UNIVERSITY of Calgary climate-change scientist David Keith is working on a device that could efficiently capture the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, directly from the air using near-commercial technology – apparently.
Keith and a team of researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to reduce CO – the main greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming – by using a relatively simple machine that can capture the CO content of air at any location.
“At first thought, capturing CO from the air where it’s at a concentration of 0.04% seems absurd when we are just starting to do cost-effective capture at power plants where CO produced is at a concentration of more than 10%,” says Keith.
“But the thermodynamics suggest that air capture might only be a bit harder than capturing CO from power plants. We are trying to turn that theory into engineering reality.”
The research is significant because air-capture technology is the only way to grab CO emissions from transportation sources such as road vehicles and aircraft.
Air capture is different from carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
CCS involves installing equipment at, for example, a coal-fired power plant to capture CO produced during burning of the coal and then pipelining this waste gas for permanent storage underground in a geological reservoir.
Air capture, on the other hand, uses technology that can capture – no matter where the capture system is located – the CO that is present in ambient air everywhere. The Keith team has built a tower which was able to capture the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO on a single square metre of scrubbing material – roughly what we in Britain each produce annually.
It has devised a new way to apply a chemical process derived from the pulp and paper industry to cut the energy cost of air capture in half and has filed two provisional patents on its end-to-end air-capture system. While it isn’t yet commercial, it is said to be simple, reliable and scalable technology.
British entrepreneur Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, has offered a $25million prize for anyone who can devise a system to remove the equivalent of one billion tonnes of CO or more every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade.
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