New carbon capture plant makes fuel from air

This week marked the opening of new “pilot” fueling plant in the coastal town of Squamish, British Columbia. But this plant is not like any other fuel making plant. This plant is responsible for pioneering a completely new industry of refining fuels needed for transportation utilizing the carbon dioxide captured from air. If its sounds a little too good to be true, Technology Review explains.

“It’s not designed for or capable of measurably reducing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Rather, the motivation is to produce fuels for transportation applications, such as jet aircraft and heavy-duty trucks and buses” David Keith, the founder of Carbon Engineering and the company that built the pilot plant states that once the plant is at its full efficiency, their system will be able to strip about one ton of carbon dioxide per day. The Harvard Professor in Applied Physics is also not new to concepts of reengineering fuel sources and approaches towards the remission of global warming. About two years ago, Keith was a major public advocator, calling for more research into geoengineering and exploring the idea of irrigating the lower stratosphere with sulfuric acid to reflect sunlight and offset warming effects.

Keith also explains that their carbon capture system doesn’t utilize any new technology but combines the industrial processes that are already used in current industries, like papermills. However, the process sounds slightly more complicated than making paper. Essentially a large wall of fans pulls air into a liquid that reacts with the CO2 to create a carbon rich solution. The concentrated solution is then purified through a process where it is then made into a CO2 gas and the same liquid to be used in the beginning of the process of air extraction. That is just the first half of this process, part 2 is actually still in the works of construction, because it requires the plant to install an electrolyzer to split water to collect the hydrogen needed to create the hydrocarbon fuels needed to fuel transportation vehicles. Because this system is so energy-intensive, self-sustaining modifications such as solar panels need to be implemented for the plant to be economically valuable. But in spite of a few tweaks here and there to ensure performance efficiency, this is a huge stride in fuel production.