Progress On Direct Air Capture Of Carbon Dioxide: "Climeworks Captures Double the CO2 for Half the Energy"

Still a long way to go before this approach is anywhere near cost-effective. And even then there are activists and pressure groups that don't want any human-related CO₂ releases, from agriculture and hydrocarbons and maybe even exhaled breath. (not kidding: see voluntary human extinction movement, Club of Rome [not to one billion as some have claimed but much lower than current levels], Paul Ehrlich etc) and they look upon DAC as enabling continuing releases. All that being said, here's the intro to a 2021 post "Carbon Sucking in Iceland":

This story is an opportunity for me to throw an editorial wrapper around a short announcement.

The plant is small and the technology is expensive but this really is the wave of the future.

As to size, a few years ago Sweden's Lund University calculated that Bill Gates' 59 trips on his jets (I think he has four now, two big Airbus' and two big Gulfstreams) produced 1600 tonnes of CO2.

Here's the headline story and then a bit more editorializing. From The Chemical Engineer, September 21:

Climeworks starts up industrial-scale direct air capture facility

CLIMEWORKS has started operations at the world’s largest direct air capture and CO2 storage facility, in Iceland.

The construction of the facility, known as Orca, began in May 2020. It is constructed with advanced modular technology of container-sized units and has a capture capacity of 4,000 t/y of CO2. It is situated next to ON Power’s Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant so that it runs entirely on renewable electricity. The captured CO2 will be stored underground by partner Carbfix, which mixes the CO2 with water for rapid underground mineralisation in a process that takes less than two years....

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From IEEE Spectrum, June 5:

The world’s first megaton carbon capture site will join a growing field

The geoengineering debate—which, in part, concerns pulling back carbon that’s already in the atmosphere—has been hindered to date by the lack of scalable tech. The Swiss startup Climeworks is hoping to help turn the tide.

The Zurich-based company has just unveiled the latest generation of its direct-air capture (DAC) technology, which it says will help remove millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by the end of the decade.

Climeworks has, in fact, already made a name for itself by building a series of large-scale carbon capture plants in Iceland. The company switched on a facility dubbed Mammoth last month, which is now the world’s largest DAC plant and will ultimately be able to pull 36,000 tonnes of CO₂ out of the air annually.

But speaking at the opening of the Climework’s annual Carbon Removal Summit in Zurich yesterday, co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher noted that according to projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world will probably need to be removing between 6 billion and 16 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year by 2050.

“If we look at our scale-up curves—our growth rates that we need between now and 2050, to achieve those goals—those rates are very similar to the ones that solar PV and wind have shown over decades as well.” —Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks

While that remains a distant goal, the company has taken a modest step in that direction with the announcement of the third generation of its DAC technology. The new system features a revamped cubelike design and a reengineered sorbent (the material used to absorb CO₂), which Wurzbacher said can capture twice as much carbon dioxide as the previous design. The new system also uses half the energy, while the materials are projected to last three times as long—all of which cuts overall costs by 50 percent....

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The 2021 rant continued:

....So this plant, currently the world's largest would remove the equivalent of one guy's travel emissions for 2 1/2 years..

Big whoop. However...

Carbon capture and storage is favored at some of the highest political levels and will be used by companies that are so big they see the expense required to get to negative emissions as a competitive advantage against smaller competitors who will be crushed by the costs. This is the same approach multinationals take toward regulation: bring it on and bury the little guys.

There are voices in the control-freak wing of the green coalition that are already howling that this technology will allow "business-as-usual" to continue which is a threat to their wannabe power over people and economies. They will probably be bought off.

One last note: the approach that Carbfix uses, solidifying the CO2 is absolutely the way to go versus pumping CO2 gas into disused caverns or oil and gas fields or under the sea.

Although more expensive initially, it eliminates the threat of carbon dioxide belches that could be, not just counterproductive to the storage effort, but physically dangerous to people in the vicinity. See Cameroon's Lake Nyos for an example.

If interested in a few more mentions of Climeworks see also April 2021's
Carbon Capture & Storage: The Current State of Play

December 2023's:
"Here Come the Unicorns of Clean Energy"

It's Redwood that we are interested in. The other three, Climeworks, Solugen and Sila Nanotechnologies may or may not make it but Redwood seems to be a possible fortune builder....

And a couple weeks ago:

Oxford Uni.: "The outlook for CO2 removal"

It is still far too expensive to be more than just demonstration projects, now and for another decade minimum.

And as with all such conversations the promoters never, ever, speak of degrees of warming avoided. If interested see after the jump....