Can carbon removal become a trillion-dollar business?
“TODAY WE SEE the birth of a new species,” declared Julio Friedmann, gazing across the bleak landscape. Along with several hundred grandees, the energy technologist had travelled to Notrees, a remote corner of the Texas oil patch, in late April. He was invited by 1PointFive, an arm of Occidental Petroleum, an American oil firm, and of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian startup backed by Bill Gates. The species in question is in some ways akin to a tree—but not the botanical sort, nowhere to be seen on the barren terrain. Rather, it is an arboreal artifice: the world’s first commercial-scale “direct air capture” (DAC) plant.
Like a tree, DAC sucks carbon dioxide from the air, concentrates it and makes it available for some use. In the natural case, that use is creating organic molecules through photosynthesis. For DAC, it can be things for which humans already use CO2, like adding fizz to drinks, spurring plant growth in greenhouses or, in Occidental’s case, injecting it into oilfields to squeeze more drops of crude from the deposits.
Yet some of the 500,000 tonnes of CO2 that the Notrees plant will capture annually, once fully operational in 2025, will be pumped beneath the plains in the service of a grander goal: fighting climate change. For unlike the carbon stored in biological plants, which can be released when they are cut down or burned, CO2 artificially sequestered may well stay sequestered indefinitely. Companies that want to net out some of their own carbon emissions but do not trust biology-based offsets will pay the project’s managers per stashed tonne. That makes the Notrees launch the green shoot of something else, too: a real industry.
2023-05-21 11:56:04
Link from www.economist.com
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