When exploring an emerging technology like Climeworks’ Direct
Air Capture, it pays to read multiple articles.
MIT Technology
Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/)
has identified Climeworks
as one of 2022’s Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies.
The Orca project, located in Iceland, is
Climeworks’ most ambitious to date. Its technology sucks huge quantities of air
through special filters which extract CO2 from the air. The CO2 is then
combined with water to produce a fizzy cocktail which is then pumped into
basalt formations located deep underground. The basalt gradually absorbs the
CO2, and within two or three years this former gas becomes a permanent part of
the rock formations.
The process requires lots of energy. The green energy is supplied by geothermal
power plants, which are abundant in the region.
The MIT article is quite informative, of course. Even so, a close reading of
articles from other sources provides details that can enrich your understanding
of the technology.
TIP:
Google® climeworks iceland
Excerpts from some of the results of this search appear below.
///////
Climate change
Carbon removal factory (MIT Technology Review)
A large plant that captures carbon from the air could help create an industry
the world needs to avoid dangerous levels of warming this century.
Kristján Maack, February 23, 2022
Key players
Climeworks, Carbon Engineering, Carbon Collect
The facility, outside Reykjavik, Iceland, can capture 4,000 metric tons of
carbon dioxide every year. Large fans suck air through a filter, where
materials bind with CO2 molecules. The company’s partner, Carbfix, then mixes
the carbon dioxide with water and pumps it underground, where it reacts with
basalt rock and eventually turns into stone. The facility runs entirely on
carbon-free electricity, mainly from a nearby geothermal power plant.
Each module at Orca is made up of a dozen carbon
removal units. Air passes through grates and over a filter that traps carbon
dioxide with adsorbent chemicals. When the filters are full, grates close
across the front of the unit and pipes pump heat into the enclosed space,
releasing CO2 from the filters. The carbon dioxide is then pumped to an area
where it's prepared for storage before the gates open again to restart the
process.
source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044972/carbon-removal-factory-climate-change/
///////
The
world is banking on giant carbon-sucking fans to clean our climate mess. It's a
big risk. (CNN)
By Ivana Kottasová, CNN
Wed October 20, 2021
The Orca plant — its name derived from the Icelandic word for energy — is what
is known as a "direct air carbon capture facility," and its creator
and operator, Swiss firm Climeworks, say it's
the world's largest.
The aim of Orca is to help the world reach net zero emissions — where we remove
as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as we emit. Scientists say that
simply cutting back on our use of fossil fuels won't be enough to avert
catastrophe; we need to also clean up some of the mess we've been making for
hundreds of years.
"We, as humans, have disturbed the balance of the natural carbon cycle. So
it's our job to restore the balance," said Edda Aradóttir, a chemical
engineer and the CEO of the Icelandic company Carbfix,
which carries out a process to store the captured CO2 underground.
How the 'magic' happens
The Orca machines use chemical filters to capture the heat-trapping gas.
The "fans," or metal collectors, suck in the surrounding air and
filter out the CO2 so it can be stored.
Carbon dioxide's concentration in Earth's atmosphere has likely not been this
high at any other point in the last 3 million years, according to NASA
scientists. But at levels over 410 parts per million, to actually capture a
meaningful amount of CO2, a huge amount of air needs to pass through these
machines.
"What is happening is that CO2 in the air is an
acid molecule and inside the collectors we have alkaline. Acids and alkaline
neutralize each other," Climeworks co-CEO Christoph Gebald told CNN.
"That's the magic that happens."
In two to four hours, the surface of the filter is almost completely saturated
with CO2 molecules — as if there are "no parking slots left," as
Gebald puts it.
"Then we stop the airflow and we heat the internal structure to roughly
100 degrees Celsius, and at that temperature, the CO2 molecules are released
again from the surface, they jump off back to the gas phase and we suck it
out."
Because of the high temperature that is needed for the process, the Orca plant
requires a lot of energy. That's a problem that's easily solved in Iceland,
where green geothermal power is abundant. But it could become a challenge to
scale globally.
The machines at Orca are just one way to remove CO2 from the air. Other
methods involve capturing the gas at source — like the chimney of a cement
factory — or removing it from the fuel before combustion. That involves
exposing the fuel, such as coal or natural gas, to oxygen or steam under high
temperature and pressure to convert it into a mixture of hydrogen and CO2. The
hydrogen is then separated and can be burned with much lower carbon emissions.
However, methane emissions could be a problem when the process is used on
natural gas.
The carbon that comes out of CCS can be used for other purposes, for example to
make objects out of plastic instead of using oil, or in the food industry,
which uses CO2 to put the fizz in drinks. But the amount that needs to be captured
vastly exceeds the world's demand for CO2 in other places, which means the
majority of it will need to be "stored."
Opponents of CCS argue the technology is simply another way for the fossil fuel
industry to delay its inevitable demise.
While they are not involved in the Orca plant, fossil fuel giants dominate the
sector. According to a database complied by the Global
CCS Institute, a pro-CCS think tank, an overwhelming
majority of the world's 89 CCS projects that are currently in operation, being
built or in advanced stages of development are operated by oil, gas and coal
companies.
Oil companies have had and used the technology to
capture carbon for decades, but they haven't exactly done it to reduce
emissions — ironically, their motivation has been to extract even more oil.
That's because the CO2 they remove can be re-injected into oil fields that are
nearly depleted, and help squeeze out 30-60% more oil than with normal methods.
The process is known as "enhanced oil recovery" and it is one of the
main reasons why CCS remains controversial.
Full text source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/20/world/carbon-capture-storage-climate-iceland-intl-cmd/index.html
///////
Jon Gertner, Yale Environment 360
The dream of carbon air capture edges
toward reality in Iceland (Yale
Environment 360)
Science Sep 21, 2021
In early September, at an industrial facility located about 25 miles southeast
of Reykjavik, Iceland, the Swiss company Climeworks
will mark the opening of a new project named “Orca.”
At least in a conventional sense, Orca doesn’t actually make anything. It is
comprised of eight elongated boxes that resemble wood-clad tanks. Each of these
boxes — known as “collectors” — is roughly the size of a tractor trailer, and
each is festooned with 12 whirring fans that draw a stream of air inside.
Within the collectors, a chemical agent known as a sorbent will capture CO2
contained in the air wafting through. Periodically, the surface of the sorbent
will fill up. And at that point the CO2 trapped within it will need to be
released. At Orca, this task is accomplished with a blast of heat, which is
sourced from a nearby hydrothermal vent. The extracted CO2 will then be piped
from the collector boxes to a nearby processing facility, where it will be
mixed with water and diverted to a deep underground well.
And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide
captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a
process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function
as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.
Climeworks maintains that Orca, once it’s running around the clock, will remove
up to 4,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. And there isn’t
much reason to doubt the facility can achieve this feat. For one thing, the
technology for the plant, known as direct air capture, or DAC, is a variation
on ideas that have been utilized over the course of half a century in
submarines and spacecraft: Employ chemical agents to “scrub” the excess CO2 out
of the air; dispose of it; then repeat. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact
that Climeworks has already built smaller, less sophisticated plants in
mainland Europe, which have in turn pulled hundreds of tons of CO2 per year
from ambient air.
What seems most significant about Orca, then, is how it
represents the possibility that direct air capture has moved closer to
something resembling a commercial business. Climeworks now has dozens of
customers — individual consumers who have purchased carbon removal services
directly from the company, as well as corporations, like the insurance giant
Swiss Re — who will pay for the permanent carbon offsets that will be buried
underneath Icelandic soil. What’s more, the Orca facility will be the largest
functioning direct air capture plant in the world to date — by the company’s
estimation, it represents a “scale-up” of its carbon removal efforts by about
eighty-fold over the course of four years.
And yet, Climeworks and Orca will likely soon be eclipsed. Plans for even
larger DAC plants — one in the U.S. Southwest, slated for completion at the end
of 2024; another in Scotland, to be finished about a year after the American
project — will be built by a competitor, Carbon
Engineering, of British Columbia. Employing a somewhat different
technology, Carbon Engineering’s facilities, as initially planned, will be
powered by renewable energy and will eventually each remove, on net, about a
million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere.
“In our view, this will decisively answer the question:
Is direct air capture feasible at large scale and affordable cost,” Steve
Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, told me recently. “As I see it, we are
out of academic research and feasibility and now into engineering reality.”
One concern is that DAC might prove increasingly controversial if it erodes
global efforts at mitigation. If carbon can effectively and affordably be
removed from the air, in other words, it may slow the rush to eliminate fossil
fuels. For now, at least, that remains a hypothetical risk. And Oldham and
colleagues in his field told me they believe new state and government policies
are moving his industry in the right direction. A U.S. tax credit for companies
called 45Q, for instance, is helping to subsidize some of the high costs of
carbon capture and sequestration. The possible passage of a federal
infrastructure bill in the coming months may likewise allocate as much as $3.5
billion to help construct large DAC plants. Meanwhile, a push from the private
sector has been a boon to fledgling DAC firms. A slew of tech companies
interested in becoming carbon neutral or carbon negative — Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify are the most prominent
— have invested substantial sums in Climeworks and
Carbon Engineering. Their commitments have, in turn, helped the
companies move forward with planning and construction.
At the same time, investment dollars are beginning to flow into “next
generation” DAC ideas. The U.S. Department of Energy recently invested more
than $12 million in a slew of early-stage approaches and component
technologies. A number of venture firms, notably Breakthrough
Energy and LowerCarbon Capital, have
placed tens of millions more into startups. One new firm, San Francisco-based Noya, utilizes existing power
plant cooling towers to create a “distributed” system of direct air capture
stations that the company hopes will prove cheaper than building DAC plants
from scratch; another, a Detroit-based startup known as
Remora, fits carbon-capturing sorbent technology on trucking rigs to
vacuum up CO2 on long hauls. As a sweetener, a new $100 million X-prize,
sponsored by Elon Musk, involves a four-year global competition that will
reward the most promising young carbon removal firms for ideas that can be
scaled up to gigatons per year.
So within the industry, there is plenty of money and plenty of enthusiasm. What
is in short abundance, in light of the hottest month on record and near-term
projections for future global temperatures, is plenty of time.
source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-dream-of-carbon-air-capture-edges-toward-reality-in-iceland
///////
The Washington Post
September 8, 2021
Climate Solutions
$$The world’s
biggest plant to capture CO2 from the air just opened in Iceland (Washington
Post)
The Orca, an installation built by Climeworks, will capture 4,000
metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — and serve as a blueprint for similar
technology.
By Michael Birnbaum
By 2050, humanity will need to pull nearly a billion metric tons of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere every year through direct
air capture technology to achieve carbon neutral goals, according to
International Energy Agency recommendations from earlier this year. The plant
in Iceland will be able to capture 4,000 metric tons annually — just a tiny
fraction of what will be necessary, but one that Climeworks, the company that
built it, says can grow rapidly as efficiency improves and costs decrease.
source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/09/08/co2-capture-plan-iceland-climeworks/
///////
Smithsonian
$$World’s
Largest Carbon Capture Plant Opens in Iceland (Smithsonian)
‘Orca’ will use geothermal energy to pull thousands of metric tons
of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and pump it underground
Ben Panko
September 9, 2021
The world's largest carbon capture plant has come online in Iceland, as
entrepreneurs and environmentalists seek to build momentum for technology they
see as key to fighting the increasingly dire threat of climate change.
Named "Orca," the facility is located on a lava plateau in southwest
Iceland, reports Michael Birnbaum for the Washington Post. Using a system of
fans, filters and heaters and powered by a nearby geothermal power plant, it
has the capacity to pull 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air
each year and pump it into underground caverns where the gas, mixed with water,
will slowly become stone as it cools.
Orca's method of carbon capture, called "direct air capture," is a
relatively new technique, which uses chemical reactions to remove CO2 from the
atmosphere, reports Audrey Carleton for Motherboard. The method contrasts with
the more commonly used technologies that capture carbon emissions directly at
their sources. It's also currently incredibly expensive, with a price tag of
roughly $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, the Post reports.
Direct air capture's high costs, relative lack of track record, and energy
requirements have made it a controversial proposition among environmentalists,
Motherboard reports. This year, hundreds of
environmental groups signed an open letter to leaders in the American and
Canadian governments arguing that carbon capture is not a solution to climate change
because it gives cover to fossil fuel companies, among other reasons.
Ben Panko is a staff writer for Smithsonian.com
source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/worlds-largest-carbon-capture-plant-opens-iceland-180978620/
///////
The New York Times
$$Is Carbon
Capture Here? (New York Times)
By Peter Wilson
Published Oct. 31, 2021Updated Nov. 4, 2021
This article is part of a special report on Climate Solutions, which looks at
efforts around the world to make a difference.
Mr. Hitz and his small team of technicians are running Orca, the world’s
biggest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which in September began
pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at a site 20 miles from the capital,
Reykjavik.
As the wind stirred up clouds of steam billowing from the nearby Hellisheidi
geothermal power plant, a gentle hum came from Orca, which resembles four
massive air-conditioners, each the size of one shipping container sitting on
top of another.
Each container holds 12 large round fans powered by renewable electricity from
the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel catchment boxes where carbon
dioxide or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, chemically bonds
with a sandlike filtering substance.
When heat is applied to that filtering substance it releases the CO2, which is
then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to create a drinkable fizzy
water.
Several other firms are striving to pull carbon from the air in the United
States and elsewhere, but only here in the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is the
CO2 being turned into that sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred
meters down into basalt bedrock.
Carbfix has discovered that its CO2 mix will chemically
react with basalt and turn to rock in just two or three years instead of the
centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take, so it takes the
CO2 that Climeworks’ DAC captures and pumps it into the ground through wells
protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily serve as
props in a space movie.
It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of
forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in
a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other firms are planning to inject into
empty oil and gas fields could eventually leak out, some experts fear, but once
carbon turns to rock it is not going anywhere.
Orca is billed as the world’s first commercial DAC unit
because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year have been paid
for by 8,000 people who have subscribed online to remove some carbon, and by
firms including Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi
and Microsoft.
Dr. Gebald, a soft-spoken 38-year-old, began working on DAC with a fellow
German, Jan Wurzbacher, while they were studying mechanical engineering in
Switzerland. They formed their company in 2009 but Dr. Gebald says their big
breakthrough was the release of the U.N.-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change report in 2018, setting out the need for reaching net zero emissions by
2050 if global warming was to be kept to 1.5 degrees. Crucially, it also
produced the first scientific consensus that some emissions would be too hard
to eradicate so all viable paths to “net zero” would rely on removing some
previous emissions.
Dr. Gebald believes that machine-based solutions may have to carry half that
workload because the potential for most nature-based
options are limited by a shortage of arable land.
A fundamental difference from wind and solar power is that they were ultimately
driven by the profit motive because once subsidies had helped to make them
competitive they were producing a valuable asset: cheap electricity.
DAC’s main “output” — helping to save the planet — must instead rely on
government supports such as emission credits and taxes on carbon emitters,
hence the importance of meetings such as the Glasgow COP.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/climate/is-carbon-capture-here.html
///////
$$World’s
biggest machine capturing carbon from air turned on in Iceland (Agence
France-Presse)
Operators say the Orca plant can suck 4,000 tonnes of CO2 out of the
air every year and inject it deep into the ground to be mineralised
Agence France-Presse
Wed 8 Sep 2021
The world’s largest plant designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and
turn it into rock has started running in Iceland, the companies behind the
project – Switzerland’s Climeworks and Iceland’s Carbfix – said on Wednesday.
The plant, named Orca after the Icelandic word “orka” meaning “energy”,
consists of four units, each made up of two metal boxes that look like shipping
containers.
Constructed by Climeworks, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000
tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, the companies say.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, that equates to the
emissions from about 870 cars. The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build,
Bloomberg reported.
To collect the carbon dioxide, the plant uses fans to
draw air into a collector, which has a filter material inside. Once the filter
material is filled with CO2, the collector is closed and the temperature is
raised to release the CO2 from the material, after which the highly
concentrated gas can be collected.
Then, Carbfix’s process mixes the CO2 with water and injects it at a depth of
1,000 metres into the nearby basalt rock where it is mineralised. Carbfix says
the CO2-water mixture turns to stone in about two years, and hydride of sulphur
(HS2), within four months.
Proponents of so-called carbon capture and storage believe these technologies
can become a major tool in the fight against climate change.
Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and
might take decades to operate at scale.
source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/09/worlds-biggest-plant-to-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-rock-opens-in-iceland-orca
///////
Bloomberg Green
$$World’s
Largest Carbon-Sucking Plant Starts Making Tiny Dent in Emissions (Bloomberg
Green)
Startups Climeworks and Carbfix are working together to store carbon
dioxide removed from the air deep underground.
By Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir and Akshat Rathi
September 8, 2021
In Iceland’s barren landscape, a new container-like structure has risen
alongside plumes of steam near the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant. Its job
is to reverse some of the damage carbon-dioxide emissions are doing to the
planet.
The facility, called Orca and built by Swiss startup Climeworks AG, will suck
CO₂ out of the air. Icelandic startup Carbfix will then pump it deep into the
ground, turning it into stone forever. Of the 16
installations Climeworks has built across Europe, Orca is the only one that
permanently disposes of the CO₂ rather than recycling it.
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-08/inside-the-world-s-largest-direct-carbon-capture-plant
///////
$$Giant fans
made by this Swiss startup are sucking planet-warming CO2 right out of the sky
(Fortune)
By Bernhard Warner
March 1, 2022
After spending a good chunk of his university years backcountry skiing on the
glaciers around the French-Swiss border town of Chamonix, Christoph Gebald
figured he knew a thing or two about extreme weather. But then came this
winter—in Iceland.
When he spoke to Fortune in mid-February, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur went
straight into the weather report: Gale-force winds. Blizzards. Repeat.
“Operating under those conditions is a bit challenging,” said Gebald, cofounder
and co-CEO of the Swiss green-tech startup Climeworks AG.
In September, Climeworks,
with the help of its Icelandic partners Carbfix and ON Power, made climate-science history when they
flipped the switch on Orca, the world’s first and largest direct air capture
(DAC) and carbon storage installation.
The basic idea around DAC is that giant fans can be engineered to suck
planet-warming CO2 out of the sky; on a very basic level, think of how an air
purifier hoovers up dust and funky odors in your living room. What sets DAC
apart is that it collects all that bad air, and returns it deep below the
earth, usually storing it in geological formations.
Which brings us to Iceland.
Climeworks chose the volcanic island nation in the North Atlantic for a few
reasons. Iceland has an abundant supply of clean geothermal energy to power the
lungs of Orca—its massive fans. It also has plenty of basalt rock. The big
by-product of DAC is usually a liquefied carbon dioxide mixture, which needs to
be carefully disposed of. In the case of Orca, that CO2 soup gets pumped into
the layer of basalt below ground. There, the basalt acts as a sturdy cap.
Within a few years, the CO2 mixture will turn to stone, Climeworks says, with
little to no risk that it will return to the atmosphere, where it would foul
the air and warm up the planet.
Still, a growing list of corporations looking to reduce
their carbon footprint are teaming with Climeworks. Last year, the insurance
giant Swiss Re signed a 10-year carbon removal purchase agreement, in essence
paying Climeworks to suck carbon out of the sky to help it meet its net-zero
goals. Microsoft, Square, Ocado, and Boston Consulting Group are also paying
Climeworks to sequester carbon over the next decade. Individuals who feel
guilty about their carbon footprint can buy carbon-reduction subscriptions from
the company. Want to remove a monthly 30 kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere
as you begin to fly around the world again? That subscription package will cost
you €30 (or about $34) per month.
That business line started innocently enough, Gebald says. When he and his
business partner and former university roommate, Jan Wurzbacher, would share
what they were working on, they’d get enthusiastic responses from friends and
family. That’s when the light bulb went off. “Hey, we can democratize climate
action,” he recalls thinking. “We take the CO2 back out of the air, full stop,
and they can pay us for that. That’s sort of how the
invention of the carbon-dioxide-removal-as-a-service model was born.” [Editor’s note: like paying a company for garbage removal]
How DAC works
Orca’s fans are designed to suck the ambient air into a special chamber. There,
filters isolate and strip out the CO2 pollutants. The final stage: The pristine
air is blown out the other end into the wild. A crucial middle step in the
process: The carbon particles that get collected are neutralized at a high
temperature, and, with the help of Carbfix’s technology, this unwanted
by-product is mixed with water and pumped underground where it slowly turns to
rock.
Not surprisingly, there’s suddenly a lot of competition
coming from this corner of climate science. Carbon Engineering, a Canadian
company, has plans this year to build an even bigger DAC facility in the middle
of fracking country, Texas’s Permian Basin, with Occidental Petroleum, and
another in Scotland. For the Scottish project, Carbon Engineering will team
with Storegga, another startup trying to crack the DAC market. Not to be
outdone, Exxon Mobil is working with climate-tech specialists Global Thermostat
to jointly develop DAC technology, seeing it as key “to decarbonizing the
energy sector in the long term.”
DAC is an oddball in the polarizing world of climate science in that it seems
to be bringing together competing interests—and not just Big Oil and climate-tech
startups. For example, Democrats and Republicans in Congress see in DAC a
promising technology that can reduce America’s roughly 5 billion metric ton
carbon footprint. To wit, in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signed by
President Biden in November, $3.5 billion is earmarked for the construction of
direct air capture hubs around the country. “There is definitely bipartisan
support in Congress for direct air capture right now,” Erin Burns, executive
director of the climate-focused NGO Carbon180, tells Fortune.
Even as investor interest and political will coalesces around DAC, the science
is still a long way from perfection. The big challenge all DAC operators
contend with is bringing down the costs of this emerging technology. Arizona
State University professor Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in the field, doesn’t see
the DAC market taking off until the commercial players can get costs of
removing a ton of carbon dioxide to below $100. Climeworks hasn’t hit that
number yet: It has shaved down costs over the years, but it’s still “somewhere
in the range of $200 to $300 per ton,” says Gebald.
source: https://fortune.com/2022/03/01/climeworks-orca-co2-climate-change-musk-gates-breakthrough/
///////
Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy
An American University Research Center
Posted on September 10, 2021 by Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy
$$Why Orca
matters: long-term climate policy and Climeworks’ new direct air capture
facility in Iceland (Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy)
Authored by David Morrow & Michael Thompson
Prepared for the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy
Earlier this week, the Swiss company Climeworks fired up its new Orca direct
air capture facility in Iceland, which will remove 4,000 metric tons of carbon
dioxide (CO2) per year and turn it into stone.
Obviously, 4,000 metric tons is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to today’s
emissions. Each year, Orca will clean up about three seconds’ worth of global
CO2 emissions at today’s rates.
But that’s not the point. Orca is a baby step toward a larger carbon removal
industry that could one day clean up emissions from the hardest-to-abate
sectors or, even better, start cleaning up “legacy carbon” that remains in the
atmosphere from our past emissions. Without baby steps like Orca, though, we
would never get there. In that respect, Orca is a bit like the tiny, 3.5
kilowatt solar power station that NASA’s Lewis Research Center installed on the
Papago Indian Reservation in 1978; it’s only the beginning. Global solar power
capacity now stands at more than 200 million times the capacity of that little
installation. While direct air capture isn’t likely to grow at such a pace, the
point is that we shouldn’t judge the potential of an industry by its output in
its earliest days.
One reason that direct air capture won’t grow at the same pace as solar power
is because solar panels provide energy, whereas direct air capture consumes it.
So, at least for the next couple of decades, it will almost always make more
sense, from the perspective of climate change mitigation and energy justice, to spend money on
installing more clean energy and replacing old fossil fuel infrastructure than
on building more direct air capture facilities. The
reason to spend some money on direct air capture now, though, is to help the
technology grow so that once we’ve drastically reduced our emissions, we can
use direct air capture and other approaches to carbon removal to get to
net-zero and maybe even net-negative emissions. By analogy, four decades
ago, the reason to spend money on solar panels was not because they offered a
cost-effective way of reducing emissions or supplying energy, but because those
investments helped the technology grow. If everyone had dismissed solar at the
time as too small and too expensive, we wouldn’t have the solar industry that
we do today.
At any rate, one of the compelling things about Orca is that it’s running on
renewable geothermal energy that was basically stranded in Iceland. Because
Iceland already runs almost entirely on renewables, the clean energy that Orca
uses couldn’t easily have been used to displace dirty energy instead.
(Arguably, one could have instead built a facility to produce green hydrogen to
ship to Europe or North America, but again, the point of Orca isn’t to reduce
emissions today but to help build a technology that will be useful in the
future. Besides, there’s plenty of renewable energy to go around in Iceland, so
why not both? Build a hydrogen plant there, too!)
Another compelling thing about Orca is that it sits atop the perfect geology
for mineralizing CO2. Orca can inject its captured CO2 directly into basalt,
where it will turn to stone in a matter of years.
The combination of abundant, stranded clean energy and good geology for
sequestration makes Iceland an ideal place to build early direct air capture
facilities—which raises an interesting question: where else in the world can we
find that combination?
source: https://research.american.edu/carbonremoval/2021/09/10/why-orca-matters-the-point-of-climeworks-new-direct-air-capture-facility-in-iceland/
///////
Google® Better!
Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian,
Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean
Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he
performed for Aramco.
Follow Jean’s blog at: http://desulf.blogspot.com/
for continuing tips on effective online research
Email Jean at letters@jeansteinhardt.com
with questions on research, training, or anything else
Visit Jean’s Web site at http://www.jeansteinhardtconsulting.com/
to see examples of the services we can provide
