A Canadian company, backed by Bill Gates, says it has reached an important threshold in developing technology that can remove CO2 from the air. Carbon Engineering has published a peer-reviewed study showing that they can capture carbon for under $100 dollars a tonne. This would be a major advance on the current price of around $600 per tonne. The company says their immediate goal is to produce synthetic liquid fuels made from carbon and renewable energy.
Set up in 2009 with funding from Microsoft's Bill Gates and Canada oil sands financier Norman Murray Edwards, their pilot plant has been running since 2015, capturing about one tonne of CO2 per day. The process works by sucking air into a modified cooling tower with fans, where it comes into contact with a liquid that reacts with the CO2. After several processing steps, a purer stream of CO2 is extracted and the capturing liquid is returned to the air contactor.
"We see our long-term fuels plant as being roughly 2,000 barrels a day, but the next one we build will be the first real commercial plant but will be 10 times smaller than that - we are developing that right now, looking for very cheap solar or wind power and looking for investors."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44396781
Here we go! Finance those pipelines! Burn that coal! 😱
ReplyDeleteEh ???
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor - I was being sarcastic, but that's probably what Trump would suggest if he thought we could cheaply suck the excess carbon out of the atmosphere.
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