Is carbon seize an environment friendly technique to deal with CO2? | NESMAG

It could possibly be a scene from science fiction. Towering over darkish, mossy lava fields are stacks of noisy machines the dimensions of delivery containers, domes, and zig-zagging silver pipes.

Found 30km (19 miles) southwest of Iceland’s capital Reykjavik, that is the world’s largest direct air seize (DAC) facility.

Called Mammoth, it has been developed by Swiss agency Climeworks.

It has been working for 2 months, sucking global-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air, then storing it deep underground the place it turns to stone.

Twelve collector containers are actually put in, however within the coming months 72 of them will circle the big processing corridor.

“That will enable us to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 every year,” Climeworks’ chief business officer, Douglas Chan, tells the BBC.

The concept is to reverse emissions which have already been pumped into the ambiance.

Each collector unit has a dozen highly effective followers, which, each 40 seconds, can suck up sufficient air to fill an Olympic swimming pool.

“The technology relies on sucking in lots and lots of air, slowing it down so that the filter can capture it, and then venting the air back out the end,” says Mr Chan.

CO2 solely makes up a tiny proportion of the ambiance (0.04%), so capturing it requires a number of electrical energy.

For Mammoth that electrical energy comes from a neighbouring geothermal energy plant, so, whereas working, the plant is emissions free.

Once full, the gathering chambers are flushed out with sizzling steam, which is piped into the processing corridor.

Inside the corridor, Mr Chan factors out two huge balloons overhead, which collectively maintain a single tonne of CO2.

That captured CO2 is then blended with recent water, in an adjoining tower.

“It’s almost like a shower,” explains Dr Martin Voigt, from Icelandic agency Carbfix, which has developed a course of to show CO2 into stone.

“From the top, water trickles down. The CO2 is coming up, and we dissolve the CO2.”

Hidden inside two white, igloo-like domes close by are injection wells, the place the CO2-laden water is pumped greater than 700m underground.

“This is a fresh basalt here,” says Dr Voight, exhibiting me a lump of black rock taken from a current volcanic eruption, and riddled with tiny holes. “You can see there’s a lot of porosity.”

Iceland has an abundance of volcanic basalt, and this bedrock acts like a storage reservoir. When the carbon meets different parts discovered within the basalt, a response kicks off and it solidifies, locking it away as carbonate minerals.

“Here you can see a lot of these pores are now filled with whitish specks,” says Dr Voight, dealing with a pattern of drilled out rock.

“Some of these are carbonate minerals. They contain the mineralised CO2.”

The course of is fast, claims Dr Voight enthusiastically. “We’re not talking about millions of years.”

“Around 95% of the CO2 was mineralised within two years in the pilot project. This is incredibly fast. On geological timescales at least.”

Capable of eradicating 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a 12 months, an quantity just like taking 8,000 petrol automobiles off the street, Mammoth is nearly 10 occasions bigger than Climeworks’ first business plant referred to as Orca.

It prices Climeworks virtually $1,000 (£774) to seize and retailer a tonne of CO2. To earn a living it sells carbon offsets to shoppers.

“Mammoth has already sold close to a third of its lifetime capacity,” states Mr Chan, who believes technological enhancements and scaling up, will drive down future prices.

“By the end of the decade, we want to be at a cost of capture of between $300 and $400.”

Among its prospects are Microsoft, H&M, JP Morgan Chase, Shopify and Lego; in addition to over 20,000 people who subscribe on Climeworks’ web site.

“We’re following the science,” Microsoft’s senior director of vitality and carbon elimination, Brian Marrs, beforehand advised the BBC.

“Carbon removal has to be part of the equation. You can’t reduce emissions that are already in the atmosphere, you have to remove them.”

Eventually Mammoth will likely be dwarfed by US-based Project Cypress, which breaks floor in 2026, and which Climeworks hopes will take away as much as one million tonnes of CO2 yearly, utilizing new expertise which it claims will likely be cheaper and extra vitality environment friendly.

DAC expertise is, nevertheless, not with out critics who assume its over-hyped, pointing to excessive prices, excessive vitality consumption and restricted scale.

Those critics would argue that capturing CO2 the place it’s emitted can be much more environment friendly.

“It’s much easier to remove the carbon dioxide directly from smokestacks,” says Dr Edvard Júlíus Sólnes, a professor on the University of Iceland and former Icelandic Environment Minister.

Despite repeated calls to curb emissions, a file quantity of planet-heating CO2 was churned out final 12 months.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that emissions should be urgently slashed, however that also received’t be sufficient to forestall dangerous world warming.

Many local weather scientists agree that carbon elimination will even be essential however this additionally divides opinion. Multiple strategies have emerged, and a few warning in opposition to reliance on so-called techno-fixes, which could discourage polluters from altering their methods.

Currently no carbon elimination is going down at wherever close to the size that might be wanted.

“We release about 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, so this [DAC] won’t make a dent in the big problem,” says Dr Sólnes.

“We need to divest from fossil fuels and find other sources of energy,” he asserts. “But I think we should use all methods to fight this problem.”

More DAC initiatives are getting off the bottom. According to the International Energy Agency, 27 crops have been commissioned worldwide, however solely 4 of them seize greater than 1,000 tonnes of CO2 yearly.

Plans for additional 130 services are additionally on the drafting board, and round $3.5bn has additionally been earmarked by the US authorities to kickstart three large-scale hubs geared toward finally eradicating a mega-tonne of CO2, per 12 months.

However, Doug Chan is satisfied that DAC may help battle world warming. “I really do believe direct air capture and other engineered solutions are going to get us to the point that we need to help fight climate change.”