![]() ![]() While the development pathways for CDR and NETS remain unclear, there’s an increasing consensus within the scientific and industry community that these technologies are both necessary and here to stay, even if they do not provide a silver bullet to the climate crisis.After decades of sowing doubt about climate change and its causes, the fossil fuel industry is now shifting to a new strategy: presenting itself as the source of solutions. Capture6 believes its industrial-scale solutions can realistically capture millions of tons of carbon/ year by 2030, well before mid-century, when larger extractions will be needed. That, too, is an innovation, as other CDR technologies do one or the other. At plant scale, the process removes as much carbon as Sleipner, but from the ambient air, not from the equivalent of a smokestack, and while improving the ocean’s chemistry. Capture6 has looked at equipment and processes used in industries such as desalination and is reorganizing them for carbon capture.”Ĭapture6 uses salt-water and electrochemistry as a path to absorption of atmospheric carbon, which is incorporated into calcium carbonate – what sea-shells are made of - and then returned back to the ocean. Satisfying that present and growing demand means utilizing and reorganizing the technologies that industry already knows how to deploy at massive scale. The firm marries existing technology and infrastructure practices to the rapidly growing market for “high quality” corporate carbon offsets (carbon that can be reliably measured and stored more or less permanently).Īccording to Capture6’s co-founder Ethan Cohen-Cole, “There’s a huge unmet demand for non-biological CDR by Fortune 500 companies, and even many governments with net-zero goals. Sleipner demonstrated that significant carbon capture and storage levels at emission source points (where the carbon concentration is highest) is possible.Ĭapture6, based in California and New Zealand, is perhaps the only carbon-capture firm that addressing the economics - and therefore scale - problem head-on. Others note that the active constraint to effective carbon capture is not technology but political will and funding - a public private partnership between the government of Norway and Statoil resulted in the world’s first (heavily subsidized) point-source CDR project, “Sleipner,” which since 1996 has captured and re-injected into underground storage about a million tons/year of carbon from a natural gas drilling platform in the North Sea. At 5000 tons/year, the world would need hundreds of thousands of units to capture enough carbon to be meaningful.Ĭarbon capture advocates frequently cite the growth of photovoltaics (PV) to make that point that technology can advance quickly: solar cells have nearly doubled in efficiency between 20. The technologies are promising, but the biggest challenge remains scalability. Running Tide, a Maine-based company, has been working since 2010 to develop a system for growing macro-algae (i.e., kelp forests, a carbon sink) and associated aquaculture across swathes of open ocean. The company offers individuals the option to purchase carbon removal with their credit card. Among the beneficiaries are a small but growing number of companies like Climeworks, the most visible CDR tech firm, runs a flagship direct air capture facility in Iceland, that removes about 5000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year. The IPCC report may have broken the dam in favor of NETS, but the combination of steady technical progress and the threat of huge near-term financial losses due to global warming laid the foundation for the the movement of billions of dollars into carbon capture tech in the last few months. And despite the fact that climate has been a staple issue for partisan warfare in the United States, carbon capture is one remedy where partisan chasm isn’t as deep: big oil understands that effective carbon capture can extend the economic lifespan of fossil fuels. Experts think this legal action is just the beginning. Recently an environmental group sued Air France-KLM was recently sued for “misleading” public carbon neutrality claims, given the mismatch between the uncertain result of its carbon capture commitments and the relative certainty of the aviation’s growing carbon footprint. Renewable power – including wind, solar, and geothermal - has become more broadly available consumer pressures are moving companies towards “net zero” emissions planning the up-take of ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) accounting means that companies are no longer able to support claims of carbon neutrality with hand-waving: offsets with uncertain capture (planting trees, for example) are harder to justify to the public and shareholders when emission streams are growing.
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