In the meantime, scientists and researchers are working to make current carbon capture technologies better. His research focuses on finding the optimal material for carbon capture. Hence, even the best carbon capture technology will be useless if the world is not willing to put a price on carbon," Berend Smit, a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley, tells CNBC by email. "The best capture technology will reduce these costs, but it will never be zero. To change that reality, there must be economic costs to releasing carbon dioxide pollution into the atmosphere. It is cheaper to let it go up the smokestack than put this chemical plant on the back of the smokestack to remove it," Herzog says. So why isn't it being used everywhere already? The technology exists to capture carbon and there is a grave need for climate change to be mitigated. We have for two centuries simply dumped the waste from energy production - which is carbon dioxide - in the atmosphere and not thought about it any further, and we are gradually waking up to the fact that that's not acceptable," Lackner says. "In the end, I see CO2 as a waste management problem. A lot of people jumped on this," he says. 04%," Herzog tells CNBC, and the technical process of removing carbon dioxide from a gas gets more expensive the lower the concentration of the carbon dioxide gets. "Carbon removal is expected to play a key role in the transition to a net-zero energy system," the IEA says, but currently it is a very expensive technology.ĭirect air capture is "very expensive because the CO2 in the atmosphere is only. The only choice, Lackner says, is to "draw down" the atmospheric carbon dioxide - or to suffer unknown, devastating consequences.Ĭapturing carbon from the air, not from a factory smokestack, is called "direct air capture," and there are currently 15 direct air capture plants in Europe, the United States and Canada, according to the IEA. "The oceans have started to rise, hurricanes have gotten way worse, climate has become more extreme, and this will only get worse over the next decade," Lackner says. "By now we have 415, and we are going up 2.5 ppm a year at this moment." The consequences of that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already dire and will get worse. "We started the industrial revolution with 280 parts per million in the atmosphere," Lackner tells CNBC. As of December, atmospheric carbon dioxide stands at 414.02 ppm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is tracked as in parts per million, or PPM. "But you needed to have this discussion 30, 40 years ago because back then you still had a chance to stop the train before we collide with something." "The question of whether you want to store or not to store was a very good question in 1980," Lackner tells CNBC. In terms of reversing global climate change, there's already been too much carbon released into the atmosphere for us not to try and capture carbon and store it, says Klaus Lackner, the director of Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and professor at Arizona State University. It has the capacity to take 1.1 million tons of carbon per year out of the emissions released by a corn processing factory, and stores that carbon a mile and a half underground. One example in the United States is in Decatur, Ill., where the food processing giant Archer Daniels Midland Company launched a carbon capture and storage project in 2017. By the 1990s, "activity really ramped up," he says. It wasn't until the 1980s that carbon capture technology was studied for climate mitigation efforts, but even then, it was "mainly lone wolves," Herzog says. The earliest CCUS technology was used for enhanced oil recovery, meaning the carbon dioxide is pumped into an oil field to help oil companies retrieve more oil from the ground, Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative and author of the book "Carbon Capture," tells CNBC. There are currently 21 large-scale CCUS commercial projects around the globe where carbon dioxide is taken out of factory emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental energy organization.
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