The Problem with Carbon Removal

 

This is Orca, the world's largest carbon removal plant to date. It's expected to draw 4,000 tons of airborne CO2 per year. 

It has two drawbacks. It's expensive to build and expensive to operate. The real problem is that 4,000 tons of CO2 represents just three seconds of global emissions.

Carbon capture, that scrubs CO2 out of industrial exhausts is also costly but more effective. The drawback is that it does nothing about removing existing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Bill Gates is putting his money on a Canadian company, Carbon Engineering. Its technology could remove 25 times what Orca achieves. 25 times 3 seconds is what, 75 seconds? That's a solid 1:15 in terms of global emissions. At that ration, Carbon Engineering would need to construct something in the range of 420,000 to 450,000 plants worldwide.

Back to the drawing board.  Maybe not.

UPDATE:

The Guardian's environment editor, Damian Carrington, writes that the companies building these plants  want just that - to build millions of these plants. And, best of all, they figure it can be done at a modest cost of just $100 US per tonne.

“It is not super intuitive,” says Jan Wurzbacher at Climeworks, which just opened the world’s biggest Dac plant in Iceland and recently hosted a conference for the Dac industry. “But that doesn’t mean it is hard. There is no physical reason it can’t be done for $100/tonne in the next 10-20 years.”

Importantly, there is a huge overlap between the skill sets required to do Dac and traditional oil and gas, so it really supports the green transition,” she says. The company aims to bury 1m tonnes a year in the US in 2025, at about $300/tonne. The company also wants to use its technology to provide CO2 as a feedstock for producing low-CO2 jet fuel. “That’s the largest market we’re seeing at the moment,” Ruddock says.

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial, has an even more striking pitch: “We put oil back underground.” The company takes agricultural and forestry waste that would otherwise rot – emitting CO2 – and heats it to create “bio-oil” that is then pumped back into empty oil reservoirs.

So there you have it, my lovelies. Problem solved. We might as well shut down the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. No need for more of those dreary climate summits. Happy days are here again.  We'll just suck all that nasty CO2 out of the air and Bob's your uncle. And imagine, guilt-free air travel with low-CO2 jet fuel produced out of bio-oil.

And who has the mega-bucks it will take to build these millions of CO2 removers? How about Exxon, Chevron, BP, Total, Gulf? How about every Sheik and Emir in the Persian Gulf? Hey, this'll put them right back in business.

At $100 per tonne, governments can easily collect that in carbon taxes to fund these operations. That should make it really cheap for the fossil fuel producers/carbon scrubbers.  And you - you can get that vintage gas guzzler out of the garage and tearing up the streets just like God intended.

One other thing.  This is a technology of rapidly declining efficiency and escalating costs. Extracting CO2 from air a few feet away is terrific. The air column, however, is thousands of feet high. Getting the CO2 out of the air column even hundreds of feet above the plant is going to be very, very difficult.

Even if you could get at mid- and high-altitude CO2, your success, i.e. efficiency, would decline as the concentration of airborne greenhouse gas declined. You would be using ever more energy at increasing cost to extract ever smaller volumes of CO2.  Eventually the viability of the idea collapses under its own weight.