![]() Photograph by Jim Richardson, Nat Geo Image Collection John Reganold of Washington State University stands by a deep road cut in eastern Washington’s Palouse region, examining the exposed layers of ancient soil. However, keeping global warming to less than 2 degrees C (the international target to avoid the most dangerous impacts) will likely require “negative emissions”-some way of taking lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it permanently, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every year the world burns enough fossil fuels to add close to 40 billion tonnes of CO2. That was far too much to be useful in sucking large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Until now, the costs of CO2 removal, or what’s known as “direct air capture,” were believed to be at least $600 per ton. “Our paper shows the costs and engineering for a full-scale plant that could capture one million tons of CO2 a year,” Keith said. The company used existing industrial processes to scale up and reduce costs. The design and engineering cost of the pilot project that’s been running since 2015 in Squamish, British Columbia, was published today in the peer-reviewed energy journal Joule. Getting it right also meant keeping the costs below $100 for each ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. Keith said capturing CO2 from the air and making fuel didn’t require scientific breakthroughs per se as much as $30 million, eight years of engineering, and a “million little details” to get the process right. “This isn’t going to save the world from the impacts of climate change, but it’s going to be a big step on the path to a low-carbon economy,” said David Keith, a Harvard Professor of Applied Physics and founder of Carbon Engineering. This is an engineering breakthrough on two fronts: A potentially cost-effective way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere to fight climate change and a potentially cost-competitive way to make gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel that doesn’t add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere. Imagine driving up to your local gas station and being able to choose between regular, premium, or carbon-free gasoline.Ĭarbon Engineering, a Canadian company, is already making a liquid fuel by sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere and combining it with hydrogen from water.
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