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This Company Wants To Recycle Carbon Dioxide From The Atmosphere

This article is more than 8 years old.

We recycle cans, we recycle clothes, yes, we even recycle bras and old prosthetic limbs.

But what if you could recycle some of your fossil fuels, the carbon dioxide (CO2) that's emitted from using coal, oil and natural gas?

Carbon Engineering in Canada is powering up a plant which promises to do just that. Their first carbon capture plant is set to start producing recycled co2 next month.

The pilot plant, built just north of Vancouver, works like a huge air purifier for carbon dioxide: air is captured from the atmosphere, passes through a “scrubber” and carbon dioxide, which makes up just a tiny portion of that air, is extracted via a chemical capture solution.

It's like “one giant plant to capture your emissions after you emit them” says Carbon Engineering's Geoff Holmes, who's been working on making this plant a reality for over five years. 

When the plant kicks the air out at the other end, the air has been 'cleaned' of co2: it contains one fifth of its original carbon dioxide. The other four-fifths of the co2 pulled from the air are then processed, to produce a concentrated stream, a final product of pure co2 that can be sold and re-used.

Other forms of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already being recycled everyday, via the carbon cycle. Plants, trees and humans are all, quite literally, inhaling oxygen, and exhaling co2. That co2 is turned around and put back into plants and absorbed into the earth—a complete recycling system.

The addition of tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, the kind that run cars and airplanes, plug in electric grids, and put power behind manufacturing everything from steel to concrete to paper, has thrown that system out of balance--and the amount of carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere has been skyrocketing.

“Over time, growth in accumulation of co2 in the atmosphere, contributes to the climate problems we're seeing today,” Carbon Engineering CEO Adrian Corless says.

Carbon Engineering's plant is one attempt to bring the fossil fuel cycle into a more full circle-style recycling system, one that produces a finished, recycled product: concentrated, pure co2, which can be used as feed-stock for gas or diesel, moving co2 from tailpipes back into fuel tanks.

“That fuel didn't come from underground, it came from the air” Holmes says.

While there are a small handful of carbon capture plants already in operation around the globe, Carbon Engineering's plant is the first that's not linked to combatting emissions from a specific industrial source of co2, like a big smoke stack or industrial gas stream.

“We would never be able to remove all the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," Holmes says. "But we can remove a small amount, we can cut the amount of carbon dioxide we're emitting to the atmosphere each year.”

The plant runs on natural gas – for every ton of co2 their plant processes from the air, they're also capturing and processing a half ton of their own co2 emissions.

Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State, has been working in the field of carbon capture for roughly twenty years. He's building resins and artificial trees, more passive ways to capture co2 than Carbon Engineering's new plant.

“We need to all move forward,” Lackner says, adding it's important to experiment with lots of different approaches to carbon capture, so that “people will feel more comfortable when they see it working.”

This technology on its own “won't solve the climate problem,” Lackner says, but he's hopeful the variety of different carbon capture solutions coming online will help scientists in the industry continue experimenting, and drive the cost of new technologies down.

Assuming their small pilot plant runs well over the next six months, Carbon Engineering wants to go full-scale with a commercially-backed plant that could capture 1,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, which would be like recycling the co2 emitted from 300,000 cars on the road.

This story was corrected on July 30, 2015 -- a full-scale commercial plant would capture 1,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide, not 100,000.

See the plant under construction: