One method for combating harmful CO2 emissions in the environment is to suck it right out of the air. Climate journalist Alec Luhn joins host Krys Boyd to discuss “direct air capture,” the challenges for pulling it off, and why it could offer an excuse for some of our biggest polluters to go on polluting. His article in Scientific American is “Can Pulling Carbon from Thin Air Slow Climate Change?”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] It is possible to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in a place where it can’t do us any harm. This is one reason some carbon credit operations put a lot of new trees in the ground, but as excellent as plants are at sequestering carbon for us, we are still pumping more into the atmosphere faster than all the flora on the planet can handle. If human made machines and the fuel they require are largely responsible for generating greenhouse gases, could we make different machines to remove those gases? From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Amazingly, the technology already exists and the chemistry that enables what is called direct air capture of excess CO2 is actually not all that complicated. Its biggest champions think these systems could be deployed to at least slow the pace of global warming or even to possibly help pull global temperatures down within our lifetimes. It’s a very hopeful idea, but it is not yet a sure thing. And the reasons why are worth looking into. Alec Luhn is a climate journalist. His article “Can Pulling Carbon from Thin Air Slow Climate Change Appears in Scientific American.” Alec, welcome to Think.
Alec Luhn [00:01:12] Hey, great to be here.
Krys Boyd [00:01:14] This is pretty remarkable. The chemistry required to do this is simple enough that an 11 year old who happens to have a parent who is a nuclear physicist, but a kid worked out the basics in 1997.
Alec Luhn [00:01:27] That’s right. I mean, the caveat, I guess, is this was in Los Alamos near Los Alamos National Laboratories. So the the school science fairs there, you know, everyone was a scientist kid, the school science fairs that were very intense, I was told. But nonetheless, yeah, this is simple science. Basically, this daughter of a scientist put a put some some sodium carbonate into a test tube and bubbled air through it with a fish aquarium pump and managed to capture the 10% of the CO2 from that air. And so that got her dad thinking about what if we did this on a massive scale to capture CO2 from the atmosphere.
Krys Boyd [00:02:11] So her father, Klaus Lackner, wrote a scientific paper later making the case that this could work and slow down the speed of climate change if we could scale it up enough.
Alec Luhn [00:02:22] Yeah, that’s right. He was he was concerned early on about how much fuel humanity was using and how CO2 concentrations were increasing from that. You know, this was back before climate change was really on the agenda in the 90s. But he was already aware of, you know, that this was a physics problem, that we were adding so much CO2, the atmosphere and it was going to warm the planet. There was no end in sight to humanity’s insatiable appetite for energy, which we’re seeing even nowadays with the with the boom in AI, which is driving up energy demand even more. So yeah, emissions have yet to start coming down, despite all the efforts which may have helped slow the growth of emissions. But they’ve yet to come down. And so that’s part of the reason why scientists are increasingly saying that we’re backed into a corner here. And in addition to cutting our emissions, we’re going to have to remove some emissions from the atmosphere after they’ve already been put up there.
Krys Boyd [00:03:21] So this technology is called direct air capture. When Klaus Lackner first founded a company to do this back in 2007, what sort of devices were they producing?
Alec Luhn [00:03:33] So they had a device they were using is called a moisture swing technology. They basically found some interesting industrial materials for a different purpose that had an interesting quality, which was that they and they’re based on amines, which are ammonia based compound. And they had this interesting property where they would absorb CO2 from air, from the air. And then when they were made wet, when they were moistened, they would release that that CO2 again. So essentially, he set up a couple. He put a bunch of these sheets of this material, amine material in a box, basically a big, you know, like a like a wardrobe almost with clear glass doors on it. And when the doors swung open, the the air would come in and the CO2 would bind to these amines and be basically stuck to these to these sheets of this substance. And then when the doors swung shut, they could pump some water vapor in there and that would moisten the sheets and allow the CO2, the CO2 would come off them and then be they could suck it into tanks and sequester it. They could suck it. They could essentially take the CO2 out of the air that way. And, you know, there’s there’s a couple of different ways to do that. But but essentially, yeah, the chemistry is is such that in all these methods basically a material bonds with the CO2 in the air takes it out of the air and then the device will then release that CO2 into a tank essentially.
Krys Boyd [00:05:06] Is there a lot of commercial and industrial demand for CO2 or is most of it that gets captured destined for some kind of sequestration?
Alec Luhn [00:05:15] This is the problem is there’s a there’s there’s a certain amount of demand. Obviously, we have CO2 and things like fizzy drinks and there’s a big demand for CO2 actually from the oil industry, which which pumps CO2. In Texas. There’s a lot of this Occidental Petroleum. Other players are pumping CO2 into oil deposits underground. That helps raise the yield raise how much oil you’re getting out of that deposit by up to up to 25%. Essentially, the CO2 moves through the oil deposit, forcing hard to get oil molecules out of tiny pores in the rock. And so there’s demand from that. But yeah, overall, I mean, CO2, we obviously, you know, if you put it in a fizzy drink, let’s say, then as soon as you or I drink it and then burp, that CO2 goes back in the atmosphere. So, so what we need. So basically, yeah, for CO2 to, to put it away underground, take the CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it way underground to make sure it doesn’t get back in the atmosphere. That’s something there’s not really a commercial demand for which which makes this industry difficult. Nobody, nobody really gets that benefit from from paying you, you know, from spending money on putting CO2 underground because we don’t have a price on carbon nationwide at least. So, you know, that’s that’s part of the it’s more like a waste management problem. You know, it’s like trash You put your trash out on the curb and then the city comes and picks it up. You know, the city does that as a service. We use taxpayer dollars to do that because nobody really needs that trash. Nobody’s going to pay you for your trash.
Krys Boyd [00:06:50] When you talk about CO2 being stored underground, what does that mean? Like, how can it be stored in such a way that it cannot leak back out and cause problems with the climate?
Alec Luhn [00:07:00] Well, this is another big point of contention around this whole thing is, you know, some people are worried it can leak back out. And there have been projects where it has leaked back out. Basically, the idea is underground. There are rock layers, right? There’s many different kinds of rocks in the world. And in certain places, including the Gulf Coast, there are these rock layers which were formed eons ago by sediments being brought down by ancient rivers. And that sediment, as it was, as more sediment built on top and it was compressed. It forms sandstone and sandstone is very porous, has all these little pores in it. Those pores are good place to store CO2. And what you want is a layering system where you have sandstone layers and above them is a thicker, less porous rock layer that can cap the the sandstone layer. And in the case of the Gulf Coast, that’s a shale, a shale rock. So you end up in on the Gulf Coast, you have this system where these sandstone layers are punctuated by layers of shale stone. And then in certain areas, you can force the CO2 underground into the sandstone pores. It’ll be moving through the sandstone as a super dense, supercritical almost. It’s a fluid, it’s almost like a liquid rather than a gas at that point because it’s so dense, it’s moving through these pores. And then when it tries to move back up to the surface, you have this cap rock, this shale rock layer, which is impermeable, that caps that CO2 and prevents it from coming back up to the surface. That’s the idea behind this when it works correctly.
Krys Boyd [00:08:43] Setting aside the challenges with scaling all this up, when it became evident that this technology actually could work to capture carbon dioxide out of the air, people got very excited. Richard Branson offered this huge prize for somebody to come up with a commercially viable strategy for removing greenhouse gases. Why was that prize never handed out?
Alec Luhn [00:09:02] I think there is a couple different reasons. One was that it was, you know, a lot of these companies were running into this problem of how do we fund this? How do we get all this money to scale this up? You know, we may be able to do this chemistry on a small scale, but for this to make a dent in the climate, it needs to become one of the biggest industries in the world. We would need to take tens or hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 out of the air, out of the atmosphere. So, I mean, it’s it’s really more of a logistics and engineering problem. And, you know, without a lot of money, it’s hard to figure out how to how to scale that up and make it make sense economically. So that was one issue. Another issue is that people started getting worried about geoengineering interventions meant to change the climate. Right. Obviously we’re changing the climate by by our emissions into the atmosphere. But people get worried when we start doing more of that. Are we going to make the situation worse? People were worried about messing around with the atmosphere. There’s been a lot of ideas about how to do that over the years, and this is seen as as one human intervention in the atmosphere that could have an unintended consequences. That was another that public unease was another reason why why that maybe didn’t get going at that time.
Krys Boyd [00:10:26] So I can understand concerns in the general public about messing with the atmosphere, as you say. Do scientists think this is actually something that we should worry about, that that at least the process of just taking carbon dioxide out of the air might be harmful in some way? We can’t predict yet.
Alec Luhn [00:10:44] I think the process of taking carbon dioxide out of the air is, is at this point, I think, pretty I think people and scientists accept that. I think it’s the unintended consequences around how you do it that really become the bone of contention. So I mean, with with direct air capture these machines, they can take carbon dioxide out of the air, but they use a lot of energy to do that. And so the first question is, you know, where does that energy come from? In the US, 60% of our energy is produced by natural gas, burning natural gas and coal. So you could you, you know, it could be you could be given with one hand, it could be taken with one hand and given with the other. You could be burning coal to power a DAC plant that would take the CO2 out of the air and end up not really having a net benefit because the burning of the coal would put more CO2 in the air. Right. So it’s a question of it’s complicated. You have to really take into consideration all the things around how you’re doing that process. And then there’s also a moral question here. It’s called the moral hazard argument, which is that which is people saying, well, if we know that we can do this, that we can take CO2 out of the atmosphere, then we’re going to be less incentivized to start putting CO2 in the atmosphere. This is going to undercut the urgency of dealing with the climate crisis.
Krys Boyd [00:12:09] I see. Because companies might say, look, we’re polluting a lot, but we’re taking out all the pollutants and therefore we should be allowed to continue operating and extracting fossil fuels.
Alec Luhn [00:12:20] Yeah. So and you know, the biggest investors in direct air capture right now are big tech companies Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Shopify, Stripe and also oil companies, specifically Occidental Petroleum. And so the tech companies, they have these large energy footprints that are growing because of artificial intelligence. The data centers needed to do that. And so they’re but yet they have these net zero plans. So they’re trying to, you know, purchase DAC, basically pay these plans to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for them even as their own CO2 emissions are growing. So they’re saying, well, your CO2 emissions are growing, but we’re pulling it out of the atmosphere elsewhere with these plants. So therefore, we’re getting closer to our net zero goal. Meanwhile, Occidental Petroleum, they use CO2, like I mentioned, to put into oil deposits to get more oil out. And so they’re there. They’re looking for a source of CO2 in some cases there. They’re building a plant to pull CO2 out of the air, which which in the case of their straddles plant in the Permian Basin in Texas is then going to be used to get more oil out of the ground, which is then going to be burned to put more CO2 into the atmosphere. So they’re actually trying to sell what they call net zero oil, with the idea being that, yes, you would burn this oil and produce CO2, but that CO2 would be taken out of the atmosphere by a DAC plant.
Krys Boyd [00:13:53] Alec, the Biden administration has set goals for reducing the amount of CO2 we’re generating each year, but we can’t simply stop adding more, at least with, you know, current essential technologies that rely on on fuels that generate greenhouse gases. So the idea of removing CO2 faster than we can add it is very appealing. This is what’s called negative emissions.
Alec Luhn [00:14:20] Yeah, that’s right. The yeah, the idea is that is that yeah, we’d be pulling CO2 out of the air. We’d be adding in one place, pointed out in another place. But I think, you know, everyone who’s building these direct air capture machines or doing other kinds of carbon dioxide removal, they all emphasize that this is not a replacement for cutting emissions. This is in addition to cutting emissions, because the problem is that, you know, humanity emits 40 billion tons of CO2 every year. The DAC hub in Texas that’s being built is going to remove half a million tons, perhaps up to a million tons of CO2 a year. So at at the moment, you were talking of, you know, right now around the world, only something like 1.3 million tons of carbon dioxide are going to be removed each year. So compare that to 40 billion tons, right? I mean, the scales are just hugely different. So we’re never going to get to removing more than 40 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere given how much energy it takes. So we need to drastically cut that number, bring that 40 billion tons down to say, 5 billion tons of CO2 that we’re emitted each year. And and meanwhile, scaling up the carbon removal techniques like direct air capture to the point and maybe then we can get to the point where direct air capture would be taking out that 5 billion tons each year to get us to net zero.
Krys Boyd [00:15:57] Yeah, I’m hearing all the many caveats that you’re giving us, but pie in the sky, if we could someday achieve negative emissions, we could potentially not just slow down the pace of climate change, we might reverse that a tiny bit.
Alec Luhn [00:16:13] That’s right. So, I mean, if you kept going, if you got two if you reduced emissions and then built enough direct air capture and other types of carbon removal to get us to net zero. But then you kept going. You kept building more direct air capture machines and then you could potentially you’d be taking net negative CO2 out of the atmosphere each year. So the concentration of amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would be declining each year, and that would be essentially turning back the clock on climate change. It would be reversing the effects of climate change to a degree. And this is starting to be talked about seriously because, you know, emissions have yet to fall. Emissions continue to grow each year. They’re growing more slowly than they were, but they’re still growing each year. So this, you know, we’re backing ourselves into a corner where we have less and less time and the and the climate continues to warm. We’re already at 1.1°C, 1.2°C warmer than pre-industrial. So if we want to hit that, if we want to keep that warming below 1.5°C, you know, in the long term, which is what scientists say, after that point, there will be ever more drastic and bad impacts from climate change. Then we’re going to need to overshoot. Temperatures will rise above that 1.5, but then will suck so much carbon out of the atmosphere that they can come back down to 1.5. That’s the goal of the ultimate goal, negative emissions. The big question is can we build that much carbon removal to get there?
Krys Boyd [00:17:58] Well, you explain in the piece that to meet the goals the U.S. has set for 2050, we would need to expand direct air capture capacity by something like 40% a year. Can any combination of stakeholders possibly ramp this up that fast?
Alec Luhn [00:18:16] You know, it’s this is a kind of growth of a technology that has rarely been seen in the world. But it has happened. And and so, you know, one of the one of the examples is solar panels. Solar panels have gotten so cheap, they have essentially come down that cost curve and got around and gotten cheap enough where it’s essentially in most in many places, the world is cheaper to build a solar power plant and developing the other kind of power plant. So that’s the that’s the I the hope that with that that deck, direct air capture and other carbon mobile could get that that cheap by scaling up. The difference though is that solar panels produce energy. They produce something people want. Direct air capture produces CO2 that’s locked underground. It’s not something people want, at least not. And it’s not simply people can make a lot of money off of, at least not not now. So most of the people who are watching this industry are saying that at some point there are going to have to be governments, there’s going to have to be government involvement to require people to take carbon dioxide out of the air. A lot of different ideas how to do that. But the essential idea is that companies, people, emitters who are putting CO2 into the air would need to be required to pay for that or take some of that CO2 out of the air, because otherwise the economics don’t really work out. It’s free to emit as of now in most places, but it cost a lot of money and energy to take that CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
Krys Boyd [00:19:50] Yeah, I want to make sure I understand this because lots of people have heard about companies purchasing carbon credits, but we don’t have cap and trade. So you’re saying essentially that it’s it’s a voluntary system as it exists today in the United States?
Alec Luhn [00:20:07] That’s right. So the big tech companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, these are all companies that are buying that are giving money to direct air capture companies to take carbon dioxide out of the air. They do that. They buy these carbon removal credits from these companies that say, okay, we took a ton of carbon dioxide out of the air. That’s one ton that Microsoft or whoever can cross off their balance sheet and say we’re that much closer to our net zero goal. But that net zero goal that they set is voluntary. Nobody’s going to come after them if they don’t meet that net zero goal. If they don’t make it to net zero because their emissions grew too much. So yes, right now it’s driven by this voluntary carbon market, the voluntary carbon markets. And essentially the only people involved in the voluntary carbon markets at any real scale are companies that have enough money and goodwill and want to kind of burnish their green credentials and do it voluntarily. We’re going to need more than that, experts say, to to really scale up direct air capture. And there are there have been moves. So, for instance, in California, there’s the low carbon fuel standard, which essentially says that each year in California, the emission standards on cars have been strengthened over the years, made more strict. So if you want to sell cars, sell fuel in California, that’s above a certain carbon footprint, then you have to pay a fine, essentially pay a fee to it and buy some carbon credits, essentially to have someone else reduce or remove carbon from the atmosphere. So that’s one model, right? Where where you have companies that they’re producing products that cause emissions, but then they’re having to pay some money into that system to pay to reduce emissions or remove them. In this case, we’re talking, right. So other states are looking at similar compliance markets, they’re called, where you essentially put a price on carbon. And, you know, for now is just California could expand to other states. And I think that if other states start adopting this, putting a price on carbon, that’s when you’ll see that these direct air capture companies can now make money and scale up and start really taking a lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Krys Boyd [00:22:22] Well, in looking at how the economics work out, I’m curious how cost effective is direct air capture compared with older methods of carbon capture like tree planting?
Alec Luhn [00:22:34] That’s the big question, sir, right now. So the goal, though, right, The Biden administration’s goal, the kind of magic number, quote unquote, that’s used in the industry is $100 per ton. That’s what everyone wants to get to. You would pay $100 to remove an entire ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. Right now, it costs about $1,000 to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere through direct air capture. So we’re a long way from it being affordable. Now, what the direct air capture entrepreneurs will tell you is that we can we can get to that cost by scaling up, by building so many direct air capture plants and perfecting the technology, streamlining it so much, bringing costs down through economies of scale. We can make it to $100 per ton. We can reach that goal. But there’s a lot of questions. There was a study that came out last year or earlier this year out of ETH Zurich which found that even at a billion tons, even at that goal that the Biden administration has set, where we’re taking a billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year, even if we get to that scale direct air capture will still cost about $360 per ton of carbon removed. So there’s there’s some doubts whether we can get this down to the the scale that that we that we want to where it would be potentially profitable given tax breaks that the has put into place to remove this stuff from the atmosphere.
Krys Boyd [00:24:10] There are proposals for dozens of direct air capture plants in the United States right now. And as you mentioned earlier, these have become something of a darling of the oil industry.
Alec Luhn [00:24:22] That’s right. There’s bits of a lot of this is one thing we didn’t we talked about the volunteer hours. We can talk about the tax side of it. And that’s a little you know, it gets complicated. But but basically what you need to know is that the government has a tax credit for putting carbon dioxide underground so you can make $180 per ton put in carbon dioxide that was taken out of the earth through direct air capture underground. So that has led some some some different company. So all the direct air captures are companies are looking to do that. Now, what Occidental Petroleum is doing in Texas is very interesting because they are saying they’re essentially trying to do three things. They’re trying to get three different profit out of direct air capture that the directory capture that they’re building. One would be to just sell sell credits, put carbon underground, sell credits that Microsoft, for instance, Amazon would purchase. And they are and Microsoft and Amazon have started purchasing those credits already from Occidental. The second thing would be to get that tax credit. They say we put 100, we put we put a ton of CO2 under the ground. Please give us $180 back off of our off of our taxes. The third thing then would be to add in Occidental’s mind to use some of that CO2 for enhanced oil recovery and sell and be able to sell that oil. So it’s a win win win for Occidental in that in that sense where they’re selling both carbon credits and oil and taking a tax break, which for them seems to make so much sense to make, to be so profitable that they say they’re going to build 130 direct air capture plants. But that gets us back to this moral hazard question where direct air capture, yes. Is taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but it’s also essentially allowing more oil to be extracted and sold and burned to put carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. So it gets very complicated. There’s a lot of carbon accounting that comes into play. But yes, the oil industry sees this as potentially a way for them to to make a couple different revenue streams at the same time.
Krys Boyd [00:26:42] I mean, is it too cynical for me to this sounds like setting up a business by which you break people’s kneecaps and then sell them crutches.
Alec Luhn [00:26:51] Yeah, it’s. It gets very complicated. There’s the carbon counting, but. But you could argue it that way. And I think the question is, is the regulation right? So if. Essentially, if if what it comes down to I think is is. So so basically, people who are paying the oil companies to remove carbon dioxide out of the air will need to either be saying, we’re not going to buy those credits if you’re going to use that carbon dioxide to get more oil out of the ground or we’re not going to give you that tax break if you’re using that carbon dioxide to get more oil out of the ground. That’s not always the case right now. Right now, you can get a tax break or a lesser tax break, $130 per ton just to put the CO2 underground through enhanced oil recovery. So where you would get you would. So they get a tax break for putting the CO2 underground, but they’re getting oil out of it to burn and create more CO2. So that’s not going to be great for the climate that’s going to be more, more or less a net wash for the climate Where you start to get better for the climate is when you have Microsoft and Amazon coming in and saying we’re going to purchase carbon removal credits from Occidental Petroleum, but that those credits cannot be that CO2 cannot be used to get more oil out of the ground, that CO2 has to just be sequestered and that’s it. And so where it gets complicated is, is Occidental Petroleum has said, for instance, they want to get into California’s low carbon fuel standard. So the rules of that, whether they’re allowed into that and the regulations that are put on that are going to be very important, because if California’s low carbon fuel center says, okay, you know, you can just sell credits to people who are not meeting their targets and their emissions targets in California, and whatever credits you want to sell, that’s fine. And if you put CO2 underground to get more oil out and then sell that as a credit, that’s fine. Well, then that’s a net wash for the climate. If, on the other hand, we can strengthen the regulations and say, okay, well, you know, if you put CO2 underground to get oil out. There’s a credit in our market. You can only sell CO2 that you just put underground. Well, then that might make a difference for climate. It is very complicated, very quickly. But essentially it comes down to regulations.
Krys Boyd [00:29:16] Alec, I realize environmentalists don’t all speak with one voice, but what is the general feeling among environmentalists about the potential for this technology?
Alec Luhn [00:29:26] I think there’s a real schism over this technology in the environmental movement where you have I guess I think it comes down to your view of human nature, actually. If you believe that humans will are are going to do the right thing, then you’re probably going to support direct air capture. But if you have a more skeptical view and you say, we can’t trust society to make the right choices, we can’t trust humans to do what’s right for the global good. Then you might have a more skeptical view. This is what I found talking to lots of people across the environmental movement who come down on very different sides. Some environmentalists are very much against direct air capture. They say that that direct air capture is undermining climate action now. But then there are others in the environmental movement who say, well, we’re going to need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. And so these are the technologies that we’re going to need to do it at some point. So we need to start scaling them up.
Krys Boyd [00:30:24] Alec. There are government incentives for carbon capture and removal. Are most of the facilities, though, that are operating direct air capture now run by private enterprise like is the government building any of these facilities for itself anywhere the U.S. government?
Alec Luhn [00:30:43] No, no, it’s not. Direct air capture is being done entirely by private companies, but the government is helping out. So our climate policy under the Biden administration at least, has been it’s been the carrot over the stick. So we don’t have many limits on emissions yet, but we do have we are offering these big incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, under the bipartisan infrastructure law, to all sorts of climate, tech and climate innovation to try to get money into those industries and try to help them grow. Essentially giving government money to private companies that are doing this. And the same thing with direct air capture. The Biden administration is investing $3.5 billion to build at least four direct air capture hubs around the country. The first two are in Louisiana and Texas, and they are going to each remove about a million tons, its hoped, of CO2 from the air each year once they’re fully built. So this is major government spending that’s going to go into this industry to try and help it scale up and get that cost that we talked about, down from about $1,000 per ton of CO2 removed now to hopefully something closer to 100 tons around 2015.
Krys Boyd [00:32:07] So if I understand you correctly, these DAC facilities are mostly being sited near places that are generating a lot of emissions. I wonder, though, I mean, obviously that makes sense. As emissions come out, you just grab them right away and then they don’t spread, but they don’t really stay where we put them. Right. I mean, could these direct your capture plants be placed all over to capture emissions, say, next to a freeway somewhere?
Alec Luhn [00:32:36] They can be placed all over. So Klaus Lochner, the head of who kind of fathered this industry. You know, that was the first press release his company ever released. It said that a direct year capture machine in Iceland could be removing carbon dioxide that was emitted in Bangkok. And that’s essentially what is happening there. One of the biggest the biggest functioning air capture direct facility in the world is located in Iceland now, funnily enough. But the real key for siting a director, a capture plant, you could build it anywhere but the place. It would make sense economically and geologically to build it is somewhere that has those layers of rock that I talked about. So it’s nearby somewhere where we could inject this CO2 underground and it would stay underground, trapped by an impermeable rock layer. So you want that kind of birthday cake of rock layers that you see only in certain places. And the Gulf Coast, Texas and Louisiana is one of the best places for that in the world. You also want somewhere where you’re fairly close to energy. I mentioned direct air capture. It takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of electricity to run these machines. So you want somewhere that’s going to be fairly near to renewable energy sources because, yes, right now most of the grid is fueled by natural gas and coal, but ideally more and more will be fueled by renewable energy. And direct air capture is a climate benefit only when it is powered by renewable energy, because otherwise you’re just burning emissions to create power to then take them out of the air. So that’s why Texas and Louisiana were chosen for these first sites. Those are like I mentioned, the geology is there. It’s also near to solar and wind power. The best solar in the United States is in the southern United States. And then there’s also the factor of a lot of oil and gas workers being around to be hired into this industry. Right. If this industry is going to be growing, we’re going to be put in a way. You know, the goal is to put away a billion tons of CO2 per year, put that underground. That’s a lot of CO2. That’s going to take a lot of drilling, a lot of injecting. And people with skills in drilling and injecting tend to work in the oil and gas industries. So I think that’s another reason why we’re seeing these these government funded DAC hubs being built in the Gulf.
Krys Boyd [00:35:01] How does the energy required to do direct air capture in all the places experts think it’s needed? How does that compare with the energy we currently generate from clean and renewable sources like wind and solar?
Alec Luhn [00:35:14] So if we wanted to take a billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere each year through direct air capture, it would take two times the amount of energy and renewable energy that we currently generate. So so. And remember that. And we have a lot of other energy demands, and those are only increasing. AI and everything else. Data centers more and more people driving electric cars, so on and so forth. Energy demand is going up and there’s not enough to go around. And yet we would need twice as much renewable energy as we currently produce just to do this direct air capture that we’re wanting to be doing by 2050. So it’s going to be a huge demand on our energy grid, and that’s why everyone who does direct air capture says we also need to be decarbonizing at the same time, because again, it doesn’t make any sense to burn coal or natural gas and emit CO2 to produce energy that’s used to take that CO2 out of the air.
Krys Boyd [00:36:18] It’s a catch 22. But obviously people who believe in this technology think that if we can get beyond that.
Alec Luhn [00:36:26] Yeah. So people think we can streamline the technology and make it more energy efficient. But also, you know, we need to be building tons of renewables. And so in a future where we have built so many renewables and improved our energy efficiency so much that we have extra renewable energy, that’s a future where you could be doing a lot of direct air capture with that excess renewable energy. It all has to come together though. If we fail to build enough renewables, then that direct air capture is no longer as much of a climate benefit because it’s relying on dirty energy that produces emissions.
Krys Boyd [00:37:05] So someone’s probably already given a Ted talk about this. I can sort of imagine what it would contain and it would leave out the things that are not quite so good about this and highlight the things that seem to work. But I do want to talk about everybody’s least favorite question, which is what could possibly go wrong? What would happen if a CO2 pipeline were to rupture somewhere between the site where carbon dioxide is extracted from the air and the site where it’s either going to be sequestered or placed in tanks for industrial use?
Alec Luhn [00:37:36] Well, that’s the fear of comunities that near these two direct air capture hubs that are that are being built. So one the Louisiana hub is is fairly near to Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s a predominantly black city that has had a long history of of industry and also what activists would would call environmental racism. And so when I was down there reporting, it was extremely sensitive, the topic of direct air capture, not because anybody disagrees with the idea of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but because of the questions about how it’s going to be handled and what is going to how it’s going to play into that history of of industry there. And there are similar concerns in Corpus Christi in Texas near the second direct air capture hub. There was a pipeline leak in Mississippi in 2021, I believe, a few years ago, where more than 40 people went to the hospital. Because what happened was this pipeline carrying CO2. There was a there was a heavy rain. The ground shifted and the pipeline sank and there was a rupture. The pipeline broke, let out the CO2 that seeped down into this kind of low area where there happened to be a town, again, a town of of a largely black town. And, yeah, more than 40 people left in the hospital because they essentially couldn’t get enough to breathe. You know, some some people were found passed out with foam coming out of their mouths because they’d been essentially poisoned by carbon dioxide. Now, nobody died in that circumstance. Like I mentioned, it was this this heavy rainfall in this geography which allowed the pipeline to rupture, which then and then there was this low lying area where the CO2 was able to collect and concentrate. So it was a specific set of circumstances. But this definitely raises the question of, you know, because as we build this giant industry of this giant carbon removal industry, we’re going to also be building a giant infrastructure to go around it of CO2 pipes, taking CO2 from the direct air capture machines to the injection sites where that’s going to be sequestered. It’s not something that should be blown out of context. It’s not something that happens that’s that’s inherently dangerous. Happens a lot. But it is it’s a real concern and for residents. And the other thing is, again, these kind of moral questions around the director capture, even if you don’t have a pipeline leak, if you’re building a direct air capture hub, what what is that? Does that encourage more industry to come to the area? That was a major concern of people in Lake Charles and Corpus Christi who I talked to. Right. These are these are cities that have so much industry, natural gas refineries, oil refineries, petrochemical facilities, people making plastic, all sorts of stuff. I mean, at night, you know, Corpus Christi, Lake Charles, it’s you know, it’s bright orange at night with all these flares around the town, around the city. So the question is, are these direct air capture hubs, the directory capture hubs, the sequestration sites, they’re looking to take CO2 and sequester it and get paid to sequester it from anyone. They’ll take it from direct air capital upgrade. But they’re also wanting to take it from industrial users who might be putting carbon capture scrubbers on their smokestacks. Right. And capturing the carbon because the CO2 right at the smokestack. So there are lots of industrial plants being planned, at least a dozen in Louisiana, even more in Texas. That would include carbon capture and storage. So what these activists and these local residents are worried about is that it starts with a direct air capture hub that starts this this CO2 sequestration business. And then that CO2 sequestration business becomes a reason why more industry would want to move to this area, because if they need to be putting CO2 scrubbers on their smokestacks for reasons of financing or just regulations becoming stricter, then they’ll want to do it somewhere that’s near a CO2 sequestration site. So these these communities are worried that direct air capture could actually perpetuate the kind of industry and the legacy of environmental racism that they have been fighting with for many years.
Krys Boyd [00:41:55] All that said, Alex, that you just told us about concerns about environmental racism. You think if this were done correctly, direct air capture could be an instrument of environmental justice? How could that work?
Alec Luhn [00:42:12] In a couple of ways. So the main idea is that. The most vulnerable people are the ones who suffer the most from climate change. We’ve known this for a long time and we’re seeing it. We see it every year, borne out in real time. The people who die in heat waves, the people who die in hurricanes and flooding, a lot of those people are. Poor people in poor countries, in poor areas who don’t have the resources to live elsewhere or move away. And so if we if rich countries like the United States were able to remove carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and again, this is getting to those negative emissions that we were talking about earlier, this is not just getting to net net zero. This is then going even further, removing so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that we’re actually taking down the concentration, the amount of carbon dioxide, those carbon dioxide molecules that just stick around in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. We’re actually starting to remove more of them than we’re putting into the atmosphere. If we could get to that point, then essentially what we could be doing is that rich countries like the United States would be paying to remove the carbon dioxide that they predominantly put into the atmosphere with their big economies and the massive industrialization. And then that would essentially be helping the poor people of the world, the most vulnerable people in the world who are suffering disproportionately the effects of climate change. So you could have a direct air capture plant in California, Texas, or Louisiana taking carbon dioxide out of the air, helping helping to prevent a climate disaster in Africa or Asia. That’s the environmental justice angle on this. The idea that we can undo the wrongs of climate change by innovating and spending a lot of money to get this right.
Krys Boyd [00:44:18] Alec Luhn is a climate journalist. His article “Can Pulling Carbon from Thin Air Slow Climate Change Appears in Scientific American.” Alec, thank you very much for the conversation.
Alec Luhn [00:44:29] My pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:44:30] Think is distributed by PRX the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and wherever you get podcasts by searching for KERA Think or go to our website think.kera.org to learn about upcoming shows and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
