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Microsoft signs 10-year carbon removal deal with Climeworks

Posted on July 14, 2022 by dishanth

The tech giant first announced an intention to source carbon removal solutions from Climeworks in January 2021, a year after pledging to achieve carbon-negative operations and supply chains by 2030. To achieve this 2030 goal, Microsoft – which is already carbon-neutral in operations – intends to halve emissions this decade and invest to offset and remove more carbon than it emits annually.

This week, Climeworks confirmed that it has entered into a ten-year purchase agreement with Microsoft. The investment in the deal has not been disclosed at this stage, but Climeworks claims it is “one of the largest” in the DAC space and will support the removal of “tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere”.

“Microsoft’s multi-year offtake agreement with Climeworks is an important step towards realizing the ‘net’ in net zero,” said Microsoft’s chief environmental officer Lucas Joppa. “Our experience in purchasing renewable energy shows that long-term agreements can provide an essential foundation for society’s race to scale new decarbonisation technologies.”

Pictured: Climeworks’ Orca DAC plant in Iceland. Image: Climeworks

Other corporate supporters of Climeworks include Ocado, Swiss RE, Audi, LGT and Stripe, the latter of which is spearheading a collaborative private sector commitment on scaling carbon capture technologies. Called ‘Frontier’, the collaboration is backed by $925m of commitments to purchase carbon removals using man-made technologies this decade.

Technology scale-up

Climeworks currently operates 17 DAC plants, including one, Orca, which is operating on a commercial basis. Orca came online in September 2021 and is based in Hellisheiði, Iceland. Its CO2 removal capacity is 4,000 tonnes per year.

Last month, Climeworks confirmed plans for its 18th and largest plant to date – Mammoth, also in the same Icelandic region. The plant is expected to begin operations in either late 2023 or early 2024. In the first instance, it will have a CO2 capture capacity of 36,000 tonnes per year. Climeworks is aiming to scale to two megatonnes of capacity by 2030, laying the foundations for scaling to a gigatonne of capture capacity by 2050.

Climeworks’ technology works by drawing air into a collector with a fan. Inside the collector, CO2 is filtered out. When the filter is full, the collector is closed and heated to release the CO2, ready for concentration and storage by storage partner Carbfix. The carbon associated with developing and operating the DAC facilities, Climeworks claims, is typically equivalent to 10% of the carbon that will be captured. This calculation considers the fact that the facilities are powered by renewable energy.

Microsoft’s Joppa has called DAC “a nascent but crucial industry” to achieve the halving of net global emissions by 2030 and bringing them to net-zero by 2050 – the levels recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for giving humanity the best chance to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5C.

Indeed, some climate scientists have concluded that large-scale carbon capture – whether man-made or nature-based – is needed at scale to avert the worst physical impacts of climate change due to historic and continuing emissions. The IPCC itself has stated that, by 2050, the world’s air-based carbon removal capacity should be 3-12 billion tonnes in a net-zero world.

However, as Joppa acknowledged, man-made systems are in their relative infancy commercially. Critics are concerned that they may not deliver their promised benefits and could be used as a means for businesses to avoid reducing their emissions in the first instance.

ETC report

In related news, the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) has this week published a new report outlining its recommendations for scaling carbon capture, storage and utilisation (CCUS) technologies while ensuring that efforts around zero-carbon electricity and emissions reductions are not de-prioritised.

That report forecasts that, in 2050, the world will need 7-10 gigatonnes of CO2 capture. This is at the higher end of the levels recommended by the IPCC. Reaching this scale, the ETC argues, cannot be dependent on action in the mid or long-term – concerted efforts are needed this decade, with the backing of both public and private finance.

Overall, the ETC sees a “vital but limited” role for CCUS. Its report sets out how the carbon removals provided by these technologies should be prioritised for sectors which are hard to decarbonise, such as heavy industry, and should be scaled most rapidly in the sectors and locations where CCUS has an economic advantage over other decarbonisation solutions.

The ETC has been a vocal supporter of CCUS in recent years. In March, it released a separate report recommending that the global CCUS capacity reaches 3.5 billion tonnes annually by 2030.

Source Edie

Bill Gates backs a carbon-capture start-up that uses dirt cheap material

Posted on March 21, 2022 by dishanth

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.

Source Inquirer

SpaceX’s Elon Musk is going into the carbon capture business

Posted on January 11, 2022 by dishanth

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.

Source The Hill