Scientists Create Device to Remove Carbon Directly from the Air
Scientists from the University of Calgary in Canada have created a method to efficiently capture carbon dioxide directly from the air around us. The device, which is built on near-commercial technology, was built by Uof C climate change scientists David Keith and his team.
“At first thought, capturing CO2 from the air where it’s at a concentration of 0.04 per cent seems absurd, when we are just starting to do cost-effective capture at power plants where CO2 produced is at a concentration of more than 10 per cent,” says Keith, Canada Research Chair in Energy and Environment.
“But the thermodynamics suggests that air capture might only be a bit harder than capturing CO2 from power plants. We are trying to turn that theory into engineering reality.”
Technology for reducing the levels of carbon dioxide have advanced in the last 18 months, focusing on capturing carbon directly from the production and immediately burying it. Keith’s device, however, does not require any proximity to the production of the harmful greenhouse gasses. This technology is especially helpful in the removal of emissions made by transportation sources, such as airplanes and cars.
Director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy’s (ISEEE) Energy and Environmental Systems Group and a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, Keith is heralded by his peers as a scientist looking to the future.
“While it’s important to get started doing things we know how to do, like wind power nuclear power and ‘regular’ carbon capture and storage, it’s also vital to start thinking about radical new ideas and approaches to solving this problem.”
“David Keith’s vision and originality are key factors in our ranking this year as the top engineering school in Canada for sustainability initiatives, both in terms of research and curriculum,” says Elizabeth Cannon, Dean of the Schulich School of Engineering. “Leaders like this are not commonplace, and we are proud to get behind this kind of leadership at the Schulich School.”
Keith explains just how this technology could be used by companies across the globe: “A company could, in principle, contract with an oilsands plant near Fort McMurray to remove CO2 from the air and could build its air capture plant wherever it’s cheapest – China, for example – and the same amount of CO2 would be removed.”
In a recent test, Keith and his team demonstrated that they could capture CO2 directly from the air, using less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity, and capture the equivalent of about 20 tons per year of CO2 on a single square meter of scrubbing material. “This means that if you used electricity from a coal-fired power plant, for every unit of electricity you used to operate the capture machine, you’d be capturing 10 times as much CO2 as the power plant emitted making that much electricity,” Keith says.
And though this technology is in its early stages, and relatively expensive – despite being comparable to carbon capture and storage technologies – the relative simplicity of the device and scalable technology will see the technology flourish over the next few years with commercial input.
Image: University of Calgary
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September 30th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Wow, those scientists are some seriously smart folk arent they? http://www.anonweb.eu.tc
September 30th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Um, I think something like this carbon-removal device was invented a few millenia ago… what was it called… oh yeah! TREES!
September 30th, 2008 at 10:06 am
What is the principle behind this technology? I got none of that out of this article.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Dont we already have energy efficient carbon capture technology? Plants anyone?
September 30th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Let’s remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere and watch everything die. If we’re not taxed to death first.
Crazy… Lol
September 30th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Since when is CO2 a “harmful” gas? If I remember correctly from the most basic science courses taught in elementary school, CO2 forms the basis of all plant life on the planet…? Sounds pretty dangerous to me
September 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Personally, I’d like to see us be able to get back to pre-industrial revolution levels, then maintain those levels. I don’t think that’s absurd or beyond our ability.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I’ve got a machine in my back yard that does the same thing. It’s called a forest.
September 30th, 2008 at 11:20 am
This is great news. Congratulations to David Keith and his team. What is needed now is ultra rapid implementation of these devices.
September 30th, 2008 at 11:22 am
It is the consensus of tens of thousands of scientists that global warming is caused by increasing sunspot activity, not CO2.
September 30th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Talk about overcompensation. How about plant life? Well, it sounds like it could be a feasible short-term solution, until we wake up and change our lifestyles. But burying it? Sounds too familiar. Bury everything, including the truth.
September 30th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
There’s no concensus on climate change. 20 years ago climatologists were just as worried about global cooling.
Let’s imagine that they were stupid enough try and geoengineer the planet warmer. Now let’s imagine that the current crop of scientists are just as wrong.
September 30th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/AirCapture.html provides more techincal details about the device. The photo in this article is not the most recent example, so the site is worth viewing to see where things are now.
September 30th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Send these to Venus. Then send the captured CO2 to Mars. Now we have three habitable planets.
September 30th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
….But plants Take in CO2 during the day and pump some out at night (Photosynthesis –> Respiration)
CO2 in the air is not only a greenhouse gas its also an acidic oxide which can harm the environment over a prolonged period
October 1st, 2008 at 10:38 pm
the excess co2 is being taken up by the oceans.
this is keeping the air from becoming excessively over co2 saturated. the down side is the PH of the oceans is moving towards being more acidic.lots of the life in the ocean are not tolerant of these conditions.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:27 am
but plants also make co2 at night don´t forget this.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Yes, plants are a desirable way to perform this function. They are autonomous and use solar energy.
However, plants are also used for other things as natural resources, can be inefficient in their use of land and sunlight, and their effectiveness can be hard to control, predict, and otherwise measure.
A machine is a solution that can provide the benefits of plants while mitigating their downfalls, and can be financed by the taxation of deforestation and production of carbon dioxide.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Put This Fire Out! This place in Uzbekistan is called by locals “The Door to Hell”. It is situated near the small town of Darvaz. burning, already for 35 years without any pause. Nobody knows how many tons of excellent gas has been burned, C02 produced?
http://englishrussia.com/?p=1830
Next: Tackle the underground coal fires in the U.S.A.! Now, with the playing field leveled somewhat, get Americans out of airplanes, and the Europeans too! get them on bio-diesel driven rail systems! Stop fossil fuel fires the world over! Stop lies for unfair profits about refrigeration for example! a Solar fridge using compressed gazes only is entirely possible and practical examples exist, but we continue to use fossil fuel driven electric motors for this essential service! Why? Natural Gas can be made synthetically from water and CO2 and solar/wind/geothermal energy utilizing the long know Sabatier process! We don’t develop it? Why? Cut-throat, unregulated, vulture capitalism and corporations as defined by U.S. law – that is why! When the bottom line is more important to the sociopath corporate powers, even resource waste is sanctified by its effect on the bottom line! In Canada, for example, our government in cahoots with corporations incinerated pigs, after buying them at cost from the farmers, to maintain market price for the “corporations” involved, while the food banks ran on empty – this is a fact of capitalistic societies, and happened in Ontario Canada last year! North Americans insist on using the old British 18th century designed “Crapper” toilet, and sending this valuable resource flow into rivers, lakes, and ocean shorelines where it does greater damage to the ecology, produces copious amounts of C02 as it degrades and is lost. So much for our sensitives, a better way is to use dry toilets, as in Sweden, then bio-gas the resource flow, sell the bio-gas for running cars, cooking gas, et. al. and irradiating the sludge for a valuable, safe, free fertilizer product for gardens! Lots of C02 saved, recycled, and reused. Reclaiming a resource flow, recycling it, reusing its bi-products, and in perpetuity – or like the socially unacceptable reality a “Perpetual” source of goods for free! But we shvt all over anyway, and we know this! Maybe someone from China will read this and they will get the jump on us and do better, setting an example for us black and white boneheads! I hope so! In the mean time, try to eat less beef, more veggies, fish, pork and chicken, they produce less bio-gases and 600 Billion Chinamen can’t be that far wrong, can they!
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Good luck with that machine but removing CO2 is not the point of the global warming controversy, it is removing wealth from industrialized nations. You might as well try to provide free electricity to the world and you will get the same response. I just wonder if we were going into an ice age would scientist recommend increased burning of fossil fuels to “balance” the CO2 levels to historical norms.