Air Capture Technology Quickly Advances

By Roger Pielke, jr., cross posted from his blog, Prometheus.

From the University of Calgary, this news release:

In research conducted at the U of C, Keith and a team of researchers showed it is possible to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming - using a relatively simple machine that can capture the trace amount of CO2 present in the air at any place on the planet.

In research conducted at the U of C, Keith and a team of researchers showed it is possible to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming - using a relatively simple machine that can capture the trace amount of CO2 present in the air at any place on the planet.

"At first thought, capturing CO2 from the air where it's at a concentration of 0.04 per cent seems absurd, when we are just starting to do cost-effective capture at power plants where CO2 produced is at a concentration of more than 10 per cent," says Keith, Canada Research Chair in Energy and Environment.

"But the thermodynamics suggests that air capture might only be a bit harder than capturing CO2 from power plants. We are trying to turn that theory into engineering reality."

The research is significant because air capture technology is the only way to capture CO2 emissions from transportation sources such as vehicles and airplanes. These so-called diffuse sources represent more than half of the greenhouse gases emitted on Earth. . .

"A company could, in principle, contract with an oilsands plant near Fort McMurray to remove CO2 from the air and could build its air capture plant wherever it's cheapest - China, for example - and the same amount of CO2 would be removed," Keith says.

Keith and his team showed they could capture CO2 directly from the air with less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide. Their custom-built tower was able to capture the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on a single square metre of scrubbing material - the average amount of emissions that one person produces each year in the North American-wide economy.

"This means that if you used electricity from a coal-fired power plant, for every unit of electricity you used to operate the capture machine, you'd be capturing 10 times as much CO2 as the power plant emitted making that much electricity," Keith says.

The U of C team has devised a new way to apply a chemical process derived from the pulp and paper industry cut the energy cost of air capture in half, and has filed two provisional patents on their end-to-end air capture system.

See that highlighted part above? It says that the capture part of air capture techonolgy might add as little as 11% to the cost of coal-generated electricity. Surely there are additional costs, and there are issues with sequestration and recycling. However, the progress in air capture technology in recent years on what are relatively modest research, development, and deployment budgets should give some optimism that this technology may have a role to play -- a major role -- in climate mitigation. Given the trends in global emissions, one would think that air capture would have a big fan club. Interestingly, it has a lot of vocal opponents.

Comments

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By Me. on 2008 12 05

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Numbers like this are encouraging to see. But in the last sentence you mention some great opposition... ?? I want to know who it is that's opposing these things, and why...

By Tyler Burton on 2008 10 02