Carbon Capture (and Storage) (CCS)

Notes

Where are we at with Carbon Capture using Example of Climeworks Orca (deployed 2021)

• Orca plant opened ~ Sep 2021
• 4000 tonnes a year at max capacity
• $600-800 / tonne to sequester CO2 and selling packages at around$1,200 a tonne
  • 2019 nytimes article cites numbers of $500-600 a tonne for their hand-built plant, so prices don't seem to have come down. More below.
• Interestingly it sold out at those levels - Demand for the carbon offset provided by Orca has been so high that credits have almost sold out for its entire 12-year lifespan.

The estimated 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide Orca can extract from the atmosphere this year pales in comparison to the 33 billion tonnes of the gas the IEA estimates will be emitted worldwide this year. Furthermore, the operating costs involved with Orca are extremely high: it costs between $600-800 to sequester one tonne of carbon dioxide; Climeworks sells carbon offset packages for about$1,200 per tonne. [https://interclimate.org/orca-the-future-of-carbon-capture/]

2019 study reckoned that at scale you could get to $100-250 a tonne:

But he is confident the company will eventually reach the target cost levels for direct air capture identified in a 2018 analysis in Joule, led by Carbon Engineering founder and Harvard professor David Keith. It put the range at between $94 and$232 per ton once the technology reaches commercial scale. [https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/24/1027083/what-it-will-take-to-achieve-affordable-carbon-removal/]

Does seem that progress is (way) behind their hopes from June 2017 as cited in https://www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-capture-1-global-co2-emissions-2025/ e.g. still at $600 / tonne plus nowhere close to 1% of global C02 emissions (~370 million tonnes a year):

Climeworks says that its direct air capture (DAC) process – a form of negative emissions often considered too expensive to be taken seriously – costs $600 per tonne of CO2 today. This is partly covered by selling the CO2 to a nearby fruit and vegetable grower for use in its greenhouse.

Climeworks hopes to get this down to $100/tCO2 by 2025 or 2030. It aims to be capturing 1% of global CO2 emissions each year by 2025.

2019 NYTimes article on climeworks

“Basically, we have a road map — $600, down to$400, down to $300 and$200 a ton,” Wurzbacher said. “This is over the next five years. Down to $200 we know quite well what we’re doing.” And beyond$200, Wurzbacher suggested, things get murkier. To move below that price would depend on “new developments” in technology or manufacturing.

Skepticism:

Their view is not always shared by outside observers. M.I.T.’s Howard Herzog, for instance, an engineer who has spent years looking at the potential for these machines, told me that he thinks the costs will remain between $600 and$1,000 per metric ton. Some of Herzog’s reasons for skepticism are highly technical and relate to the physics of separating gases. Some are more easily grasped. He points out that because direct-air-capture machines have to move tremendous amounts of air through a filter or solution to glean a ton of CO₂ — the gas, for all its global impact, makes up only about 0.04 percent of our atmosphere — the process necessitates large expenditures for energy and big equipment.

Scepticism about the scaling:

A huge expansion would also involve huge complications. “You start to get into really big challenges when you get to these big, large scales,” Glen Peters, a research director at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, told me. “If you can do one carbon-capture facility, where Carbon Engineering or Climeworks can build a big plant, great. You need to do that 5,000 times. And to capture a million tons of CO₂ with direct air capture, you need a small power plant just to run that facility. So if you’re going to build one direct-air-capture facility every day for the next 30 years to get to some of these scenarios, then in addition, we have to build a new mini power plant every day as well.”

Or Pacala (who advocates for this):

“The idea of bringing direct air capture up to 10 billion tons by the middle or later part of the century is such a herculean task it would require an industrial scale-up the likes of which the world has never seen,” Princeton’s Stephen Pacala told me.

Also see:

• IEA. (2021, February 17). Is carbon capture too expensive? – Analysis. IEA. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/is-carbon-capture-too-expensive