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This article is part of a special report Climate Solutionslooks at worldwide efforts to make a difference.
Stephan Hitz took a break from his job operating a strange-looking machine in an otherworldly landscape in Iceland and came up with a “Star Wars” analogy to explain his work at the edge of climate technology.
“I feel like I’ve come from the Dark Side to become a Jedi warrior,” he joked as he prepared for the treeless chilled lava and cold wind blowing through distant volcanoes.
The 37-year-old service technician from Zurich worked for nine years in the aerospace and marine industries before joining. climeworks, a Swiss start-up trying to undo the damage caused by such heavily polluting industries.
“It gives you extra satisfaction to know that you are helping the planet rather than harming it,” he said.
Mr. Hitz and his team of junior technicians operate the Orca, the world’s largest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which began extracting carbon dioxide from the air in an area 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik, in September.
A gentle hum came from the Orca, each the size of a shipping container, resembling four large air conditioners sitting one above the other, as the wind stirred up rippling clouds of steam from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant.
Each container has 12 large circular fans powered by renewable electricity from the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel collection boxes where carbon dioxide or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, is chemically bonded with a sand-like filtering agent.
When heat is applied to this filtering agent, CO2 is released which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company. carbohydrate to create a drinkable fizzy water.
Many other firms are trying to extract carbon from the air in the United States and elsewhere, but only here on the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is CO2 converted into this sparkling cocktail and injected into basalt bedrock a few hundred meters down.
Carbfix discovered that the CO2 mixture would chemically react with the basalt and turn into rock in just two or three years, rather than the centuries believed to be required by the mineralization process, so it takes the CO2 that Climeworks’ DAC captures and pumps. It is grounded through wells protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily be used as props in a space movie.
This is a permanent solution, unlike planting forests that can release their carbon by rotting, felling or burning on a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other firms plan to inject into vacant oil and gas fields may eventually leak out, according to some experts, but once the carbon turns into rock, it will go nowhere.
The Orca is billed as the world’s first commercial DAC unit, because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year has been paid for by 8,000 online subscribers and companies like Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi, and Microsoft to extract some carbon. .
Rock band Coldplay recently joined these companies to pay Climeworks for voluntary carbon credits to offset some of their own emissions. The firm hopes to one day make a profit by putting its costs below the selling price of these loans.
The problem is that Orca’s output equates to just three seconds of humanity’s annual CO2 emissions, which is close to 40 billion metric tons, but Orca at least the concept of cleaning the air and putting carbon back underground is from science fiction, Science.
Tarek Soliman, London-based climate change analyst at HSBC Global Research, says the Reykjavik launch isn’t the kind of “quantum leap” that will prove the technology can achieve the scale and cost needed to make a real impact on climate change.
“But it’s a step in that direction,” Soliman said. “Given that direct air capture is seen as nonsense by many people, it’s something you can see and touch that puts it on a path to reliability.”
Christoph Gebald, co-founder of Climeworks, is adamant that technology could evolve into a trillion-dollar industry in the next thirty or forty years. net zero emissions by 2050
“This will be a dream outcome from Glasgow, with decision makers recognizing that any approach leading to net zero must include emission reductions as well as carbon removal,” he said in a phone call from Zurich.
Speaking softly at the age of 38, Dr. While studying mechanical engineering in Switzerland, Gebald began working on the DAC with Jan Wurzbacher, a German. They founded their company in 2009, but Dr. Gebald says their major breakthrough is to publish the UN-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2018. 1.5 degrees. Most importantly, it also produced the first scientific consensus that some emissions would be very difficult to eliminate, so that all viable paths to “net zero” would rely on removing some previous emissions.
Dr. Gebald believes machine-based solutions may need to carry half that workload, as the potential of many nature-based options is limited by the scarcity of arable land.
Getting from 4,000 mt to 5 billion mt per year fast enough to help limit climate change may seem illusory, but there’s an intriguing comparison to the world’s first commercial wind farm, which opened on Crotched Mountain in New Hampshire in 1980.
This project consisted of 20 turbines with a total output of 600,000 watts. Forty years later, in 2020, worldwide installed wind capacity was 1.23 million times greater at 740 gigawatts.
Ascending Orca Annual production at the same rate will provide a CO2 removal capacity of 5 billion metric tons by about 2060.
Dr. “This is exactly what climate science is asking us to do to achieve climate goals,” Gebald said.
Difficulty, Dr. It will depend on cutting costs, which Gebald says is currently around $600 to $800 per metric ton. Increasing production could bring these costs down to $200 to $300 per metric ton by 2030 and somewhere around $100 to $150 by 2035, he said.
Dr. Gebald said the DAC would already be competitive if it receives subsidies that help the deployment and development of electric vehicles and solar panels. .
A fundamental difference from wind and solar power is that they were ultimately driven by the profit motive, because after subsidies helped make them competitive, they were generating a valuable asset: cheap electricity.
The main “output” of the DAC – helping to save the planet – should instead rely on government subsidies such as emissions credits and taxes on carbon emitters, hence the importance of meetings like the Glasgow COP.
While Mr. Hitz and his team watch Orca develop their next factory, which will be 10 times larger and expected to launch in two to three years, Dr. Gebald recognized that in many ways the Orca had to operate for ten years, and it had already served its purpose. “We know the technology works, so the main experiment with Orca was to really test the market’s interest in decarbonisation, and we’re delighted that most of the plant’s lifecycle capacity is already contracted.”
Carbfix is extensively researching how to adapt the mineralization process to other rock types and how to use seawater in areas with freshwater scarcity.
Carbfix was launched as a research project in 2007 after a local scientist was encouraged by Iceland’s then-president Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, who said Iceland’s highly porous basalt could mineralize CO2 without causing any seismic problems.
Dr. Grimsson cemented Orca’s role as “fairy godfather” shortly after ending his 20-year presidency as he walked through the bar of a luxury hotel at the COP meeting in Marrakech in 2016.
“I heard this American investor sitting at a table loudly supporting this new Swiss company that he says has technology to extract carbon directly from the air,” he said.
“So I stopped and said, ‘Hey, in Iceland we know how to turn these things into rocks’.” Dr. He got Gebald together with Carbfix “and bingo, that was the missing link.”
Despite this lucky accident, Edda Aradottir, CEO of Carbfix, says she’s not sure the latest COP will do enough to help “negative emissions technologies” realize their potential.
“Somehow, these events seem to rarely achieve what they want to do,” he said.
Former president Dr. Grimsson is also pessimistic about Glasgow and says “the problem is that COPs are primarily about finding ways to reduce emissions”.
That’s good, he said, but “we must also remove some of the carbon in the air. Unless we start doing this very, very quickly, we’ll never be successful with climate change.”
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