Carbon Engineering
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| Private | |
| Industry | Carbon Capture |
| Headquarters | Squamish, British Columbia, Canada |
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Key people
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Adrian Corless, MASc, Chief Executive Officer David Keith, PhD, Executive Chairman |
| Website | www.carbonengineering.com |
Carbon Engineering is a Squamish, British Columbia-based company commercializing technology to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the atmosphere, and also technology to use that CO2 along with renewable electricity to make clean transportation fuels. The company was founded in 2009 by David Keith, now a professor of public policy and applied physics at Harvard University, and is now led by Cellex veteran Adrian Corless. Carbon Engineering is funded by several government and sustainability-focused agencies as well as by private investors, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and oil sands financier N. Murray Edwards.
Carbon Engineering’s Direct Air Capture (DAC) system integrates two main cycles. The first cycle is the absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere in a device called an “air contactor” using an alkaline hydroxide solution. The second cycle regenerates the capture liquid used in the air contactor, and delivers pure CO2 as an end product. These cycles operate in tandem continuously, producing a concentrated stream of CO2 gas as an output, and requiring only energy, water, and small material make up streams as inputs. Energy is used in such a way that no new CO2 emissions are incurred, and thus do not counteract what was captured from the air. The captured atmospheric CO2 can be stored underground, used for enhanced oil recovery, or turned into low-carbon synthetic fuels.
Fuel synthesis from atmospheric CO2 has been callled "Air to Fuels". It can produce fuels such as gasoline, diesel, or jet using inputs of atmospheric CO2, water, and renewable electricity such as that from solar PV. Electricity is used to split water and manufacture hydrogen, which is then combined with captured atmospheric CO2 to form fuels. This approach offers a means to deliver clean fuels that can be compatible with existing engines, and can help displace fuels made from crude oil from transportation.
In 2015, Carbon Engineering started operations of its full end-to-end pilot plant, located in Squamish, B.C. The facility is designed to capture roughly 1 tons of atmospheric CO2 per day. Carbon Engineering is in process of adding equipment to turn this captured CO2 into fuels, to demonstrate the "air to fuels" concept at small scale.
Based on the data obtained from the pilot plant, Carbon Engineering intends to scale up its technology to build commercial plants, which eventually would each have the capacity to capture 1,000,000 tons of CO2 per year. At that scale, one Carbon Engineering air capture plant could negate the emissions from ~250,000 cars – either by sequestering the CO2 or by using the recycled carbon dioxide as a feedstock to produce synthetic fuel.
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Wikipedia