On the roof of a large recycling centre at Hinwil stand 18 metal fans, stacked on top of each, each about the size of a large domestic washing machine. These fans suck in the surrounding air and chemically coated filters inside absorb the CO2. They become saturated in a few hours so, using the waste heat from the recycling facility, the filters are heated up to 100C and very pure carbon dioxide gas is then collected. It can capture about 900 tonnes of CO2 every year. It is then pumped to a large greenhouse a few hundred metres away, where it helps grow bigger vegetables.
This is not supposed to be a demonstration of a clever technology - for the developers, making money from CO2 is critical. "This is the first time we are commercially selling CO2; this is the first of its kind," co-founder Jan Wurzbacher told BBC News. "It has to be for business; CO2 capture can't work for free."
Right now Climeworks is selling the gas to the vegetable growers next door for less than $600 per tonne, which is very expensive. But the company says that this is because it has built its extraction devices from scratch - everything is bespoke. The firm believes that like solar and wind energy, costs will rapidly fall once production is scaled up. "The magic number we always say is $100 per tonne," said Jan Wurzbacher.
Many greens are deeply suspicious of these efforts. They argue that we need a fundamental rethink of the way that we produce and consume to put sustainability at the heart of everything we do. "We need to step back and actually question what are all the possible pathways to a climate safe future," said Lili Fuhr from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
"Have we seriously explored them and are they not more realistic than relying on these magical technologies that in my view hold immense risks and uncertainties and are certainly harmful for many people around the planet?" Other critics are worried that if the technology works, then it will encourage politicians not to make the cuts in carbon and rapidly move to renewable energy.
I reserve a deep skepticism of militant environmentalists. "Magical" technologies perhaps says more than the speaker intended. It often feels to be that they have a problem with technology and energy use itself, that is, with the ends rather than the means. As though if you could, hypothetically, make a completely clean version of coal, they would choose not to use it. At the extreme view, a certain sort of "let's get back to living in the trees because trees are nice" mentality.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41816332
Troy Economics can fix it, if the political will is there (which, so far, does not seem to be the case). You "just" need to price emissions into the source fuels such that it's uneconomic to emit CO2 (e.g. by taxing carbonaceous fuels at source), and ratchet up the cost of emission in line with the efficiency gains.
ReplyDeleteRemember that we don't care about energy use per-se; we care about the externalities of that energy use. If you can price those in accurately, economics says that we will find a way to avoid those costs. The issue at the moment is that it's easier to avoid those costs by political means (i.e. turn them back into externalities that we all suffer from) than it is to avoid them by technological means (i.e. not buying energy that results from CO2 emission).
Except we've been 'pricing in' with cap and trade emissions and they achieved precisely zilch. Incentives have certainly helped advance renewables buuut the real improvements have come from regulatory changes. Corporations work their way around economics and invariably find the cheapest solution for them but they fear and loathe regulations.
ReplyDeleteTroy Like I said, no political willpower to actually force companies to face their own externalities.
ReplyDeleteIf the political will was there, the EU or the USA could become carbon neutral (i.e. zero net emissions) today; price in the worst case emissions to all potential producers of CO2 (at the borders for imports, within the borders for domestically produced oil/gas/coal/biomass etc and their derivates like wood and plastic, and the energy embodied in thing like steel), and use the resulting tax revenue to subsidise producers of carbon-absorbing products. Provide a certification scheme for importers to get taxed/subsidised at their net CO2 emissions point, not at their worst case emissions point.
At the expense of some upheaval, you can then ratchet up subsidy and CO2 price in sync, such that CO2 emitted goes from the current levels to a net-neutral level over time - this is an economic solution to the problem that requires some serious political willpower, but it could be done.