paul Sabatier combines CO2 with hydrogen and a catalyst to create methane and water. Musk’s rocket being developed by SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas uses engines that burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen. NASA uses the Sabatier system on the International Space Station (ISS) to create water for the crew. The methane is vented from the ISS.
The first part of Musk’s plan, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, is likely to be more challenging. The idea that carbon capture from the air would reduce the Earth’s greenhouse gasses and thus alleviate climate change is a controversial one. One such project, reported by Techcrunch, is being conducted by a company called Climeworks in Iceland. Thus far, the company spends between $600 and $800 to remove a ton of carbon dioxide, which is considered prohibitively expensive. Climeworks wants to reduce the cost to between $100 and $200 a metric ton (also known as tonne) to make the project more economically feasible.
Another form of carbon capture involves sequestering CO2 directly from power plants. Indeed, NET Power has a pilot plant a few hours’ drive away from Boca Chica in La Porte, Texas. It burns natural gas but saves and store the CO2 emissions. Could Musk buy the CO2 he needs from the NET plant or a similar source? Perhaps, but ever the environmentalist, the Musk might be reluctant to ship the gas to Boca Chica by diesel-fueled tanker truck. Would Tesla be interested in developing an electric-powered tanker truck?
In any case, Musk is interested in developing both the carbon capture from the air and the Sabatier technologies for his planned Mars settlement. The idea is to capture CO2 from the Martian atmosphere, hydrogen from water ice, and then convert them to rocket fuel for spacecraft headed back to Earth from the Red Planet.
Musk has funded a $100 million X-Prize to encourage development of carbon capture technologies, noting that “to win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year; model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year; and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future.”
If and when a direct air capture solution is achieved, a win-win result will have been achieved. Human civilization will have available one or more technologies that will go a long way toward solving the climate crisis. Musk will have a source of CO2 to make his own rocket fuel and continue pursuing his grand design to build a Mars settlement, not to mention taking humans back to the moon and a number of other goals.
A rocket whose engines burn liquid methane and liquid oxygen will create water and CO2 in its exhaust. But a world that has technology that can capture carbon from the atmosphere will likely be more than able to handle the situation.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has denounced carbon capture as a “false solution.” But the delicious irony is that while Green New Dealers concoct schemes to deal with climate change that involve destroying the fossil fuels industry, billionaire capitalists such as Musk are developing solutions that do not involve such a wrenching, economic calamity. Musk and people like him are more likely to succeed where politicians and activists are certain to fail. Musk promises to save the Earth and go to Mars.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of space exploration studies “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been touted, again and again, as one of the critical technologies that could help Australia reach its climate targets, and features heavily in the federal government’s plan for net-zero emissions by 2050.
CCS is generally when emissions are captured at the source, such as from a coal-fired power station, trucked to a remote location and stored underground.
But critics say investing in CCS means betting on technology that’s not yet proven to work at scale. Indeed, technology-wise, the design of effective carbon-capturing materials, both solid and liquid, has historically been a challenging task.
So could it ever be a viable solution to the fossil fuel industry’s carbon dioxide emissions?
Emerging overseas research shows “liquid marbles”—tiny droplets coated with nanoparticles—could possibly address current challenges in materials used to capture carbon. And our modelling research, published yesterday, brings us a big step closer to making this futuristic technology a reality.
But the efficacy and efficiency of CCS has long been controversial due to its high-operational costs and scaling-up issues for a wider application.
An ongoing problem, more specifically, is the effectiveness of materials used to capture the CO₂, such as absorbents. One example is called “amine scrubbing“, a method used since 1930 to separate, for instance, CO₂ from natural gas and hydrogen.
The problems with amine scrubbing include its high costs, corrosion-related issues and high losses in materials and energy. Liquid marbles can overcome some of these challenges.
This technology can be almost invisible to the naked eye, with some marbles under 1 millimetre in diameter. The liquid it holds—most commonly water or alcohol—is on the scale of microlitres (a microlitre is one thousandth of a millilitre).
The marbles have an outer layer of nanoparticles that form a flexible and porous shell, preventing the liquid within from leaking out. Thanks to this armour, they can behave like flexible, stretchable and soft solids, with a liquid core.
What do marbles have to do with CCS?
Liquid marbles have many unique abilities: they can float, they roll smoothly, and they can be stacked on top of each other.
Other desirable properties include resistance to contamination, low-friction and flexible manipulation, making them appealing for applications such as gas capture, drug delivery and even as miniature bio-reactors.
In the context of CO₂ capture, their ability to selectively interact with gases, liquids and solids is most crucial. A key advantage of using liquid marbles is their size and shape, because thousands of spherical particles only millimetres in size can directly be installed in large reactors.
Gas from the reactor hits the marbles, where it clings to the nanoparticle outer shell (in a process called “adsorption”). The gas then reacts with the liquid within, separating the CO₂ and capturing it inside the marble. Later, we can take out this CO₂ and store it underground, and then recycle the liquid for future processing.
This process can be a more time and cost-efficient way of capturing CO₂ due to, for example, the liquid (and potentially solid) recycling, as well as the marbles’ high mechanical strength, reactivity, sorption rates and long-term stability.
So what’s stopping us?
Despite recent progress, many properties of liquid marbles remain elusive. What’s more, the only way to test liquid marbles is currently through physical experiments conducted in a laboratory.
Physical experiments have their limitations, such as the difficulty to measure the surface tension and surface area, which are important indicators of the marble’s reactivity and stability.
In this context, our new computational modelling can improve our understanding of these properties, and can help overcome the use of costly and time-intensive experiment-only procedures.
Another challenge is developing practical, rigorous and large-scale approaches to manipulate liquid marble arrays within the reactor. Further computational modelling we’re currently working on will aim to analyse the three-dimensional changes in the shapes and dynamics of liquid marbles, with better convenience and accuracy.
This will open up new horizons for a myriad of engineering applications, including CO₂ capture.
Beyond carbon capture
Research on liquid marbles started off as just an inquisitive topic around 20 years ago and, since then, ongoing research has made it a sought-after platform with applications beyond carbon capture.
This cutting-edge technology could not only change how we solve climate problems, but environmental and medical problems, too.
Magnetic liquid marbles, for example, have demonstrated their potential in biomedical procedures, such as drug delivery, due to their ability to be opened and closed using magnets outside the body. Other applications of liquid marbles include gas sensing, acidity sensing and pollution detection.
With more modelling and experiments, the next logical step would be to scale up this technology for mainstream use.
