The Ecosystem of Carbon Capture

By Melissa Jenkins

One of the biggest sustainability initiatives for the next several decades, carbon capture is creating unique partnerships across several sectors

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology attracting a lot of attention and debate. Large investments and initiatives are underway from politicians and industry alike, to capture carbon dioxide emissions and tackle climate change.

Based on the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the risks in relying on land sinks such as forests and soils alone to take up the excess carbon, it is believed that carbon capture and storage will be a powerful tool for making the climate safer and even rectifying historical climate injustices. Carbon also can be stored permanently if injected underground, where geologists believe it can remain in place for centuries. Carbon capture can achieve 14 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed by 2050 and is viewed as the only practical way to achieve deep decarbonization in the industrial sector.

Almost two dozen commercial-scale carbon capture projects are operating around the world, with 22 more in development. There are two types of carbon capture: point-source capture, which extracts carbon from smokestacks during energy production or an industrial process; and direct air capture — removing carbon directly from the atmosphere.

We looked at a few companies on the front lines of carbon capture. In our study, we realized they are not only engaging in this technology, but also using highly innovative partnerships to create climate-based sustainable products in the process. Some of them may surprise you — but their efforts are setting the stage for another major front in our battle to combat climate change and make our world more environmentally sound and sustainable.

Bigelow Tea

For 75 years, Bigelow Tea has focused on environmentally sound policies. Bigelow has reduced the emissions associated with transporting their products by efficiently planning their shipping loads and locating their facilities closer to their customers. Since 2008, they have reduced shipping miles by 50,000 miles a year. They also installed 880 solar panels at their Connecticut headquarters, which contribute to protecting the earth by supporting renewable energy and reducing emissions.

Bigelow’s manufacturing process centers around conserving energy and water, waste reduction efforts, and land preservation and protection efforts. To reduce its carbon footprint and create a more resilient energy grid, the specialty tea market leader announced an initiative with FermataEnergy, a vehicle-to-grid technology company, that will use the power from an electric vehicle (Nissan Leaf) to supply electricity to their Louisville, KY plant during times of peak energy use. Fermata Energy’s vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, paired with a bidirectional enabled vehicle (Nissan Leaf) and proprietary software, has successfully reduced building costs by returning energy back to the grid during peak periods. This will save Bigelow Tea money while reducing its carbon footprint.

Bigelow is always learning new ways to advance its company’s mission and lead by example. Leveraging the power from electric vehicles to reduce building costs is the zerocarbon way to produce electricity to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. Bigelow Tea announced recently that they were now using V2X technology to offset their energy use and reduce their carbon footprint.

Fermata Energy

Given the shift to net-zero emissions, Fermata Energy has accelerated its plans to bring its V2G technology to the market with proven results of saving money while making the electric grid more resilient. The City of Boulder, Colorado announced that it is working with Fermata Energy to test the ability to use an electric

vehicle for dispatching power directly to the building or structure to which it is connected; in this case, the North Boulder Recreation Center. Fermata also announced a new partnership with the Roanoke Electric Cooperative to take steps to make their grid more resilient by piloting Fermata’s V2X system. Green Mountain Power became the first utility to use stored energy from an electric vehicle’s battery to help reduce peak demand on the grid.

LanzaTech

LanzaTech, a carbon-capture company, turns industrial waste into jet fuel. LanzaTech is turning our global carbon crisis into a feedstock opportunity, with the potential to displace 30 percent of crude oil use and reduce global CO2 emissions by 10 percent. By recycling carbon from industrial off-gases, syngas generated from any biomass resource (e.g. municipal solid waste (MSW), organic industrial waste, agricultural waste), and reformed biogas, they can reduce emissions and make new products for a circular carbon economy.

With LanzaTech’s carbon recycling technology, think of retrofitting a brewery onto an emission source like a steel mill or a landfill site. However, instead of using sugars and yeast to make beer, raw pollution is converted to fuels and chemicals by bacterial breakdown. Virgin Airways was the first airline to use this recycled waste in flight. Virgin just announced a deal with L’oreal to create cosmetics plastic packaging from captured and recycled carbon emissions, which it plans to fully commercialize by 2025.

General Electric

GE announced in October a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by pursuing an exit from the new-build coal power market for its facilities and operational greenhouse emissions by 2030. Further, they set a goal that net emissions of carbon dioxide must fall by 45 percent by 2030 and reach “net zero” by 2050.

GE’s Steam Power business will work with current customers on existing obligations while pursuing this exit. This can involve divestitures, site closings, job impacts and appropriate considerations for publicly held subsidiaries. GE will continue to focus on and invest in its core renewable energy and power generation businesses, working to make electricity more affordable, reliable, accessible, and sustainable. Meantime, GE Steam Power will continue to deliver turbine islands for the nuclear market and service existing nuclear and coal power plants.

Amazon.com

For the past few years, Amazon.com has been a busy and robust leader in environmental, sustainability and climate change initiatives.

In 2019, Amazon and Global Optimism cofounded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to net-zero carbon by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement. In addition, Amazon is on a path to powering all operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. From reducing water usage in data centers to using sustainable aviation fuel, they are committed to building a sustainable business for their customers, communities, and the world. They have ordered more than 100,000 fully-electric delivery vehicles (you might have seen the TV commercials), and plan to invest $100 million in reforestation projects around the world.

Amazon also launched the Climate Pledge Fund, a $2 billion fund to back visionary companies whose products and services will facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy.

In April 2020, Amazon committed $10 million to conserve, restore, and support sustainable forestry, wildlife and nature-based solutions across the Appalachian Mountains—funding two innovative projects in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy. The also announced the first Right Now Climate Fund project outside of the U.S. Amazon will commit over $4 million towards The Nature Conservancy’s Urban Greening program in Germany, which uses nature-based solutions to help cities become more climatechange resilient. The program starts in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district of Berlin and uses a science-based, municipality-wide, and stakeholder-based approach to urban greening to ensure that projects are complementing existing local efforts. Two additional German cities will be chosen, in which the initial learnings from Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf will be applied.

By the end of the five-year project, The Nature Conservancy also aims to create and share a guide to urban greening that other German and European municipalities can use. Friendly to help make it easy for customers to discover and shop for more sustainable products. Customers will now see the Climate Pledge Friendly label when searching for more than 25,000 products online, to signify that the products have one or more of 19 different sustainability certifications, such as reducing the carbon footprint of shipments to customers. Climate Pledge Friendly selection can be found across grocery, household, fashion, beauty, and personal electronics products, as well as items from a range of other categories.

As part of the Climate Pledge Friendly initiative, they are also announcing Compact by Design, a new sustainability certification to identify products that, while not always very different, have a more efficient design. With the removal of excess air and water, products require less packaging and become more efficient to ship. At scale, these small differences in product size and weight lead to significant carbon emission reductions.

Amazon also will be the first consumer electronics company to commit to address the use phase of our devices through renewable energy investments. They are building their first wind and solar farms in the U.S. to produce clean energy equivalent to the electricity used by every customer’s Amazon devices. Their eventual goal? To account for the energy consumption of all Amazon devices. They are also striving to make their devices more energy efficient, including the addition of Low Power Mode feature on all new wall-powered Echo and Fire TV devices, to reduce lifetime energy consumption by using less power during periods of inactivity. They’ll also be rolling out free over-the-air updates to bring Low Power Mode to additional devices already in customers’ homes.

Going forward, Amazon is working to source 100 percent of the wood fiber in device packaging from responsibly managed forests or recycled sources. They are also reducing waste, eliminating over 9 million plastic bags from their device packaging in 2020 alone. The packaging for the Echo and Fire TV devices today is made from more than 98 percent wood fiber-based materials from responsibly managed forests or recycled sources. This packaging program alone will eliminate more than 900,000 tons of materials from landfills. ■