Trying to capture carbon

Carbon capture or sequestration is an existing technology that works in a limited way. In the North Sea Norwegian oil has some of its carbon dioxide content sequestrated before the oil reaches the refineries, but I cannot imagine how it will be possible to remove carbon from fuel, because the carbon that is released by burning (such as when you burn a hydrocarbon) is an essential part of the fuel.

 

However it has been possible to remove carbon dioxide from the air. This is regularly done in closed environments such as submarines and space shuttles. These carbon scrubbers usually use lithium hydroxide which reacts with carbon dioxide. Some fruit shops (and home growers of the cannabis genus) use activated carbon arranged in tubes which collect carbon dioxide emitted by fruit and plants, so in several ways carbon dioxide can be extracted from the air.

 

Trying to do this on a large scale is the holy grail of all carbon capture research. In Tucson, Arizona Global Research Technologies is experimenting with its own liquid which it has designed to be effective at removing carbon dioxide. The company has designed in fact two products that work together. The proprietary liquid collects the carbon dioxide – the scrubbing part of the operation – from the air onto a membrane and then a separator washes the carbon dioxide off the membrane where it is collected.

 

What happens next to the carbon dioxide? At the moment there is a market for carbon dioxide but only about 80 million tonnes a year throughout the world and the scrubbers would be an expensive way to source it compared with traditional method which is to capture it when large scale combustion takes place.

 

Global Research Technology think that in about five years time one of their scrubbers will look like a small tower, around twelve metres high, and one of those could capture a tonne of carbon dioxide each year at an initial cost of around £120 per tonne, but the cost will fall with economies of scale. If they are right we could stabilise carbon dioxide emissions at the present level by some 250,000 devices

 

There are limited uses for the captured carbon dioxide. Scientists think underground storage might work and using the carbon dioxide (as the oil industry is beginning to) as a means of extracting oil and gas instead of using sea water) would be a promising way to get the carbon dioxide underground.

 

There is still a massive way to go with all the aspects of this research; we do not know whether Global Research will actually get the scrubbers into commercial production, or the environmental downside of them, or the environmental and health risks that might be associated with large underground carbon dioxide storage.

 

Nevertheless Global Research Technologies is a good example of the way in which people are trying to solve the problems that they have created. They were founded in 2004 with money from the Gary Comer Foundation and since then have been spending the start up money they received in trying to invent a large scale carbon sequestrator.  

 

No doubt if they get close to a product which works a whole host of organisations and people will try and jump on their bandwagon.  If this happens it is worth remembering that the carbon sequestration would have happened, not as a result of government funding or grandiose sounding initiatives but as a result of people with an idea persuading other people who have money to invest in their idea.