The Department of Energy is Opening a Lab to Capture CO2 From the Air

 

 

By Anya Litvak

September 23, 2022 - Of all the ways to decrease carbon emissions, sucking diluted CO2 out of the air is the fruit hanging at the very top of the tree. It's prohibitively expensive and a remedy of last resort.

Yet after decades of not doing enough to curb carbon emissions, scientists now believe the last resort will be needed if there’s any chance of averting the worst effects of climate change. The National Energy Technology Laboratory is launching a direct air capture center to speed up the process.

Set to be located either at the U.S. Department of Energy lab’s Pittsburgh or Morgantown, W.Va., campus, the new facility will enable researchers in universities and companies to test materials and designs to make the process of capturing CO2 more efficient and less expensive.

While air and CO2 are available everywhere, the lab will help researchers figure out the optimum environment for direct air capture.

“We want to be able to simulate conditions that go from Antarctica to equatorial Africa,” NETL Director Brian Anderson said.

While the cost of direct air capture today is estimated to range between $400 and $1,000 per ton of CO2, DOE’s goal is to bring that down to $100.

As things stand, “it is technically feasible to suck CO2 out of the air,” Mr. Anderson said. “The issue is cost, and the issue is scale.”

All other decarbonization strategies are cheaper, like carbon capture from the flue gas of a power plant or industrial facility, where the concentration of CO2 is hundreds of times higher than in ambient air — “a lot easier,” Mr. Anderson said. That’s not to mention preventing the emission of CO2 in the first place through energy efficiency, renewable energy and conservation.

“But when we’re targeting getting to full net-zero,” Mr. Anderson said, “[and] there are some indications that we need to actually do better than net-zero, we need to be net-negative” — that’s the point at which sucking CO2 out of the air, even at $100 per ton, is increasingly seen as a necessary tool.

The Biden administration has set a goal for a net-zero carbon power sector by 2030 and a net-zero economy by 2050.

Worldwide, the International Energy Agency’s net-zero by 2050 scenario envisions scaling up direct air capture from the 10,000 tons of CO2 being pulled out of the air that way now to nearly 1 billion tons by 2050.

“We need to start talking about carbon removal now because the scale we have to meet by midcentury is significant,” said Peter Psarras, a research assistant professor of chemical engineering and energy policy at the University of Pennsylvania. 

“We just didn’t do enough of those low-hanging fruit activities,” he added. “If we had done those 20 years ago, maybe we wouldn’t find ourselves in a position where we need carbon removal as an idea.”

Scaling Up Efforts

The case for direct air capture is twofold and goes like this:

Not only does the world need all the technologies it can muster to make a dent in the amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, but also even if everything that can be electrified is, there will still be industrial processes that emit CO2. To net out their emissions, direct air capture would be like placing a weight on the other side of the carbon scale.

In that application, it doesn’t need to be like a giant vacuum for the sky. It’s a targeted offset, the way that companies that disturb a wetland habitat in one area are allowed to boost it in another. If scaled up enough, however, it could start making up for historic emissions, too.

Direct air capture requires energy at several points.

First, it’s required to power fans that pull the air in through the membrane or sorbent, which acts as a kind of sponge filling up with CO2. Then, more energy to steam the CO2 out of the sorbent and more power to compress it so it can be transported and pumped underground.

It’s all that energy that makes the current cost of direct air capture so expensive.

Today, the scale of these efforts is very small. The first commercial facility opened in Iceland last year. Using geothermal energy, the project called Orca can remove 4,000 tons of CO2 from the air annually and pump it under ground into basalt, where nearly all of it mineralizes within two years.

But bigger projects have already been announced.

According to cdr.fyi, an open-source website that tracks publicly disclosed carbon credit purchases, companies have already paid for the direct air capture of half a million tons of CO2 — the vast majority of that from projects that aren’t yet built.

In July, Microsoft announced a deal with Swiss company Climeworks AG, one of the leading companies involved in direct air capture, to remove 10,000 tons of CO2 from the air over the next decade.

Earlier this year, Airbus, the Dutch airplane-maker, prepurchased 400,000 credits from a company called 1PointFive, which is a subsidiary of the Texas-based oil giant Occidental Petroleum Corp.

In August, 1PointFive and its direct air capture partner, Carbon Engineering, announced they would build a facility in the Permian Basin capable of capturing 1 million tons of CO2 annually. Once captured and concentrated, the greenhouse gas will be used in enhanced oil recovery, aka pumped into oil wells to coax more crude out of the ground while the CO2 remains sequestered underneath.

Those wary of carbon capture and removal efforts — because they believe having the option gives license to polluting industries to continue with their business as usual — tend to object to enhanced oil recovery as a carbon sink. After all, the recovered oil will release its own CO2 when burned.

Mr. Anderson envisions that concentrated carbon dioxide could be used for other purposes, perhaps combined with hydrogen to make synthetic jet fuel or made into building materials.

Some direct air projects, such as the 5 million ton Project Bison announced earlier this month, aim to use CO2 injection wells to permanently store the greenhouse gas. CarbonCapture Inc. said it will develop the project in Wyoming, where renewable energy to power the capture process is plentiful and the regulations for carbon sequestration underground are favorable.

‘Pie in the Sky’

Mr. Psarras remembers when he first discussed direct air capture with Jennifer Wilcox in her Clean Energy Conversions Lab at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. 

“We just thought it was so pie in the sky,” he said. 

Over the past few years, their views have changed.

Ms. Wilcox, now principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the Department of Energy, kicked off the department’s Carbon Negative Shot Summit in July promising to be “unrelenting in our support of our innovators, our creators” working on carbon removal, including direct air capture.

Mr. Psarras, who now leads the lab at Penn while Ms. Wilcox is on leave, said several things brought the idea of direct air capture down to earth.

One was new climate modeling showing that carbon abatement wouldn’t be enough to meet climate goals and carbon removal would be needed.

Another is the recent scrutiny of natural carbon removal options, such as tree planting, which has served as a cheap way for companies to claim environmental action. Questions about the quality and durability of carbon credits generated by reforestation have spurred accusations of greenwashing.

Today, Mr. Psarras sees corporate net-zero pledges driving interest and investment in direct air capture. Microsoft, for example, pledged to be carbon negative by 2030 and to remove its historic CO2 emissions by 2050.

“There is a willingness to pay — from an optics standpoint — even through there’s a premium to that,” he said. 

The federal government support hasn’t hurt either. Last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocates $3.5 billion to the establishment of four direct air capture hubs, each capable of removing 1 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere a year.

The concept is similar to but lower in profile than the legislation’s $8 billion for hydrogen hubs, a goal for Western Pennsylvania’s business interests.

The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law last month, awards tax credits of up to $180 per ton of CO2 that is captured from the air and sequestered. 

Pittsburgh or Morgantown?

The National Energy Technology Laboratory plans to open its direct air capture center in phases, with the first capabilities available by the end of next year.

It is choosing between retrofitting an existing building in Pittsburgh or constructing a new facility in Morgantown, where the lab has more space. The total cost will be around $25 million, the department expects.

The draw of the place will be the controlled environment. The tricky thing about working with CO2 in the air is that there’s so little of it, despite being too much for climate health.

“The level of CO2 in the air is so low, it’s hard to test before and after” its run through some new method, explained Katherine Hornbostel, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering.

“You need very fine-tuned equipment to get accurate readings.” 

Ms. Hornbostel has been working on carbon capture, including direct air capture, for years, experimenting with different materials and their ability to absorb and release CO2.

Just as important, she said, is where those materials are placed — the level of humidity that could mess with their performance, the temperature that might require more or less energy to suck the air. All that could be simulated at NETL’s new lab, she presumed.

Ms. Hornbostel doesn’t envision direct air capture systems becoming a mainstream feature of new buildings — It’s way too expensive and works better at scale. But there are some places that have more CO2 than others, she said, such as airports, highways and building exhaust pipes, where the CO2 we breathe out funnels into the air.

Interest in this work has picked up significantly over the past year or two, she said, not because direct air capture is imminent but rather because it’s hard and will need a long runway of research and development.