Some want to transform greenhouse gases
WASHINGTON — When Gaurav Sant thinks about how the planet might dodge catastrophic climate change, at the front of his mind are not solar panels or wind turbines or electric cars. It’s cement. Sant spiritedly talks of how cement production is exhausting the Earth, accounting for an absurd share of the greenhouse gases that industry spews into the air. The director of a team of civil and environmental engineering innovators at UCLA, he poses an intriguing question:
What if all those cement-factory emissions blowing into the atmosphere were instead bottled up and transformed into a useful product?
More cement, in fact. But a kind that barely has a carbon footprint at all.
“We need transformative solutions” to global warming, Sant says. “And this approach is fairly simple to implement.”
What Sant is talking about is called carbon capture, and after years of being dismissed as an unrealistically costly sideshow, it is increasingly seen as essential to keeping global warming in check.
California stands at the center of innovative efforts to develop carbon-capture and removal technologies. State officials have begun working them into their climate action plans.
And this month, when Gov. Jerry Brown welcomes officials from around the world to a global climate conference in San Francisco, the question of how far world leaders should move toward embracing such ideas will be a major focus.
“If you want to take action and do it fast and do it big, this is the way to go,” said Julio Friedmann, a leader of the Department of Energy’s carbon management efforts during the Obama administration.
“Every reasonable scenario” that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has modeled for preventing warming from becoming intolerable relies in part on fledgling technologies that divert carbon from the atmosphere to massive underground aquifers or pour it into products as varied as cement blocks, stylish sneakers and kegs of beer.
Some techniques aim to capture carbon from the chimneys of power plants and industrial factories. Others, like the units designed by Carbon Engineering, a British Columbia firm in which Bill Gates is a major investor, involve giant vacuum-like machines sucking carbon out of the air.
Several of the technologies have seen their production costs plummet to a point that makes them economically feasible, thanks to the brisk pace of innovation and some new tax breaks passed by Congress this year.
Not everyone is sold on the ideas, however. Indeed, one of the main factors that makes carbon capture appealing to economists, engineers and entrepreneurs can make it deeply problematic to some environmental activists.
“This will make a dramatic difference” in preventing the planet from overheating, “but it does not affect the way you and I behave,” said Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham.
“You can keep using the same car, keep driving your kids to hockey practice. But the carbon footprint for doing it is eliminated.”
For some environmental activists, that’s also a huge drawback. They hope that the fight against climate change will open the way to a fundamental restructuring of the global economy. Carbon capture would make some of that restructuring less urgent.
One of the most practical uses of carbon that is captured from the atmosphere, for example, is in oil extraction, through a process in which carbon dioxide is injected into underground oil reservoirs to push fuel to the surface.
Greenpeace points to this in warning that the carbon capture movement is “a costly, risky distraction” at a time the focus should be on rapidly replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind and geothermal energy.
Another problem is that carbon capture technologies have long been associated with the “clean coal” movement. Some of the biggest carbon-capture projects to date have involved retrofitting coal plants, prolonging the life of environmentally unfriendly coal energy. The results of such efforts have been mixed.
But other climate groups are rushing to embrace carbon capture and removal, reasoning that the technology promises to accelerate development of climate-friendly fuels and products.