I fail to see how any company can make money at this, but since they recently started operations, here it is…
The largest operational direct air capture facility, and second largest in the world, now sits in northern Oklahoma. Called Bantam, Heimdal Inc.’s project will capture and remove up to 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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In the above paragraph, I assume they are talking about 5,000 tons per year. That is infinitesimally small compared to total US fossil fuel CO2 emissions, which were 4.8 billion metric tons last year. But I guess this is just a demonstration plant to prove the technology, or something. To repeat, I see no way for a company to make money at this, with the possible exception of large government subsidies available. Ethanol makers, for instance, produce and capture CO2 as a by-product of the fermentation and distillation process. This Oklahoma DAC project must have its eye on big government subsidies in order to make a business plan.
Demonstration plants are not built for making money - they are built for proving a technology. All the small modular reactors (SMR) will go through building demonstration plants that are not going to make any money.
Nuscale, TerrraPower, Westinghouse AP300, BWRX-300, Kairos Power and many other SMRs may need to build demonstration plants for their new technology. These demonstration plants will not be built for making money.
That remains to be seen, but regardless, SMRs are generally power plants. Power plants generate and sell electricity. Electricity has a value that people are willing to pay for.
Who is going to buy the CO2 from this DAC plant? Some soft drink maker who needs to put some fizz in the Dr. Pepper? That just releases the CO2 back into the air where it came from. Are they going to sell the CO2 to some oil driller who wants to use the gas for enhanced oil recovery from its wells? That just produces more fossil fuels that will be burned to produce even more CO2.
It doesn’t matter the scale, whether it is 5000 tons a year, or 500,000 tons. Again, who is going to buy that CO2 and for what purpose?
Cap & Trade schemes are government mandated artificial markets that would never exist, if it wasn’t for government interference in commerce, which forces companies to buy and sell something they otherwise would never have done. Even if it were a legitimate market with willing buyers and willing sellers, what is the current price of a ton of CO2? How much does it cost for this DAC plant to produce a ton of CO2? It sure doesn’t seem like a moneymaker to me.
Uneducated guess - as actual fees get levied against big net CO2 producers, a portion of those fees (would/should) get funneled to this carbon capture industry for operational expenses.
Because, for just one thing, that carbon needs to be injected into blocks/dirt/cement/something and “buried” or shot into space or some damn thing, and that too is expensive.
In the article (which wasn’t very well written) they were talking about cap and trade system. That’s a very cost effective way to reduce emissions because it provides financial incentives for those actors who can cheaply reduce emissions to do so, even beyond regulatory requirements.
A good example was a cap and trade system was used to reduce NOx and SOx in the 1990s. Emissions targets were met faster and cheaper than anticipated.
Current international scenarios for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees by the end of the century rely on technologies that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Earth’s atmosphere faster than humans release it…
However, estimates for the speed at which these technologies can be deployed have been highly speculative. Now, findings from a new study led by Imperial College London researchers show that existing projections are unlikely to be feasible at the current rate of growth…
Co-author Dr Samuel Krevor, also from Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: "Although storing between six to 16 gigatonnes of CO2 per year to tackle climate change is technically possible, these high projections are much more uncertain than lower ones. This is because there are no existing plans from governments or international agreements to support such a large-scale effort…
In particular, the analysis suggests that projections from IPCC reports for Asian countries including China, Indonesia and South Korea, where current development is low, assumed unrealistic rates of deployment – which means existing projections are unlikely and unreliable.
Given that some emissions are very, very difficult to eliminate and others require large amounts of cash and/or society changes, then carbon capture (if feasible) make sense. The IPCC and others say that it is a requirement to reach net zero.
Someone once said “a journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step”. Take all the money that would be spent on corralling the carbon, after it has been emitted, and use the money to prevent the carbon being emitted in the first place.
Fine, but you still wouldn’t get to the goal line.
Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential to meet the Paris Agreement’s looming climate targets, according to a major report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s all but impossible to achieve net-zero carbon emissions —the key to halting global warming—without sucking massive amounts of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere …