Direct Air capture of CO2

Wow, all I can say is wow.
A Canadian firm has developed a scalable way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, that is also economically viable.

Someday, the gasoline you buy might come from carbon dioxide pulled out of the sky rather than from oil pumped out of the ground. By removing emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into fresh fuels, engineers have demonstrated a scalable and cost-effective way to make deep cuts in the carbon footprint of transportation with minimal disruption to existing vehicles.

"The carbon dioxide generated via direct air capture can be combined with sequestration for carbon removal, or it can enable the production of carbon-neutral hydrocarbons, which is a way to take low-cost carbon-free power sources like solar or wind and channel them into fuels that can be used to decarbonize the transportation sector," says lead author David Keith, founder and chief scientist of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian CO2-capture and clean fuels enterprise, and a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard University.

Direct air capture technology works almost exactly like it sounds. Giant fans draw ambient air into contact with an aqueous solution that picks out and traps carbon dioxide. Through heating and a handful of familiar chemical reactions, that same carbon dioxide is re-extracted and ready for further use -- as a carbon source for making valuable chemicals like fuels, or for storage via a sequestration strategy of choice. It's not just theory -- Carbon Engineering's facility in British Columbia is already achieving both CO2 capture and fuel generation.

How to suck carbon dioxide from the sky for fuels and more

This is actually a game changing methodology, I hate that saying, but it is apropriate. Portable transpotation fuels is one of the places that renewables have not been able to offset C emmsions and this is a fantastic idea.
Again real science is following the lead of sci fi.

a reply to: punkinworks10


They made their pilot plant in 2015. It uses repurposed industrial equipment (IIRC, the reactor is an old dairy homogenizer!). The plant was put through it's paces to show the process works. They were dumping the purified CO2 back into the environment! They wanted to study how effective it would be to react the CO2 with hydrogen (splitting it from water) to create biofuel (a little more chemistry and you can get methane and formic acid. Both useful industrial chemicals). It looks like they actually did it as they are making 1 barrel a day.

This announcement is they did the science and got a peer reviewed article published. It could even profitable for them!

At full scale they would be making 2,000 barrels a day.



ETA: We posted at nearly the same time!

From the article you linked

The idea of direct air capture is hardly new, but the successful implementation of a scalable and cost-effective working pilot plant is. After conducting a full process analysis and crunching the numbers, Keith and his colleagues claim that realizing direct air capture on an impactful scale will cost roughly $94-$232 per ton of carbon dioxide captured, which is on the low end of estimates that have ranged up to $1,000 per ton in theoretical analyses.

So they claim to be able to extract carbon dioxide at a cost of $94-$232 per ton

In this article from sept 2017 the same subject of CO2 capture and conversion is being discussed through the use of membranes. In the article it is mentioned that their estimate of the cost of one ton of CO2 is at $30. And they put strong emphasis on the fact that the 'profit' of this proces relies heavily on the availability of cheap renewable energy.

a reply to: Jubei42

The cost of CO2, which is sensitive to parameters such as capture expenses, transportation, and, in some countries, taxation, serves as another crucial input parameter for economical CO2RR.

(Source: your link)

They are assuming a source of concentrated CO2 already existing to get at their $30/ton figure.

OP is the whole cycle of capture, processing, and production of fuel.

Either way, how ever much it costs, it needed to have started years ago. Decades ago!



a reply to: Jubei42

I think your study is important. Here is a brilliant idea.

From my Zero Emission Power Plants Coming Next Year, thread, there is a clean feedstock for your membrane company! They get to make power with the supercritical CO2 generator. Instead of just pumping it underground, sell it, run it through your membrane and convert it to CO. From there you can jump in any direction. Take the "waste water" (it so clean the power company can just dump it!), split off the hydrogen, wham! You got your fuel.

$30/ton + cost of CO2 + cost of reducing CO2 to CO (if any, iirc, the membrane just does it) + cost of splitting water = who knows!

Get them all going so we are not pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, while sucking CO2 out, and making biofuels to reduce dependence on oil.

Win-win-win situation!

a reply to: punkinworks10

I admire the perseverance. CO2 sequestration for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has been tinkered with for a bit... Feasibility of EOR from CO2 seqestration

I’m not sure how the ROI from the “re-extracted” CO2 used “as a carbon source for making valuable chemicals like fuels” could ever be feasible, but I am sure sequestering it for EOR is a great idea and feasible — assumption being the CO2 capture technology has legit life-cycle validation.

I couldn’t quite digest “carbon-neutral hydrocarbons” but the rest is worth keeping an eye on!

originally posted by: Cravens
I couldn’t quite digest “carbon-neutral hydrocarbons” but the rest is worth keeping an eye on!

I'm not sure what you mean you couldn't digest it. If you take carbon out of the air, and use solar or wind based energy to convert that into hydrocarbons, they are carbon neutral because it's not adding more carbon to the environment than was already there.

The benefit would be that wind and solar have storage problems and hydro carbons would be a way of storing their output in a usable fuel. Battery technology is not very good for storage, though all the storage methods have efficiency problems. How profitable it would be (or not) depends on a lot of things which need to be tested, but one thing seems certain, the sources of hydrocarbons we use seem to be finite and as supplies dwindle, scarcity should result in rising prices, so even if making hydrocarbons the way suggested in the OP isn't profitable now, it may become profitable in the future as the prices of hydrocarbons rise.

Quite the interesting discovery. I am impressed.

I took a look at the Joule article, but i did not see what I really wanted to know: how well will this work with low-voltage DC power? If it works well enough under that condition, I can see a solar plant powering a large unit in the middle of a desert somewhere (maybe the Sahara?). That would be an efficient use of all resources and assist us in our reliance on hydrocarbons without disrupting transportation over a lot of doom porn. Godspeed in developing this to commercial levels.

Well done, OP! Good find!

TheRedneck

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: Cravens
I couldn’t quite digest “carbon-neutral hydrocarbons” but the rest is worth keeping an eye on!

I'm not sure what you mean you couldn't digest it. If you take carbon out of the air, and use solar or wind based energy to convert that into hydrocarbons, they are carbon neutral because it's not adding more carbon to the environment than was already there.

The benefit would be that wind and solar have storage problems and hydro carbons would be a way of storing their output in a usable fuel. Battery technology is not very good for storage, though all the storage methods have efficiency problems. How profitable it would be (or not) depends on a lot of things which need to be tested, but one thing seems certain, the sources of hydrocarbons we use seem to be finite and as supplies dwindle, scarcity should result in rising prices, so even if making hydrocarbons the way suggested in the OP isn't profitable now, it may become profitable in the future as the prices of hydrocarbons rise.

You sure can type a whole lot and say nothing. Bravo!

Context is your friend...ahh, probably not, you’re one of those ‘know-it-all’s. Where is your EOR link? Where is your emissions life-cycle analysis?? Nowhere. Instead, we got a bunch of, “I’m super smart on the interwebs and can just regurgitate the OP/source material and make super cool assertions...cause rote is my friend”.

Carbon-neutral hydrocarbon is, as-of-yet, an oxymoron. Period. Maybe in the future, but not yet. The friggin OP doesn’t even declare its “carbon-neutral”, at present, and ALL of that assumes a marketplace for carbon, where carbon is a priced commodity. Hey, smarty-pants (I don’t believe that at all, but you do), where is this priced carbon? Where can I go buy a CO2 equivalent ton of methane (hint: there are more than one GHGs and they’re measured in CO2 equivalence)?? Nowhere.

Read the links or learn context or don’t even bother. You’re barking up the wrong tree.

ETA: Going out on a limb, but I would wager you think hydrocarbons are destined to only go up in price in the future? Please take the bait. Like, pretty please say, ‘peak oil’, or fail to understand Hotelling’s extraction cost/discount rate...please. Serve me up. I, now, encourage you to bark up this tree.

a reply to: punkinworks10

There already is away to do this but weyhauser does not want you to know this if you plant Trees and water them they will grow tall and after time you can make all of cool things out of their wood.. no but seriously weyhauser is by law supposed to replant the forest they clear cut but in my state last twenty years they get around that by taking the land and putting in subdivisions and giving them to cities miles away. Trees are the most efficient way to attract vast amounts of carbon known to us.

a reply to: proteus33

Trees are the most efficient way to attract vast amounts of carbon known to us.

They do a real good job. But they have a way of putting a lot of that carbon back into the atmosphere. They drop their leaves and needles. Dead leaves and needles decay, releasing CO2. There are fires. Fires release CO2.

I have nothing against trees. I like trees. They are good at turning water into oxygen and they are beautiful. But they aren't the answer to the burning of fossil fuels.

More related stuff

A new study published June 25 in Nature Climate Change evaluates the potential for recently described methods that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through an "electrogeochemical" process that also generates hydrogen gas for use as fuel and creates by-products that can help counteract ocean acidification.

he process uses electricity from a renewable energy source for electrolysis of saline water to generate hydrogen and oxygen, coupled with reactions involving globally abundant minerals to produce a solution that strongly absorbs and retains carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Rau and other researchers have developed several related methods, all of which involve electrochemistry, saline water, and carbonate or silicate minerals.

"It not only reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide, it also adds alkalinity to the ocean, so it's a two-pronged benefit," Rau said. "The process simply converts carbon dioxide into a dissolved mineral bicarbonate, which is already abundant in the ocean and helps counter acidification."

Here's some about trees Phage

The negative emissions approach that has received the most attention so far is known as "biomass energy plus carbon capture and storage" (BECCS). This involves growing trees or other bioenergy crops (which absorb carbon dioxide as they grow), burning the biomass as fuel for power plants, capturing the emissions, and burying the concentrated carbon dioxide underground.

"BECCS is expensive and energetically costly. We think this electrochemical process of hydrogen generation provides a more efficient and higher capacity way of generating energy with negative emissions," Rau said.

.........

He and his coauthors estimated that electrogeochemical methods could, on average, increase energy generation and carbon removal by more than 50 times relative to BECCS, at equivalent or lower cost.

'Electrogeochemistry' captures carbon, produces fuel, offsets ocean acidification

a reply to: punkinworks10


Scotland needs that machine ASAP!

Heineken said its John Smith's Extra Smooth and Amstel brands had been hit, while Coca-Cola Great Britain said production had been interrupted until fresh CO2 supplies arrived.

"We are currently responding to an industry-wide issue that is impacting the supply of CO2 in the UK. Our focus is on limiting the effect this may have on the availability of our products," Coca-Cola said.

BBC.com - CO2 shortage: Tesco-owned Booker restricts beer sales.

Beer sale! They cut beer sales due to lack of CO2! I know if Daryl dies we all riot. But there will also be problems if you cut back the amount of beer I can drink or buy!!

I would switch to cask conditioned beers. I will donate CO2. I will give them my dry ice stash. Just don't shut off the beer!!