◎ Science and Technology Daily reporter Liu Xia
Elon musk, CEO of SpaceX, recently announced on Twitter that he plans to spend $100 million to set up the "Best Carbon Capture Technology" award.
Julio Friedman, a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy of Columbia University, told CNBC: "Musk’s move reflects the growing maturity of the private sector in the field of climate change and investment."
For many years, due to the high cost, carbon capture technology has not taken off. However, many scientists have been working hard to improve carbon capture technology and find other uses for the collected carbon dioxide.
Since the advent of carbon capture technology in the 1970s, it has been highly hoped that it can help curb the increasingly severe climate change trend. Image source: vision china
The world needs more carbon capture projects.
Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) technology refers to capturing carbon dioxide waste discharged from refineries or factories and power plants from the source and then storing it, with the purpose of removing potential harmful by-products from the environment and alleviating climate change. In addition, CCUS also includes capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air. The International Energy Agency, headquartered in Paris, France, said that capturing carbon from the air rather than from factory chimneys is called "direct air capture".
Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer in energy planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Carbon Capture, told CNBC that the earliest CCUS technology was used to improve oil recovery-pumping carbon dioxide into oil fields to help oil companies retrieve more oil from the ground.
It was not until 1980s that people began to study the mitigation of climate change by carbon capture technology. Then, in the 1990s, carbon capture projects increased day by day. According to the data provided by the International Energy Agency, from 1972 to now, there are 21 CCUS commercial projects in operation all over the world, aiming at capturing carbon dioxide from waste discharged by factories.
For example, Archer Daniels Midland, a food processing giant in Illinois, started a CCUS project in 2017, which can extract 1.1 million tons of carbon from corn processing plants every year and store it one and a half miles underground.
The agency said that since 2017, 30 new projects have been launched around the world, but more projects are still needed to prevent carbon emissions from raising the earth’s temperature by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with the pre-industrial level.
Different ways to reduce costs
Scientists have been working hard to improve the existing carbon capture technology to reduce the related costs.
Paitoon Ton, a professor of industrial and process systems engineering at the Canadian Academy of Engineering and co-founder of university of regina Institute of Clean Energy Technology, told CNBC: "In the past 10 years, CCUS has made many innovations and improvements. The new carbon capture process can save more energy and up to 70% of the cost, including new solvents (and their mixtures) and new process hardware (such as new towers and catalysts)."
Baehrend Schmidt, a professor of chemistry and biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has been focusing on how to find the best materials to capture carbon.
For example, he is studying how to use a sponge that "has a strong adsorption capacity for carbon dioxide". He said: "If we let air flow through this sponge, this sponge will’ suck up’ carbon dioxide. Then, we heat this sponge, let pure carbon dioxide run out and store it, and the sponge can be reused. "
Find a place for carbon dioxide
Also optimistic about CCUS technology is Microsoft. A year ago, Microsoft announced that it would invest $1 billion to set up a fund to invest in "carbon emission reduction, capture and removal technologies". Direct air capture startups such as Climeworks, Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat have all received at least tens of millions of dollars in investment.
Other companies are also trying to convert the collected carbon dioxide into other more valuable items.
For example, LanzaTech Company of the United States has developed a technology that can capture the discharged waste gas and use bacteria to convert it into usable ethanol fuel.
Swiss startup Climeworks specializes in direct air capture. The company uses filters to capture carbon dioxide from the air and store it or use it for other purposes, such as fertilizer and even adding bubbles in carbonated drinks.
Canadian Carbon Engineering Company is also committed to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and treating it to improve oil recovery and even make new synthetic fuels.
Although CCUS technology has many benefits, the high cost has always been the main obstacle to the rapid development of this technology. In addition to using more advanced technology to reduce the cost of carbon capture, pricing carbon is also a policy issue that scientists pay attention to. Schmidt believes: "The best carbon capture technology can reduce the cost, but the cost will never be zero. If the whole world is unwilling to price carbon, even the best carbon capture technology is useless. "
Source: Science and Technology Daily
Original title: "The cost is too high to attack for a long time, and carbon capture technology needs to be broken."
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