Oxy moves forward on Permian 'direct air capture' plant

[thackney]

Oxy moves forward on Permian 'direct air capture' plant
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Oxy-moves-forward-on-Permian-direct-air-capture-13867251.php
May 22, 2019

Houston's Occidental Petroleum said Tuesday it is designing the first "direct air capture" plant in West Texas' booming Permian Basin to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky and inject it into the ground to aid in oil production.

Oxy and Chevron earlier this year became the first major oil companies to put their money into so-called negative emissions technologies with the goal of developing "direct air capture" factories. They both invested in Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company that has developed a direct air capture pilot plant outside of Vancouver.

Now Oxy is moving first with Carbon Engineering to begin the engineering and design work of what they're calling the world's largest direct air capture and sequestration facility to be located somewhere in West Texas....

[thackney]

I wonder what will power the plant.  Will it produce more CO2 than it captures?

[Elderberry]

I wonder what will power the plant.  Will it produce more CO2 than it captures?

Carbon Engineering

https://carbonengineering.com/about-dac/

What is DAC?

DAC is a technology that captures CO2 from atmospheric air, and provides it in purified form for use or storage. CE’s DAC technology does this in a closed loop where the only major inputs are water and energy, and the output is a stream of pure, compressed CO₂. This captured, compressed CO₂ then offers a range of opportunities to create products and environmental benefits, including CE’s main focus, production of clean-burning liquid fuels with ultra-low carbon intensity.

At CE, we have been developing our DAC technology since 2009 and capturing CO2 from our pilot plant in Squamish, B.C. since 2015.

Why is DAC important?

Direct Air Capture is a flexible technology that can be used to achieve industrial-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and can also enable production of clean-burning low carbon intensity fuels.

In recent years, climate modelers have agreed that to meet the temperature goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement, removal of existing CO2 from the atmosphere is necessary. Aggressive emissions reductions are imperative, and large-scale carbon removal is also required. Carbon Engineering’s DAC technology, when paired with the safe and permanent storage of CO2, can create physical, verifiable, “negative emissions” at industrial scale.

How can DAC be used?

Individual DAC plants can be placed in any country and in multiple climates, and can be built to capture one million tons of CO2 per year. At this large scale, our technology will be able to achieve costs of $100-150 USD per ton of COâ‚‚ captured, purified, and compressed to 150 bar.

CE’s DAC plants, and the resulting captured CO2, offer a range of opportunities.

[thackney]

...where the only major inputs are water and energy, and the output is a stream of pure, compressed COâ‚‚...

Thanks.  I guess energy means electricity in this case, but it could be unicorn farts.

[Elderberry]

Thanks.  I guess energy means electricity in this case, but it could be unicorn farts.

http://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/2018/05/direct-air-capture/

Actors involved

DAC is a commercially active geoengineering technology. David Keith’s company Carbon Engineering is funded by private investors including Bill Gates and Murray Edwards, the billionaire tar sands magnate who runs Canadian Natural Resources Ltd (Keith is a prominent US-based geoengineering researcher and proponent). Carbon Engineering opened an CAD$ 8 million pilot plant in Squamish, British Columbia in 2015, where they claim to extract about a tonne of carbon dioxide a day. Carbon Engineering also plans to turn captured CO2 into transport fuels, which then re-emit CO2 into the atmosphere when they are burned.----

Impacts

DAC requires considerable energy input. When including energy inputs for mining, processing, transport and injection, energy requirements are greater still, perhaps as much as 45 gigajoules per tonne of CO2 extracted. For David Keith’s pilot DAC unit, this is the equivalent of running it off a constant 0.5 megawatt power supply. Neither Climateworks nor Carbon Engineering publish the energy requirements of their units, and in the case of Carbon Engineering, it is not known how the electricity powering the unit is produced. Because of the huge demand for energy that DAC implies, some geoengineering promoters have proposed to use “small nuclear power plants” connected to DAC installations,  potentially introducing a whole new set of environmental impacts.

DAC also requires substantial water input. One study estimates that at implementation levels that would remove 3.3 gigatonnes of carbon per year, DAC could expect to use around 300 km3 of water per year (assuming current amine technology, which is what Climeworks uses). This is equivalent to 4% of the water used for crop cultivation each year. DAC technologies using sodium hydroxide (Carbon Engineering) would use far less, but this in turn is a highly caustic and dangerous substance.

[Joe Wooten]

http://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/2018/05/direct-air-capture/

So, it will be much, much more expensive than separating out from natural gas. When I was a junior engineer at the Morgan Creek power pant in Colorado City, Tx, in 1979, a big liquid gas company, I believe it was Air Products, approached us with a proposal to separate the CO2 from the  boiler stack on Unit 6, a 500 MW steam plant that went online in 1966. The CO2 was to be used in local oil fields for tertiary recovery. Texas Electric accepted, as they would pay us for the power used and a small fee for the CO2 they took out. An AE was hired and started work in late 1979. Before much more than preliminary engineering got done, mostly bid specs, and big gas strike in the upper panhandle that was high in CO2 content. I think it was about 15% on average. The project was abandoned, as it would be much much cheaper to separate it from the natural gas, which would have to be done anyway before it could be used as a fuel or feedstock.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

This has all the same romance of making fresh water out of sea water.
Yes, it can be done.   But......
Sounds great, except very costly to construct and energy intensive to operate.