Carbon capture: Growing pains for a new industry
Carbon capture is part of the future. It will happen and indeed is already happening. It’s pretty common sense stuff. If there is CO2 in the air that is contributing to global climate change why not get to the business of pulling it back out of the atmosphere? Simply extract it and then inject the inert carbon back into the Earth whence it came.
Of course the details are a bit tricky. Until very recently it hadn’t been done. Carbon capture is also currently very expensive. There are issues around the environmental impact of the carbon capture facilities themselves. There are issues around how such facilities are funded. For some there are ethical issues around pursuing a technology that may divert resources from more traditional carbon mitigation efforts.
In the attached article Inside Climate News explores the potential impact of carbon capture tech in rural Wyoming, a state that supplies 40% of US coal.
Some people in Rock Springs (the town profiled in the piece) lament the passing of coal as a way of life. Some people fear that the new carbon capture plant called “Project Bison” will impact grazing and wildlife. Still others are cautiously optimistic as Project Bison will mean an infusion of jobs into an area that is losing them.
But everyone knows that change is afoot and that there is money backing this change.
(From Inside Climate News)
A California-based start-up, CarbonCapture said it has secured enough private investment to begin work next year on the Wyoming plant, although it still needs to receive state and local permits. Rather than attaching to a coal plant, this project would pull carbon dioxide out of ambient air by passing it through giant fans fitted with a chemical sorbent, which traps the CO2. The sorbent is then heated to release the gas for compression before being reused.
Project Bison would initially capture 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, but the company said it plans to expand to reach a capacity of 5 million metric tons by 2030. That higher figure would be orders of magnitude above what any company has achieved so far, yet roughly equal to the emissions of one coal power plant, or less than 0.1 percent of total U.S. emissions of nearly 6 billion metric tons in 2020.
The operations would be financed by selling carbon credits to corporations seeking to offset their own emissions. The company said it has already sold credits at $800 per ton to Cloverly, a carbon-offset marketer, and to CO2.com, a new carbon offset venture of TIME, the magazine owned by the billionaire Marc Benioff.