February 14, 2025
What is carbon capture? - Business News

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The US is investing in technologies that keep CO2 away from industrial emissions – or that remove it from the atmosphere. Here’s everything you need to know:

What is carbon capture?

With greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, politicians and scientists are considering carbon dioxide capture as a possible solution to help reach net-zero emissions. The Biden administration just announced a $1.2 billion investment in two carbon-capture projects in Texas and Louisiana, its first major investment in the growing carbon-removal industry. Carbon capture aims to trap CO2 released by power plants and factories and prevent it from reaching the atmosphere, either by sequestering it underground or recycling it in plants. For most of human history, nature has provided its own form of carbon capture: trees absorb carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis. But human civilization is now producing more CO2 than the trees can handle. Is Carbon Capture New? The idea has been around since at least the 1980s, but has yet to be implemented on a large scale. This would require a huge increase in government funding. A recent report found that carbon sequestration technologies would need to increase 1,300-fold by 2050 to limit global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels. (The Paris climate accord’s increasingly unlikely target is 1.5 degrees.) Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said, “No matter how fast we decarbonize the nation’s economy, we must first protect our environment from the worst effects of climate change.” legacy pollution from the present has to be dealt with.”

How does this work?

There are two types of carbon capture: post-combustion and direct air. The former is the primary method currently used in the US. It takes emissions from smoke stacks at power plants and factories and separates the CO2. Instead of direct air capture, a machine is used that sucks in large amounts of air like a vacuum and then removes the carbon with chemicals. The CO2 is then pressurized into liquid form and transported by pipelines for use or storage. This can go towards commercial purposes – for example carbonating drinks – or be recycled back into the energy industry. If the carbon is sequestered, it is injected into a dense rock layer at least 2,600 feet below the ground so that the CO2 does not escape.

Is this process expensive?

Very. Direct air capture is currently too expensive and energy-intensive to operate on a large scale – only 18 direct air capture plants are currently operating in the world. But the Biden administration plans to invest $3.5 billion in direct air-capture hubs. The World Resources Institute estimates that the cost of directly capturing CO2 in the air ranges from $250 to $600 per metric ton. But even at $100 per metric ton, reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations by just 1 part per million would cost about $780 billion. The atmosphere’s CO2 concentration is now about 420 parts per million – well above the 350 level at which scientists believe we can limit global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. So major technological breakthroughs are needed to make carbon capture a truly useful tool. Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory recently discovered a new technique for capturing carbon produced at power plants costs just $39 per metric ton—the most cost-effective yet found in a peer-reviewed journal. Report is cheap.

What are the downsides?

Some scientists and environmentalists argue that carbon capture may deviate from the goal of reducing emissions and provide an “out” to energy companies who want to continue burning fossil fuels. Oil and gas companies actually lobbied for carbon-capture funding to be included in the 2021 infrastructure bill. Plus, the carbon-capture process itself generates emissions. A 2019 study found that widespread carbon capture would only reduce Earth’s net emissions by 10 to 11% after taking into account the energy used to capture carbon. With the construction of new pipelines to transport CO2 comes environmental and safety risks. “If you’re doing very little towards emissions mitigation, carbon dioxide removal doesn’t make sense,” said Glenn Peters of Norway’s Center for International Climate Research.

So why do this?

Most scientists agree that it will be incredibly difficult to reach safe levels of carbon in the atmosphere without using carbon capture. Shifting to renewable energy sources alone may not be enough. The two projects funded by Biden’s investment are expected to abate more than 2 million metric tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of eliminating about 500,000 gas cars. The International Energy Agency says carbon capture could eventually reduce global CO2 emissions by about a fifth and reduce the total cost of mitigating climate change by up to 70%. “There is no 100% solution,” said Howard Herzog of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative. “We need a lot of 10 and 20% solutions, and this is one of them.”

geoengineering capability

Two other geoengineering ideas are gaining attention: weather modification and solar radiation modification. Weather modification, also known as cloud seeding, involves adding microscopic particles of silver iodide to the atmosphere to promote snow and rain, alleviating severe drought. More than 40 projects are already underway in the US, and another 200 are in the works. In solar radiation models, reflective aerosols can be sprayed into the upper atmosphere as a “reflective blanket” to reduce the amount of radiation that reaches Earth by about 1%. This technique, which would mimic the situation when large volcanic eruptions cool the planet, has not yet been tried. Skeptics warn that artificially reducing sunlight reaching the ground risks unpredictable consequences, such as altering rainfall patterns or causing unwanted weather changes in other parts of the world. There are also national security concerns: A government could weaponize the technology to alter an opponent’s environment. Still scientists are studying on this. “We really need to be open to recognizing that some types of approaches that are loaded with downsides should still be considered,” said Chris Field of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. That’s because the choices are dire.

This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more of this, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine Here,

Source: theweek.com

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