Brief Guide To Carbon Capture

Capturing Carbon Dioxide is Not a New concept. In the 1920s, some Drillers were already Venting Gas through Liquid-filled chambers to separate CO2 from more lucrative Methane. The fundamentals of Carbon Capture, getting Carbon molecules near something they'll stict to, haven't changed much since then.

Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that in order to maintain a Livable Climate, we need to Not only Stop Cabon Dioxide from entering the Atmosphere, but also Remove billions of tons of the stuff Annually by Midcentury. Plants, our old allies, can absorb only so much.

Far-out ideas like Ocean Fertilization risk Trashing entire Ecosystems just to store some Carbon. Cabon Capture can't Reverse all our past Emissions, but it might Help.

Here's a look at the Leading Technologies, promising, hopeful, yet also Troublesome:

Point-Source Carbon Capture

How Its Work - Collecting CO2 from a point source like a smokestack or a gas well is the most efficient form of carbon capture costs about $70 per metric ton of carbon, about a fifth of the price of capturing the gas once it's dispersed into the air.

Why Its Problematic - This kind of carbon capture has a long history. For the most part, it'sa long history of failure. Pointisource carbon capture takes a lot of energy. So the fossil-fueled factories and power plants that use it run less efficiently, use more water, and are more expensive to operate. For that reason, point-source is better suited for industries like steel that are hard to decarbonize by simple swithing to renewable energy.

DIRECT-AIR Capture (DAC)

How Its Work - Carbon scrubbers have been making air breathable on space shuttles and submarines for decades, a fan pulls air into a filter that is coated with a chemical that CO2 molecules stick to. Amines, a smelly derivative of ammonia, are a frequent choice, as one soda lime and lithium hydroxide. Heating the filter releases the CO2, which can be stored or sold, though space shuttles and submarines just vent it outside.

Why Its Problematic - Snagging CO2 from open airis challenging because the carbon is si diluted, .04% versus 15% or so in a steel mill smokestack. But if we want a reasonably livable planet, we need to bring that open-air CO2, closer to .35%, and that would take hundreds of thousands of DAC plants and a phenomenal amount of energy. Scalling up this technology is not easy. For one thing, it needs renewable energy or the whole setup will generate more CO2 then it can capture.

DAC is also expensive. The Orca plant is Iceland, which is run by the global carbon-capture outfit Climeworks, gets abundant energy from a nearby geothermal plant, but its captured carbon still costs well-heeled buyers $600 to $1,200 per metric ton.

Bioenergy With Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS)

How Its Work - With this method, plants, anything from agricultural leftovers like sugarcane stalks to fast-growing crops like poplar trees, do the work of sequestering carbon. The processof burning those plants, capturing the carbon, using the energy, and putting in a new crop is, at least in theory, carbon negative. If you're familiar with ethanol production, you have some idea of how BECCS works. Plenty of ethanal and other bioenergy plants already exist across the U.S., the difference is that BECCS plants store or reuse any CO2 released in the production process.

Why Its Problematic - The process of vegetation capturing CO2 from the atmosphere is carbon negative. Transporting those plants and refining, capturing, and storing CO2 is not. For BECCS to be cabon negative, all the above would have to be done with renewable energy.










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