Direct air-capture technologies for CO2 have been viewed skeptically in the past. The reason has to do with carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Even with rising levels, the gas sits at a relatively dilute concentration of about only 380 parts per million in the air. But it can make up 10 percent or more of the smog belched from a power plant's smokestack.
As a result, the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program, which coordinates research into technologies capable of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, has focused on capture techniques designed for use at power plants. Energy-independence advocates as well have hailed carbon capture from power plants as a path to so-called clean coal.
Direct air-capture technologies, such as Lackner’s, on the other hand, have been sidestepped for now, with the Climate Change Technology Program defining them as a strategy for the long-term - 40 to 60 years from now.
“Clearly one of the challenges is just the enormous volume of air you have to handle [with direct air capture],” said Robert Socolow, the Princeton scientist who developed the “stabilization wedge,” a popular conceptual tool for thinking about how to halt climate change using existing technology. “There’s eight-tenths of a gram of CO2, weighing about as much as a paper clip, in a cubic meter of air.”
Even though CO2 is still laced thinly throughout the atmosphere, its levels are far higher than in past climate warming cycles that have occurred over the last 650,000 years. Barring serious efforts to reduce emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, the concentration of CO2 is expected to surge higher still, accelerating a warming that already poses risks of coastal flooding and inland drought.
As a result, Socolow and others are starting to take direct air-capture technologies seriously and the American Physical Society, a society of physicists with more than 46,000 members, has just approved a $25,000 grant for him to organize a study on the various options being researched. The society’s grants are often supplemented by money from outside foundations.
The new study will look at capture techniques that could be used to suck CO2 from the air anywhere, which is how Lackner’s invention operates, as well as those tailored for use at a power plant. According to Socolow, it will be the first independent assessment of such technologies, and will begin sometime this fall.
Lackner and the group at Global Research Technologies, located in a 10,000-square-foot building near Tucson’s airport, aren’t the only scientists exploring how to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. In fact, a colleague of Lackner’s at Columbia, Peter Eisenberger, is testing CO2 absorbers that could inhale and exhale carbon dioxide in response to temperature swings.
And in Canada, David Keith, at the University of Calgary, has been working with technology similar to Lackner’s first prototype, with the goal of building a mega-CO2-scrubbing facility. Keith tested a version of his CO2-scrubbing tower last summer, as featured in the Discovery Channel’s new “Project Earth” television series.
Still other work is underway by Julio Friedmann at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, based in Livermore, Calif., where scientists are looking for a catalyst that could speed how quickly the CO2 binds to an absorber.
“It’s a very interesting idea, it’s a new idea, and it’s a hard idea,” Socolow said of general capture concepts. “So, we will try to sort out whether this is something for the next decade or for the longer-term.”
All of the air-capture technologies, however, require a place to put the carbon dioxide once it’s collected. And, at the moment, no CO2 sequestration areas currently operate in the United States.
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