Killer whale: Capture carbon dioxide from the air and inject it into rocks.

"The concepts of purifying the air and putting carbon back underground have changed from science fiction to science.

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Editor's Note: To solve the problem of carbon emissions, we should not only find ways to reduce future carbon emissions, but also reduce greenhouse gases already in the air as much as possible. At present, Climeworks, a Swiss startup, tries to capture carbon dioxide in the air by using a DAC device called Orca in Iceland and inject it into basalt bedrock hundreds of meters deep to mineralize it. "The concepts of purifying the air and putting carbon back underground have changed from science fiction to science. In the past, many people thought that capturing air directly was nonsense, so Orca is something that can be seen and touched, which made the concept of "capturing carbon dioxide from the air" embark on a credible road. This article comes from compilation, hoping to inspire you.

Stephen Izz operates a strange-looking machine in a "special place" in Iceland. He stopped to explain his work at the forefront of climate technology with the metaphor of Star Wars. "I think I come from the dark side and want to be a Jedi. He joked when the cold wind blew through the endless cooling lava and distant volcanoes.

The 37-year-old maintenance technician is from Zurich. Before joining Climeworks, he worked in the aviation and shipping industry for 9 years. Climeworks is a Swiss start-up company trying to make up for the damage caused by these heavily polluting industries.

He said: "knowing that you are helping the earth instead of destroying it will really bring you extra satisfaction."

Izz and his small technical team are running Orca, the world's largest commercial direct air capture device. Since September, the device has started to extract carbon dioxide from the air 20 miles away from the capital Reykjavik.

When the wind blows up the steam cloud of the nearby Heilig Di geothermal power plant, killer whales make a soft hum. Killer whales are like four huge air conditioners, each as big as a container and placed on top of the other.

Each container is equipped with 12 large circular fans, which are driven by renewable electricity from geothermal power plants. These fans suck air into the steel water collection tank, where carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, reacts chemically with the sand filter.

When the filter material is heated, it will release carbon dioxide, which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to make a drinkable carbonated water.

Several other companies are trying to extract carbon from the air in the United States and other places, but only in Iceland's volcanic plateau is carbon dioxide converted into sparkling cocktails and injected into basalt bedrock hundreds of meters deep.

Carbfix found that the carbon dioxide mixture will react with basalt and turn into rock in two to three years, instead of centuries as people think. Therefore, it protects the carbon dioxide captured by Climeworks' DAC from the harsh environment through the steel igloo, and pumps it underground. The steel igloo looks like a prop in a space movie.

This is a permanent solution, unlike planting forests, which release carbon through decay, logging or burning on a warming planet. Some experts worry that although the carbon dioxide that other companies plan to inject into empty oil and gas fields may eventually leak, once the carbon turns into rock, it won't go anywhere.

Orca is advertised as the first commercialized DAC unit in the world, because it can extract 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year, and 8,000 people have ordered the cost of decarbonization online. These companies include Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft.

Coldplay, a rock band, recently joined these companies and paid Climeworks a voluntary carbon credit to offset some of their own carbon emissions. The company hopes to make a profit one day by reducing the cost below the selling price of these credits.

The problem is that the killer whale's emissions are equivalent to three seconds of human annual carbon dioxide emissions, while human annual carbon dioxide emissions are close to 40 billion tons, but the killer whale at least shows that the concepts of purifying the air and putting carbon back underground have changed from science fiction to science.

Tariq soliman, a climate change analyst at HSBC Global Research in London, said Reykjavik's attempt was not a "giant leap" to prove that the technology could reach the scale and cost needed to have a real impact on climate change.

"soliman said, but this is a step in that direction." Because many people think that capturing air directly is nonsense, killer whales are something you can see and touch, which makes the idea of capturing carbon dioxide from the air on a credible road.

Christopher Gerbalde, one of the founders of Climeworks, firmly believes that this technology can develop into a trillion-dollar industry in the next thirty or forty years. He said that if the United Nations Climate Conference COP26 held in Glasgow, Scotland, saw that most countries promised to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, this goal would be helped.

He said in Zurich: "This will be an ideal result for Glasgow, and at the same time, policy makers realize that any method to achieve net zero must include carbon removal and emission reduction.

Gebalde is 38 years old and speaks softly. When he was studying mechanical engineering in Switzerland, he started DAC work with another German, Jan Jian Zihao Bach. They set up their own company in 2009, but Gebalde said that their major breakthrough was the report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change led by the United Nations in 20 18, which suggested that if global warming is to be controlled within 1.5 degrees Celsius, it is necessary to achieve zero net emissions by 2050. Crucially, it also produced the first scientific knowledge that some emissions are difficult to eradicate, so all feasible methods to achieve "net zero" will depend on eliminating some previous carbon emissions.

Gebalde said that machine-based solutions may have to take on half the workload, because the potential of most nature-based solutions is limited by the shortage of arable land.

It seems an illusion to rapidly increase the annual wind power generation from 4,000 metric tons to 5 billion metric tons to help curb climate change, but it is an interesting contrast with the world's first commercial wind farm that was put into use in Mount Rochet, New Hampshire in 1980. The project consists of 20 turbines with a total output of 600,000 watts. 40 years later, in 2020, the installed capacity of global wind power increased by 654.38+0.23 million times, reaching 740 GW.

If the annual output of Orca increases at the same rate, it will generate 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide removal capacity by 2060.

"This is exactly what climate science requires us to do to achieve climate goals," Gebalde said.

The success or failure of this challenge will depend on how to reduce costs. Gebalde said that the current cost is about $600 to $800 per metric ton. He said that by 2030, the increase in output will reduce these costs to $200 to $300 per ton and to $65,438+000 to $65,438+050 around 2035.

Gebalde said that DAC will be competitive if it receives subsidies to help the deployment and development of electric vehicles and solar panels.

The fundamental difference with wind energy and solar energy is that they are ultimately driven by profit motive, because once subsidies help new energy sources improve their competitiveness, they produce a valuable asset: cheap electricity.

The main "output" of DAC is to help save the planet, which must rely on the support of the government, such as emission credits and taxation of carbon emitters, so meetings like the Glasgow meeting are very important.

Although Izz and his team are supervising Oka to improve their next factory, Gebalde admits that Oka has achieved its goal in many ways. "We know this technology is effective, so Orca's main experiment is actually to test the market's interest in carbon removal. We are glad that a large part of the factory's production capacity has been contracted.

Carbfix is busy exploring how to adapt its mineralization process to other types of rocks and how to use seawater in places lacking fresh water.

In 2007, under the impetus of then Icelandic President grimsson, the research project Carbfix was launched. A local scientist once told Grimson that Iceland's porous basalt can mineralize carbon dioxide without causing any earthquake problems.

In 20 16, Grimson consolidated his position as an Oka promoter shortly after ending his 20-year presidency. At that time, he was walking in the bar of a luxury hotel to attend the United Nations Climate Conference in Marrakech, Morocco.

He said: "I happened to hear an American investor sitting at the table and loudly promoting this new Swiss company. He said that this company has the technology to extract carbon directly from the air. So I stopped and said,' Hey, in Iceland we know how to turn carbon into stone!' .

Despite this incident, Ada Aladottir, CEO of Carbfix, said that she did not believe that the recent UN Climate Conference could make enough efforts to help "negative emission technologies realize their potential.

"Somehow, these activities rarely seem to achieve their goals," she said.

Grimson is also pessimistic about Glasgow. He said, "The problem is that the main task of the conference is to find ways to reduce emissions.

This is good, he said, but "we must also eliminate some carbon that already exists in the air. If we don't start doing this as soon as possible, we will never succeed in tackling climate change.

Translator: Jane