Carbon Capture Technology Explained | Seachange

(dramatic music) - All of human activities at the moment, collectively each year, put about 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere. Carbon removal now has to be thought of as part of Plan A, for responding to climate change. - Here in British Columbia, we collect CO2 directly out of the atmosphere.

- For some people, it seems like something that's way down the road, but the technology's ready for us to use now. - Climate change is a nasty thing. And it's going to take all of human ingenuity to get us through this moment.

What we need to look at is if direct air capture is going to live up to its promise. (dramatic music) It's much easier to keep a unit of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than it is to try and retrieve it once it's already there. So, when it comes to climate change, the best way to respond is to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In addition, scientists are suggesting the need to remove about 10 billion tons per year. That does have the ring of science fiction to it. Broadly speaking, there are two different categories of carbon removal strategies.

One is a biological category, planting trees, changing farm practices. Or you can, at the other end of the spectrum, imagine more technological or chemical based strategies. Something like direct air capture, which would have been off the table a few decades ago, as kind of a wacky scheme by mad scientists, now needs real consideration.

But the economics and storage questions, about where the carbon dioxide can actually be held over the long term, these are open questions. (dramatic music) - So, we're a carbon capture company. We have a pilot facility, which captures a ton of CO2 per day.

We think we're different because we're focused on very large scale. - There's different ways of attacking carbon capture. What we do is direct air capture.

So, we're targeting the low concentration CO2 that's in the atmosphere. (dramatic music) - Fundamentally, our process has four steps. Each step concentrates the CO2 more.

- First step is a big fan, it pulls air through. It's reacts with a chemical and captures 80% of the CO2 out of the air. - We take that CO2-rich solution, we precipitate out solid calcium carbonate pellets.

- We heat those very small pellets up, and out comes the CO2. You can then do two things with it. You can choose to permanently bury it somewhere safely.

Now you've reduced the overall level of CO2, and that's carbon negative, or you can make products out of it. One of the things we do here in Squamish is, we combine our CO2 with hydrogen, and we make a fuel that's essentially carbon neutral. You put it in your car, you drive your car, your car burns the CO2, and it goes back into the atmosphere again.

And that's what carbon neutral means. You're not adding, overall, to the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. - If you think about a closed loop system, around and around we go.

In time though, there won't be enough to address climate change, because the carbon dioxide has to be put into storage to actually remove the carbon dioxide from the atmospheric system. Direct air capture, at the moment, is a reasonably expensive proposition. - Industries feel that its scaled costs come down all the time.

That's why, as a company, we focus on large scale and why we're also happy to license that technology to anybody in the world who wants to build these plants. We just announced our first large scale plant in Texas. We're actually expecting that would be a one megaton atmospheric CO2 plant.

That's the equivalent of 14 million trees in one plant. Our cost point is a little less than $200 per ton for that first plant, but we expect the cost to come down a lot. If carbon dioxide can be captured for $150 or less per ton, then it becomes almost a commercially viable enterprise, because that carbon dioxide could be put to a use that would enable the facility to pay for itself.

But to scale it up, would mean building lots and lots of these facilities and spreading them around the world. - You could eliminate the world's emissions with 40 thousand of our plants. Sounds like a big number, but it's actually less than there are power plants, for example, in the world.

(dramatic music) - Lots of grand promises have been made about carbon removal, and one of the jobs that has to be done now, is to sort through the reality from the promise. The goal is to use large scale carbon removal as a piece of humanity's response. But if society kind of gets the notion that there's a "Get out of jail free" card, then that might have perverse impacts on climate response today.

So the trick now, is to work out what forms of carbon removal, at what scales, are going to make the best contribution, and the most socially just contribution. - We think of ourselves as a really important tool that we have to have in the fight against climate change. I don't think it should be the only solution, but we need everything we can bring to the table.

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