Carbon Engineering is a company co-founded by Harvard physicist David Keith and funded, among others, by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Since 2015, the firm has been running a CO2 extraction plant in Canada, testing out a technology that was until recently rejected as too costly.
Keith and his collaborators, who wrote the paper, have used an independent cost assessment to calculate that using the process they developed allows the capture of a metric ton of carbon dioxide at the cost of $94 to $232, depending on variable costs such as the price of natural gas.
That’s far lower than previous estimates for the technology, ranging from $550 to $1,300 per ton.
At Keith’s prices, investing in CO2 capture can be a better idea both for consumers and for the environment than car electrification. According to the International Energy Agency, increasing the number of electric cars on the road from the current 2 million to 280 million by 2040 will displace only 1 percent of the expected global CO2 emissions, largely because other demand for carbon-based energy, including from planes and ships, will push emissions up — and because electricity to power the giant electric vehicle fleet won’t come entirely from clean sources. To achieve this unimpressive result, carmakers have already pledged some $90 billion in EV investment.
Since late last year, Carbon Engineering’s plant has been producing fuel from the CO2 it extracts by combining it with hydrogen. The fuel is compatible with current internal combustion engines, so there’s no need for carmakers to invest in completely different technology.
Since burning the synthetic fuel can only release as much CO2 as was used in its production, the whole cycle is pretty much carbon-neutral.
Keith calculates that at scale, his technology can produce fuel at $3.79 per gallon ($1 a liter) — significantly higher than the current wholesale prices. There’s no question that going over from fossil fuel to the synthetic liquids would need to be subsidized by environmentally friendly governments, but such subsidies have a distinct advantage over incentives for EV owners and investment in parallel infrastructure: Nothing will need to change for the enormous existing fleet of cars, about 1 billion of them. Existing gas stations will be able to handle the new liquids just as they do fossil fuel, too.
And the new fuels could be used for those modes of transportation that aren’t even close to being electrified, such as ships.
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