Alberta’s Deep Sky Alpha facility is pulling carbon from the air in a risky political environment
John Hollins
In the rolling farmland of central Alberta, a unique testing site for technology designed to extract carbon dioxide from the air is powering up against political winds that have shifted since its developer broke ground a year ago.
Geoff Strong
John,
Thanks for bringing this up. I don’t know who the ‘Deep Sky’ people are, and whether they have expertise at DAC (Direct Air Capture of CO2), but I have some doubts there. Near the end of your attached document, they finally gave some numbers (because exploratory data is all-important on this question).
I’ll quote from the article: “The site is supported by the carbon credits it generates. Last year, the company sold its first credits to Royal Bank of Canada and Microsoft Corp., covering CO2 removals of 10,000 tonnes over 10 years.” If that number, ‘10,000 tonnes in 10 years’ or average 1000 tonnes per year, is correct, then it is miniscule, given that annual CO2 emissions are close to 40 GT (40,000,000,000 tonnes) per YEAR. At that rate, you would need 40 million such facilities to suppress global emissions, or more realistically, 4 million DACs to suppress 10% of global emissions. That pretty much gives us the futility in this effort. And I never subscribe to the saying that “at least they are trying to do something.” They need to put the exploratory data up front, then do their planning and design.
BTW, the Climeworks MAMMOTH facility in Iceland has the capacity to capture 35,000 tonnes per year, which is still miniscule. Plus, MAMMOTH uses existing geothermal energy to drive their system. The article did not mention the energy source for the Innisfail AB facility, but I expect it is run at least indirectly by fossil fuels. How much carbon emissions does it release?
We still need to drastically reduce carbon emissions globally, and to date that has not happened, but looking beyond that, we also need to be VERY concerned about existing atmospheric CO2, now about 428 ppm (annual average, we exceeded 430 this past spring), and rising at an annual rate of ~ 3 ppm/year. That existing CO2 has the potential to warm the planet 3-4 ºC without any more emissions. So, I applaud all efforts to drawdown that CO2 as this Alberta group is attempting, but we need other methods, as DAC alone cannot accomplish it just on the basis of numbers and the amount of ‘air’ one must process to get 438 molecules of CO2 out of 1,000,000 molecules of air.
Geoff Strong
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Art Hunter
In the rolling farmland of central Alberta, a unique testing site for technology designed to extract carbon dioxide from the air is powering up against political winds that have shifted since its developer broke ground a year ago.
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--Cheers,John
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Subject: Re: [cacor-public] Alberta’s Deep Sky Alpha facility is pulling carbon from the air in a risky political environment