The US has ambitious plans to reduce CO2, and to do this they want to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the air every year. What's up Engineering Lovers, my name is Gustavo Pereira and today we are going to talk about reducing CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere. This reduction in global carbon emissions is intended to reduce the impact of climate change on the planet, although it may not be enough.
In an attempt to turn the tide amid dire scientific predictions, the US Department of Energy has announced ambitious new plans to accelerate the development of carbon capture technologies. The shift comes in the form of a new initiative called Carbon Negative Shot, or " Carbon Negative Shot," which aims to scale up CDR carbon dioxide removal technologies and make them cost-effective. The initiative, which was announced on the US Department of Energy website, aims to reduce the price of CDR to less than $100 a ton.
This would mean that this technology could be used to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without being impractically expensive. According to the US Department of Energy, removing one billion tons or one gigaton of carbon dioxide would be the equivalent of removing pollution from about 250 million vehicles in one year. To achieve this lofty goal, the US Department of Energy will have to vastly improve the technology over existing carbon-scavenging plants.
The world's largest direct air capture plant, called Orka, went into operation in Iceland this year. It is currently capable of extracting 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which puts it well behind the figures cited for the new initiative. The other plant, under construction in Scotland as part of a collaboration with British energy transition company Storegga Geotechnologies and Canadian carbon capture technology company Carbon Engineering, will eventually capture up to 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year, according to the two companies.
But there is still a lot to be done to try to stop global warming. The latest IPCC report, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on climate change, for example, pointed to the fact that the Earth is setting heat records in 125,000 years. Several scientists now say that carbon capture technologies will need to work hand in hand with initiatives aimed at drastically reducing carbon emissions.
As UCS recently pointed out on its website, to achieve net zero emissions, we need to do more than just reduce our emissions, and we need to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or offset its effects. And how is this extraction done? Well, there are basically two ways to extract CO2 from the air.
One is to increase nature's ability to absorb and store carbon. Healing degraded forests, restoring mangroves, planting trees on an industrial scale, increasing carbon uptake in rocks or the ocean all fall into the hotly debated category of "nature-based solutions. " The second way, called direct air capture, uses chemical processes to remove the CO2 and then recycles the CO2 for industrial use or ends up storing it in porous rock formations, unused coal beds, or saline aquifers.
Factories operating today use either a liquid solvent or a solid solvent to separate CO₂ from other gases. The machines use a fan to pull air into a “collector”, and inside this collector it has a selective filter that captures the CO2. When the filter is full, the collector is closed and CO2 is captured.
A variation known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, combines elements of both approaches. This carbon can be further converted, for example into biomass, and later converted into biofuels or burned to drive turbines that generate electricity. In this way, the CO2 emitted is approximately canceled out by the CO2 absorbed during plant growth.
Or this CO2 can be stored and stored, thus creating a carbon deficit in the atmosphere. But this whole initiative still faces a serious problem, which in this case is the large amount of energy needed to extract these large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. If not planned carefully, carbon-removal technologies can actually contribute to the problem for which they were designed.
This is because, for the construction and operation of these plants, it is necessary to consume a large amount of energy, as well as the consumption of different materials. And as we've said in some of our videos, it's no use having sustainable processes if they end up using energy from non-sustainable sources. It is the same as building a carbon capture plant using a thermoelectric plant that burns coal, in other words, this is not sustainable.
Therefore, it is extremely important that there is a robust investment in technology and infrastructure for generating clean energy, such as solar, wind and many others. This is just one of the challenges it faces on its way to making the technology viable on the scale it needs. And you, what do you do in your daily life to contribute to reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere?
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