Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/16/2015
Alberta-Based Carbon Engineering is scheduled to launch a pilot plant demonstrating its direct air capture technology today outside of Squamish, British Columbia The $9 million facility is designed to capture 1 ton of CO2 per day. “Everyone at Carbon Engineering is extremely excited about the plant coming together and our technology reaching this stage. It’s been a great pay-off to see the system come together after all of the long hours spent in the engineering and design phases in order to get this far. Some members of this team have been working on this concept for over [five] years now, and to see our system being built at this scale is incredibly satisfying,” Geoff Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering, told GHG Monitor this week by e-mail.
The technology being tested uses an air contactor to absorb atmospheric CO2, which is then run through a carbon capture solution. The resulting carbon-rich solution is then sent through a regeneration cycle “involving several processing steps, [which] produces a purified stream of CO2 and re-makes the original capture chemical,” according to the company’s website. This process enables the continuous capture of CO2 from the atmosphere and the output of pure CO2 for utilization or sequestration.
Carbon Engineering hopes to complete core data gathering by the end of 2015 or early 2016. The plant will continue to operate through 2016 “for more extended optimization work,” Holmes said.
Pending results of the pilot plant, engineering and construction of a commercial-scale plant could begin as early as 2017, Holmes said, “but to start operations that year we’d have to be pretty aggressive.”
While the pilot plant will be carbon positive, at commercial scale the technology would be carbon negative, according to Holmes. “The pilot in Squamish is definitely carbon positive. The captured CO2 is vented after purification and both natural gas and electricity are used to run the plant. The focus is all about experimentation, testing, and demonstration at a small 1 ton/day scale. Our process is designed such that a commercial plant, even run on natural gas, that injects CO2 for sequestration, will be deeply net negative,” he said
