On a global basis, roughly 9,000 tons of CO2 are removed from the air now. It uses a chemical to extract CO2 out of the air, and then injects the separated CO2 into depleted oil and gas fields. This refers to the volume of CO2 removed from the air and buried, if we focus on direct-air-capture.ĭaniel Egger, chief commercial officer at Climeworks talked of plans for scaling up by increasing capacity by ten times every three years… an astonishing rate of growth.Īnother method of direct-air-capture is being built by Carbon Engineering in Canada for Occidental Petroleum’s OXY use in West Texas. The second question of scale is volume of CO2. They will set up joint ventures with industry, academia, and local communities to encourage pursuit of the goal. The US government have weighed in by announcing recently a goal of $100/ton to remove and store CO2. Such high present costs will require a carbon-pricing mechanism to promote their application. Costs are similar for the Carbon Engineering method below. But observers predict this could fall to about $200/ton in the 2030s. The Iceland process is expensive at $500 - $600/ton of CO2 captured. The CO2 is collected in large boxes where it accumulates on a filter, then is injected into underground zones of basalt where it combines chemically with the rock formations within a couple of years. It’s a miniscule amount compared with what GHG the world emits: over 30 Gt/year. Called Orca, the plant is the largest “direct-air-capture” plant in the world and uses giant fans to collect 4,000 tons/year of CO2. It’s harder to do since the concentration of GHG in the air is much smaller than GHG in power plant chimneys or in steel or cement plants.īut it can be done, and a company called Climeworks in Iceland is showing the way. Rather than burying GHG that are generated by burning fossil fuels, the GHG can be vacuumed out of the air. This is hard to grasp.Īn alternative source of GHG is the atmosphere itself. The numbers are staggering, but to make it happen a CCS industry would, by 2050, end up in size as big as the present-day oil and gas industry. This would represent a 20% growth in CCS year-over-year. Rystad Energy predicts it will need to be 400 Mt/year by 2030, an increase by 10 times, and 8,000 Mt/year by 2050 - a total increase by 200 times. Globally, CCS in 2020 stored only a puny 40 Mt/year (Mega-ton or millions of tons per year). So, CCS is expensive, and many think it will require carbon-pricing to implement on a wide scale – certainly if the GHG are just stored and not used to improve oil production. It was a technical success but when the price of oil fell below $50/barrel, the project was shelved. Petra Nova was a CCS demonstration out of Houston, supported by the federal government, where CO2 was captured from a coal-fired power plant smokestack and injected into an old oil field to boost the oil production. Since OGCI reported that CCS of 5 -10 Gt/year will be needed by 2050, this converts to a supply that would last 1300 – 2600 years. After evaluating 715 CCS sites in 18 countries, the total capacity found was 13,000 Gt. On a worldwide basis, the numbers for CCS are large. US now emits about 6 Giga-tons/year (6 Gt/year or 6 billion tons/year) of GHG and this entire amount could be stored for 23 years. The US has plenty of storage capacity just in old oil and gas fields. What Balch meant by “scaled up” is that there are enough geological sites around the world to store the GHG volumes. Can CCS be scaled up to accept the enormous GHG volumes needed, and the associated costs? How large will the CCS industry become and will it be manageable?įrom New Mexico Tech, Robert Balch stated that CCS is the only method that could be scaled up to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement. The practical questions are related to scaling up to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. These layers can be old oil and gas fields or saline aquifers, or volcanic rocks such as basalt. The GHG are then injected into layers deep underground where they are trapped and eventually merge chemically with the rock. GHG removal from the air will be required as well as reducing GHG emissions, to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
GHG, including its dominant component CO2, can be captured in different ways, using absorbing chemicals in smokestacks of power plants, or bottling up biproducts of steel or cement-making, or extracting directly from the air. Carbon capture and storage is viewed as an escape hatch. So in the US, oil and gas thinking has turned to alternatives. And many millions of people across the world have been lifted into the middle class by cheap and reliable oil and gas energy. In the US, pressure to cut back production of oil and gas seems like a slap on the wrist because of the tremendous success of the shale revolution of the past 20 years. Benefits range from cheap gas to energy-independence for the first time since 1947.
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