🔦 Spotlight edition: carbon capture
Happy Monday all and welcome back to the Green New Spiel!
Given the number of articles I have seen this week on carbon capture, I thought we would do a spotlight edition on the topic (hopefully the first of a series of spotlights).
As I mentioned in a previous edition of the Green New Spiel, only c. 0.04 gigatonnes of CO2 are captured every year by existing man-made carbon capture facilities, which equate to less than 0.1% of global CO2 emissions. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that we need to capture over 7 gigatonnes per year to keep global warming below 2 degree celsius (c. 200x increase in today’s carbon capture capacity). Below are two examples of carbon capture methods and one particularly interesting and novel use case for what can be done with the carbon that has been captured.
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🧽 Understanding Carbon Sponges
Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division are studying a material called metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. Imagine a MOF as a highly porous sponge, with a uniform pore structure, which is able to absorb huge quantities of a specific gas, such as carbon dioxide, by making it particularly ‘sticky’ for the gas of choice. What is fascinating about them is the extent of their surface area: by engineering them to a desired structure specification, scientists are able to make just one gram of a MOF, an amount similar to a cube of sugar, can have a surface area greater than a football field. This makes them very effective at removing CO2 from sources such as power plant flue before the gases enter the atmosphere.
The issues often faced by the carbon capture sector are the energy needed to blow air through direct capture units, or the associated costs of releasing the CO2 and reusing the absorbent material.
Mosaic Materials, a producer of MOFs co-founded by a senior scientist at Berkeley, is attempting to address this in their MOFs, which are set up in a unique rotating bed system which can achieve quick capture-release cycle times and thereby reduce the associated energy consumption. Their binding technology allows the CO2-loaded MOFs to be reused by using only moderate temperature or pressure changes, substantially increasing energy efficiency and decreasing costs versus competing technologies. More research is still needed, according to Berkeley, to get to their target price of $100 per ton of CO2 removed from air (versus the $500 to $1,000 per ton that we are currently at now).Â
Read the Q&A with Berkeley Lab scientist Jeffrey Long here.
🌊 Blue Carbon
Apart from being critical to biodiversity and helping replenish marine life (and even protecting property by acting as natural barriers to storms and sea surges), seagrasses, mangrove swamps and tidal marshes are particularly effective at absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and converting it into plant matter. All three environments are therefore critical components of our effort to limit climate change.
What makes them effective? According to The Economist, these submerged forests are often denser than land-based equivalents and are also able to trap floating organic debris which then settles and is buried under the sea floor, increasing the amount of CO2 stored. In addition, they can’t burn and release the CO2 back into the ocean.
That unfortunately does not mean that they are risk free - cyclones (May 2020, Bangladesh and India) and marine heatwaves (2010-11, Australia) can destroy them and release their stored CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Keeping these environments alive continues to be a challenge: a recent study found that at least 44% of United Kingdom’s seagrasses have been lost since 1936, 39% since the 1980’s. However, losses over longer time spans may be as high as 92%. Seagrass may have once covered 82,000 hectares of seabed across the UK – an area as large as 115,000 football fields.
Leaving you on a positive note, Apple protected 11,000 hectares of mangroves on the Colombian coast in 2018, estimating that the project could lock away around 1m tonnes of carbon.
As you will know, I plant a tree for every Green New Spiel published; given today’s topic, I will make sure this week’s tree is a mangrove.
🧪 Perfume à la carbone
Coty, a global luxury producer of cosmetics and fragrances and whose brands include Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Davidoff and Marc Jacobs, has recently partnered with LanzaTech to introduce sustainable ethanol made from captured-carbon emissions into its fragrance products.
LanzaTech captures emissions from industrial processes such as steel manufacturing and turns them into ethanol. Coty’s scientists are confident that LanzaTech’s ethanol of sufficiently high-purity that it is suitable for use in fragrances. Ethanol is a key ingredient in a perfume as it allows the efficient dispersion of its smell. Typically ethanol is sourced from materials such as sugar cane, which uses land, water and fertilizers. LanzaTech’s production processes reduces water consumption to near-zero and naturally reduces the need for the agricultural land to grow sugar cane on.
Coty’s goal is to have the majority of its fragrance portfolio using ethanol sourced from carbon-capture by 2023.
Read Coty’s announcement here and learn more about LanzaTech here.
Enjoyed the first spotlight edition? Drop me a message on LinkedIn and let me know what you thought. Always keen to to connect with the Green New Spiel’s readers.
Have a fantastic week!
Ciao,
Carlo