Pulling Greenhouse Gases From The Air - Can It Be Done?

Pulling Greenhouse Gases From The Air - Can It Be Done?

This remains key to the appeal of air capture: Because greenhouse gases are dispersed around the globe, they can be extracted from the air anywhere. Carbon dioxide spewing from a tailpipe in Sao Paulo or a coal plant in China can be captured by a machine in Iceland or the Middle East because the atmosphere functions as a conveyor belt, moving CO2 from its sources to any sink. That’s important because while we can envision a world where most or all of the electricity we use comes from nuclear, solar or wind energy, or from fossil fuels where the CO2 is captured at the power plant, it’s harder to see how emissions from cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes can be eliminated. The beauty of air capture, Lackner and his colleagues explained, is that “one could collect CO2 after the fact and from any source….One would not have to wait for the phasing out of existing infrastructure before addressing the greenhouse gas problem.” Air capture plants, they wrote, could be located atop the best underground reservoirs for storing CO2, which may be in isolated locations. This fact is key to the business plans of all the air-capture startups. In only one regard was Lackner’s paper clearly mistaken — he estimated that the cost of air capture would be “on the order of $10 to $15 per ton,” a target that now looks wildly optimistic.