Bloomberg Businessweek - USA (2019-12-23)

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● Companies are bringing

down the cost of a

controversial weapon against

climate change

Halting global warming by sucking carbon dioxide

out of the air strikes many people as a dumb idea.

It’s complicated and energy-intensive. Why not focus

on keeping more greenhouse gases out of the atmo-

sphere in the first place—say, by installing more solar

and wind power? Stanford engineering professor

Mark Jacobson told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz

in early December that “carbon capture is the

Theranos of the energy industry,” referring to the

company that built false hopes for blood diagnostics.

Some critics even argue that “direct air cap-

ture” of CO 2 is a form of greenwashing—i.e., putting

a gloss of environmentalism on the dirty business

ofhydrocarbonproduction.Theypoint tothe

involvement of oil companies Chevron, Exxon Mobil,

and Occidental Petroleum, which intend to use cap-

tured CO 2 to recover more oil from their fields.

The companies leading the commercialization of

direct air capture—Carbon Engineering of Canada,

Climeworks of Switzerland, and Global Thermostat

of the U.S.—say the technology is meant to supple-

ment, not replace, shifts to solar and wind power.

They reject the charge of greenwashing, saying the

use of CO 2 in oil fields is a transitional step in the

decarbonization of the global economy. One long-

term plan is to inject the captured gas into basalt

rock formations to remove it from the atmosphere.

Most important, the companies are trying to

prove that direct air capture can be cheap enough

to be deployed widely and soon. An influential study

published in 2011 by the American Physical Society

estimated it would cost $550 to capture a metric ton

of carbon dioxide using one leading method. But

Edited by

Jeff Muskus

A Big Step for the

Sky Vacuums