Carbon capture: surrender, enablement, or non-optional?

This week's episode focuses on the tricky business of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.

So, the human-caused part of global warming is the part where we emit thousands of tons of carbon dioxide, methane, and other pollutants into the atmosphere, which increases something called the “greenhouse effect.” The greenhouse effect heats the planet enough for us to live on Earth, but if too much heat builds up, then ice caps melt and species die because their environments dramatically change, weather gets more extreme and far, far less predictable, and things get a lot less livable. (It’s my opinion that you can never have too many reminders of the basic and well-proven science at work here.)

So, a seemingly obvious solution to the problem of too many pollutants in the atmosphere is, well, can we find some way to … take some out?

That’s led to a field of climate science and entrepreneurship known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). This generally takes two forms—one is the idea of capturing carbon dioxide (and other) emissions as they’re being emitted, and preventing them from entering the atmosphere in the first place. Imagine, basically, high-tech hats on top of smokestacks or even mobile “scrubber” systems that get installed on, say, cargo ships to try to capture and compress CO2 into something you can transport, like a liquid, and then it’s pumped underground for storage instead of released into the atmosphere.

And the next next evolution of that is something called direct air capture, which is the appealing idea of just sucking CO2 directly out of the atmosphere and either storing it or turning it into something else, like diamonds (this is a real thing!) or jet fuel or similar.

Both of these are considered a little bit controversial, for a couple reasons: first, they’re expensive and the technology isn’t entirely proven at scale. It still takes a lot of energy to compress CO2 into liquid or pump it underground for storage or turn it into jet fuel or carbon-neutral chemicals. And there’s the question of moral hazard: is carbon capture the kind of thing that just lets us keep doing business as usual—drilling for and burning fossil fuels (which is a dirty business no matter how much CO2 you manage to capture), versus transitioning to renewable energy sources and building a cleaner global economy across the board.

This is a real and fair concern:

From ClimateWire in December:

Oil and gas companies could continue to thrive beyond the middle of this century by using technologies that suck their climate pollution out of the sky and pump it underground.

“This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed,” the leader of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub, said at an oil conference in March.

For many climate scientists, Hollub was saying the quiet part out loud.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was originally envisioned by scientists as a way to eliminate climate pollution that is released by making cement, flying across oceans and industrial activities that are all but impossible to do without fossil fuels. That’s to say that the expensive and commercially risky technology was intended for sucking only relatively small amounts of pollution from the air. Scientists have a name for it: residual emissions.

The Dubai, United Arab Emirates, climate agreement signed Wednesday accelerated a movement that is increasingly worrying scientists: The idea that carbon removal approaches can play an ever-growing role in fixing climate change, whether or not countries and corporations take the dramatic step of shifting away from oil, gas and coal.

The possibility that the technology could become a reason to keep burning fossil fuels is driving a growing division in the scientific community about how much attention and money the world should be devoting to CO2 removal.

And yet.

You know me by now: I’m not kicking any solutions out of bed for eating crackers. And the fact is that the UN’s own climate panel issued a stark assessment in 2022 (emphasis added):

As emissions continue to rise, the levels of greenhouse gas the world can still release before pushing the planet past very dangerous warming thresholds has become alarmingly tight, warns the report released on Monday. This means that cutting emissions alone almost certainly won’t be enough, it finds. The world will also need to create the infrastructure, systems, and policies required to suck billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the air annually.

As I keep saying: we need it all. Dramatic cuts in emissions AND the technology to clean up our mess, to put it bluntly. So how about this: let’s figure out how to do it well and at scale, regulate it appropriately, and let the increasingly favorable economics of renewable energy drive us in that direction no matter what, shall we?

This week’s episode of Everybody in the Pool features Charles Cadieu, co-founder and CEO of Spiritus, one of a growing number of companies working to tackle this problem, and one that’s gotten the backing of some big names in the investment community, like Khosla Ventures. They’ve developed a novel material (a “sorbent”), designed after the human lung, that absorbs carbon dioxide and can be reused over and over, ideally making the capture and sequestration (or eventual re-use) much cheaper than other technologies.

The idea is to plant these in “orchards” of carbon-sucking lung-like blobs. What? That’s science.

That, Cadieu says, will unlock all kinds of markets for high-quality, verifiable carbon removal credits. And as re-use technology advances, there’s the possibility of creating entirely new markets for absorbed carbon dioxide.

As to what he calls the “complex moral thicket” of carbon removal, see my comment above about cleaning up our mess. Charles likens carbon removal to trash collection:

(I)n some ways, I probably do create more waste because I have trash collection. But to tell me that we should stop trash collection so that I can stop buying so much stuff and creating more waste—that seems like a pretty preposterous proposal here.

But in the atmosphere, we're just in a different situation where we haven't invented trash collection yet. We haven't invented that CO2 removal yet. And so for those to say that, you know, we should not emit that, we should not invent that trash collection because that might allow people to continue to emit. Well, I mean, I feel like that's just a challenging proposition to stand on. I like it in the idealistic sense, but I think in the practical sense, I just would prefer a world where we do have trash collection.

Hear the entire episode here and thanks for listening!