![]() ![]() Pulling one million tons per year of CO2 out of the air requires roughly 200-300 megawatts of zero-carbon energy (a combination of heat and electricity). Although the costs will come down over time through deployment and wider adoption, today’s high costs are a barrier to investment and deployment.Īnother challenge is around the energy requirements associated with direct air capture. Today’s systems have prices between $600 and $1100/ton CO2 removed. Like all climate mitigation approaches, direct air capture has challenges. Report: Criteria for high-quality carbon dioxide removal > Challenges and concerns of direct air capture In fact, the more rapidly direct air capture scales and deploys, the less total energy and total cost needed to achieve key climate goals. The last fraction of hard-to-abate emissions can be managed through direct air capture, effectively capping global costs to reach net-zero emissions. While reducing emissions remains the top priority, there are certain types of emissions that are either very hard or very expensive to abate. This reduces competition for land and provides opportunities for economic development in regions with the right resources.įinally, and most critically, direct air capture is a backstop technology. Because of this, direct air capture facilities can be anywhere and still have a climate benefit-as long as there is sufficient available clean energy and options for CO2 storage or use nearby. Globally, our atmosphere mixes fully every two weeks, meaning that CO2 released in China or Australia arrives over the US and vice-versa in this amount of time. It can be done anywhere with low-carbon energy and CO2 storage options. This leaves more room for conservation, agriculture, rewilding, and other important work. Typical direct air capture systems do the carbon removal work of trees with 1,000 to 2,000 times less space. It's clearly additional (meaning it only happens with financial and human intervention), easily verified, and durable (stored for many hundreds of years or more).ĭirect air capture has a small physical footprint. The devices remove CO2 from the air, a meter measures it, and operators store and monitor that CO2. This means scaling can be fast and removals profound. In effect, there are no practical limits to our ability to scrub CO2 from the sky or store it in deep geological formations around the world. In addition, CO2 can be recycled into fuels and chemicals, which prevents net-new carbon dioxide from being released but does not count as a carbon removal solution.ĭirect air capture has many advantages as a CO2 removal approach:įirst and foremost, it’s scalable. The second is by storing the CO2 into products like concrete, which offers clearer commercial benefits. The most important is geological storage, which keeps CO2 out of the air and oceans indefinitely in deep geological formations (more than half a mile down) and offers the clearest climate benefits. The most commonly used chemical compounds are liquid solvents or solid sorbents, but other chemical, electrical, and physical processes could also work.Īfter the filtering process, the captured CO2 is usually stored in one of two ways. From there, CO2 filtering typically involves a chemical process that binds the CO2 for release later. To be effective, direct air capture must draw a lot of air into separating equipment like filter banks or cooling towers (this is similar to the small-scale systems that have scrubbed CO2 from air in spacecraft and submarines for decades). One approach, direct air capture, has grown in prominence, reflecting advances in climate science, technology, commercial practice, policy, and investments into companies and projects.ĭirect air capture works by sucking in air then filtering it to remove CO2 that has built up over time and still sits in the atmosphere. There are many methods of removing CO2 from the air and oceans, including creating new forests, burying wood, and making new carbon-based minerals. But by combining emissions reductions with carbon dioxide removal we can balance the carbon budget. Currently, the funds and technology required to get global emissions rates to net zero rapidly are insufficient or don’t exist. Human activity has emitted so much carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere that current reduction efforts alone-while still critical-aren’t happening fast enough to prevent significant and irreversible effects of climate change. ![]()
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