In partnership with NRG
Meet the tech start-ups that are getting clever with carbon
Reality check, folks: according to the scientists even if we, as a world, hit every single emissions-reduction target ever made, it still might not be enough to beat climate change. However much solar or wind energy we produce, research says we’re probably not going to stay under the agreed 2C limit. The UN says so too: we’re not going be OK with greenhouse-gas offsets alone.
Luckily, there are other ideas on the table. Right. Such as? Well, one of the most evolved ideas right now is ‘carbon conversion’, which focuses on converting carbon emissions from power plants into valuable resources – incredibly useful, basically. Another similar but distinct method is ‘carbon capture’ or ‘direct air capture’, as it’s known in the biz – that’s ‘DAC’ if you want to sound like you really know your stuff.
Is all this the stuff of sci-fi? Not really. In terms of carbon conversion, it basically means developing tech that grabs carbon from those high-emission factories and power plants, and puts it to good use. In fact, this know-how already exists. And it’s about to get a big, big boost: this year, The NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE – yes, it’s associated with that XPRIZE that aims to get us back to the moon – co-sponsored by the energy company (and Collectively partner) NRG (and Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, COSIA), is offering $20 million to anyone who can come up with a workable, scalable way to convert carbon dioxide into a valuable product. It is, without doubt, one of the biggest challenges in the world. Who will win? Well, we won’t know until March, 2020, when the winner is announced.
In the meantime, here’s our guide to the current state of play in the emerging world of carbon conversion and carbon capturing tech – among these prototypes and solutions might just prove to be the most important idea anyone’s every had…
1. Opus 12
Not to be confused with the Ocean’s Eleven sequel, Opus 12 is a much-hyped carbon-grabbing start-up founded by Stanford science super-grads Nicholas Flanders, Etosha Cave and Kendra Kuhl. Right now, the team are working on finding an economically viable way to convert carbon dioxide emissions into clean, planet-friendly liquid fuel via renewable electricity and, um, water. The “economically viable” bit is important because, well, the tech to do this kind of already exists – it just doesn’t make money sense.
Yet, anyway. Twenty-nine-year-old Flanders and team reckon they’re getting close to a scalable solution: a sort of bolt-on reactor that can be stuck on to “any existing source of industrial carbon emissions”, like, say, petrol refineries or fossil-fuel plants.
The device, they say, can save the environment and, you know, makes loads of cash. Example: the US corn ethanol industry wastes 45 million tons of carbon each year. Turn that into 7 billion gallons of low-carbon fuel and, well, you make $15 billion. And those are the kinds of numbers that gets Big Energy-a-knockin’. Game-changer is right.
2. Carbon Engineering
Imagine this: a giant, factory-sized wall of rotating fans that can literally suck carbon out of the atmosphere on a big-ass, super-industrial scale? Well, that’s happening. Or, at least, it’s going to to thanks to this Bill Gates-backed company based in Canada. Let by Harvard physicist David Keith, the idea is to capture “dispersed” or “diffuse” emissions – in other words, from moveables like cars, trucks, ships and planes unlike, say, Opus 12, that goes for stationary emissions from power plants and factories. So, you know, not just a small part of worldwide global emissions (60 per cent, in fact).
Still, like Opus 12, these guys will also turn their harvested carbon into super low-emission fuel. How? With their own, patented “air contactor” – yes, that’s the giant wall of smog sucker-upping fans – that, put simply, mixes captured emissions with a chemical solution to create a high-carbon liquid which is then processed to make a non-toxic fuel (OK, it’s way more complicated than that – if you want the proper geek-test, check their site).
All hot air? Nope, not at all. CE say they’re just coming to the end of its latest pilot phase and reckon they’ll have a fully functioning commercial air-capture plant up and running by 2017. Hopes are that it’ll produce 10,000 barrels of synthetic fuel a year that could be used to replace jet fuel. Ker-ching.
3. Climeworks
Still sceptical? This Swiss-based company has actually proved that synthetic, carbon-made, CO2-neutral fuel really works. And it could be a lane-switcher for the car industry. But let’s rewind: Climeworks, first up, is another biggie in the carbon-capture game with what might be the most evolved programme so far, particularly when you hear about the cool things they’re doing with the carbon after capturing it.
Later this year – in fact, any day now – they’re going to open the world’s first commercial carbon-to-cash plant in Zurich, Switzerland that will suck CO2 from the ambient air. It’ll then be processed, stored, and sold. To whom? Well, turns out, they’ve already got their first customer: a nearby greenhouse farm that will use the carbon to boost growth of its greens by 20 per cent. Selling greenhouse gas to actual greenhouses? Seriously?
Yes, and it gets better: last April, Climeworks sold a bunch of carbon to a clean-tech company called Sunfire that used it to create “e-diesel” – that is, no-impact, carbon-neutral car fuel made from only waste carbon and water. In a much-trumpeted experiment backed by Audi, the German Minister of Research Johanna Wanka pumped five litres of the stuff into her Audi 8 and, well, it worked. Perfectly. With zero emissions. Big news? Oh yes. Right now, the plant is producing the fuel on a small scale (42 gallons per day). But the near-future plan is to scale up production, make it commercial and, well, save the world from its oil habit. Zero-carbon cars in the next, um, 20 years? Could be.
4. Global Thermostat
OK, so you’ve got two kinds of carbon capture start-up: one that works on stationary emitters like, say, factory smoke-stacks; and one that can pretty much be put anywhere to effectively clean the air of carbon. Well, Global Thermostat does both.
Based in New York, but with a pilot plant in California, the company is co-run by inventor-professor Peter Eisenberger of Columbia University and is bankrolled by Warner Music buh-zillionaire Edgar Bronfman Jnr. On the face of it, they’re pretty similar to the other companies here: except for one thing: their tech is way, way cheaper to run than everyone else’s. Cool, you say. But how?
Well, it’s cheaper because it can be powered by excess steam heat – you know, the stuff you get at pretty much any industrial facility around the world. And that, they say, is what gives them the jump on all the other carbon-capture companies: it doesn’t just make the plant carbon neutral, it makes it carbon negative. Still, like the other companies, GT will sell their carbon, too. In fact, they reckon the global carbon market is worth a whopping $1 trillion. Who knew? Customers include farmers, syngas-makers and, um, soda-pop producers. Imagine, that: carbon-negative carbonated drinks. Now that’s some feel-good fizz.
5. Inventys
You know you’re probably onto something good when a Nobel Laureate joins your corner, right? In 2013, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former energy secretary to Obama, Steven Chu joined this hotly tipped Canada start-up that reckons it’s got a totally different approach to all the other companies out there: instead of a chemical solution, like the others here, it uses a kind of rotating filter-separator made of honeycomb-like “activated carbon”, which can be fitted inside a smokestack to capture, well, carbon. And it’s called… VeloxTherm (in a deep, movie-trailer narrator’s voice).
And it’s really, really cheap. Like, silly cheap. Or so says founder-CEO Andre Boulet. He reckons he can capture carbon for $15 per ton (that, he adds, is one sixth cheaper than chemical-assisted carbon-capture rivals).
No wonder, then, Inventys is popular with energy firms. And they’re going to get even more popular with big emitters if, say, the US implements legal limits on carbon emissions from natural gas. Either way, without putting carbon back in the box, Chu reckons the world is, well, screwed. “Without carbon capture,” he told Forbes, “we’re going into – the technical physics word is deep doo-doo”.
Produced in collaboration with NRG, a Collectively partner.
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