Swiss company Climeworks announced that it successfully removed carbon dioxide from the air and buried it in the ground. In this process, CO2 will turn to rock over time. This way of sequestering carbon has been verified by an independent third-party audit.
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Can we really just bury CO2 in the ground?
Climeworks’ achievement marks the first time a company has taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, successfully buried it and delivered carbon credits to a paying customer. As part of the burgeoning carbon removal industry, Climeworks’ new technology might be a solution to the problem of CO2 only now peaking in 2023, far later than Earth needed to reduce emissions to avoid worsening climate change that borders on the catastrophic.
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This company was founded by Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher in 2009, as a spinoff startup from ETH Zurich, a large technical university in Switzerland. The technology works by vacuuming greenhouse gases out of the air, filtering them and then burying them in the ground. This is called direct carbon removal, a way of reducing CO2 not be reducing emissions but be directly pulling existing CO2 from the atmosphere for storage so that it doesn’t trap heat in the atmosphere.
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If it sounds pie in the sky, consider that Microsoft, Shopify and Stripe are all new clients of Climeworks, having purchased future carbon removal services from the company. DNV, the independent auditor, has certified this carbon removal process to ensure it’s more than greenwashing.
What does direct carbon removal cost?
Carbon removal and storage costs depend on quantity and the period of time over which clients want to commit to these services to offset their emissions. The price for carbon removal generally runs to several hundred dollars per ton. Individuals can pay for offsetting personal emissions with Climeworks, too, if it fits in their budget.
Climeworks recently raised over $780 million to scale with the support of investors including Swiss Re and VC John Doerr. The main carbon dioxide removal facility for Climeworks is located in Iceland, where its partner company CarbFix stores the gas underground. It isn’t just being stored or sequestered in its current form, however. Direct carbon removal in this plan means dissolving carbon dioxide in water and mixing it with basalt rock formations. The material naturally converts to solid carbonate minerals in just two years.
Compared to the 11 generations it takes for plastics to break down in landfills or the forever chemicals building up in our water, not to mention irreversible climate effects of loose CO2 in the atmosphere, this process is astonishingly fast and a potential solution for reversing climate change in the short term if it can scale. The question is who is paying for it, and how expensive it is to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere.
Climeworks has begun construction of its second commercial-scale plant in Iceland in June of 2022 that can capture and store 36,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. That is a small percentage of global carbon emissions, which hit a record 36.3 billion metric tons in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency. But this technology shows promise. If companies can build carbon capture facilities for significantly less cost and emissions than the process of CO2 capture accomplishes, this might be a new solution to climate change emissions from corporate polluters, who make up the majority of global emissions.
What other options are there for CO2 capture?
According to the Global CCS Institute, there are three types of carbon capture currently available for use: pre-combustion, post-combustion and oxyfuel with post-combustion. Pre-combustion processes convert fuel into a gaseous mixture of hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen is separated and can be burnt without producing any CO2; the CO2 can then be compressed for transport and storage. The fuel conversion steps required for pre-combustion are more complex than the processes involved in post-combustion, making the technology more difficult to apply to existing power plants.
Furthermore, fossil-fuel burning industrial plants are the main contributor to CO2 emissions globally. By concentrating on technology for capturing and converting CO2 in this sector, major impact can be achieved to reduce climate change effects of CO2 emissions.
Via CNBC
Lead images via Pexels
