Direct Air Capture (DAC) since 12 Jan 2023

7 locations in Japan and abroad selected for underground CO2 capture and storage...Government aims for early commercialization through intensive support [The Yomiuri Shimbun, 13 Jun 2023]

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has selected seven sites in Japan and abroad for the commercialization of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), which is considered a trump card in the fight against global warming, with the aim of establishing a business model quickly through intensive government support. The government will soon make an announcement and begin providing business support from fiscal 2023.

The selected sites are off the coast of Kyushu, which is planned by the Eneos Group and Power Development Corporation, and the coast of Hokkaido, which is under consideration by Idemitsu Kosan and others, as well as a total of five domestic sites in Tohoku, Niigata, and the Tokyo metropolitan area, and two overseas sites off Malaysia and in the waters of Oceania.

All of these projects are led by Japanese companies and aim to collect CO2 from thermal power plants and oil refineries and transport it by ship or pipeline for storage.

CCS has been in practical use overseas since the 1990s, but in Japan it has been limited to demonstration experiments because the initial cost is huge, several tens of billions of yen, and profitability is difficult to predict.

In April, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) publicly solicited "advanced projects" for support in order to hasten the commercialization of CCS in Japan. A committee of academic experts narrowed down the list to seven locations after carefully examining CO2 capture and transport methods, storage areas, and other factors.

The government has set a goal of storing 6 to 12 million tons of CO2 underground annually by the year 2008. If the seven sites are commercialized, it is expected that approximately 13 million tons of CO2, equivalent to slightly more than 1% of Japan's annual CO2 emissions, will be stored by FY30.

The companies participating in each project will sign an outsourcing contract with the Japan Energy, Metals and Minerals Corporation (JOGMEC), which is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and in fiscal 2011 will proceed with the design of CO2 capture facilities and surveys to select the storage areas.

According to METI's calculations, in order to achieve "carbon neutrality," which means virtually zero CO2 emissions by the year 50, the amount of CO2 stored by CCS should be 120 to 240 million tons per year.

CCS = Technology that captures carbon dioxide and traps it on the seabed or underground, effectively reducing emissions. CCS is an acronym for Carbon Dioxide, Capture, and Storage.

Cheaper method to capture carbon dioxide could shake up industry [Chemistry World, 23 May 2023]

BY BÁRBARA PINHO23 MAY 2023

Scientists have created a guanidinium sulfate salt that can capture and store carbon dioxide at ambient pressures and temperatures, with little energy input. The strategy could change how industry captures, transports and stores the gas.
An international team of scientists charged an aqueous Gua2SO4 solution with carbon dioxide and saw a single-crystalline guanidinium sulfate-based clathrate salt form at ambient conditions. Because the solution encased carbon dioxide without forming strong bonds with the gas, researchers were able to easily reverse the process to release the gas again.
Cafer Yavuz, a researcher from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and one of the study authors, says that releasing trapped carbon dioxide has never been so easy. ‘All you have to do is just take this [resulting precipitate], shovel it into water, the water dissolves the salt and CO2 comes up,’ he explains. ‘It’s almost like the tablets we use to drink vitamin C. You put it in the water and bubbles [appear]. It’s CO2 coming up.’
After the carbon dioxide was released, the team found that the resulting Gua2SO4 solution was immediately ready for another cycle of carbon dioxide uptake.
Currently, the most common method of removing carbon dioxide from a gas stream involves capturing the molecule via chemisorption, usually using an amine sorbent. While this strategy is highly selective for carbon dioxide, the energy demand is high. Gua2SO4captures the gas equally well without expending nearly as much energy.
‘It’s unique, because it has perfect selectivity like in chemisorption. But no chemical bonds are formed between CO2 and the host, like in physisorption. It’s weird. It’s in between, it’s a quasi-chemisorption quasi-physisorption state,’ adds Yavuz.
But while the salt looks promising for the carbon capture industry, Yavuz foresees other applications. Because the resulting powder is stable at ambient conditions, the clathrate could be useful to carry and store CO2, as well as capture it from industrial sources. This isn’t necessarily a problem that needs to be solved because there’s already infrastructure to transport and store CO2, but Yavuz still believes the clathrate could improve the entire carbon capture chain and cut down on costly infrastructure. ‘The best thing this powder [could be] used for is for the mobility of CO2, to carry [it] in a truck or for storing it,’ Yavuz adds.
Alexander Forse, who works on new materials for carbon capture at the University of Cambridge and was not involved in the study, says the work is impressive, and applying it to real-world scenarios will be an interesting next step. ‘This is an exciting new way to think about capturing carbon dioxide from industrial emissions like cement plants,’ he says. ‘I’m curious to see how energy-efficient this technology can be, and whether the kinetics are rapid enough to enable a practical carbon capture system.’

References
Z Xiang et al, Cell Rep. Phys. Sci., 2023, 4, 101383 (DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2023.101383)

Georgia Tech College of Engineering Carbon capture: how does CO2 removal work? [Phys.org, 19 Jan 2023]

by Marlowe HOOD

With global temperatures still on the rise, even the most sceptical of scientists agree that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is crucial to meet the Paris Agreement goal of capping global warming below two degrees Celsius.

A new global assessment published Thursday says limiting global warming at liveable levels will be impossible without massively scaling up CDR.

But even the most ardent promoters of carbon removal technology insist that slashing emissions remains the primary objective, even if the continued failure to do so has pushed CDR sharply higher on the climate agenda.

Methods range from conventional techniques like restoring or expanding CO2-absorbing forests and wetlands, to more novel technologies such as direct air capture.

Here AFP explains the essentials on CO2 removal:

What is CO2 removal?
There are basically two ways to extract CO2 from thin air.

One is to boost nature's capacity to absorb and stockpile carbon. Healing degraded forests, restoring mangroves, industrial-scale tree planting, boosting carbon uptake in rocks or the ocean—all fall under the hotly debated category of "nature-based solutions".

The second way—called direct air capture—uses chemical processes to strip out CO2, then recycles it for industrial use or locks it away in porous rock formations, unused coal beds or saline aquifers.

A variation known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, combines elements from both approaches.

Wood pellets or other biomass is converted into biofuels or burned to drive turbines that generate electricity. The CO2emitted is roughly cancelled out by the CO2 absorbed during plant growth.

But when carbon dioxide in the power plant's exhaust is syphoned off and stored underground, the process becomes a net-negative technology.

Do we really need it?
Yes, for a couple of reasons.

Even if the world begins drawing down carbon pollution by three, four or five percent each year—and that is a significant "if"—some sectors like cement and steel production, long-haul aviation and agriculture are expected to maintain significant emission levels for decades.

The first-ever State of Carbon Dioxide report concluded that CDR must extract between 450 billion and 1.1 trillion tonnes of CO2 over the remainder of the 21st century—the equivalent of 10 to 30 times annual CO2 emissions today.

And there is another reason.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes it alarmingly clear that the 1.5C threshold will be breached in the coming decades no matter how aggressively greenhouse gases are drawn down.

CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, which means that the only way to bring Earth's average surface temperature back under the wire by 2100 is to suck some of it out of the air.

What's hot, what's not?
BECCS was pencilled into IPCC climate models more than a decade ago as the theoretically cheapest form of negative emissions, but has barely developed since.

A peer-reviewed proposal in 2019 to draw down excess CO2 by planting a trillion trees sparked huge excitement in the media and among gas and oil companies that have made afforestation offsets a central to their efforts to align with Paris treaty goals.

But the idea was sharply criticised by experts, who pointed out that it would require converting twice the area of India into mono-culture tree farms.

The inside of a Climeworks CO2-removal factory in Iceland.

"I don't see a BECCS boom," said Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and an expert on CDR.

Also, planting trees to soak up CO2 is fine—until the forests burn down in climate-enhanced wildfires.

Among all the carbon dioxide removal methods, direct air capture is among the least developed but the most talked about.

How fast can we scale up?
Direct air capture (DAC) is a large-scale industrial process that requires huge amounts of energy to run.

Existing technology is also a long way from making a dent in the problem.

The amount, for example, of CO2 potentially extracted from what will be the world's largest direct air capture plant (36,000 tonnes)—being built in Iceland by Swiss company Climeworks—is equivalent to 30 seconds' worth of current global emissions (about 40 billion tonnes).

But the trajectory of earlier technologies such as solar panels suggests that scaling the industry up to remove billions of tonnes per year is not out of reach.

"It's at the upper end of what we've seen before," University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Gregory Nemet. "It's a huge challenge, but it's not unprecedented."

Climeworks announced last week the world's first certified CO2removal and storage on behalf of paying clients, including Microsoft and software service company Stripe.

Georgia Tech College of Engineering Cutting Emissions Isn't Enough. We Need to Scrub Carbon Directly from the Air [Carbon Brief, 19 Jan 2023]

By Joshua Stewart

New Direct Air Capture Center will leverage Georgia Tech’s leadership in a burgeoning field.
In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed: they would reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to limit warming of the earth’s atmosphere to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

The Paris Agreement actually aims for 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avoid potential catastrophic changes to our climate. But it’s become increasingly clear to climate scientists and policymakers that just reducing emissions is not enough.

“We now know that we probably should have stopped putting massive amounts of CO2 in the air 10, 20, 30 years ago to prevent the climate from getting above 2 degrees C,” said Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech. “Now we've waited so long to reduce our emissions that we need to develop technologies that are referred to as negative emissions technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.”

Jones was one of a handful of scientists who co-authored a landmark National Academies report in 2018 that outlined a variety of approaches to negative emissions. Agricultural practices and forest management are options — essentially using nature’s ability to grab carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away in plants and soil. But Jones said we’ll need quicker and more direct approaches.

“We could plant billions of trees to do this, but there's not enough available land. And the trees don't grow fast enough for us to do this quickly enough to slow global warming at the rate required,” said Jones, John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). “That's where direct air capture comes in: It's a chemical engineering way of designing a process that takes CO2 out of the air.”

Direct air capture is a bit like a massive household air purifier — but for the globe. Systems would pull air across specially designed filter materials with molecules that grab CO2. When the filters are saturated, they’re cleaned, and the carbon dioxide is pumped underground for storage in the very places we’ve extracted oil and natural gas over the decades.

It’s a technology proposed only in 1999, with companies launched in 2008, and is now quickly becoming a reality, according to another Georgia Tech chemical engineer, Matthew Realff.

“It's definitely a technology that is moving past the lab; it's in the pilot scale/deployment phase as an initial technology. By 2030, we should see deployment of what I would call the first commercial-scale facilities in different places in the United States — systems that can remove a million tons of CO2 a year,” said Realff, professor and David Wang Sr. Fellow in ChBE. He pointed to a $3.5 billion federal investment to develop four regional direct air capture hubs that was part of federal infrastructure legislation passed in 2021.

“If you're going to make a difference, to be honest, it really needs to be at about 1,000 times that scale, a gigaton scale of direct air capture,” Realff continued. “Some people would argue that we might need even more than that two to three decades from now, depending on how our emissions reduction efforts go.”

Realff and Jones are working at different ends of the direct air capture spectrum — the systems and molecular levels — to develop the technology. In between is ChBE professor Ryan Lively, who works on materials, devices, and processes. Now they’re recruiting more of their Georgia Tech colleagues to the cause with a newly established Direct Air Capture Center (DirACC) within Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute.

The center is an effort to seed interesting ideas across engineering, sciences, policy, and more and leverage Georgia Tech’s longstanding leadership in the area. Lively said DirACC will fill a need nationally to act as a convener of researchers, industry, funders, and other stakeholders.

It is one of a few centers in the nation focused on direct air capture and the first such effort to encompass the complete supply chain of capture and sequestration of CO2 from the air.
Leveraging Longstanding Leadership

“As an institution, Georgia Tech has essentially been involved since the direct air capture field’s infancy,” Jones said.

Jones has led collaborations since 2008 with one of the original startup companies in the field, Global Thermostat. Lively leads an Energy Frontier Research Center that received a rare third round of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2022 and that’s working on how materials for clean-energy technology evolve and degrade. One of the focus areas is direct air capture.

Alongside the 2018 National Academies report, Congress introduced a federal tax credit for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Lawmakers more than tripled those incentives to $180 per ton in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Jones said that got people’s attention.

“Since 2018, we've had billions of dollars of legislation for direct air capture technology research and development. That trend is why we are launching the Direct Air Capture Center now: We really want to communicate to the outside that we are a hub in this space.”

Tim Lieuwen, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute, said the new center will extend beyond developing the science and technology: “It’s exciting to see Georgia Tech also engaging more broadly in the societal-level considerations associated with deployment of direct air capture, including community engagement, workforce development, and ensuring a just transition for historically marginalized populations.”

Just Like in Real Estate, Location Matters
Jones works at the first step of the carbon-capture process: the molecules that link with CO2 to pull it out of the air. One of the areas he’s become most interested in is customizing different materials for different locations and climates.

“A molecule or a material that we studied five years ago maybe failed operating at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That would not work in Atlanta or in Florida, but maybe it works really well if we go to 50 degrees F or 20 degrees F, and we can deploy it in Montana,” Jones said. “We're starting to think more about whether we might have advantaged materials or advantaged processes in particular locations.”

Chris Jones, left, and Ryan Lively hold two kinds of filters for direct air capture systems. The test rig behind them uses the larger filter Jones is holding.

In a future where direct air capture is widely deployed — say, 20 years from now — Jones said there could be a dozen different solutions customized to different locations around the globe.

He said Georgia Tech has an opportunity to get ahead of that curve and design the right solutions for the right environments.

Realff’s work on systems and process modeling plugs in here. His team works to extrapolate the economics and the lifecycle of materials and lab-scale direct air capture modules to real-world performance. If Jones and Lively have data from experiments at different temperatures and humidities, for example, Realff might model how those materials would work over the course of a year.

“That's the frontier of where we're working right now, understanding how environmental variability impacts the performance of the direct air capture system,” Realff said.

Practicality Matters, Too
Another frontier is engineering carbon capture materials that will last long enough to be economically practical, Lively said.

When Jones creates molecules that grab carbon dioxide out of the air, Lively incorporates them into fibers that can be bundled together or even woven into fabric. Those fibers seem to be durable, but the question is whether the delicate chemistry of the molecules repeatedly capturing and then releasing the CO2 can hold up. The DOE-funded center Lively leads is working in part to better understand how these materials evolve and degrade.

“One of the key cost drivers is, how long can you make these things last?” Lively said. “We know what the answer should be: If you can get them to where they largely maintain their performance for a year to a year and a half, then you're in good shape. We're just not sure if we can get there yet.”

Creating fibers for use in a canister, filter, or other device has become a fairly mature technology, Lively said, so the team is working now to move some of their materials into the commercial market. He’s also experimenting with 3D printing approaches that can create more complex structures with the materials — though at a cost.

“The nice part about 3D printing is you can get really complex structures that you can't get with fibers. But the manufacturing process is fundamentally slower,” Lively said. “The complexity of the device is going to have to make up for the slower rate at which you can make it, because the slower rate will mean higher cost.”

Air Capture and Renewables as a One-Two Punch
One of the newer projects Realff, Jones, and Lively are working on would pair carbon capture systems with wind farms.

They’re exploring systems that would be passive: Instead of relying on some mechanism to blow or draw air across the filters that extract CO2, natural wind would move air across the filters in these systems. It turns out, a wind speed of around 6 meters per second is enough velocity, Realff said — and it’s also just enough to turn a wind turbine and generate power, although higher velocities are preferred.

“If you integrate passive capture with wind farms, now your turbines are helping mix the air.

You could think about having alternating banks of direct air capture and then turbines,” Realff said. “The turbines generate the power to enable the direct air capture system to work; you don't have to connect either one of them to the grid.”

Realff said the system the researchers are developing is relatively simple, using the wind electricity to heat up a resistor and release the carbon dioxide and regenerate the filters so they can remove more CO2. Lively called this “all-electric” approach a second-generation system. Current direct air capture technology uses steam or hot water, for example, to heat the filters and release the captured CO2.

“If you think about it, I want to put a passive contactor where I have a lot of wind — which is also where I want to build a wind farm. There’s a natural coupling of those two,” Realff said.

When A Double-Negative is a Positive
Another emerging idea would pair direct air capture systems with natural gas combined-cycle power plants. These plants use gas to turn a turbine and generate electricity. The waste heat from that process is then used to create steam that turns another turbine and generates more power.

Realff, Jones, and Lively have partnered with ChBE’s Fani Boukouvala and Joe Scott on a project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to instead use that steam to do conventional post-combustion carbon capture and to power a direct air capture system.
“With the combination of those two systems, we can get natural gas combined-cycle plants that can operate and be net negative in their carbon dioxide,” Realff said.

In fact, he said, the reduction in carbon from such a system would be enough to wipe out the carbon emissions of another power plant operating at full capacity.

“For power companies, it gives you a way to get to essentially zero carbon by modifying, say, roughly half your fleet of natural gas combined-cycle plants.”

No Time to Waste
Those kinds of advances will be critical to making direct air capture economical enough to have impact, the researchers said.

Jones called it a generational challenge akin the NASA’s failure-is-not-an-option mantra during the 1960s moon missions.

“The level of funding and interest is pretty enormous, but the challenge, unfortunately, might be even more enormous than the interest,” Lively said. “The longer we wait, the bigger the challenge.”

Solar energy technology was promising but too expensive to be practical when it debuted in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Now, it’s cheap and common. The difference with direct air capture is the timeline: We can’t afford to wait 40 years to scale.

Jones pointed to solar energy as a useful analogy for getting to a future with widespread removal of atmospheric carbon. Initially, the technology was promising but too expensive to be practical when it debuted in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Now, it’s cheap and common. The difference with direct air capture is the timeline: We can’t afford to wait 40 years to scale.

“Today, direct air capture from the initial startup companies costs between, say, $600 and $1,000 a ton. The target, in order to have it be widespread deployed all over the world, is about $100 a ton,” he said. “We can't have a five- or 10-year technology testing period; it's got to be a year or 18 months so that we can build it, operate it, learn from it, revise it, build it, operate it, learn from it. We need to do that five or 10 times to get the cost down.”

A possible carbon-capture milestone in the fight against climate change [CBS News, 12 Jan 2023]

BY IRINA IVANOVA

In what could be a major milestone in the fight against climate change, a startup said Thursday it has started successfully pulling carbon dioxide from the air and burying it underground.

Climeworks announced that it has sequestered CO2 from the atmosphere using its facility in Iceland and stored the substance underground. The action was independently verified by risk management company DNV, and the resulting carbon credits were sold to Microsoft, Shopify and Stripe, the startup's first corporate customers.

Companies purchase carbon credits to offset their own carbon emissions. Microsoft in 2020 made a bold promise to erase its entire carbon footprint since the company's 1975 founding.

Founded in 2009, Climeworks has already successfully demonstrated that its direct-air capture technology works. However, Thursday's milestone marks the first time a company has pulled a significant amount of carbon from the air using a third-party verification process, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"We hope we are growing from a teenager to a grown-up in this industry," Christoph Gebald, co-chief executive of Climeworks, told the newspaper.

Climeworks' direct-air capture (DAC) facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland, in 2021.CLIMEWORKS
Climeworks declined to say how much carbon has been removed — a key metric in assessing how important carbon-capture will be in the fight to slow global warming.

Once its carbon-capture plant in Iceland is at full scale, which it has not yet reached, it will remove 4,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide, a company spokesperson said. That's roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by 800 cars driving for a year.

There is a growing consensus among scientists and policymakers that to prevent the worst effects of global warming, people will need to not only reduce greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero but also remove carbon that has already been emitted.

In addition to low-tech ways of achieving this, such as planting trees and restoring wetlands, the high-tech promise of removing carbon directly from the atmosphere has captured the public imagination and billions of investor dollars.

Congress funneled $12 billion into carbon-capture efforts in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and expanded funding for carbon storage in last year's Inflation Reduction Act.

Private investors, too, are champing at the bit. Last year saw a surge in venture capital dedicated to post-emissions carbon capture, with deals in the second quarter of 2022 hitting a record, according to PitchBook.

Climeworks founders Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher pose in front of the company's carbon-capture facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland in 2021.

CLIMEWORKS
Climeworks has also committed to creating a carbon-capture hub in the Gulf Coast of the U.S., a facility it says will remove 1 million tons of CO2 annually by the end of the decade.

"There is no solution to get to net-zero without carbon capture technology," Collin O'Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said last year, reflecting a common view among environmental scientists.

But despite the hype, some scientists harbor considerable doubt about whether direct-air capture technology can ever advance to the point of economic feasibility. Attempts to clean up U.S. coal plants using carbon capture have largely been an expensive failure, according to a government report, and direct-air capture projects often use tremendous amounts of power — negating their environmental benefits.

A recent study also found that carbon-capture technology would put added stress on the world's water supply, an already scarce resource in many parts of the world.