New Direct Air Capture Plant That Runs On Nuclear Heat To Be Built In The UK
Geoengineering News
Credit: PPP Aerial Photos | ShutterstockSizewell C nuclear power station and Associated British Ports (ABP) – UK’s leading port operator with a network of 21 ports across Britain have agreed to work together to build an innovative heat-powered direct air capture (DAC) facility.
The facility will be a demonstration project that will aim to test a new DAC technology using heat from Sizewell C rather than electricity to run. The location of the project will be at the Port of Lowestoft. If successful, the large-scale direct air capture project is planned to be at a separate location from the power station, with the heat transported through underground pipes.
Relevant: Progress On CO2 Capture Plan for Sizewell C Nuclear Plant
The large-scale facility could potentially capture 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 each year. The two companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to lease a site at the port and seek planning permission to build the plant.
Credit: Ian Reay | ShutterstockThe project also received a £3 million ($3.7 million) grant from the government’s Greenhouse Gas Removals competition in 2022 – a competition by the UK government that will provide funding for developing technologies that enable the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in the country.
“We are delighted to be developing plans with ABP to locate the demonstrator DAC facility at the Port of Lowestoft and to help drive net zero innovation in the East of England… DAC is one part of our plan to make Sizewell C a low-carbon hub, which will help kickstart other technologies and deliver even more value to our energy system.” said Sizewell C’s Managing Director for Financing, Julia Pyke.
Relevant: Air Products And ABP To Build UK’s Largest Green Hydrogen Facility
Direct air capture and storage is an essential carbon removal technology that could help significantly reduce the excess atmospheric CO2 emissions that have already built up. However, innovation is needed in the space to reduce the large electricity consumption of the technology, as it could compete with households for clean electricity usage.
If DAC technologies redirect a large proportion of clean energy from communities, the amount would have to be compensated by fossil fuel energy which threatens DAC’s viability as an effective carbon removal solution.
Source: Carbon Herald
Nucleation Capital
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Andrew Lockley
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Eelco Rohling
Prof. Eelco J. Rohling
(Ocean & Climate Change)
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Andrew Lockley
Michael Hayes
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Seth Miller
- A DAC plant will be built in locations which are geologically favorable for storage, but are expensive to tie to the grid (Iceland, West Texas, etc.)
- An energy cost from modular nuclear of $0.08/kWh, which will be competitive with grid-tied renewables that require long distance transmission
- A generic energy cost of 1,200 kWh/tonne CO2 captured by DAC, such that a plant capturing 1 MT CO2/yr would require roughly 150 MW of continuous power for capture + compression/injections.
Nucleation Capital
Shannon A. Fiume
And Valerie, I'm assuming you've seen the latest Lazard LCOE.
Capital costs are still high and would need to be balanced with
asset lifetime and additional benefits of DAC/CCU/industrial heat.
If we're serious about avoiding overshoot, we need to grow
nuclear. If we were looking for maximal optimistic growth on all
things not fossil, it could look like so: https://bit.ly/energbal.
I underplayed nuclear given it's not a technology that scales like
Solar PV or wind, and waste concerns. The problem with my
speculation is relies too heavily on CCS (140 Ej/yr at 2030) even
if it's coupled to bio sources and waste, solar and wind are
stretched to the max. But shows us unless we do more with RE,
energy storage and nuclear, we still have upwards of a third of
power that will likely be some part actual fossil instead of
nearly phased out. Emissions from power for 2021 was 39.3% of FF
(https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00406-z), taking 30% is 4.7
GtCO2. Optimistically we could have somewhere from a bit over
1GtCO2 to nearly 5GtCO2 in emissions by 2030.
How close will we be to overshooting 1.5ºC at that time? How much
over 1 GtCO2 at 2030 puts us in overshoot? Would all the other
sectors be at net-zero by 2030? How many countries will just agree
to kick the can down the road and slide above overshoot? To all of
those questions, I don't know. I do know that sea level rise (that
occurs until peak warming and is fully realized decades after) is
basically permanent no matter how much carbon we remove or shield
with SAI. For those in energy, it's critical clean energy and
electrification maximally accelerate, to avoid overshoot.
Best,
~~sa
-- Shannon A. Fiume sha...@autofracture.com | +01.415.272.7020 http://www.autofracture.com/research | http://www.autofracture.com/opencarbon https://linkedin.com/in/safiume | Go Carbon Negative!
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Michael Hayes
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Michael MacCracken
Dear Michael--
Regarding your discouraging view on SAI, I could equally say
there are no nations that I know of that favor further warming.
Now, I'd agree that not all, perhaps not any, favor going back all
the way to the 19th century preindustrial climate, or even perhaps
to early 20th century climate. It seems to me that there is thus
the possibility to use SAI to keep the global average temperature
in a range of the conditions of the second half of the 20th
century, and doing so in a gradual manner, so not in the type of
emergency mode of letting things get too far and suddenly going
down, which could be more traumatic than, at least for a decade or
two, continuing to go up.
Until quite recently, most SAI studies have been perhaps scientifically interesting (e.g., seeing how well one can reverse a doubling), but politically a bit nonsensical. There are now emerging quite interesting studies about using SAI, for example, to hold conditions constant (which would be especially helpful this decade to offset warming from the cutback in marine sulfur emissions) and the simulations could readily be adjusted to gradually pull the global average temperature back toward late 20th century values. Interestingly, the most responsive aspect of the system seems to be the hydrologic cycle, the changes in which seem to be the most devastating. True that conditions won't become exactly as they were, but it would seem that they could become within the ranges of variability to which society and the environment could much more readily adjust that allowing conditions to continue to become more disruptive given the sluggish efforts at mitigation and the huge challenge and time it will take to phase up sufficient CDR to prevent further warming.
Mike MacCracken
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Michael Hayes
Dan Galpern
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Robert Chris
Dan
I'm pretty sure you know the answer to your question. Climate change is and has always been framed by those not intimately engaged with the science, as an economic problem to be resolved using standard approaches to other economic problems. Climate change and global warming are still not perceived as existential threats by most people, and certainly not by the movers and shakers of the major world economies. For them it's all about power. And in that they are absolutely correct. However, their big mistake is that they have yet to realise that nature is also a player in this game and it has more power than they do.
The only meaningful question is whether they will understand soon enough they they can't continueindefinitely to swim against the tide . Will they turn and go with the flow, or will they be responsible for the sixth mass extinction event? I wouldn't bet on the outcome, either way there's too great a risk that the bookies won't be around to pay up!
CDR and non-CO2 GHG removal on any likely scale-up trajectory are
now little more than a sideshow. The UNFCCC has become an
irrelevance (as your one-liner below illustrates) and the IPCC has
signally failed to shift the dial (link).
Following the example of those stoically accepting their fate as
the Titanic went down, perhaps the next big investment opportunity
is in party planning. And the party planners, can take their
new-found fortunes with them to their watery graves. OK, perhaps
a little hyperbolic and cynical - but by how much?
Robert
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Douglas MacMartin
Michael – I think everyone agrees that governance would be challenging. Nonetheless, many of us think it important not to foreclose options, given where it looks like we might be headed.
But the odds of SAI accelerating polar warming are roughly the same as the odds of CDR accelerating polar warming. No reason to deliberately spread disinformation.
d
Valerie Gardner, Managing Partner
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Michael Hayes
Michael Hayes
Douglas MacMartin
(Non-CDR post other than context and the hopes that CDR will scale up sufficiently that those of us working on SAI find something else to do)
Short answer is no… I don’t think it’s something that anyone knows how to model, and certainly not me. But agree with you 100% that in thinking about the risks of deployment vs risks of not deploying, one needs to include both the direct physical risks as well as the risks that come from human dimension, including conflict, including moral hazard, and including the physical consequences of non-ideal deployment such as termination. Lots of intelligent thoughtful people disagree about how large any of those risks are relative to the risks of climate change. I would strongly suspect that the physical climate risks of a well-intentioned deployment are “better” than the risks of not deploying, though even there, I don’t think there’s enough research to base decisions on; it’s the societal part that worries me the most.
Obvious question of whether SAI increases or decreases overall risks of conflicts at different levels; clearly it has the potential to do both, and the answer will depend a bit on what we learn in more research (how small are the actual modeled “side effects”), how well that research is perceived as legitimate, as well as on how decisions are made. Decisions taken unilaterally could certainly lead to the possibility of much worse outcomes than climate change alone. And ultimately, the risk-risk calculus depends at least as much on what climate change without SAI winds up looking like.
Bottom line is that I wish I was confident that reduction in net emissions would suffice, and that the resulting climate impacts are manageable. But I remain enough of a pessimist that I’m not willing to gamble on that, and thus argue for more research on SAI with the hopes that whatever decisions are ultimately made, they are at least informed by whatever knowledge we know how to generate between now and then.
https://carbonherald.com/new-direct-air-capture-plant-that-runs-on-heat-to-be-built-in-the-uk/
April 1, 2023
Credit: PPP Aerial Photos | Shutterstock
Sizewell C nuclear power station and Associated British Ports (ABP) – UK’s leading port operator with a network of 21 ports across Britain have agreed to work together to build an innovative heat-powered direct air capture (DAC) facility.
The facility will be a demonstration project that will aim to test a new DAC technology using heat from Sizewell C rather than electricity to run. The location of the project will be at the Port of Lowestoft. If successful, the large-scale direct air capture project is planned to be at a separate location from the power station, with the heat transported through underground pipes.
Relevant: Progress On CO2 Capture Plan for Sizewell C Nuclear Plant
The large-scale facility could potentially capture 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 each year. The two companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to lease a site at the port and seek planning permission to build the plant.
Credit: Ian Reay | Shutterstock
