Is carbon capture here? | The Seattle Times

Stephan Hitz took a break from his work, which operated a strange-looking machine in an otherworldly landscape in Iceland, and reached for a “Star Wars” analogy to explain his job at the limit of climate technology.

“I feel like I’ve come from the dark side to become a Jedi warrior,” he joked as he braced himself against a cool wind that blew over the treeless stretches of cold lava and distant volcanoes.

The 37-year-old service technician from Zurich worked in the aviation and shipping industry for nine years before joining Climeworks, a Swiss startup that tries to repair the damage caused by such heavily polluting industries.

“It gives you added satisfaction in knowing that you are helping the planet rather than harming it,” he said.

Hitz and his small team of technicians operate Orca, the world’s largest commercial direct air capture device, which began pulling carbon dioxide from the air in September at a location 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik.

As the wind whirled up clouds of steam from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, Orca heard a gentle hum, reminiscent of four huge air conditioning units, each the size of a shipping container.

Each container contains 12 large round fans that are powered by renewable electricity from geothermal energy and suck air into steel receptacles, where carbon dioxide or CO2, the most important greenhouse gas of global warming, chemically combines with a sand-like filter substance.

When heat is added to this filter substance, CO2 is released, which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to make a drinkable sparkling water.

Several other companies in the United States and elsewhere are trying to suck carbon out of the air, but it’s only here on the volcanic plateaus of Iceland that the CO2 is turned into this sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred meters deep into the basalt rock.

Carbfix found that its CO2 mixture chemically reacts with basalt and turns into rock in just two or three years, rather than the centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take to protect wells from the harsh environment by steel igloos could easily serve as props in a science fiction film.

It’s a permanent solution, as opposed to planting forests, which can release their carbon by rotting, logging, or burning on a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other companies are planning to inject into empty oil and gas fields could leak at some point, some experts fear, but once carbon turns to stone, it will go nowhere.

Orca is billed as the world’s first commercial direct air capture unit because the 4,000 tons of CO2 it can extract each year was paid for by 8,000 people who signed up online to have CO2 removal and by companies like Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft.

Rock band Coldplay recently joined these companies to pay Climeworks for voluntary carbon credits to offset some of their own emissions. The company hopes to make a profit one day by bringing its costs below the selling price of these loans.

The problem is that orca’s emissions are only three seconds of humanity’s annual CO2 emissions, which is closer to 40 billion tons, according to science.

Tarek Soliman, a London-based climate change analyst at HSBC Global Research, said the Reykjavik launch was not a “quantum leap” proving that technology can reach the scale and cost needed to make a real impact to have on climate change.

“But it’s a step in that direction,” said Soliman. “Given that direct aerial photography has been viewed as nonsense by many, this is something to see and touch that puts it on the path to credibility.”

Christoph Gebald, co-founder of Climeworks, firmly believes the technology can grow into a trillion dollar industry in the next three or four decades.At COP26, most nations pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 .

“That would be a dream result from Glasgow, along with decision-makers who recognize that any approach that leads to net zero must include both carbon removal and emissions reduction,” he said from Zurich.

The future of carbon capture depends on reducing costs, which Gebald says is now around $ 600 to $ 800 per tonne. Increased production could bring that cost down to $ 200-300 per ton by 2030 and $ 100-150 per ton by 2035, he said.

Direct collection would already be competitive if it received the subsidies that support the deployment and thriving of electric vehicles and solar panels, Gebald said.

A fundamental difference to wind and solar energy is that they were ultimately driven by the pursuit of profit because, after being made competitive through subsidies, they produced a valuable commodity: cheap electricity.

The main “output” of direct air capture – helping to save the planet – must instead rely on government support such as carbon credits and taxes on carbon emitters, hence the importance of meetings like the Glasgow conference.

Grimsson is calm about Glasgow and says, “The problem is that the COPs are primarily about finding ways to reduce emissions.”

That’s okay, he said, but “we also need to destroy some of the carbon that’s already in the air. If we don’t start very, very quickly, we will never succeed with climate change. “

This story was originally published on nytimes.com. Read it here.
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