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Carbon Capture Booming | Earth Wise

November 24, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

For the world to reach a state of net-zero emissions, it is going to require more than the ongoing transition to renewable energy sources. There will also need to be efforts to capture the emissions from sources that can’t easily eliminate their pollution. These include steel mills, cement plants, and other industrial sites. At least for the foreseeable future, a number of essential industries have no other viable path to deep decarbonization, and carbon capture and storage projects are the only promising strategy on hand.

Companies use CCS to filter emissions from fossil fuel power plants and industrial facilities and then bury the captured carbon underground, often in deep caverns.

Over the past 12 months, the pipeline for carbon capture and storage projects has grown by 44%. This year, firms have announced 61 new CCS projects, bringing the total number of commercial projects in the global pipeline to 196, which includes about 30 that are already in operation. Another 11 are under construction, and 153 are in development.

When all of these projects are completed, they will have the capacity to capture a total of about 270 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. Estimates are that there need to be 1,400 million tons locked away each year to reach zero-emissions. So, the existing project pipeline constitutes about 20% of what is ultimately needed.

The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act boosts tax incentives for carbon capture. Analysts believe this could multiply U.S. deployment of the technology more than 10-fold. Globally, it is expected that CCS will continue its rapid growth as countries ramp up investments in the technology.

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Carbon Capture Projects See Meteoric Growth in 2022

Photo, posted August 22, 2022, courtesy of Nenad Stojkovic via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Plants Paying For Biofuels | Earth Wise

May 7, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Biofuels are an important element in broader strategies to replace petroleum in transportation fuels like gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. The idea is that biofuels recycle carbon by getting it from growing plants rather than from fossil sources. The biggest problem with biofuels is that they cost more than conventional petroleum fuels, so there is economic incentive to keep burning the fossil fuels.

One strategy to make biofuels cost competitive is to have the plants provide additional economic benefits beyond being a feedstock for fuel. This in principle can be done by engineering plants to produce valuable chemical compounds, or bioproducts, as they grow. Bioproducts include such things as flavoring agents and fragrances as well as biodegradable plastic. These bioproducts can be extracted from the plants and then the remaining plant material can be converted to fuel.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently published a study to determine what quantities of bioproducts plants need to produce to result in cost-effective biofuel production.

The study looked at a compound called limonene, which is used for flavoring and fragrance. They calculated that if this compound was accumulated at 0.6% of the biomass dry weight, it would offer net economic benefits to biorefineries. This corresponds to recovering 130 pounds of limonene from 10 tons of sorghum on an acre of land.

Such quantities are completely practical but, on the other hand, none of these substances are needed in huge quantities. Just six refineries could supply the world with limonene. So, fuel crops would need to be engineered to produce a broad range of bioproducts to enable a viable cost-effective biofuel industry.

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Making Biofuels Cheaper by Putting Plants to Work

Photo, posted September 28, 2019, courtesy of Michele Dorsey Walfred via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Carbon Capture As Big Business

December 26, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere is an essential part of the overall effort to achieve zero net carbon emissions and stabilize the climate. Since we have not been able to reduce emissions fast enough to do the job, it is important to find ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

There are many ways to do it, but they tend to be rather expensive and, so far, the need to mitigate climate change does not seem to provide sufficient incentive. A new study by researchers at UCLA, the University of Oxford, and five other institutions, analyzed the possibility of creating a large global industry based on capturing carbon dioxide and turning it into commercial products.

The study investigated the potential future scale and cost of 10 different ways to use carbon dioxide, including in fuels and chemicals, plastics, building materials, soil management, and forestry. The study looked at processes using carbon dioxide captured from waste products that are produced by burning fossil fuels as well as by simply capturing it directly from the atmosphere. The study also looked at processes that use carbon dioxide captured biologically by photosynthesis.

The conclusions of the study were that on average each of the ten utilization pathways could use about half a billion tons of carbon dioxide that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere. Thus, theoretically, these various pathways could take more than five billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Currently, fossil fuel combustion emits about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

The authors of the study stress that there is no silver bullet in the fight against climate change. It will require multiple approaches – including CO2 removal for industrial use – to make real progress

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Carbon dioxide capture and use could become big business

Photo, posted September 18, 2015, courtesy of Tony Webster via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Designing Plastic To Fall Apart

September 17, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In the 1940s and 1950s, synthetic polymers became very popular. These man-made materials were designed to be cheap and durable and soon began replacing metals and glass in everything from automobiles and airplanes to bottles and dishes.

An Internal Price On Carbon

December 11, 2017 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

As the world looks to reduce carbon emissions, many companies are dealing with paying for their carbon emissions as part of the cost of doing business. But apart from the situations in which companies already are required to pay for their carbon emissions, a growing number of companies now build carbon pricing into their business plans even if they are not yet directly paying for their emissions. This practice is known as putting an internal price of carbon into their business plan.