![]() “We’d really like this thing to be so cheap that everybody has one,” Mr. Bottom, lab technician Annika Brickwood tests samples in the plant's lab. Top, Carbon Engineering's direct air capture pilot plant in Squamish, B.C. Open this photo in gallery: Open this photo in gallery: A commercial project will consist of dozens more of the units. At the Squamish facility and lab, CE is working to keep improving the guts of its technology, testing processes and chemical combinations by running a single train of the process. ![]() The calcium is then rehydrated in a slaker, so it can be reused in the process.Ī big plus is that the major equipment is repurposed from other industrial processes, from petroleum to mining to water treatment, so operations and upkeep are well understood. The pellets are fed into a cylinder called a calciner, where they are heated to 900 C, to release the CO2 as a pure gas. The fluid flows into a reactor to separate the salt from the solution into calcium carbonate pellets. Fans installed in long banks of towers called air contactors pull air through plastic honeycombs that are wet with a potassium hydroxide solution, which bonds to the CO2, creating a carbonate salt. “Although the satellite business was not directly on climate, I was super aware of climate change because we were monitoring the whole Earth all the time.”ĭirect air capture does pretty much what the name suggests. Friedmann saw the scale of the growing climate crisis as the Canadian space technology company’s satellites mapped the poles, the Amazon basin and other fragile regions suffering the effects, he recalls. (MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates) MDA-T, Mr. In his former career as long-time CEO of MDA Ltd. In other words, efforts to decarbonize the economy, from slashing fossil fuel use to rethinking how to manufacture cement, steel and other materials, must proceed apace as they do, direct air capture can make a dent in the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere to extend a global carbon budget that is still shrinking as countries seek the Paris Agreement goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Opinion: Canada’s cleantech economy suffering from too many recommendations, not enough action “Now, it doesn’t mean that we should go about our lives without any change and expect this to magically appear everywhere because when you do the math, it just doesn’t work.” ![]() Friedmann said during a recent tour of CE’s testing facility built on former industrial land in the shadow of the mountains near the end of Howe Sound, about an hour’s drive north of Vancouver. “That’s the beauty about this technology,” Mr. one kickstart such developments, allowing the market for the carbon credits the plants earn to then develop. Supportive government policies such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, with its US$369-billion of subsidies and tax breaks for green projects, was “absolutely” beneficial for the project to proceed in the oil-rich Permian Basin, about 570 kilometres west of Dallas.ĬE’s business plan involves licensing its technology to other companies, and it hopes hundreds of plants will be built around the world as part of the race to get to net-zero emissions. DARRYL DYCK/The Globe and Mailĭaniel Friedmann, CE’s chief executive officer, said the U.S. Friedmann says the strategy to let others make the massive capital investments to build projects will contribute to CE remaining headquartered in Canada.
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