2023 Annual Meeting – Next Generation Technologies for Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage
okay as people begin to file in I'll begin my uh my introduction of the the first panel of today um so welcome back we'll now begin our panel entitled Next Generation Technologies for carbon capture utilization and storage uh known colloquially as ccus our speakers will address direct air capture direct ocean capture techniques for transforming carbon emissions into useful products and Innovative carbon sequestration approaches our moderator for the panel this morning is Professor Emily Carter the Gerhard R Andlinger Professor in Energy in the Environment at Princeton University as well as senior strategic advisor and associate lab director at the department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Lab or PPPL she was the founding director of the an linger Center and was the director when I was hired about 10 years ago and um she was then afterward the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences or SEAS at Princeton after that she served as UCLA's Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost and distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular Engineering before returning to Princeton and PPPL a few years ago the author of over 450 Publications and patents she has delivered nearly 600 invited or plenary lectures worldwide serves on advisory boards spanning a wide range of disciplines she's the recipient of numerous honors um including election to the US National Academy of Sciences the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the US National Academy of inventors as well as the US National Academy of engineering and the U and the European Academy of SES please join me in welcoming Emily Carter well thank you all for being here it shows how important uh that the the topic the topics of today are I'm going to give a defense here in in light of the uh of of the remarks of the keynote speaker who said that CCUS is not needed uh maybe it's that was a misinterpretation but we can talk about it afterward it's clear that we still need to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere given the extreme weather and climate change we're already seeing so there is definitely a need for the work that you're going to hear about today um we can have more discussion on that later I would also just like to just take one editorial remark to say that I am delighted to see that Rick Andlinger is is here um who uh has been instrumental since the beginning as has Paul Mater um in in uh how the Andlinger Center has evolved being being parts of the executive committee Rick is the son of the late Gerry Andlinger who I had the privilege and joy to work with um to realize his dream he would have been delighted uh to be here to see um what his his dream of this Center has become so uh I want uh Diane to not count any of those remarks as part of my time um okay uh that's got to be said with that um let me first uh uh say that it just Pro provides great joy for me to have um Twisted the arms of these three terrific individuals um who are at The Cutting Edge of uh of the CCS part of the CCUS um and so I'm going to start by introducing uh our panelists Erica llant first of all Erica is co-founder and head of Merv mrv um for those of you that I I believe very strongly that in in defining all acronyms one uses uh measurement reporting and verification so she's the head of me measurement reporting and verification and environmental impact assessment at Equatic some of you may have known it um in its earlier stage as I did when it was first formed as Seachange but it it it changed its name in the last year um an ocean carbon removal company that accelerates and amplifies the ocean's natural ability to absorb and permanently store atmospheric carbon she is also an assistant professor of Material Science and engineering at the University of Colorado uh University of California Davis she applies her expertise in geochemistry to address many issues in climate sustainability and the built environment welcome Amic thank you uh our next uh um panelist is Noah McQueen he is the co- U they they are the co-founder of and head of research at heirloom a direct air capture company with the goal of removing 1 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2035 I must say that air heirloom he's going to talk about this a little bit is um is a um is is a central partner in one of the recently announced direct air capture hubs no's experience expertise surrounds carbon capture and removal with a focus on Direct a capture and carbon mineralization Technologies Noah's expertise further includes technoeconomic analysis and life cycle assessment to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of carbon removal systems they hold a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of of Pennsylvania and a BS in chemical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines thank you so much for being here Noah uh next Erica came all the way from Norway to be with us Sarah sorry sorry what sorry Sarah wrong wrong went jumped to the wrong place Sarah came all the way here from Norway to be with us she is the research director and chief scientist at uh in computational geosciences at Norse an independent Research Institute in Bergen Norway she currently leads the center for sustainable surf subsurface resources a national Research Center dedicated to providing new subsurface knowledge and digital solutions to reduce Norway's offsh offshore emissions drastically Norway is really at The Cutting Edge in terms of um the the sequestration um Technologies she uh I added that you did you didn't add that she she is uh an internationally recognized expert in CO2 storage technology with with contributions to understanding long-term migration and containment leakage risk gigaton scale storage assessment and storage in depleted petroleum reservoirs and I must say I invited her because I heard her speak at a International Conference in the in in the spring and I was was really impressed and I had no idea about this next little bit of the blurb but it's icing on the cake which is Sarah holds a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from none other than Princeton University in 2008 a Princeton along so with that let me just set the stage I've asked each of our panelists and I will be representing because I work on carbon utilization um I will be representing the carbon utilization piece each of us is going are going to take 10 minutes to talk about our Technologies or our our our sense of the Technologies in the areas of First Direct ocean capture direct air capture and then sequestration and utilization and then we will open it up for questions so with that I'm going to turn it over to Erica thank you so much Emily um so I have a few slides to describe aquatic an ocean based carbon dioxide removal technology the ocean is a the Earth's largest CO2 Reservoir and currently it removes about a quarter of our Global annual CO2 emissions um uh sorry um sorry so it currently removes about a quarter of our Global annual CO2 emissions um and there are various technologically enhanced Pathways to accelerate this storage and this includes increasing the growth of marine plants increasing ocean alkalinity as well as electrochemical separation of CO2 from seawater and Then followed by direct ocean capture um it is important to consider though that this same equilibrium that allows the oceans to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere also implies that the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere would be partially offset by ocean de gassing and there's one uh model that estimates that for example if we have a pulse removal of 100 Pigs of carbon um this will be followed by ocean de gassing over a period of 30 years such that only about a quarter of that CO2 that is initially sequestered is actually permanently removed and so with this consideration it's important to think about technologies that also increase the ocean capacity for storage of CO2 so aquatic is a process that accelerates and amplifies this natural ability of the oceans to absorb CO2 um at a gigaton scale while also producing carb negative hydrogen and so this uh production of alternative fuels and carbon negative hydrogen example to replace fossil fuels is important this clean and renewable energy sources because it would help us decarbonize industrial sectors um as well provide electricity and provide alternative fuels for sectors like Trucking and Aviation and this aquatic technology which has been born of about a decade of research at UCLA engineering is describing this schematic so we have first uh the application of electrical current in seawater and this uh current then uh induces chemical reactions that does two things so one we have the the hydrogen that is freed up from the seawat this hydrogen can be used to power the plant as a as an energy source but also be sold as fuel and then the other thing that happens is the splitting of the water into two streams we have an acidic stream and a basic stream in the basic stream the calcium ions that is strapped in that sea water reacts with CO2 already dissolved in that sea water to produce calcium carbonates and also we have the production of magnesium hydroxide in that sea water and the sequestration of CO2 happens when we bubble that basic stream with air or with a point source of CO2 and this allows the magnesium hydroxide to dissolve and CO2 to dissolve that traps then the carbon in the form of bicarbonate and carbonate ions and then meanwhile in our acidic stream the acidic stream is then used to dissolve rocks to release or to replenish the culum Magnesium as well as to neutralize that acidity and then the in the end this neutralized sea water is then discharged back into the ocean where the carbon is going to be permanently stored so because we have here the production the co-production of hydrogen um this allows us uh for for cost deduction at scale but also in addition to hydrogen we also produce oxygen we also produce calcium carbonate that could be use the Green Building Materials another coproduct would be uh the softened water that can be used for desalination and then also minor metal co-precipitates that's extracted from that sea water so um this aquatic uh technologist and engineered CDR process that really combines direct ocean removal and direct air removal so per kilogram sea water has 2.6 milles of dissolved inorganic carbon 11 milles of calcium ions and 55 Mill of magnesium ions the first stage of the process can be considered as direct ocean capture direct ocean removal where we have the CO2 that is already dissolved in that water is uh transformed to a new phase to a solid phase to permanently store that CO2 in the form of calcium carbonate solids and then in the second stage this is an aater that is within the battery limit of the plant so we do this within the plant there's an additional sequestration of 100 milles of CO2 that's then trapped in the form of ions bicarbonate and carbonate ions so in total we sequester 4.6 grams of CO2 per kilogram of sea water um that we process so these two unique Pathways there's two unique forms of carbon both as solids and as ions have a stability that exceed 10,000 years so it's very durable means of CO2 storage so where we are now um we are currently operating two fully functional Pilots one in Los Angeles and one in Singapore each of these Pilots has the capability to remove 100 kilog of CO2 per day while producing 3.5 kilg of hydrogen per day we are also on track to reach commercial scale at 100,000 tons of CO2 per year while producing uh 3.6 th000 uh tons of hydrogen and we recognize uh this that for CDR for any CDR technology cost and
scalability are interrelated really obstacles for deployment of these Technologies but because we have a single process that produces two valuable products one is the carbon negative hydrogen and the carbon removal credits then we are able to drastically reduce our cost and increase our scalability in the near term so our goal is to reach gen to commercial scale of 1 million tons of CO2 per year that's equivalent to 35,000 tons of hydrogen at this scale the hydrogen that is co-producing the process is sufficient to offset production costs and then if we multiply this by a thousand times then we reach gigaton scale at this scale the hydrogen that we produce can fully decarbonize hard to Abate sectors like steel and cement so companies like Boeing and Stripe have already recognized um the aquatics impact and in summary so we're doing uh our vision is to translate science to uh societal progress and we do this by developing and operating these technologies that are scalable that decarbonized today thank you thanks awesome um well I'm Noah and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about direct air capture and then the specific company that I work with named heirloom so as a little bit of context setting um the world requires permanent carbon removal to stay below 2 degrees Celsius warming so shown here is from the ipcc AR6 report it see not only requires deep decarbonization of our Global Society but also some level of removal and that really serves two purposes the first is there's a series of hard to Abate sectors um where it's exceptionally difficult or otherwise unjust to decarbonize there's also historic emissions so we've been emitting CO2 at massive rates into our atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution and we need technologies that can take those historic emissions out of the atmosphere so before I go too much further I do want to make a distinction between carbon capture and carbon removal as they're often conflated um in carbon capture you're actually avoiding emissions before they reach the atmosphere so this is similar to putting a sponge on the outlet of a natural gas combined cycle to prevent those CO2 emissions from actually reaching the atmosphere in a different lens carbon removal actually creates negative emission so instead of going with where CO2 is being emitted you're pulling it directly out of the atmosphere um and this enables us to have you know pull CO2 that's either historically been emitted or been emitted more recently out of the atmosphere atmosphere is a giant mixing vessel so it doesn't really care um with that there's a lot of different ways to do carbon removal so I I'm going to talk specifically about direct air capture but there there are several different approaches such as aforestation re reforestation direct ocean capture as was just discussed um as well as things like carbon mineralization so indirect air capture you're moving massive amounts of air over these chemicals that have an affinity for CO2 so that as they move over those chemicals they bind to that CO2 and you get a CO2 depleted Airstream coming through so when that material becomes saturated with CO2 you can send it into a regeneration process and in this you're typically either elevating the temperature lowering the pressure or some combination of the two to both recreate that binding Mater material as well as produce a pure stream of CO2 that can be used for CO2 utilization permanent storage um in particular heirlooms process actually merges that process of direct air capture with a process known as carbon mineralization so in carbon Min mineralization um you have minerals that naturally react with CO2 in the atmosphere to form stable solids um the biggest uh challenges with this type of approach is that it's hard to Monitor and verify that you've pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere since it's an open system that carbon can go pretty much anywhere typically into waterways um and the other piece is that it has a large land footprint so in the heirloom process we're actually using a mineral-based material to do direct air capture which has the uh benefit of being permanent and additional meaning you've created a system it's clearly obvious that you've had a climate intervention it has clear monitoring reporting and verification because you can have a flow meter on the outside of the process to actually see how much CO2 you're capturing um and has several other benefits of both direct air capture and carbon mineralization so what does this type of a system actually look like so in heirlooms process we start with a mineral calcium carbonate or Limestone if you're not familiar with calcium carbonate it's really Earth abundant and it's the primary ingredient in Tums so so safe you can actually consume it um so we start with that carbonate Rock and we send it into an electric reactor in that reactor it decomposes into two parts you get a calcium oxide and you get Co2 that is then we partner with a storage facility to permanently store underground so that calcium oxide is kind of a sponge for CO2 so we hydrate that to calcium hydroxide and we spread that calcium hydroxide out on trays that are then stacked up in the vertical Direction so increasing the surface area for the CO2 to react with um in nature this conversion of calcium hydroxide to calcium carbonate occurs over months to years heirloom has accelerated that to be a roughly 3 Day process so after 3 days we saturate this mineral with CO2 and we can cycle it back into that electric reactor to once again use it to capture more CO2 so it's a cyclic process that reuses the mineral um so the other question is how does this actually scale to gigaton scale direct air capture so there's there's three real advantages with this technology set that goes back to the pieces around scalability so the first is the inputs so limestone is roughly 4% of the Earth's crust and um that really enables us to to leverage a highly available material at a billion tons of CO2 removal per year this process would use less than 0.1% of annual calcium carbonate production since it's such a heavy input into cement and lime Industries internationally additionally this is a really cheap material it's about $1 to $50 per ton which is thousand times cheaper than other chemicals used for direct air capture processes the second piece is modularity when we think about gigaton scale anything we need to think about Supply chains um modularity enables Mass manufacturing the way we think about this processes our fundamental level of modularity is a tray and then you have a stack of trays and then you have a bank of stacks and all of those should be independently able to be manufactured and kind of just propped up on site so as little construction on site as possible which really leads to the complexity of some of these quote unquote Mega projects um that we build the more modularity you can have the more likely on to lowcost construction and then the final piece here is learning from every every ton so we collect tens of millions of data points every month um the way we control that carbonation reaction is really based on our fundamental understanding of the reaction of CO2 with calcium hydroxide so the better we refine that the more finely we can control that we actually feed that into software and algorithms that we can update in real time on existing hardware and we've demonstrated this at our F pilot facility in Brisbane California which can capture at its entirety roughly 100 tons of CO2 per year um yeah with that this really enables the ability to achieve gigaton scale direct air capture and I'm I'm super excited to talk more about director capture and heirloom thank you good it's my turn now to talk about storage I don't know if this is high in the pH light everybody hear me okay um it's a little bit odd actually to be at this conference which is about next Generation Technologies because CO2 storage has been happening and is happening today industrial scale for 20 some odd years there have been 26 projects all around the world and cumul cumulatively 200 million tons of CO2 has been stored uh already today the figure on the left is showing you some of the different types of storage uh environments that have been tested and and and piloted or even industrial scale for example off the coast of Norway that Emily alluded to and the one one thing all these projects have in common is that well one they're all very deep so a kilometer underground where CO2 is in very dense space so not gas phase CO2 uh very low density but very high density CO2 700 to 800 900 kilog per cubic meter still lighter than water or the other fluids that are there but again uh efficient uh use of the of the poor space the last thing they have in common is that they use the natural geology the physical mechanisms the natural mechanisms exploit what is already there in nature to capture and trap the CO2 underground very similar to the natural oil uh and gas accumulations we call them natural because they occurred by Nature that have been sitting underground trapped in and contained over hundreds of millions of years so we talk about thousands of years containment 10 thousands of years it is possible to store CO2 in this manner for hundreds of millions of years if we know uh where to look and of course we have the analoges from oil and gas industry to show us uh the way there are of course new things that emerge with CO2 storage that the petroleum industry is not used to first you have to put fluids into the to the subsurface they migrate in different ways CO2 is not like oil and gas it can dissolve in the water and also there are other aspects like induced size myti uh pressurization that are unique to CO2 storage uh which have been studied now quite extensively for the last two decades and we believe we have quite a lot of knowledge uh to support a gigaton scale uh scaleup a picture is always uh better than words and this is actually showing you CO2 in a tank of fill of sand the sand was strategically placed there in order to mimic the real geology I'll walk you through it in a second but I just want to acknowledge that the the University of Bergen have developed this uh room scale flow rig it is approximately 3 MERS by 2 m wide so it's an enormous uh from a lab perspective uh piece of equipment and there CO2 real CO2 can be injected and you can see uh the uh what would usually be something that is invisible except for using geophysical techniques to observe what's happening a thousand meters underground we can see it uh in real time the different mechanisms that that actually occur so I'll walk you through a little bit what you see here so right right away you see there are two different injection points and I mentioned before that CO2 is buoyant which means it will rise unless there is some barrier and the lighter color Sands there are fine grain Sands uh that have um uh the capillary forces required to uh enter into those Sands is higher than the boy pressure from the CO2 so already we can see that the natural systems have uh the ability by force balance to contain CO2 um and in the subsurface this two or three or four cmet gas plume that is uh oop sorry uh that is accumulated under this seal translates in in the real world to 100 meter thick CO2 plumes of bubbles of plumes that can actually be trapped by force balances in the in the uh in the subsurface so that is a and the other thing that we see here are these fingers that are are this is a photo that was taken at about 5 days after experiment started and the CO2 is dissolving into the water I don't remember the numbers you were using four gram per kilogram of water CO2 dissolves by about 2 to 4% by by mass and when it does so it actually increases the density of water and this causes a density and stability and you get convective mixing and this is extremely unique to CO2 and some other uh gases and that draws the CO2 away from this gas accumulation that could be considered a leakage risk and into deeper deeper into the subsurface and after you've left the simulation run or the the the model run uh eventually all of that gas accumulation will have been dissolved um in real time we can see in the lab over the course of days in the subsurface things move more slowly uh so it could take years to tens of years to decades to hundreds of years but the the point is is that over time that C2 will equilibrate with its surroundings and be less and less buyant we use all this knowledge uh to inform the models and a lot of my work has been going and I know there's a video here so I don't know if the AV people can start that and we use that to inform the the simulation tools and this is we need simulation tools we can't perform many of these experiments they're very expensive uh and we take all this knowledge and we wrap it into into simulators and and show that we in fact know enough about these systems to be quite sure about what is happening even though we cannot directly observe for example this fingering would be impossible to observe of underground but we uh have a good sense of that this is actually happening and this is a work done by by my group and and this is open source simulation which is another very key component here to differentiating CO2 storage uh from the oil and gas industry that has tended to be less and less transparent we are moving in the opposite direction with CO2 storage which is good let me bring you to Norway it was mentioned about uh CO2 storage and Norway has been going on for the last 25 years Norway is a country as many of you might or might not know a lot of water exists in the country and a lot of hydropower uh so there's not a lot of emissions and the business model for for Norway really relies on CCS scaling up and building economies to scale around CCS there's a lot of good mentioning about how how to scale up the capture Technologies and how we scale up the storage Technologies has to match the ability to scale up on the capture side Norway sits on this is showing you a geological map of some of the ba major basins offshore Norway Bergen is there on the west coast that's where I live beautiful place everybody should visit uh and there's enormous storage resource potential but the problem is Norway does not have very many emissions this is showing you a map from uh this is from Gus which is the Geological Survey in Denmark from last year or two years ago that shows you the bubbles are the size of the emissions and Norway has some bubbles but not very big mainly uh the most of the EU metters are sitting uh uh deep into the continent uh where the only options for CO2 storage would be on Shore and that of course has not uh been a very publicly favorable solution uh so the idea is to connect those emitters with the offshore storage resources and this is not just Norway it's also the UK the Netherlands Denmark are all developing this type of business models to uh uh remove the uh CO2 emissions from deep inside the interior of the EU out to the to the offshore already in Norway and and now similarly in the UK and Denmark and and and Netherlands there have been several licensing rounds uh this is very familiar to the oil and gas industry and there are now five uh license five licensing round and you can see here highlighted some of the the licenses are already being uh developed for CO2 storage and the success of all of this because it's Import and Export of of climate gases really depends on a good deal of trust and reliability in building These Chains uh which are quite extensive and complicated so the the first such chain is already started now uh Norway as actually the world's first endend uh CCS project focus on Pure Storage the US of course has been storing CO2 for for 30 40 years in the form of CO2 e but this would be the first in in in Saline aquafers so Pure Storage as we would like to call it uh Northern Lights is that uh business model that is building infrastructure uh receiving terminal for CO2 coming from the continent we're starting first with a CO2 emitted from a cement plant uh on the around the oso area and it's being shipped uh by a barge around the coast of Norway uh uh uh to be permanently stored off the off the coast actually about 50 kilometers outside of Bergen the key here is that they have linked this uh full chain project only to hard debate Industries Bel lot of talk about do we Bo CCS on fossil power all of the first projects now are on process industry cement waste energy um um fertilizer uh various different types of industries that the processes themselves emit CO2 Renewables will not um reduce those emissions uh significantly um so this is part of the uh the first ever and it's heavily publicly financed and this is a vast difference to what's going on in the US right now with the IRA Norway has come out and funded 80% publicly financed of 25 billion region croner project compare that with the EV electric vehicle policies which have been high successful I think Norway is one of the largest per capita owners of Tesla in the world and that has cost the government 20 billion Norwegian croner just divide by 10 for those of you who want to get it to dollars in loss tax revenue from those incentives every single year so this is actually fairly cheap project compared to the Eevee all of it of course is needed it's it Dimensions such that this can scale up to gigaton uh uh within the next 20 years so the storage facilities on Shore can receive much more CO2 than the initial um phases of the project I'll skip ahead uh the US model as I alluded to for gigaton scale storage permitting this is showing you the uh the pipeline of permits on the right uh that are currently under review by the EPA class six well permits and it has increased we're talk about exponential growth there are now over what is it 57 storage license applications for class six permits under review there's actually a bottleneck in the EPA review that may not have the Manpower for that but in that sense you can see the explosion uh and what it means is that there's many different mechanisms and vehicles to get CCS really off the ground the European model is to fund publicly funded uh uh common infrastructure uh and the US model is much more decentralized but both will probably work so I think I'll I'll stop I think the discussion will be really interesting just want to leave you with the CCS train has left the station it is going to happen it is happening uh and it's really just a matter and there are no technical showstoppers but it's really just a matter of managing a lot of this uh um you know emerging um technical challenges and Engineering challenges around clustering and infrastructure and various things uh and I would say that CCS pretty much enjoys quite broad bipartisan support not just in the US but also across Europe so that is really comforting because if it's very partisan it could be very easily flipped and that has happened in the past two decades now we see enjoying bipartisan support for something that not so often happens uh public acceptance could still uh be something to be aware about but we can certainly talk about in discussion and I alluded to transparency that's key to all of this differentiating CCS from the past sins of the petroleum industry we have to be extremely transparent about what we're doing so I'll stop there thank you well thank you Sarah I think your point about bipartisan support is we we'll have is is an interesting one it's it's likely to be true but the public acceptance piece is something which I think is is a is of concern still okay anyway um so what I'm what I'm going to do oh sorry being reminded okay what I'm going to do is very briefly tell you uh I'm here representing in fact uh I chair for the national Academy's uh study that is ongoing it's a three-year congressionally mandated study on carbon utilization uh carbon dioxide utilization and actually utilization related to Coal waste as well um and I'm going to give you some just a very brief set of of findings associated with uh our first report we're in the midst of of writing a second deeper dive this was a a first report done very quickly to inform infrastructure investments in the United States so um first of all if we think about CO2 utilization uh the scope of what we were asked to think about was not things like uh carbonation of beverages or enhanced oil recovery which are just physical Transformations but actually to focus on chemical transformations of CO2 into um useful products either from point sources uh or from the atmosphere or water um into market marketable products so uh the one of the the important points is that uh when we think about whether to use C2 for uh utilization rather than storage it really its impact its climate impact will depend on the product life time it'll depend on the CO2 source and also the emissions from other inputs such as electricity and hydrogen and how those um H and what those Footprints are with respect to CO2 and so if we think about for example we've already heard about mineralization CO2 plus minerals making for example uh cement or other building materials uh in various ways that can lead if you form a solid that can lead to durable carbon storage and uh and so that that's extremely attractive especially for building materials that are needed on on a massive scale on the other hand most fuels well I would say all fuels and chemicals are going to have lifetimes that are less than a 100 years and and so if you think about that all you could the best you can do is a circular carbon economy um in terms of taking CO2 converting it to something which then ultimately will be released back to the atmosphere so there's an important point about CO2 source and product pairing in order to have sustainable CO2 utilization in particular if you have a fossil source so if you're thinking about the power plants which emry lovens pointed out should should be going away um so that won't be a source uh but they'll be potentially they'll be around for quite some time whether we like it or not and of course there's uh um those fossil sources um really have to be used in longlived products uh in order to be Net Zero emission uh compatible um the point is that fossil CO2 to short live products which is the other option just delays emissions okay they they eventually get emitted to the atmosphere on the other hand if you have Co 2 that is uh sourced from direct air capture or direct ocean capture like we heard or from biogenic CO2 sources like ethanol plants then you could imagine making both short-lived or long-lived products and if you make longlived products you're you you are really going net negative which we will need to do for a while and uh but if we make short live products at least we are Net Zero compatible and so fuels and chemicals in the future if we're going to make any of them from CO2 and that's still a big if must come from these other sources not fossil sources direct air capture direct ocean capture or biogenic CO2 so one needs to do a real life cycle analysis to make sure in addition to technoeconomic analysis to make sure that one would actually build out some CO2 utilization um uh industry okay I'm not going to go through all of this this is just to point out the complexity of the problem of the infrastructure needs for CO2 utilization it involves the same infrastructure needs associated with ccs that we've already talked about um in terms of capture we didn't really talk about purification but those are big issues as well as well as how how One Transport Sarah mentioned uh transporting by barge uh the cheapest mode is pipelines but building out those pipelines is um there are many things we can talk about with respect to that purification on the on at the end it's more it's much more likely that what's going to happen in terms of any CO2 utilization is going to piggy back on C CCS projects I think or or or very very likely um and then there are many different Pathways for CO2 utilization uh and then ultimately if you've made something you have to transport that product and you have to weigh which products you whether it's better to transport the CO2 or transport the product in terms of whether you decide to do centralized or distributed CO2 utilization and so one of the one of the things that the committee uh came to is people should recognize the opportunities for collocation to minimize transport instead of having to build out these the you know a large pipeline Network the US has 5,000 uh miles of CO2 pipelines right now um but it's basically for uh enhanced oil recovery right now so it's in only one and so they're not located essentially where one could imagine uh both the sources that of CO2 as well as um the um the utilization that that you could you could uh that that one could Envision so uh it's very important to be thinking about that and to recognize that if you think about that collocation you could imagine for example building materials uh marketing uh near existing Point sources um and product uses so near cities um and otherwise for example direct air capture facility cited already next to existing chemical manufacturing infrastructure would make a lot of sense this is a way to eliminate the pipeline need um and so the committee found for example in terms of near-term opportunities for investment to focus on uh potentially uh sustainable Aviation fuels using as a CO2 source for example ethanol plants that that generate um CO2 uh and bringing in clean hydrogen and clean electricity uh so that that some of that work is already going on there are companies that are that are engaged in in that kind of work and then there are a lot of companies that are engaged in um using sort of any source of CO2 plus minerals um and we've heard a little bit of that here today already uh to uh to create building material so that's sort of the lwh hanging fruit um over the next decade uh in addition so this is sort this is the issue of sort of of piggybacking you see the the the um the mention of geologic sequestration um essentially utilizing CO2 bringing again the collocation the idea of having industrial clusters this is a big topic and is being um is is is being realized in the EU uh already which is to recognize we should take advantage of the fact that there's already an infrastructure um for chemical Transformations and think about essentially uh piggybacking off of whatever is built for ccs to uh to have it be collocated near this kind of chemical infrastructure and uh and then be able to take uh both fossil sources to have to make Long Long Live products as well as um direct air capture direct ocean capture biogenic sources to make both long-lived and and short-lived products so uh with that I actually saved us a little bit of time and I'm um happy to open it up for questions or I will also uh I also have my own questions for the panel as well and you can also ask questions of me so thank you okay I see uh um maybe we can start in in the front here for a moment or no no but but we want to make sure that people can hear here you go and please identify yourself this is it's a it's a best practice to identify who you are and and I'm team Fox a adjunct at at ruter and at Columbia sea uh but a regulator for my whole career utility and environmental uh my question is specifically and I'm doing a class on there at Columbia in the spring with SE not just this with with sequestration which gra organ from Carnegie Mel say you use sequestration and not storage well European thing he got yeah he got all over blame it on Europe but but anyhow uh the issue I ask is for instance USGS or EPA they regulate this for the us and it doesn't seem like they have standards or regulations as to where you can put it and where you can't put it underground uh for instance would you want to put California where there are earthquakes so I just wanted to know about that and leakage and how is that handled Technically when these are cited okay um no I mean Regulatory Agencies aren't in the business of telling companies where to go discover resources right I mean I think the companies have to find those resources we do know oil and gas exists in accumulations in California so we know that it is possible to store buoyant gases underground for hundreds of millions of years in seismically active areas and their seismically active areas is also in southern Europe so I mean there's a good understanding of of how to avoid the worst of the seismic activity and uh and move your way upwards a little bit farther away so I think it's it's a lot of good uh understanding uh underpins these decisions about where to put CO2 storage but I don't think it's the regulatory agency's job to what they do is a um they storage atlases in Norway it's it's the same regulatory agency that actually produces es that show okay here are some of the potentials but they're very very rough numbers and it's it's up to the the companies to refine those numbers into commercial um reality so I don't know if I answered your question but it's oh yeah and about the leakage yeah I didn't really allude to leakage at all here it is um possible of course it can never rule out leakage these are natural systems that that are imperfect in their own way and uh and of course our knowledge of the surf subsurface is not perfect um but I would from the estimates and and the and the the work that's been done and also the analoges that we have for CO2 is leaking uh from natural systems all over the world uh it's hard to say that it would be of any consequence from either a climate perspective environmental perspective or human health and Public Safety perspective but you can't rule it out and that and that's the kind of about the transparency part I think if anybody stands up here and says it will never leak they're either lying or they're or they're ignorant I mean it you can't say it can't it won't uh but that's a really important part of being transparent is to say it it might but we can manage it we can monitor and we can identify uh more serious anomalies and this has happened already in the 26 years of CO2 storage there had been anomalies that had been managed and it was never any threat to environment human public health or safety uh so it's like any industrial engineering activity there are some risks but as long as they're manageable then we should be able to as a society accept them so I hope that answer your question I think the issue I think the issue that was great I think the issue is more with respect to and again this gets to the discussion about public acceptance which I think is is really important you know EU has already done the experiment they're not going to to to first order have injection underground there is some discussion I guess in Switzerland of doing something soon but you know who knows but um and it's because people are concerned right and offshore it seems much safer and so that decision has been made in in the EU that decision that conversation is still going on in the US as to what will happen but I think this the issue of trans of transparency and understanding of risk will be really important in and early Community engagement to discuss how it would be managed if they're and how and monitored to mitigate against any leakage yeah exactly yeah because right environmental USGS right in the back wait wait wait wait for the microphone and please introduce yourself thanks uh hi my name is EMT I'm an undergraduate at Princeton um is heirlooms technology used for carbon capture rather than removal and if so in What proportion no it's used solely for removal yeah okay right there too might as well hi I'm Edmund Downey I'm a third-year PhD student in the school of public policy um I wanted to ask Sarah specifically about transport uh and the relative sort of uh competitiveness position of Norway compared to other uh actors in the North Sea area UK Netherlands Denmark um how big a sort of share of the overall uh process costs is transport and how does that affect you know from proximity standpoint how do you guys compete against some of these like maybe Danish sources that are closer to German sources or something like that no it's a very good point yeah it's um let's say you can Envision this being a very competitive market uh where the cost of Transport would be the deciding factor but actually once you put it onto a into a tank er uh the distance the tanker sails is less much it's not the biggest factor it's getting it onto the tanker and offloading the tanker and all the infrastructure around um in fact uh some people are worried that Iceland which is even farther away uh nobody has mentioned Iceland at all Iceland has a very Innovative approach to uh carbon sequestration I will use that for this crowd um uh which is direct it's carbon mineralization in situ and they inject carbonated water uh very cheap um they have abundant basalts which are volcanic rocks that react within days and months uh and permanently sequester that in minerals underground and and they can probably even out compete what's happening in Norway even though they're farther away so transport is I don't remember all the numbers but it's on the order of 10 to 10 10% to whatever storage is also around 10 to something per all the cost is in the capture because it's an energy intensive process um well some of them are energy intensive I mean they're all but but to varying degrees the early ones early ones we're very energy intensive and I think that's getting better but it it costs energy to do this so so yeah so proximity Is Not the the deciding factor here it's how cheaply can you get it under the ground okay here hi I'm Sue dward uh I a masters of carbon management student at Colombia finishing up this semester and Jim Price over there um installed my heat pumps so I was happy to see him um I also the uh sustainability cordinator at raren Valley Community College so I have a question for Noah um I I love that you guys got the doe awards for the dag hubs that's huge huge uh step for you know a startup company I'm wondering what challenges you face as you look to uh Pro you know move those projects forward and and also speaking to the energy usage for your um your regeneration with the heat how how you're addressing that thanks yeah um I'll start with challenges in scaling the technology up so you know we did recently receive a director capture Hub award in collaboration with Batel and clim works another direct air capture company that uses solid sorbent engineered materials to remove CO2 from the atmosphere um in that we've actually you know we're in Southeast Louisiana which is a a part of Louisiana that has been historically devastated by industrial activity um so one of the biggest challenges actually is going into the community and trying to educate on what we're going to do and gain public Buy in and acceptance and it's a really critical piece of any type of project development ideally you're going in years before the project has even begun engineering just to make sure and engage with that Community um Community benefits Agreements are something that we are working with communities to develop so what do those communities actually want to see from Technologies from companies and oftentimes it has nothing to do with the technology it's access to health care or food security um and how can the company coming into their communities actually provide them with that level of security so often times um the challenges being faced in this regard are not necessarily related to the technology itself um from the other part of your question around energy consumption so we've designed a system that runs entirely on electricity um as we've stated capture of CO2 is an energy intensive process it becomes more energy intensive the more dilute the CO2 is in your Stream So in the air 410 parts per million you're you talking somewhere between 5 and 10 gigles per ton of CO2 that you remove from the atmosphere so for a million tons of CO2 removal you're talking somewhere between two and 300 megawatt of energy generation required for that level of removal so I won't share our numbers exactly but that's ballpark for for direct air capture more broadly oh my question I'm Mark martiz from Princeton plasma Physics laboratory my question is for Erica uh so the knee-jerk uh criticism about um electrochemical CO2 mineralization is of course uh what are you going to do with the acid stream and of course your company uses calcium and magnesium silicates from Wonder stand so the reaction is is the the mining of those minerals going to be sustainable and is there going to be enough to actually for you to achieve the the gigaton scale that you're proposing yeah I think that uh the advantage of this technology it's scalable because we need seawat we need rocks and we need renewable energy source so with rocks which is your question um there are enough U calcium silicates magnesium silicates to neutralize their acid stream and yes we need to be strategic on these sources uh if we could utilize spine tailings for example that's already ground uh there's energy that's required to grind these rocks so they can be more reactive uh so we can collocate find locations where all of these these resources are in one place and that would be our best bet than wherever thanks so much I'm Ela Weber I'm a professor here in the anling center and also in public policy and in Psychology and I want to bring the discussion back to uh the public acceptance that Emily already raised a few times uh and yeah at this point the American public and all in Europe don't know very much about carbon capture and sequestration they don't have strong opinions it's a real opportunity to shape public perception rather than be mour it after the fact when it's too late like we did with nuclear power and and other Technologies so maybe all of you could say a little bit about what kind of initiatives maybe are in place what kind of initiatives are to be in place and also maybe to guard against political polarization because even though it's bipartisan at this point that is no guarantee for the future who would like to speak to that first um I mean I'm happy I'm happy to take a shot we actually just released um a I guess an opinion editorial on high road carbon removal and kind of what it means to do this responsibly so I I think the first step is that there needs to be a dialogue between not only technology developers but also uh policy governments and that needs to happen at a federal state and local level um the the thing you know in in this kind of High Roads carbon removal principle we have things like you know we will not use any of our CO2 molecules for enhanced oil recovery which is actually injecting CO2 in the subsurface to recover more oil that would otherwise be unrecoverable so I I think we really need to start some of those conversations about what does it look like to responsibly deploy these Technologies and what standards do we hold Technologies developers to um so additionally there we have transparent monitoring reporting and verification as a tool for justice so ensuring that we're not only being transparent with Regulators but also with communities this is what we're going to be doing this is how we're going to do it um and getting feedback from those communities as well it needs to be a two-way conversation not only on the monitoring reporting and verification but also on the community benefits agreements um and then you know the final thing is working either with with union labor or otherwise to make sure that you are providing quality jobs quality high paying jobs in the region that you're actually deploying so you know that's kind of the framework that we laid out but we really want to start a conversation more broadly um and that needs to extend beyond just the technology developers and individual communities but also into a framework for how we approach that more broadly that's great I I mean I would just say that in the the report that I alluded to we talked a lot about the need for this early engagement with the community and basically sitting not not going in with the attitude that you're you're there to educate them because you're the expert but in fact going in to understand their their experience their um their concerns and be able to sit down and talk about how um and their fears right um to to be able to address those concerns and fears and and to talk about how it is possible to um to address them and to recognize that there are that that it doesn't mean that every project will go forward you know but to put in that early investment long before your you're doing it and and build trust and have essentially identify people within the community who can be who can help essentially be a translator right and and a goet in terms of um making sure that there's a trusted person that they're hearing from who also has has gained the trust of the developer yeah I I'll add to this discussion I showed this picture of this experiment and in fact the University of Bergen um has now built a mobile unit for this and they go around to all all manner of places and have visited actually uh Berlin recently and I think part of it is just showing people what this is I mean for CO2 storage it's thousand meters underground even scientists I looked at those pictures the first time it's like oh wow right you you start to get a grip of what this really means um and and people are you know smart enough once you explain some of the physics and the science with pictures and and to see you know things happening in real time there was a at the Museum of Bergen it was part of a big exhibition exhibition about poor media science in general how important that is for our world not just uh sub Sur CO2 storage but also Medical Science and all manner of things where por media is is intricate to to understanding po media is really important uh schools getting kids interested in in stem you know and and showing them that that there are jobs here uh it doesn't have to be in the oil and gas industry is a very similar um science behind all of it and they can take their competence and their their education and go into CO2 storage underground hydrogen storage energy storage compressed air I mean you name it there's all manner of things that you can use these uh so the more we up and down the society bring uh the message about you know uh what is really happening and what are the physics behind it um I think also helps build Comfort level that this is some off the you know out of the blue we where do we come with this from so it's it's an important part of it communication and I was a scientist generally speaking are poor communicators so it's uh it's also on us to uh understand how to communicate to different audiences y I'd like to augment this very useful information by getting confused on a higher level about economics uh what these efforts have to compete compete with in some sense is efficient use which is cheaper than buying the fuel renewable Supply which is generally cheaper than buying the fuel uh and of course some some of what you're describing is particularly challenging because it's kind of fcking a fight with entropy it's like un peeing the swimming pool but uh there what what could change that is if the recovered carbon uh can create exceptional value that more than pays for capturing it in competition of course with natural systems which already produce value and are designed to in a self-perpetuating way from capturing carbon so has somebody published perhaps in your committee a kind of supply curve of quantities and values for uses to which captured carbon could be put so that we can look at the net value of doing what many of you are describing uh and see whether there's there's some hidden gold there yeah so there I mean there have been uh there have been various papers that have looked at technoeconomic analysis of different Technologies producing different products um and uh uh you know and and our our committee also spoke to that and we speak to that in this next report in more depth um I think you know a a a good example could be uh because you're absolutely right I mean one of the things that that one has to be concerned about is I mean obviously we're made of carbon and water to first order okay and so we and food is carbon uh and so carbon you know this concept of decarbonization drives me crazy it's not you know we're we're not we're we're not going to decarbonize our world otherwise we'll all be dead um but but the point is that it's the question of where does the carbon come from and so one has to ask the question does it come is it best to come from biomass is it best to come from recycled Plastics is it you know I mean there's lots as opposed to carbon dioxide or from coal waste or whatever because carbon dioxide is you know down here in energy and anything you do is going to cost energy to to make it better so it has to be something that you you clearly see that there is a value to make it worthwhile so one area that that I particularly think I mean so you either do something that you make very cheaply um and it's just needed in mass quantities which is concrete pote
2023-11-12 13:18
