One of the biggest, buzziest trends in Climate Tech in 2021 is carbon capture — often abbreviated “CCS” (for carbon capture and storage). As we’ve noted before, Microsoft, Elon Musk, and several larger startups are actively investing in CCS, both directly and in the form of carbon removal credits.
Carbon removal’s also seeing growing public support as well. In 2020, the U.S. government committed $450 billion in federal funds to support R&D for large-scale carbon removal, and CCS features prominently in the innovation segment of the EU’s new 10 year climate agenda.
Together, this public-private momentum is finally helping large-scale carbon capture projects start to come online. Earlier this month, the Swiss company Climeworks opened the world’s largest commercial carbon capture facility in Hellisheiði, Iceland, named Orca. Powered by renewable energy, Orca has the capacity to remove 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere per year, equivalent to the emissions of approximately 870 cars or 9,281 consumed barrels of oil.
So where are we today with carbon capture? Where are we going? What are the key risks and challenges?
Carbon Capture - The Basics
There are many different forms of carbon capture, including natural methods which have existed for millions of years. Trees are biological carbon capture, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and sequestering it as organic mass. Roughly 50% of a tree’s trunk and bark is solidified carbon dioxide (CO2).
However, this can also pose carbon capture risks in extreme weather scenarios: if a wildfire burns a forest to the ground, all its stored carbon is released right back into the atmosphere.
Commercial or human-made carbon capture technology is much newer, first developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but not widely used due to its high cost. Most commercial carbon removal is done via direct air capture (DAC), which uses a series of chemical reactions to process air, extracting the CO2 from it while returning the rest of the air to the environment
The isolated carbon can then be stored or repurposed. Climeworks’ Orca facility, for example, injects the carbon into underground basalt rock, mineralizing it. Other forms of carbon capture store CO2 in concrete, ocean limestone, and even the Earth’s crust. What starts as air becomes rock — mining from the sky.
Commercial Carbon Capture at Scale
Today, Climeworks’ Orca facility has a carbon capture capacity of roughly 183,719 trees, equivalent to a 460 acre forest. It’s a technological feat to be sure, but still not delivering on the scale or cost-effectiveness of carbon removal we collectively need. To absorb 1 minute of humanity’s global carbon emissions, we need 20 Orca’s running at full capacity (in the small good news department: that’s on the way).
Estimates peg the cost of commercial carbon capture at $600 to sequester one metric tonne of carbon, which isn’t a competitive carbon credit price for carbon markets today and remains a lot more expensive on a per-tonne basis than planting trees.
Getting down the cost curve on commercial carbon capture — which goes hand-in-hand with increasing capacity will a critical, global priority over the next decade, alongside large-scale tree planting, conservation, and wildfire adaptation.
We’re rooting for projects like Orca, as they have the future potential to play an important role in shifting our global emissions balance.
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