*[Enwl-eng] SFB Weekly: Can investors save the Amazon?
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Fri Sep 3 13:47:27 MSK 2021
SFB Weekly: Can investors save the Amazon?View this email in your browser
A solutions-oriented weekly digest from Struggles From Below
03/09/21
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Next month, the dream of carbon air capture will take an important step toward reality as an industrial facility in Iceland becomes the latest of a growing number of projects to remove CO2 from the air and put it underground. But – as Yale Envrionment 360's Jon Gertner finds out – major hurdles, including high costs, remain before this technology can be widely deployed and play a key role in tackling climate change.
In early September, at a facility located about 25 miles southeast of Reykjavik, Iceland, the Swiss company Climeworks will mark the opening of a new project named “Orca”. At least in a conventional sense, Orca doesn’t actually make anything. It is comprised of eight elongated boxes that resemble wood-clad tanks. Each of these boxes — known as “collectors” — is roughly the size of a tractor trailer, and each is festooned with 12 whirring fans that draw a stream of air inside. Within the collectors, a chemical agent known as a sorbent will capture CO2 contained in the air wafting through. Periodically, the surface of the sorbent will fill up. And at that point the CO2 trapped within it will need to be released. At Orca, this task is accomplished with a blast of heat, which is sourced from a nearby hydrothermal vent. The extracted CO2 will then be piped from the collector boxes to a nearby processing facility, where it will be mixed with water and diverted to a deep underground well.
And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralisation that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.
Climeworks maintains that Orca, once it’s running around the clock, will remove up to 4,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. And there isn’t much reason to doubt the facility can achieve this feat. For one thing, the technology for the plant, known as direct air capture, or DAC, is a variation on ideas that have been utilised over the course of half a century in submarines and spacecraft: Employ chemical agents to “scrub” the excess CO2 out of the air; dispose of it; then repeat. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that Climeworks has already built smaller, less sophisticated plants in mainland Europe, which have in turn pulled hundreds of tons of CO2 per year from ambient air.
What seems most significant about Orca, then, is how it represents the possibility that direct air capture has moved closer to something resembling a commercial business. Climeworks now has dozens of customers — individual consumers who have purchased carbon removal services directly from the company, as well as corporations, like the insurance giant Swiss Re — who will pay for the permanent carbon offsets that will be buried underneath Icelandic soil. What’s more, the Orca facility will be the largest functioning direct air capture plant in the world to date — by the company’s estimation, it represents a “scale-up” of its carbon removal efforts by about eighty-fold over the course of four years.
And yet, Climeworks and Orca will likely soon be eclipsed. Plans for even larger DAC plants — one in the US Southwest, slated for completion at the end of 2024; another in Scotland, to be finished about a year after the American project — will be built by a competitor, Carbon Engineering, of British Columbia. Employing a somewhat different technology, Carbon Engineering’s facilities, as initially planned, will be powered by renewable energy and will eventually each remove, on net, about a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere.
“In our view, this will decisively answer the question: Is direct air capture feasible at large scale and affordable cost,” Steve Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering, told me recently. “As I see it, we are out of academic research and feasibility and now into engineering reality.”
Read the article
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What we're reading:
From 30 million cases to zero
After a 70-year effort China has eradicated malaria. Could other countries replicate their success? REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
How to fight microplastic pollution with magnets
Huge amounts of plastic ends up rivers and oceans every year, harming the environment and potentially also human health. But what if we could pull it out of water with the power of magnets? BBC FUTURE
We could power households from the scraps in our food waste bins – here’s what is stopping us
Imagine if you could power your kettle using the energy generated from the vegetable cuttings quietly breaking down in your kitchen’s compost bin. That reality might not be so far off with the growth of biogas technology. THE CONVERSATION
‘It’s a miracle crop’: the pioneers pushing the powers of seaweed
Kelp can clean New York’s polluted waters, tackle climate change and is sustainable – but growers need a law change first. THE GUARDIAN
Soil and its promise as a climate solution: A primer
Soil acts as a carbon sink in the global carbon cycle because it locks away decomposed organic matter. But deforestation, various agricultural practices, and a changing climate are releasing it back into the atmosphere and oceans as carbon dioxide, resulting in an imbalance in global carbon budgets. MONGABAY
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One to ponder:
Why is it so hard to be rational?
The real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be. THE NEW YORKER
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Quote of the week:
“Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself." – Honoré de Balzac
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Song of the week:
Alfonzo Hunter - Just The Way (Playas Play)
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That's it for today, folks. If you're enjoying this newsletter, please do forward it on to any friends who might be into it.
All the best,
Ollie
Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Struggles From Below
Copyright © 2019 Struggles From Below, All rights reserved.
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Subject: SFB Weekly: Can investors save the Amazon?
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