Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun’s rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet.
Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels.
The UN says the targets are way off track and will not be met simply by reducing emissions for example from factories or cars — particularly after US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 pact.
Illustration: Lance Liu
They are pushing for other ways to keep temperatures down.
In the countryside near Zurich, Switzerland, Climeworks in May began to suck greenhouse gases from thin air with giant fans and filters in a US$23 million project that it calls the world’s first “commercial carbon dioxide capture plant.”
Worldwide, “direct air capture” research by a handful of companies, such as Climeworks, has gained tens of millions of dollars in recent years from sources including governments, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the European Space Agency.
If buried underground, vast amounts of greenhouse gases extracted from the air are predicted to help reduce global temperatures, a radical step beyond cuts in emissions that are the main focus of the Paris agreement.
Climeworks says it now costs about US$600 to extract a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air and the plant’s full capacity due by the end of the year is only 900 tonnes per year. That is equivalent to the annual emissions of only 45 Americans.
Climeworks sells the gas, at a loss, to nearby greenhouses as a fertilizer to grow tomatoes and cucumbers, and has a partnership with automaker Audi, which hopes to use carbon in “greener” fuels.
Jan Wurzbacher, director and founder of Climeworks, says the company has planet-altering ambitions by cutting costs to about US$100 per tonne and capturing 1 percent of global human-generated carbon emissions a year by 2025.
“Since the Paris agreement, the business substantially changed,” he said, with a shift in investor and shareholder interest away from industrial uses of carbon to curbing climate change.
However, penalties for factories, power plants and cars to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are low or non-existent. It costs 5 euros (US$5.82) per tonne in the EU.
Isolating carbon dioxide is complex, because the gas makes up just 0.04 percent of the air. Pure carbon dioxide delivered by trucks for use in greenhouses or to make drinks fizzy costs up to about US$300 per tonne in Switzerland.
Other companies involved in direct air capture include Carbon Engineering in Canada, Global Thermostat in the US and Skytree in the Netherlands, a spinoff of the European Space Agency originally set up to find ways to filter out carbon dioxide breathed out by astronauts in spacecrafts.
The Paris agreement seeks to limit a rise in world temperatures this century to less than 2°C, ideally 1.5°C above pre-industrial times.
However, UN data show that current plans for cuts in emissions will be insufficient, especially without the US, and that the world will have to switch to net “negative emissions” this century by extracting carbon from the ecosphere.
Riskier “geoengineering” solutions could be a backstop, such as dimming the world’s sunshine, dumping iron into the oceans to soak up carbon, or trying to create clouds.
Among new university research, a Harvard geoengineering project into dimming sunlight to cool the planet set up last year has raised US$7.5 million from private donors. It plans a first outdoor experiment above Arizona next year.
“If you want to be confident to get to 1.5 degrees [Celcius] you need to have solar geoengineering,” said David Keith, of Harvard.
Keith’s team aims to release about 1kg of sun-dimming material, perhaps calcium carbonate, from a high-altitude balloon above Arizona next year in a tiny experiment to see how it affects the microphysics of the stratosphere.
“I don’t think it’s science fiction ... to me it’s normal atmospheric science,” he said.
Some research has suggested that geoengineering with sun-dimming chemicals, for instance, could affect global weather patterns and disrupt vital monsoons.
Many experts say that pinning hopes on any technology to fix climate change is a distraction from cuts in emissions blamed for heating the planet.
“Relying on big future deployments of carbon-removal technologies is like eating lots of dessert today, with great hopes for liposuction tomorrow,” Christopher Field, a Stanford University professor of climate change, wrote in May.
Jim Thomas of ETC Group in Canada, which opposes climate engineering, said direct-air capture could create “the illusion of a fix that can be used cynically or naively to entertain policy ideas such as ‘overshoot’” of the Paris goals.
However, governments face a dilemma. Average surface temperatures are said to be about 1°C above pre-industrial levels.
“We’re in trouble,” said Janos Pasztor, head of the new Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Project. “The question is not whether or not there will be an overshoot, but by how many degrees and for how many decades.”
Faced with hard choices, many experts say that extracting carbon from the atmosphere is among the less risky options.
Leaders of major economies, except Trump, said at a summit in Germany this month that the Paris accord was “irreversible.”
Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at Oxford University, said solar geoengineering projects seemed “barking mad.”
By contrast, he said “carbon dioxide removal is challenging technologically, but deserves investment and trial.”
The most natural way to extract carbon from the air is to plant forests that absorb the gas as they grow, but that would divert vast tracts of land from farming. Another option is to build power plants that burn wood and bury the carbon dioxide released.
Carbon Engineering, set up in 2009 with support from Gates and Murray Edwards, chairman of oil and gas group Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, has raised about US$40 million and extracts about a tonne of carbon dioxide per day with turbines and filters.
“We’re mainly looking to synthesize fuels” for markets such as California with high carbon prices, said Geoffrey Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering.
However, he said that “the Paris agreement helps” with longer-term options of sucking large amounts from the air.
Among other possible geoengineering techniques are to create clouds that reflect sunlight back into space, perhaps by using a mist of sea spray.
That might be used locally, for instance, to protect the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, said Kelly Wanser, principal director of the US-based Marine Cloud Brightening Project.
Among new ideas, Wurzbacher at Climeworks is sounding out investors on what he says is the first offer to capture and bury 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air, for US$500 per tonne.
That might appeal to a company wanting to be on forefront of a new “green” technology, he said, even though it makes no apparent economic sense.
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