Tech

Quest to trap carbon in rock — and beat climate change


An evening in In November 2016, Gebald attended a luxury party in Marrakesh hosted by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. He felt a little out of place among her guests, a crowd of prominent climate researchers, activists and policymakers who were in town for the COP conference, a major annual event. year in the climate world. Seriously doing the rounds, he meets a pompous man with white hair in a high bun. It was Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the recently retired president of Iceland. Gebald had given him the rumor about Climeworks. “That’s great!” Gebald recalled Grímsson’s words. “I can store CO2 underground in my country. But we lacked the technology to capture it. “

Grímsson is talking about Carbfix, a subsidiary of Reykjavik Energy, which is developing a system to sequester carbon by injecting it into geological formations underground. Reykjavik Energy also operates several nice clean geothermal power plants. Grímsson made several recommendations, and soon Gebald and Wurzbacher began collaborating with Carbfix.

Icelandic officials may have been welcoming, but Iceland itself was not. Wurzbacher and Gebald built a small test plant with a single exhaust fan near Hellisheidi in 2017, but in short order “it really froze,” says Gebald. One day when the temperature dropped below zero, the steam from the geothermal plant hit the bare metal of the machine, covering it in ice. Another time, a huge storm nearly swept away the entire multiton structure. “We had to fix it to the ground,” Gebald said.

Four years and many hardships later, Climeworks’ new factory, named Orca (after both the killer whale and the Icelandic word for “energy”), has popped up online. It is located in the verdant volcanic plains, a short drive from the visitor center where the opening ceremony was held. Eight olive green steel boxes about the size of transport tanks stand on concrete platforms, connected by overhead pipes to a low white building as the control center. Steel ships, known as CO2 In front are large black fans sucking air.

Inside the collector boxes, air flows through filters coated with amine-based absorbers and other materials that trap CO.2 molecules. Eventually the carbon saturates the filter, like water expanding a sponge. At that point, the sliding doors seal the air inlets and hot air is drawn in from the control center to heat the filters to about 100 degrees Celsius, helping to release CO.2. The aspirators then pull the free-floating molecules to a control center, where tanks, ducts and other hardware compress the air. It was then moved to a handful of igloo-sized geodesic steel domes a few miles away, crouching on the plains like emergency Martian housing.

The Orca’s giant fans dragged the river of air.

Photo: Tanya Houghton

Photo: Tanya Houghton

Carbfix technicians and machines handle the next steps. Inside the domes, a powerful motor pushes a stream of water in and down the fountain. HAVE2 gas pipeline to the water. “It’s an Underground SodaStream!” Sandra Snæbjörnsdóttir, a Carbfix scientist with shoulder-length brown hair and earnest blue eyes framed by turtle shell glasses, who helped design the system. Several hundred meters away, the soda stream flows into the ground, where it reacts with basalt deposits turning it into a solid mineral. In other words, the heated carbon will be turned to stone, like a fairy tale villain. “This is basically how CO is stored in nature2,” said Snæbjörnsdóttir. There’s a lot of room for this tactic. Worldwide, there are probably enough geological formations suitable to store trillions of tons of carbon.

At its most basic level, the system does what it’s supposed to: Climeworks extracts carbon from the air and Carbfix bury it underground. And both use geothermal energy, producing only small greenhouse gas emissions. But the capture part still takes a lot of energy and is therefore very expensive. Of course, the fan needs electricity, but most of the electricity is used to heat the carbon to release it from the absorber.

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