Better Than Fusion: Carbon Capture

Although far from perfect, modules that sequester CO2 could help limit climate change

By Ed McKinley

Nuclear fusion won’t produce usable power until at least the end of this century, long after unchecked climate change could wreak untold damage, according to L.J. Reinders, a European researcher, attorney and author. So, instead of chasing the pipe dream of fusion, scientists should concentrate on perfecting carbon capture technology that would scrub greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and deposit them deep underground, says Reinders, who’s writing a book on the subject.

“We should put much more money into these [capture] technologies,” he maintains. “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air at the moment is 450 parts per million. It’s almost twice what it was before the Industrial Revolution.”

He applauds the United States for setting aside $10 billion for carbon capture research in the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Joe Bidensigned into law on Nov. 15.

But not everybody’s happy about the prospect of capturing the offending gases. Some environmentalists oppose carbon capture because it could prolong the use of the fossil fuels they’re trying to banish.

Yet, if society strips carbon from the air efficiently and pumps it into old oil and gas fields, there’s no need to reject coal, oil, gasoline and natural gas, Reinders observes.

AN EARLY-STAGE TECHNOLOGY

Whatever one thinks of carbon capture, the science behind it hasn’t come of age. Removing a ton of carbon dioxide from the air costs about $500, five times the value of a ton of carbon traded on the European Emissions Trading System.

Still, observers expect the cost to come down as the industry matures and its methods become more refined. Switching from today’s chemical capture of carbon to a mechanical process would bring major improvement, Reinders says.

“To capture the carbon is easy—that goes automatically,” he notes. “But to take the carbon out again, once it has been absorbed in this chemical stuff, that costs a lot of energy.”

The problems don’t end with the high cost or the need for energy. “I have a feeling that chemistry will always be too slow,” Reinders laments, “so that it will be very hard to scale.”

Just the same, commercialization has already begun.

Companies engaged in the pursuit include Climeworks, a Swiss concern that operates facilities in Iceland; Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company with an extraction device in the United States; and Global Thermostats, an American firm.

All three of these privately held companies have intriguing backstories.

Climeworks is helping Microsoft reduce its carbon emissions to zero by 2030. The companies also intend to cleanse the

atmosphere of as much carbon as Microsoft has produced in its entire history, a feat they hope to accomplish by 2050.

The Microsoft name also surfaces in discussions about Carbon Engineering, which counts former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates among its financial backers.

Global Thermostats’ co-founder and CEO, Graciela Chichilnisky, an Argentine-American mathematician, wrote the book Reversing Climate Change: How Carbon Removals Can Resolve Climate Change and Fix the Economy.

L.J. Reinders

UPSIDE AND DOWN

So what could come of the efforts of those three companies, combined with the labors of everyone else engaging in carbon capture? Reinders envisions a day when governments and businesses position carbon-sucking modules alongside the water treatment plants and solar panel arrays that already dot the landscape.

But challenges stand in the way of that proliferation of anticarbon installations, chief among them the sheer volume of carbon dioxide fouling the air. Science has yet to discover a good way to reuse carbon removed from the atmosphere.

Humankind needs to scrape thousands of gigatons of gases from the sky, far more than industry needs as an additive to concrete or as a bubble-maker for fizzy drinks.

Engineers could press carbon into service in the creation of biofuels, possibly developing a newly viable source of energy. But the carbon would only find its way right back into the atmosphere through combustion, Reinders notes.

On what some would consider a positive note, Norway is pumping natural gas out of a porous aquifer 800 meters beneath the bottom of the North Sea, removing carbon from that natural gas and pumping the carbon back down.

Storage or reuse aside, economic factors could eventually help carbon capture push aside other approaches to going green. A project in Norway seems like an especially good candidate for cancellation, according to Reinders.

The country plans to spend $307 billion to insulate nearly every house there, thus reducing the carbon produced by burning natural gas by 60 million tons annually. At $100 per ton, that comes to only $6 billion a year, resulting in a staggeringly long payback period.

But humanity will find a way to deal with carbon or else face the consequences. Unless most nations deliver on their promises to combat climate change, the planet may become too hot by 2050 to yield enough food, according to a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued last month.

Perhaps carbon capture can help, and that’s precisely where Reinders would like scientists to shift their attention.

“We must do this to save the world—if the world is indeed in danger,” Reinders says with a laugh that sounds a bit forced.

1930s

That’s when small-scale carbon capture began in submarines. It later moved to space stations.

$307 billion

The cost of insulating nearly every house in Norway to reduce natural gas consumption.

$100

The value of a ton of carbon, according to the European Emissions Trading System.

34.8

Worldwide annual CO2 emissions for 2020 in billions of metric tons.

Clearing the Air of What’s Harmful

A process called “carbon capture” grabs carbon dioxide at a source like a coal-burning power plant and prevents it from entering the atmosphere.

Here’s how it works: Emissions are pumped through a solution that absorbs carbon dioxide but allows other gases, such as nitrogen, to pass through. The solvent containing the CO2 then flows into a boiler so heat can separate the carbon from the solution. The emissions also pass through membranes that act as filters to sort gases according to the size of their molecules.

Once the carbon dioxide is separated from the rest of the emissions, it’s stored underground or used in manufacturing.

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