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Direct Air Capture – The Rudy Giuliani of Technology [1]

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Date: 2023-03-21

As it becomes clearer that we will not reach our goals for greenhouse gas reductions, the publicity for Direct Air Capture (DAC) gets louder. Let me say up front that I’ve got nothing against DAC. The fight against global warming needs all the tools it can get.

However, we should understand all the pros and cons before we get too excited.

What is DAC?

Direct Air Capture is a process by which carbon dioxide might be pulled directly out of the atmosphere and either sequestered in some long-term storage facility, or converted into some useful form, like fuel or plastics.

Note that I say ‘might’. DAC is not currently in use commercially. There are many research projects where it’s functioning at lab scale and there are a few pilot scale facilities.

Pros:

Because we are losing the battle against global warming, we may need a backstop. It’s just possible that one of the many research projects just might hit a home run and become commercially viable.

Cons:

DAC is extremely expensive. The pilot scale projects underway today can cost upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. The price will not decrease with commercialization.

Many of the technologies themselves use hazardous chemicals that will have to handled properly in order to compound an already hazardous environmental problem. That’s not to say it can’t be done. But it makes the technology tougher to implement commercially.

DAC is new technology. It has not been proven on a commercial scale. It works in laboratories and to some extent, in pilot facilities. Nobody knows if it can work at commercial scale. Maybe it will. I hope so. But it’s a roll of the dice and I wouldn’t pin the safety of civilization on it.

Why is DAC so risky? The reason is that the risks of scale-up are under appreciated. Everybody thinks that if you can make it in the lab, all you have to do is make it bigger, then stand back and collect money. Well, let me ask you this: have you ever seen an erlenmeyer flask the size of an oil refinery?

DAC technology is particularly risky because it necessarily involves some kind of phase transfer process. Phase transfer occurs when a material moves from one phase to another. Phases are a state of matter, like gaseous, liquid, or solid. Almost everything can exist in all of these phases depending on conditions. For instance, carbon dioxide can be a solid, as in dry ice; or it can be a gas, or it can be a liquid when it's dissolved in water, like beer.

Phase transfer processes are ubiquitous in the chemical industry and have been for generations. You would think that we would know by now how to successfully predict how to scale them up from lab to pilot to commercial scale. We don’t! The wheels can fall off at any step in that sequence.

Phase transfer, and therefore DAC, is the Rudy Giuliani of technology. We have lots of theories, but none of them work.

Here’s an example of the technical problems that DAC companies run into. Some companies use bacteria to convert carbon dioxide into useful chemicals. Great idea until you run into reality. Often times the rate limiting step in the process is simply getting the carbon dioxide from the air dissolved into the water phase that the bacteria live in. The standard way to speed up that part of the process is to agitate the water to mix in the air. The problem is that turbulence then tears apart the bacteria. One solution for that is to introduce a chemical to reduce surface tension. But that chemical is hazardous…

You see where this is going.

But there’s a more insidious problem. If you look into the ownership of many of these DAC start-ups, you’ll find a carbon company. Now you ask, “If these DAC technologies have so little chance of success, why are big profit oriented carbon companies wasting their money?”

They are greenwashing.

A hundred million dollar pilot plant is nothing to them if they can convince people that we can continue to burn carbon and then at some point in the future extract it from the atmosphere. I say, “Let’s not put it into the atmosphere to start with!”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/21/2159557/-Direct-Air-Capture-The-Rudy-Giuliani-of-Technology

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