How can direct air capture of CO2 contribute to the global climate goals and the Paris Agreement?

DAC is a major tool of the strategy of predatory delay. Backed by oil companies and Bill Gates, it promises to deliver a magical atmospheric vacuum cleaner to absolve us from our sins of fossil fuel combustion. It will never make an impact on climate change, but it will enable o&g companies to continue business as usual, by pretending they are doing something on GHG management. The only process engineers that I know who support DAC are the ones receiving money for their DAC business. No serious process engineer that I know thinks DAC is economically feasible.

🔋 How Direct Air Capture (DAC) Works 🌍 1. Air Intake: DAC starts by drawing in atmospheric air using a fan within the collector. 🌬️ 2. CO2 Capture: The air passes through a filter or chemicals that selectively react with and capture CO2. 🌐🧪 3. Sorbent Interaction: Captured air moves over solid materials or liquids, called sorbents, where CO2 is absorbed or adsorbed. 🌡️ 4. CO2 Release: The process then requires heating to release the captured CO2 from the sorbent, allowing for the collection of concentrated CO2. 🔥 5. Storage/Utilization: Finally, the captured CO2 is either stored underground or utilized in various products or industrial processes. 🏭💨

Direct Air Capture (DAC) can significantly advance global climate goals and the Paris Agreement: Scalable Carbon Removal: DAC enables the large-scale extraction of CO2 from ambient air, a critical tool for achieving net-zero emissions by directly reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. Integration with Storage and Utilization: Captured CO2 can be sequestered in geological formations or utilized in industrial applications, such as synthetic fuels and chemicals, driving a circular carbon economy. Adaptive Technology: With innovations in liquid and solid capture systems, DAC technologies are evolving rapidly, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs, thus making them more accessible for widespread deployment.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) of CO2, while innovative, faces significant challenges in the climate change sector. It's currently not financially feasible on a large scale, with high operational costs. The environmental impact of the chemicals used in DAC also raises concerns. This technology, still in development, is far from being a viable, large-scale solution. Its focus risks diverting attention and resources from more immediate and effective climate actions. While DAC has potential for future contributions to global climate goals, it's important to view it as a long-term strategy, not a replacement for direct, immediate climate change mitigation efforts.

Direct air capture (DAC) offers benefits including carbon removal, climate change mitigation, flexibility in deployment, carbon neutrality, negative emissions, technological innovation, complementing renewable energy, carbon utilization, and providing a long-term solution for addressing climate change.

🔋 Benefits of Direct Air Capture (DAC) 🌍 1. Flexible Deployment: DAC can be located anywhere with low-carbon energy and CO2 storage options. 🏞️⚡ 2. Land Efficiency: It's over 100 times more land efficient than reforestation, making it a scalable carbon removal solution. 🌳🌐 3. Scalability: With no practical limits to the ability to scale up the technology 🌀💧 4. Energy and Air Quality: DAC has the potential to manage energy consumption, improve air quality, and enhance energy efficiency in indoor spaces. 🏠💡 5. Geological Storage: Paired with geological storage, DAC offers scalability, permanence, and verifiability of carbon sequestration. 🌏🔒

DAC is most effective when it is paired to intermittent renewables that have a high capacity factor, and the cost-effectiveness of integrated renewable energy varies greatly by geography. In principle DAC can be deployed offshore, paired to offshore wind and solar, and not require land use at all, while not requiring any interconnect, representing very large cost and time savings for such deployments.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) presents unique benefits for advancing global climate goals and the Paris Agreement: Land and Resource Independence: DAC bypasses limitations of land use, water scarcity, and biomass constraints, offering a versatile solution not tied to specific resource availability. Global Accessibility: Capable of capturing CO2 from any location, DAC eliminates the need for extensive transportation networks, simplifying integration into existing infrastructure. High-Purity Output: DAC produces CO2 of exceptional purity, facilitating direct utilization or storage without additional processing, enhancing its efficiency and economic viability.

🔋 Challenges of Direct Air Capture (DAC) 🌍 1. High Cost: DAC technology is currently energy-intensive, making CO2 capture from the atmosphere expensive, costing between $250 and $600 per ton. 💸⚡ 2. Technological Complexity: Advancing DAC technologies face numerous barriers due to their complexity, such as components for sorbents, modularity, grid integration, etc.🛠️🔬 3. Capital and Energy Costs: Low concentrations of CO2 in the air lead to high capital and running energy costs. 🏗️🔋 4. Decarbonizing Electricity: To avoid problem-shifting and make DAC more sustainable, decarbonizing the electricity sector is essential. 🌿🔌

Direct air capture consumes an astounding amount of energy per ton of CO2 recovered at a time when the world needs all the energy it can access. This process requires that 99.9996 parts of atmosphere must be rejected to capture 0.0004 parts of CO2. This is an incredibly inefficient and costly approach. Unless DAC is vastly improved, it is a huge waste of money and energy and is potentially the worst form of greenwashing/virtue signaling.

The challenges of DAC are structural, not something you're going to fix with innovation. It has all the normal problems associated with CO2 storage, which industrial CCS projects have contended with poorly and at great expense (Shell Quest, with its public data, and ideal disposal reservoirs less than 60 km away, costs $165/tonne). But DAC also contends with the extreme energetic problem of trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at 0.0004 bar partial pressure, relative to Quest's much easier task of removing CO2 from syngas at 3.8 bar partial pressure. DAC is fundamentally broken as a technology. But it works brilliantly as a predatory delay strategy.

Direct Air Capture (DAC) holds transformative potential for climate goals and the Paris Agreement, yet faces notable challenges: Cost Barriers: Current DAC costs range from $100 to $600 per ton of CO2, driven by the low concentration of CO2 in ambient air, which necessitates substantial energy and material inputs. Policy Gaps: The absence of supportive policies, such as carbon pricing or subsidies, limits the financial viability and market integration of DAC technologies. Energy Intensity: High energy demands for DAC operations add to its expense, necessitating advancements in energy efficiency and renewable energy integration. Your dedication to sustainability is crucial in overcoming these hurdles and advancing DAC technologies.

While fast-growing, the DACS industry faces these challenges: 1. Technology maturity and scale: As with any heavy industry, the current DAC operations and projects will continue to drive the learning curve on all aspect: chemistry, design, processes, materials, operations etc. Maturing from demo to Gigaton scale DAC plants will still take years, to create a tangible climate change impact. 2. Cost: In real-world demo plants, cost tends to be 800-1000$/ton due to unknown variables. As the DAC industry matures and scales to Gigaton scale, price would need to come down to 100-200$/ton range to accelerate adoption. This necessitates regulatory framework, financial incentives, cost-effective green energy and storage options, economies of scale.

In addition to CO2, gas families such as NOx - N2O specifically - have an incredibly potent impact. Although smaller in tonnage, the far greater warming effect than CO2 makes it imperative to address. N2O is ~285x more potent than CO2 and so is 7% of total CO2e. Impossible to hit net zero by 2050 without addressing N2O.

The opportunities with DAC are limitless. We know that to return our planet to pre-industrial temperature, we must not only reduce current emissions, but also remove the already emitted carbon from the atmosphere. DAC technology need to be scalable, easily deployable, measurable, and effective. The opportunities for emerging technology in this space spans from biological conversions of removed CO2 to biomass, to electrochemical conversions of CO2 to hydrocarbons and oxygenates. DAC is bringing credibility to the carbon offset market, and with demand comes opportunity for advancement, profitability, and growth.

DAC is most effective when paired to the production of usable materials. Biological options exist for effective conversion into alcohols and CO2 can be electrochemically converted into carbon monoxide and ethylene in particular. It isn't well-appreciated, but ethylene is triple the size of the ammonia market. Between these products and hydrogen, effectively all plastics and industrial chemicals can be produced in a carbon negative manner and this represents a tipping point for DAC to become more cost-effective, potentially profit-generating when these technologies are paired to renewables.

DAC presents a multitude of promising business opportunities. Participating in carbon markets offers revenue through the sale of carbon offsets, while the captured CO2 can be utilized in diverse industries, fostering innovation and new market niches. Companies at the forefront of DAC technology development position themselves as leaders, attracting investments and partnerships. Energy innovation in DAC projects, especially those incorporating renewable sources, is pivotal for success in the transition to sustainable practices. In essence, the rise of DAC offers a dynamic landscape for businesses to contribute to carbon removal efforts while capitalizing on diverse and evolving market opportunities.

Some of the largest efforts to accelerate DAC are coming from Oil & Gas companies (Shell, ConocoPhillips) and airlines (Air Canada, United). These two trends merge with the rise of sustainable aviation fuels where start-ups (Ineratec, OxCCU, and Twelve) use DAC to create eJet, a form of synthetic jet fuel that is 80+% less emission intensive than kerosene. eJet is still very expensive and currently supported with heavy production subsidies or mandatory blending quotas (usually <50%) with traditional jet fuel.

Examples of ways to get involved in DAC, based on my experience in carbon markets: * Companies to follow: DAC companies such as Climeworks and RepAir, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) startups such as Carbonfuture, CUR8, Isometric and Supercritical. * VCs focusing on climate and DAC in particular: Extantia, Deep Science Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Earthshot Ventures and Counteract. * Communities to network with: Voyagers, Climate Connect, Climate Connection, Women in Carbon, Climate Collective. * Podcasts to listen to: The Carbon Removal Show, My Climate Journey, Climate Tech Cocktails. *Newsletters: Carbon Business Council, CTVC, Quantum Commodity Intelligence, Carbon Pulse *Job engines: ClimateU, Work on Climate, Climate17, Jobs in carbon

The global warming may be sequestrated via using renewable energy integrated with energy storage as well as installing CO2 capture for traditional factories (that have CO2 emissions). But there are a lot of CO2 mixed with other air ingredients that are mandatory to be separated and extracted from atmosphere to reduce the undesirable environmental impacts. The solution might be DAC. But the rate of DAC to separate CO2 is too low, hence other methods of CO2 removal are highly demanded.

In the simple equation of net zero (evening our bad things with good things) there’s no way we can get there without carbon removal. As we’re already seeing, offsets based on avoided emissions are dodgy, and are really just an accounting method that still adds CO2. If we truly want to lower total CO2 - and isn’t that the whole goal of our climate efforts? - then we have to get serious about carbon removal. For those worried about exorbitant costs let’s remember that all our climate solutions are too expensive until the government underwrites them (Teslas anyone?). If we truly want to effect CO2 directly then we need to commit to carbon removal, front and center.

Today's announcement on the EU's new certified carbon removal registry is a game-changer for business leaders in the climate tech space. It not only underscores a significant legislative move towards cutting-edge technologies like Direct Air Capture but also sets a clear path for scaling these solutions. This initiative signals a ripe opportunity for innovation, investment, and leadership in the transition to net-zero emissions, offering a clear legislative framework that will detail certification processes and market integration. As we await further details, this step is poised to further define the path on how businesses contribute to and benefit from carbon removal technologies.