Carbon Engineering is using a method of extracting hydrocarbons from the air on a commercial scale. The method extracts carbon by taking in air using fans and separating the carbon by pushing it through filters. The carbon is gathered in a solution, and then extracted using heat to create a synthetic fuel.
This is potentially a working method of managing very large amounts of carbon, too. There’s a real possibility of high capacity operation collecting 1 million tons of CO2 per year. The demonstration units in Squamish, British Columbia can process 2 tons of CO2 daily.
The idea of “winding back the clock” using this technology as a way of fighting climate change obviously needs to be proven. A simple way of managing the vast quantities of carbon in the atmosphere, however, is a game changer.
The theory of “trapping” carbon has produced some good — and truly lousy — ideas. Some have missed the point entirely. One of the least impressive recent ideas was to “grow lots of trees to store carbon, and then burn the trees.” Presumably, the resulting carbon can then be used — 20 or 30 years after planting the trees. We have 85 years left of this century, and that’s a bit slow.
The need is to deal with the “human carbon cycle,” which is the actual problem, in a practical way. Scrubbing carbon on a large scale could deliver hydrocarbons, and more importantly, more advanced hydrocarbon products. Fuel is only one of the uses of carbon.
The sheer waste of carbon fuels, in fact, is also an economic issue. In my own country, Australia, coal sells for a pitiful few bucks per ton, and is exported as fuel, creating pollution which does almost incomprehensible amounts of damage to people and the environment. Do we explore more profitable uses of carbon? No, like every other moronic, backward, energy-producing country, we prefer to make $50 a ton from coal rather than $5000 a ton from graphene or advanced polymers. The astonishing scale of absolute stupidity in the carbon industries is as huge as the scale of the global pollution problems and hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by carbon emissions pollution.
If these idiots had put 5 percent of the energy and millions of dollars into developing safe products that they’ve put into denying climate change, they’d be making a lot more money. Clearly, any real solutions to carbon emissions will have to come from outside this human-hating, misanthropic, senile industry sector.
There’s another irony here — just about every other use of carbon is a possible non-pollutant. Carbon, in fact, “traps” itself in non-biodegradable forms. It’s one of the reasons plastics are such a nuisance in the environment. However — the carbon in these forms which don’t break down also doesn’t directly pollute the atmosphere. A pollutant as a counter to pollution? Simply turn waste carbon in to inert plastics? Perhaps. It’s pretty easy to do.
Ending the dependency on fossil fuels, however, will take time. Years of inaction haven’t helped. Every year now counts, and the current lack of achievement in cutting greenhouse emissions has actually moved the Doomsday Clock forward to the closest it’s been to midnight since the Cold War at its worst.
Things need to start happening, ASAP. Replacing the antiquated infrastructure, the antiquated vehicles, and the time to create effective distribution of alternatives needs to be factored in.
The Carbon Engineering scrubbers could do a lot of good, replacing the fossil fuels with clean fuels while simultaneously cleaning the air. More importantly, they can prove a vitally important point — better economic management of carbon really can do the job.
