Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Theory On Carbonsinks
Theory On Carbonsinks
dioxide up into the atmosphere carbon removal now has to be thought of as part of plan a for
responding to climate change here in British Columbia we collect co2 directly out of the atmosphere
so some people it seems like something that's way down the road but the technology is ready for us
to use now climate change is a nasty thing and it's going to take all of human ingenuity to get us
through this moment what we need to look at is if direct air capture is going to live up to its promise
it's much easier to keep a unit of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and it is to try and retrieve it
once it's already there so when it comes to climate change the best way to respond is to stop putting
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in addition scientists are suggesting the need to remove
about 10 billion tons per year that does have the ring of science fiction to them broadly speaking
there are two different categories of carbon removal strategies one is a biological category planting
trees changing farm practices or you can at the other end of the spectrum and imagine more
technological or chemical based strategies something like direct air capture which would have been
off the table a few decades ago as kind of a wacky scheme by mad scientists now needs real
consideration but the economics and storage questions about where the carbon dioxide can actually
be held over the long term these are open questions
[Music]
[Music]
fundamentally our process has four steps
each step concentrates the co2 more first step is a big fan it pulls air through it reacts with chemical
and captures 80 percent of the co2 out of the air we take that co2 rich solution repressive potato
solid calcium carbonate pellets we heat those very small pellets up and out comes the co2 you can
then do two things with it you can choose to permanently bury it somewhere safely now you've
reduced the overall level of co2 and that's carbon negative or you can make products out of it and
one of the things we do here in Squamish is we combine our co2 with hydrogen and we make a fuel
that's essentially carbon neutral you put it in your car you drive your car the car burns the co2 and it
goes back into the atmosphere again and
Texas we're actually expecting that will be a one Megaton atmospheric co2 implant that's the
equivalent of 40 million trees in one plant our cost point is a little bit less than $200 per ton for that
first plant but we expect the cost to come down a lot if carbon dioxide can be captured for 150
dollars or less per ton then it becomes almost a commercially viable enterprise because that carbon
dioxide could be put to a use that would enable the facility to pay for itself but to scale it up would
mean building lots and lots of these facilities and spreading them around the world you could
eliminate the world's emissions with 40,000 of our plants sounds like a big number but it's actually
less than there are power