AspiraDAC is on track to begin “sponging” carbon dioxide out of the air in 2025 to store in underground reservoirs as part of a $700,000 deal with Frontier – a $US1 billion carbon removal fund backed by Stripe, Meta, Alphabet, Shopify and McKinsey – inked last year.
AspiraDAC will capture and store 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2027 at an agreed price of $US1000 a tonne under the advanced market commitment.
‘Super uneconomic’
“The buyers of these voluntary credits are typically United States corporations,” says Rohan Gillespie, whose company Southern Green Gas will develop the 180 direct air capture devices for AspiraDAC in partnership with the University of Sydney.
“Nobody in Australia is putting up their hand up,” he says.
Despite being “super uneconomic” at this point in its lifecycle, Grok Ventures chief executive Jeremy Kwong-Law wonders why more Australian companies aren’t looking at direct air capture and storage either on land, in the ocean, in geological formations, or in products.
Grok Ventures CEO Jeremy Kwong-Law. Oscar Colman
Sectors such as transport can’t achieve their net zero climate commitments without it, he says.
“Fuel companies around the world are definitely onto it, they want to use the CO2 that’s extracted [from the atmosphere]… to create some product that can go back into the current supply chain,” Kwong-Law says.
Southern Green Gas is already working on solving this problem.
Momentum builds
Direct air capture has gained significant global momentum in the last two years.
“In 2007, the output of the global direct air capture industry was one patent application a year. In 2022, this number increased to 100 – the same rate as wind and solar energy on the late nineties and early 2000s,” says Christoph Gebald, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, which operates the largest direct air capture facility, the Orca plant, in Iceland.
Orca aims to permanently store up to 4000 tonnes of CO2 a year – the equivalent of 170,000 trees on 340 hectares of land – by dissolving it in water and pumping it underground where it reacts to form rock. The company raised the largest ever direct air capture investment last year, equivalent to $US650 million.
“Air capture is real, and it is here to stay,” says Gebald.
It does, however, face significant challenges. At just 0.04 per cent, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes removing and storing it tricky.
Critics argue that direct air capture emits more carbon than it removes from the atmosphere because of it is so energy intensive –a huge amount of air needs to be processed to extract a small amount of carbon.
“It is technically difficult, but it can be done,” Turecek says. “And there is a whole global effort to make this competitive and commercial.”
It reminds Turecek of the early days of solar PV, when naysayers knocked it for being too expensive and inefficient. “The whole objective is to bring cost down with scale,” Turecek says.
Storage bottlenecks
AspiraDAC’s units are powered by solar panels that cover it like an A-frame tent. The energy supply comes with the capture technology which allows it to be co-located close to storage facilities.
Turecek claims this is a unique advantage in a sector where storage is shaping up as a significant bottleneck.
It can take around four to 10 years to develop an operating CO2 storage site from conception to injection, according to the International Energy Agency. Permits and policy could get in the way if governments are not careful, the agency warns.
Rohan Gillespie next to his direct air capture device in Riddels Creek, Victoria Louis Trerise
Gillespie says Australia is lucky to have a generous supply of the most obvious place to store carbon dioxide captured from the air – depleted oil and gas reservoirs.
Already oil and gas companies like Santos are positioning themselves to offer CO2 storage as a service.
A Santos carbon capture and storage plant in South Australia.
Gillespie says the $20 to $30 a tonne price they are targeting for this service is “very doable”.
But not everyone is happy about it. Detractors are concerned about toxins released through the direct air capture process.
Some climate activists feel it is just another way to keep the fossil fuel majors in business since injected carbon is used to extract oil. What’s more, carbon dioxide can’t be injected into existing wells, so new ones need to be drilled.
The buzz surrounding direct air capture stems from an overwhelming consensus that net zero can’t be achieved without significant carbon dioxide removal. There are lots of ways to do this, but direct air capture is shaping up as one of the more compelling techniques.
To date, 27 direct air capture plants have been commissioned worldwide, removing almost 0.01 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year.
Another 130 facilities are in various stages of development with the potential to up that number to 75 million tonnes a year.
The IEA forecasts that with the rate of investment over the next seven years, direct air capture will be removing 90 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a year.
But to reach this level it needs to become a staple ingredient in the carbon credit portfolios of companies and governments.
“That will be driven by net zero commitments that companies make” Turecek says. “Even if a small portion of their decarbonisation portfolio is direct air capture or carbon removal, that will pull through this technology and get it to scale.”
Regulatory setbacks
For now, Gillespie would be happy if the Australia government recognised direct air capture as a critical technology.
It is explicitly excluded from the Australian government run carbon credit scheme, despite an April report by the government’s climate advisors highlighting direct air capture as an important technology to achieve global net zero emissions and avoid climate catastrophes.
In contrast, the US Inflation Reduction Act offers a $US180 a tonne tax credit to suppliers of direct air capture with geologic storage and has earmarked $US3.5 billion to build four major direct air capture and storage hubs.
“The US government is not just subsidising carbon removal, it is investing in the infrastructure required to get it to scale, including measurement, reporting and verification and understanding ecosystem impacts, as well as steering the technologies in responsible directions by making robust community benefits plans a condition of funding,” a DAC industry insider explains.
Despite having designed AspiraDAC to be commercial without the help of government subsidies, Turecek is frustrated by how quiet the carbon removal discussion is in Australia compared to the US.
Ultimately, he says it will be private companies wanting to offset emissions voluntarily that will commercialise direct air capture technologies and create a sustainable global industry.
0 Comments