This is also informative but published March 2012. Not sure what is happening now.
Direct air capture of CO2 is becoming a business, for better or worseSince 1999, when Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner wrote the first scientific paper [PDF, download] about capturing carbon dioxide from the air, his unlikely idea has grown into a nascent industry. Four start-up companies, including his own, Kilimanjaro Energy, are working on technologies to extract CO2 from the atmosphere using chemical processes. The air-capture start-ups are funded by billionaires (Bill Gates, Edgar Bronfman Jr.) and venture capitalists (Arch Venture Partners), and they are attracting interest from private equity firms (Warburg Pincus), investment banks (Goldman Sachs), energy companies (Summit Power) and a military contractor (Boeing).
This week, a group of about 70 entrepreneurs, academics, investors and partners gathered in Calgary, Alberta, for the first-ever North American conference devoted to air capture. (Someone said it felt like history in the making. That remains to be seen.) As the industry’s pioneer, Lackner, who is affiliated with Columbia’s Earth Institute, played a prominent role, but he was in no mood to celebrate. While climate change was on the agenda, much of the program focused on the biggest emerging market for air capture technology–namely, using liquid CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.
Kilimanjaro’s CEO, Ned David, said that CO2 could do for the oil business what hydrofracking has done for natural gas, unleashing vast amounts of fossil fuels that might otherwise remain in the ground. “A money gusher,” he called it. Others talked about using air capture to make fuels at the military’s Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) and even, half in jest, to “green” the fizz in Coke and Pepsi.
This, of course, was not what Lackner had in mind way back when. “What makes air capture worth doing is its climate impacts,” he told me. “What will pay for it are these other applications.”
“The real problem I want to solve is not interested in being solved,” he lamented.
The conference was the strongest sign yet that direct air capture is becoming a business–for better or worse. For better? Because air capture technology has enormous potential to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, albeit very slowly and at considerable expense. The costs remain unknown, with estimates ranging wildly from $30 per ton of CO2 captured, which is almost surely too low, to more than $600 a ton, which is almost surely too high, although the bigger number comes from a report [PDF, download] from the respected American Physical Society. For worse? Because as air capture transitions from academia into the marketplace, the start-up companies will need to generate revenues to stay alive, even if those revenues enable more oil to be pumped out of the ground. Put another way, air-capture technology has become a solution in search of a market, while its backers wait for the world to get serious about climate threat.
theenergycollective
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.