A First-Ever Commercial Plant Extracting Carbon from Air

Heirloom Carbon Technologies has opened the first commercial carbon capture plant in the U.S. This key moment presages the start of what is widely expected to be an important new industry whose entire purpose is preventing the carbon emissions released by burning fossil fuels from destroying life on our planet.

Brad Plumer, writing in the New York Times, provides the details of this very small demonstration plant built in Tracy, California. It's an open air structure, with 40-foot racks holding hundreds of trays, each sprinkled with calcium oxide powder that turns into limestone when it binds with airborne carbon dioxide. This is a natural process that Heirloom is working to speed up.

Once the carbon dioxide is "captured" through the creation of the limestone, the company expects to heat up the limestone in a kiln at 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit, which then releases the carbon dioxide, where it then gets pumpted in a storage tank, leaving the calcium oxide to be returned and reused on another set of trays.

The carbon dioxide (called CO2) is expected to be transferred again to be permanently stored. For now, Heirloom is looking at the large concrete marketplace and working with CarbonCure, a company that was launched to mix CO2 into concrete to make concrete stronger by having it turn into limestone again where it will be permanently stored and reduce the carbon footprint of concrete (which ordinarily releases a lot of carbon emissions through its normal creation and use throughout the building industry).

Providing CO2 to CarbonCure has a value for sure but for now, that value is far below the costs of capturing the carbon. Let's look at what these economics are now. The Tracy facility will be able to absorb 1,000 tons of CO2 per year. At the estimated $50/tonne "social cost" of carbon, the Heirloom facility would earn $50,000 per year. Although Heirloom hasn't released info on its specific costs, those funding breakthrough carbon capture activity, such as Frontier (which includes Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey Sustainability), are typically paying between $500 and $2,500 per ton to accelerate innovation and market development. These high prices are intended to generate sufficient revenue for these early-stage ventures to actually cover their costs. At $1000/ton, Heirloom could earn $1,000,000 per year. However, Plumer estimates that Heirloom's actually costs may be in the range of $600 per ton or higher.

Fortunately for Heirloom and other ventures working in this space, there are a lot of large corporations willing to spend millions to pay for "carbon removal credits" in what has been a voluntary carbon market to effectively be able to claim that they are reducing their carbon footprints. These corporations see reputational benefits from those outlays, even if they do not result in even meaningful actual carbon reductions at this stage. The Biden Administration is also getting into the act and awarded $1.2 billion to help Heirloom

The Heirloom carbon capture plant in Tracy, California

Many people still don't know much about carbon capture and storage, or what has been called "Carbon Capture, Utilization and Sequestration" (CCUS). There are a multitude of approaches being taken to capture carbon and, as a result, a plethora of acronyms have emerged. The approach used by Heirloom is now called Direct Air Capture (DAC) and specifically involve capturing CO2 out of the air but other approaches are simply called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and utilize a range of methods to bind that CO2 in a semi-permanent or permanent way, such as through marine-based CDR or natural processes such increasing the CO2 content in soils or accelerating the use of CO2 by plants, such as by growing crops or trees with the intention of having them capture the CO2.

Utilization of CO2 involves finding valuable ways to use that CO2 or just the carbon (C) from captured CO2. Ventures working on the utilization part of this process pose the prospects of having profitable business models. Nucleation Capital, as a climate-focused venture fund, recognizes that CCUS is a growth industry that is anticipated to become a large consumer of energy. We are following the activity in this nascent space and we are investing in some of the most promising approaches, especially where that approach has strong profit and growth prospects or where it intersects with the need for abundant clean energy. While knowing all the acronyms isn't critical, there are a few key things to know about CCUS in general.

Key Facts to Know about CO2 and Carbon Capture, Utilization & Sequestration

While CO2 itself is natural and not toxic (except in high doses), the enormous amount that we have polluted our atmosphere with by burning fossil fuels for energy is causing our climate to warm up at a very fast rate. We need CCUS in order to lessen and possibly reverse the rate of warming, so we can restore a healthy climate.
All technological approaches to capturing carbon back out of the air or water are expensive and early stage. So are the approaches to carbon utilization and sequestration (i.e. methods to utilize and/or store the carbon so it doesn't get released back into the atmosphere).
To stop making our climate crisis worse, we have to stop burning fossil fuels, as our highest priority mitigation effort. While some might think that capturing the carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels right at the point source may warrant continuing to burn fossil fuels, that will not enable us to use carbon capture to restore the damage already done, which is the primary rationale for CCUS.
Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today, the amount of damage the long-lived CO2 pollution is causing the world will continue to heat the planet for decades or centuries. The only way to prevent that is by removing this excess CO2 pollution.
Today, there are only a handful of dedicated carbon capture plants in existence globally but, to prevent serious damage to earth ecosystems, we will need to scale up these plants in record time to be able to reverse most of the emissions produced by the fossil fuel industry in its entire history. We will also need to scale utilization and sequestration capabilities.
The cost of cleaning up all of the emissions caused by our past use of fossil fuels will be enormous and we haven't come to any agreement as to who bears that burden. Some of that cost can be mitigated with valuable commercial utilization technologies.
Powering CCUS plants will require massive amounts of low-carbon clean energy because it makes no sense to emit carbon in the process of capturing carbon. The best and least-cost approach will likely involve using the coming generation of small modular reactors to generate 24x7 power in remote areas.
The cost of clean energy used to capture and sequester carbon will be a significant factor in the total cost of that activity but powering CCUS can help SMRs scale up, which will help reduce the manufacturing costs.
There is no scenario in which the cost of burning fossil fuels and capturing all the CO2 from that activity and permanently storing it will cost less than replacing the fossil fuels with renewables or nuclear and avoiding the release of new emissions in the first place.
Fossil fuel companies are already lobbying to earn carbon credits by pairing carbon capture with the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. This is why some environmentalists, like Al Gore, oppose providing funding for CCUS to oil and gas companies, even though the most cost-effective CO2 capture is done at or close to the fossil fuel smokestack source point.

Read more in the New York Times, "In a U.S. First, a Commercial Plant Starts Pulling Carbon From the Air," by Brad Plumer, November 9, 2023.

Learn more about Frontier a consortium that is providing advance market commitments (AMC) that aim to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies, without picking winning technologies at the start of the innovation cycle. The goal is to send a strong demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies.

The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $3.5 billion to fund the construction of four commercial-scale direct air capture plants. In August, the Biden Adminstration announced $1.2 billion in awards for the first two, one to be built by Battelle in Louisiana and the other to be built by Occidental Petroleum, in Texas, through a 50-50 cost share.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Advanced Nuclear, Carbon emissions, Carbon markets, Carbon negative, Climate change, Climate policy, Construction costs, Government support, History Timeline, History-making, Investor activity, LINKS, Private companies, Solving climate, US competitiveness, US technological leadership

June 21, 2023

Sweden adopts “100% fossil-free” target

Sweden has done something very few countries or jurisdictions have done with respect to energy: they have kept their eye on the goal. The Swedish Parliament adopted an energy target of "100% fossil-free" energy—which should be everyone's goal—rather than falling into the trap of focusing on and dictating the means to that goal. This is so rare, it deserves recognition.

In Sweden adopts '100% fossil -free energy target, easing way for nuclear, EURACTIV reports on Sweden's new plan to remove their "100% renewable" target in order to use all available clean energy resources—including nuclear—to meet the expected doubling of energy demand while also meeting a net zero emissions goal by 2045.

“This creates the conditions for nuclear power,” Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said in parliament. “We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.”

This new policy gives a green light for the government to push forward with plans by state-owned utility, Vattenfall, to build new small modular nuclear reactor plants and refurbish the country's existing plants to extend the their operating lives. Meanwhile, they are also working to simplify environmental permitting to speed up not just the build-out of nuclear but also for wind power and to accelerate other green technologies.

This is a very significant and promising change of focus which every country should adopt, while allowing utilities to find the best path forward for eliminating their use of fossil fuels. As far as we can tell, nothing else will enable the transition to move ahead at maximum speed.

Read more at EURACTIV's Sweden adopts '100% fossil -free energy target, easing way for nuclear, June 21, 2023.

Published by Nucleation Capital in 100% Renewables, Advanced Nuclear, Carbon emissions, Climate change, Energy abundance, Fossil fuels, Future of Energy, Government support, International support for nuclear, LINKS, Nuclear competitiveness, Politicians supporting nuclear, Regulatory reform, Solving climate, Zero emission energy

May 18, 2023

Warming towards cold fusion

In Fusion Runs Hot and Cold, Jonah Messinger, the Breakthrough Institute's Senior Energy Analysist, provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the science of low energy nuclear reactions (LENR), a field once known as "Cold Fusion." Although long castigated as a pseudoscience, the field has attracted a growing number of credible experts, recent DOE funding, and has produced a growing body of empirical evidence for a phenomena that is becoming increasingly understood as a third type of nuclear power.

Cold fusion has long been widely misunderstood, beginning with its flawed introduction by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, electrochemists at the University of Utah, as far back as 1989. They claimed to have induced fusion reactions of deuterium nuclei in a palladium foil by applying a current to drive electrolysis. Their electrolysis experiments—inspired by older anomalous reports of cold-fusion-like experiments in the 1920s—caused several sharp, multi-day bursts in thermal power output from their cells well above the electrical power of the input current or the total potential energy stored in the chemical bonds of the electrolyte.

There were multiple problems with Fleishmann and Pons’ work, which were revisited by Jonah Messinger, not least of which was a lack of both reproducibility and a lack of a theoretical explanation. According to this review, not five weeks after the initial claims—the field was proclaimed dead by speakers at the influential American Physical Society (APS), among which was a mocking rebuttal by Steven Koonin, then a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech—now notorious for his dismissal of climate change impacts.

Although at that time, the DOE’s panel to evaluate cold fusion opted against funding cold fusion research (despite evidence of neutron and tritium production that could not be explained), the body of scientific evidence since then has grown such that even the DOE has finally agreed to fund research. Catch up on the current state of scientific understandings about what is now far more widely believed to be a highly complex, multi-body, low energy nuclear reaction with this article from the Breakthrough Institute.

Read more at Breakthrough's Fusion Runs Hot and Cold, by Jonah Messinger, May 18, 2023. Also see the Nature.com article, Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion by Ross Koningstein, David Fork, Matt Trevithick and others, from May 19, 2019.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Advanced Nuclear, Carbon emissions, Energy abundance, Future of Energy, Government support, LINKS, Nuclear innovation, Nuclear R&D, Politicians supporting nuclear, US competitiveness, US technological leadership, Zero emission energy

May 9, 2023

Support for nuclear power soars

Grist writes: "US support for nuclear power soars to highest level in a decade: As the country looks to decarbonize, nuclear’s popularity continues to climb." This is what Akielly Hu, Grist's News and Politics Fellow, reports following the release by Gallup of a survey that found that 55 percent of US adults support the use of nuclear power. This total is up four percentage points in a year, and "reflects the highest level of public support for nuclear energy use in electricity since 2012."

Among other findings, the survey found that Republicans are more likely to favor nuclear energy than Democrats, which partisan divide is particularly visible at the state level, with more pro-nuclear policies adopted in Republican-controlled states than left-leaning ones. Nevertheless, support for nuclear energy by Democratic is also on the rise, in part due to advances in nuclear technologies and new federal climate laws that clarify the fact that nuclear power is carbon-free energy and can help in efforts to solve climate change.

The Biden administration has identified nuclear energy as a key climate solution to achieve grid stability in a net-zero future. The administration is pushing for the deployment of advanced nuclear reactor models that improve on the safety and efficiency of traditional reactor designs. These designs will all be far more consistent and reliable than wind and solar energy, which vary depending on the weather. The broader shift in public opinion and, in particular, Democratic opinion toward nuclear energy, is at least partially a function of strong pronuclear leadership coming from the Biden Administration and the DOE under Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

Read more at Grist, US support for nuclear power soars to highest level in a decade, by Akielly Hu, May 9, 2023.

June 1, 2021

Biden should impose a carbon fee immediately

James Hansen and Daniel M. Galpern co-authored an opinion piece which was published in the Boston Globe, entitled "Biden should impose a carbon fee immediately." According to the authors, under the Independent Offices Appropriations Act, the president retains authority to direct the Environmental Protection Agency to impose a fee on greenhouse gas emissions.

As they explain, the president retains authority to direct a relevant federal agency (here, the Environmental Protection Agency) to impose a fee on GHG emissions. The fee can be collected efficiently from the about 200 oil, gas, and coal companies that produce, refine, and distribute fossil fuels in the United States.

This is a crucial clarification to executive authority, because EPA has labored for decades under a presumption that it lacked authority to impose such fees. That assumption derived in part from an aside in a legal memorandum by then-EPA General Counsel E. Donald Elliott. Elliott had reviewed economic incentives available to the agency to restrict pollution but, by his own later admission, Elliott at that time was “woefully ignorant of the IOAA and related jurisprudence.” Writing in 2019, Elliott sought to “set the record straight that EPA does have existing authority to impose a reasonable user fee on releases of carbon dioxide and other GHGs . . . any time that it has the political will to do so.”

Economists agree that a rising carbon price covering all fossil fuel uses is essential for rapid phasedown of emissions. More than 3,500 economists — including 28 Nobel Prize laureates, all four living former chairs of the Federal Reserve, and 15 former chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers — issued a statement endorsing a carbon fee and dividend. More than 400 student body presidents, representing more than 4 million college students across all 50 states, support a carbon fee and dividend as well.

See The Boston Globe oped "Biden should impose a carbon fee immediately." by James Hansen and Daniel M. Galpern, June 1, 2021.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Brilliant thinkers, Carbon emissions, Carbon markets, Climate change, LINKS, Solving climate, US technological leadership

September 26, 2007

Scientists have urged exploration of carbon-fixing solutions for a long time

Back in 2007, scientists recognized that curtailing emissions from our use of energy was going to be very difficult, and they began to urge research into ways to "fix" carbon that could prevent the coming climate catastrophe. "We are taking the very strong line that we are not going to save the planet by the regular approaches like the Kyoto Protocol or renewable energy," Professor James Lovelock told BBC News.

Publishing their thoughts in the journal "Nature," London Science Museum head Chris Rapley and Gaia theorist James Lovelock discussed the concept of boosting ocean take-up of CO2 through the use of circulation pipes. "What we have to do is to look at it in a systems sense, or a Gaian sense, and see if it's curable by direct action."

Read this 2007 BBC News report: "Lovelock urges ocean climate fix."

Published by Nucleation Capital in Brilliant thinkers, Carbon emissions, Carbon negative, Climate change, LINKS, Scientific debate