How soon until our carbon dioxide removal tech can be ready?
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
When it comes to climate tech: speed matters. We hear loud and clear how important it is to turn the cart around before 2030. And yet we’re working on options that are likely to still have their training wheels on by that point.
But we’d disagree with anyone claiming research into carbon dioxide removal isn’t worth doing.
While planted forests and restored ecosystems remove billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide annually across the globe, newer technologies contributed only about a million tonnes. It’s a tiny fraction of what humanity released into the atmosphere. But things could move fast. We intend to.
Our goal is to get rid of a million tonnes of carbon dioxide within Aotearoa New Zealand every year – the emissions produced by the country’s coal-burning power plant in a quiet year – as soon as possible.
Innovation takes time. It took more than 60 years from the invention of the photovoltaic cell to the point where solar panels became the “cheapest source of electricity in history”. All that R&D means that right now we have an incredible opportunity to deploy this low-emitting, renewable energy across the world.
Over that period, humanity quadrupled the greenhouse gases released each year. The recent energy crisis should encourage countries to embrace greener tech, but it will still take time to make a U-turn, considering all the existing fossil fuelled machines out there. The longer the world keeps emitting, the more carbon dioxide needs to be dealt with.
Carbon dioxide removal literally pulls planet-heating gases out of the atmosphere and stores them where they cannot contribute to further warming. It’s humanity’s chance to reverse emissions.
And when we achieve the incredible goal of net-zero, we wouldn’t have to wait for natural ecosystems to bring down the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We could actively draw it out ourselves.
More than trees
Scientists are counting on two types of carbon removal to meet the world’s climate goals.
One is nature-based carbon removal, such as planting trees and restoring wetlands. Overall, New Zealand’s planted forests already drew around 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air in 2023 – giving a great base to build on.
Let’s encourage new commercial and native forests. It’s not just about carbon: forests help clean up our air and provide homes for native insects and birds. The same goes for wetlands.
But unfortunately, these ecosystems are threatened by the worst outcomes of climate change. Increasing temperatures around the globe worsen droughts and lead to drier conditions in forest and peatland environments. So when fires rage, they rage hard. Storms are also increasingly powerful, damaging and killing trees in their paths.
Dying trees and burning soils haemorrhage their stored carbon back into the atmosphere, which in turn makes climate change more potent.
More is better
Then we have more tech-y carbon dioxide removal, the type we want to develop. These options aren’t as fragile as forests, and some have the potential to store carbon for a lot longer – potentially millennia.
Our work won’t interfere with forest planting, because our leading options rely on trees as a source of carbon. But we’re going to take a key problem with commercial forests – the slash left behind from harvesting, which often causes major damage during climate-enhanced storms – and put it to good use.
Slash could be used to produce wood chip or pellets, and these could be burned in boilers rather than fossil fuels. Companies are already adopting this “bioenergy” instead of high-emitting coal and gas.
Trees breathe in carbon dioxide throughout their lives, and transform it into wood. In a traditional boiler, the wood combusts back into carbon dioxide (plus energy). Typically, this planet-heating gas is simply released back to the atmosphere as exhaust.
Instead, we want to take that carbon away and store it somewhere safe. There’s a few ways we could do this: we could capture a pure stream of carbon dioxide and pump it deep underground – such as into a defunct oil and gas well.
An alternative combustion process could transform the wood into biochar: a fertiliser that effectively locks its carbon into the soil. We think it’s a particularly good idea to combine this with geothermal power generation, creating a hybrid geothermal-bioenergy plant that both generates energy and removes carbon.
But when?
Our research project will spend the next five years developing this and other technologies – and we hope there will be at least one bioenergy-carbon removal pilot plant when we wrap things up.
To be completely upfront, work on a pilot could begin tomorrow.
We have the ideas and the expertise. And we're looking to build relationships with people on the ground with capital.
Let’s say one of the potential first-movers that we’re working with gets really excited. Maybe the organisation was thinking of building a traditional energy plant already: maybe bioenergy, maybe geothermal.
If its leaders become convinced that energy plus carbon removal could better achieve their economic and environmental goals, they’ll have to do some extra homework before breaking ground.
We’re preparing a case study outlining how the whole plan might work: where the wood might come from and how much it might cost, for example, as well as the revenue you could expect to earn from captured carbon dioxide, biochar and renewable energy.
Our work would be informative, but the company would need to do its own vigorous assessment before greenlighting construction, of course. And its leaders might start by financing a pilot plant, at a smaller scale and cost.
That would add some time: both for the construction of the pilot plant and the evaluation stage. We’d expect it would need to run for a year or two, before anyone would consider scaling up. A more conservative company might want five years before investing many millions – potentially even a billion for a new geothermal field – on a large plant.
Allowing a year for pilot scoping work, 18 months for pilot construction, two years for the pilot plant to run and be evaluated, another year to scope the full plant, and three and a half years for construction: that’s nine years. (Eight if you do pilot evaluation and full plant scoping at the same time.)
Still, nine years to bring a game-changing technology to market isn’t bad, at least in our view. And we’ve seen that, once a single site introduces new tech, other industrial players can be very quick to follow suit.
The fine print
Of course, this glosses over a couple of other obstacles: regulation and payment.
Our team will be reviewing national and regional laws to ensure these plants can be built, and what standards they’ll need to meet.
Critically, a company won’t stump up millions if there’s no market for carbon removal. Typically, large-scale removal projects have been launched only once the company has secured a major advance purchase agreement, such as the famous deals that Microsoft had been financing.
So our team is monitoring and working with officials on new regulations and policy.
For example, the New Zealand Government is developing frameworks allowing these technologies to earn and sell national carbon credits. Officials and ministers are also formulating rules on how a company would need to monitor carbon storage sites, plus rectify any leaks or other issues. Companies won’t invest before they know what to expect.
Thinking big, the Government could offer a separate form of financial support tied to its international climate pledge, to which the country is falling short.
Across history, the fossil fuel industry has benefitted from decades of government lawmaking and financial backing. With just a fraction of that support, carbon dioxide removal could literally change the world.
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