Squamish company doubling the carbon-removal capacity of its commercial 'Direct Air Capture' design
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:27:03 +0000
A Squamish clean-energy company has expanded the capacity of its commercial carbon-scrubbing plant design so it can remove one million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year.
The move is in response to corporations feeling the pressure from shareholders, governments, scientists, the buying public and even schoolchildren to become carbon neutral, Steve Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, said.
“We’re essentially providing a service, much like water treatment, sanitation or waste disposal,” he said. “But instead, we’re providing an air-treatment service that removes the excess CO2 in the atmosphere, which the scientists tell us is putting our planet at risk.
“What we provide is a mechanism for a company to remove as much of its carbon footprint as it wants.”
The beauty of Carbon Engineering’s trademarked Direct Air Capture (DAC), Oldham said, is it can be located anywhere.
Steve Oldham is the CEO of Carbon Engineering, a company in Squamish that removes CO2 from the atmosphere on an industrial scale and permanently buries it or converts it into synthetic fuel.
“By capturing CO2 directly out of the air, DAC can eliminate any emissions regardless of where and when they occurred,” he said.
“Importantly, the exact amount of carbon captured and permanently stored is measured, making this a verifiable and quantifiable solution for carbon-dioxide removal, or ‘negative emissions’, that has the potential to be scaled up to capture and store huge quantities of atmospheric CO2.”
Many sectors of the economy — agriculture, airlines, construction for example — find it difficult to decarbonize, Oldham said.
“Many are finding that while some of their emissions can be directly cut or reduced from within their activities, others are far more challenging,” he said. “For these hard-to-eliminate emissions, the ability to remove an equivalent quantity of CO2 directly from the atmosphere is a powerful new tool to include in their sustainability tool kits.”
The expansion is projected to begin in 2021 with the plant becoming operational within two years. The recovered CO2 is eventually stored permanently underground.
“Collectively as a society, if we want to get to a carbon-neutral world, there will be a cost,” Oldham said. “So far we have not paid the cost of the impact, just the cost of getting it out of the ground.”
Carbon Engineering was founded in 2009 to commercialize the capture and storage of carbon-dioxide on an industrial scale or synthesizing it to make clean transportation fuels.
The Squamish pilot project of CO2 removal from the atmosphere began in 2015 and fuel-conversion began in 2017, using atmospheric CO2, hydrogen split from water and clean electricity to make gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
The technology can be built to produce millions of gallons of synthetic fuel a year, according to the company, while removing one million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere is the equivalent of the annual emissions of 250,000 cars.
The company lists among its private investors Bill Gates (Microsoft), Murray Edwards (Canadian Natural Resources Limited), Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, LLC (a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corporation), Chevron Technology Ventures (the venture capital arm of Chevron Corporation) and BHP.