Earlier in the semester, I came across an article that grabbed my attention. The article focused on a revolutionary new developing technology that would allow for carbon dioxide to be captured directly from the air.
Carbon Engineering, the company in Canada that recently released information about this technology, describes Direct Air Capture (DAC) as a way of “accelerating our shift to a net-zero world”. The DAC technology requires inputs of water and energy into a closed loop which then outputs pure, compressed carbon dioxide. This carbon dioxide can then be stored below ground or used in CE’s Air to Fuels™ systems which recycles atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce clean-burning liquid fuel that can be used instead of crude oil.
Aside from the technology of DAC, you may be curious to know how economically feasible it is. The cost of using DAC to capture a ton of carbon dioxide, while still more expensive than preventing the same amount of carbon from being emitted through the use of renewable energy, has fallen significantly over the past years to between $94 and $232.
Currently, DAC is being used to reduce carbon emissions, by collecting carbon dioxide that is emitted as exhaust from industrial fossil-fuel powered processes. But it could potentially be used to do “negative work” by removing carbon dioxide originally in the biosphere (above ground) and moving it into the geosphere (the ground). This can be done through burning biomass in a thermal plant and burying the exhausted carbon dioxide or by sequestering carbon dioxide already present in the air and moving it underground. However, there is no market for negative emissions, making the practice unlikely ever be economically viable.
The proposal of this new technology immediately brought to mind Wendell Berry’s standards of technological innovation. Although Berry is an environmental activist, I expect that he would have some qualms about this specific approach as it violates many of his rules – it is not cheaper or smaller in scale than existing renewable energy technologies, it does not come from a small, private shop nor can it be repaired locally, and most importantly, there is no clear evidence that it would work demonstrably better or fail to disrupt existing practices.
In fact, people getting caught up in the supposed wonders of this new technology and believing that we can undo hundreds of years worth of environmentally damaging practices by simply sucking carbon out of the air, would be a distraction from what should be our focus: reducing our carbon emissions and integrating renewable practices into our industries.
For more info:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/14/17445622/direct-air-capture-air-to-fuels-carbon-dioxide-engineering