CAN BUILDING INTEGRATED CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES BE PART OF A SOLUTION TO MEET OUR 1.5° C CLIMATE TARGET?

The building industry is in a race – global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions need to peak before 2025 and be reduced by 43% by the end of this decade to stay under the 1.5C° threshold (IPCC, 2022). We need to rethink the way we design and build to tackle our carbon emissions in a holistic way – we need to focus on whole life carbon emissions (both operational and embodied). What if our buildings could become carbon absorbers? There are natural ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, like forests and oceans. But we also have technological means of carbon removal, including direct-air carbon capture (DAC). DAC is a chemical or mechanical process which isolates the carbon dioxide from ambient air. Innovators are already developing carbon removal technologies that are integrated into building systems. What if we could piggyback on existing building HVAC systems to capture carbon?

To explore this question, we partnered with a Helsinki-based start-up Soletair Power, along with the UK architect team at Gensler to test one of these emergent technologies in a UK context applied to commercial buildings. We were interested in the following question s:

• Does it save carbon over its lifetime (over the 20 years) when looking at the CO2 captured, the embodied carbon and its operational carbon impact (the unit requires electricity to function)? Where is the technology viable?

• At what cost (over the 20 years) ? This technology is not cheap at the moment but is likely to be reduced by 50% in the next 5 years.

• How does it do compare against other renewable options such as PV, standard Direct Air Capture (DAC), and wind energy?