![]() ![]() ![]() When Powers Combineīut major investors have their eyes on the skies, banking on the promise of DAC. Now that the research has been verified by scientists across fields related to climate and ocean science, Kelland says, Planetary Technologies will begin its open-ocean trials this year to develop methods to launch ocean alkalinity enhancement at scale to become an effective, international solution to the climate crisis. This, in turn, would allow more CO2 from the atmosphere to be captured and stored in the ocean. The idea is that by adding antacid to outflows from wastewater treatment facilities-which already are permitted and monitored to ensure the safety of treated water before it goes into the ocean-it will combine with dissolved CO2 in the surface oceans to form carbonates and bicarbonates that remain in the seawater for a long, long time. The antacid (magnesium hydroxide) works like TUMS or baking soda, lowering the pH balance of seawater to make it less acidic. “What if we put antacid into seawater, then what does that do? Research says it starts to rebalance and the ocean pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere, safely storing it for hundreds of thousands of years.” Too much CO2 in the air leads to too much CO2 in the oceans, which over time leads to dangerous ocean acidification, says Mike Kelland, CEO of Planetary Technologies. Its technology is based on the fact that the atmosphere and the ocean are constantly communicating. This unit can be up and running in less than eight weeks, Sharma says.īased in Canada, Planetary Technologies is taking a more liquid approach. With target dates looming like storm clouds, equipment needs to be delivered lightning-fast. CycloneCC is the size of a shipping container, which Carbon Clean believes is pivotal for mass production. For decades, conventional technology for industrial sites were massive plants designed for the oil and gas industry. This technology solves the “capacity problem,” says Aniruddha Sharma, chair and CEO of Carbon Clean. (The company is testing the use of non-aqueous solvent (NAS) to bring this cost down in the future.) The cost of the unit is undisclosed at this time, but by 2025, Carbon Clean aims to have customers pay $30 per metric ton of carbon captured. A commercial rollout is scheduled for 2023 with deployment partners including CEMEX, Chevron, and Veolia. That said, WRI supports a portfolio approach, says Katie Lebling, an associate in WRI’s climate program.Īs of August 2022, CycloneCC has been successfully pilot tested in the U.K. DAC, which uses ventilators to suck CO2 from the sky, takes up less space, but requires a lot of energy. Tree restoration is low-maintenance, but requires a lot of land (and trees can burn down in wildfires, which are worsening under climate change). In 2020, the World Resources Institute (WRI), a nonprofit organization focused on helping solve global problems practically, published a paper showing the two strategies with the largest carbon removal potential from now to 2050: tree restoration and direct air capture (DAC). ![]() If you follow the money, investors are betting big that carbon removal technology will be the way forward. This is where using carbon removal technology-vacuuming CO2 straight out of the atmosphere for safe storage-comes in. With so much carbon in the air, reducing emissions is critical, but not enough to meet climate goals. In 2021, the global average level of carbon dioxide set a new record high at 414.72 parts per million. Every year about 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases get released into the air, with carbon dioxide being the main culprit, making up 76% of the mix. Will it be enough to avert a climate disaster? Some say no. Net-zero means greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere cancel out greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuels and industrial processes. This goal requires countries to act now (or, more accurately, yesterday) by reducing emissions to net-zero by 2050. So what’s the plan? The Paris Agreement wants to make sure earth absolutely does not get 2 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial levels-and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees. Without drastic measures, researchers say, the climate consequences will be much, much worse. Science says a hotter globe triggers extreme weather events: more fires, bigger floods, stronger hurricanes. But since the Industrial Revolution, the global temperature has gone up by about 1 degree Celsius because greenhouse gas emissions (such as carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere trap heat like a blanket. In the late 1800s, before the Wright Brothers took off, earth’s annual average temperature was about 13.7 degrees Celsius. ![]()
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