One way to think of direct air capture, Beuttler says, is to imagine it like “space-efficient artificial trees.” Trees, after all, are the original carbon-capturing machines. Direct air capture technology is intended to strip the carbon dioxide out of air anywhere in the world. Scientists have been capturing carbon dioxide for decades, especially from highly concentrated sources, like power plants. “And it works.” How does direct carbon capture work? “Direct air capture is real,” Reimer says. But the bottom line is that the technology now exists to put a dent in our future atmospheric carbon. And the net benefit depends on what we do with that carbon dioxide once it’s removed. Climeworks already provides its carbon dioxide removal service to several businesses, including big tech companies.ĭirect air capture is not without its challenges, namely high costs and concern that we might shirk necessary policies to curb current emissions in favor of tech that erases past ones. More and more large multinationals are paying for carbon dioxide removal to achieve their climate targets and get to net-zero or net-negative emissions by 2030. That support was coupled with increasing demand from private companies. Then in August 2020, the United States Department of Energy announced $13.5 million in funding for direct air capture projects intended to draw carbon dioxide from ambient air (not attached to a power plant). “The idea is really to provide a non-fossil source of CO 2 for fuels, products, and materials, rather than be a means to extract more fossil CO 2 from the ground,” he says.Ĭompanies needed to start building air capture facilities within seven years to take advantage of the tax credit. Businesses can glean the credit by sequestering the gas or by using it to squeeze additional hydrocarbons out of oil - a process called enhanced oil recovery, which might be economically feasible, but also sustains our dependence on oil.Ĭlimeworks will not engage in enhanced oil recovery, Beuttler says. tax code expanded a tax credit called 45Q, which gives businesses tax breaks for capturing carbon dioxide. The regulatory landscape started to shift in 2018 when an adjustment to the U.S. He says there’s still a long way to go, but a few key pieces have fallen into place and set the project in motion. Such projects represent “an engineering project probably larger than has ever been created by humanity in the past,” says Jeffrey Reimer, a materials chemist at The University of California Berkeley who is not affiliated with Climeworks. To make a big enough hole, though, this tech will have to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Direct air capture can’t keep us below that threshold on its own, but it can help poke a hole in our proverbial carbon bucket to drain out some of our past emissions. Here's Howīut all of the pathways that keep us at or below 1.5 degrees C, as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also include development of direct air capture technologies like the giant fans set to start spinning in Iceland. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. To keep that bucket from overflowing, we’ll certainly have to cut back on global emissions (which, with the exception of 2020’s pandemic shutdown, are projected to keep rising). Today, that bucket is almost full: We have about nine percent of the volume left to fill if we want to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050. You can think about the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere like a bucket. “This, together with reducing emissions and planting as many trees as we can, enable us to just make the Paris Agreement.” “To me, this is kind of the last hope,” Christoph Beuttler, the carbon dioxide removal manager of Climeworks tells Grist. Developed by the Swiss engineering firm Climeworks, Orca is the largest example of direct air capture to date - a technology intended to suck carbon dioxide out of thin air. The facility, called Orca, is intended to suck approximately 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide directly from the air each year. ![]() Twelve giant fans mounted on the outside of each box will start spinning later this year. In January 2021, eight shipping container-sized boxes were assembled in Hellisheiði, Iceland, next to the third-largest geothermal power station in the world.
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