Carbon Dioxide – Who else has Ideas to pull it DOWN and OUT?

DAC – separating CO₂ from ambient air.
We need to try every idea !

Not the over-all subject of Carbon capture. Only DAC.

In this post:
A Balloon DAC
A DAC Blimp
DAC Mechanical Trees
A Train – Railroad DAC
A Retrofitted Building Ventilation DAC
A Sea Water DAC
A Retrofitted Cooling Tower DAC
A Jet Plane DAC idea
Some kind of DAC at the ends of earth
A little “D.I.Y.” DAC
….Is there money for this?
…Remember a list at the bottom of other posts about GHGs and Capture

DAC in operation today:
The pull down that has been going on for a while now, is Climeworks and their projects such as with U.S. Department of Energy. There seems to be other companies that are latching on to climeworks’ subscription program. And Carbon Engineering and their projects. There is much talk about the expense of the DAC machines* they use……. Also GlobalThermostat, who feels that they have conqured the cost factor, finally has a number of projects on the way….

All the Ideas
to get the excess CO₂
out of the air !
— Humans Wanted —

Carbon Dioxide in our Atmosphere – possible points of interest

…“We started the industrial revolution with 280 parts per million in the atmosphere,” Lackner tells CNBC. “By now we have 415 [ppm], and we are going up 2.5 ppm a year at this moment.” The consequences of that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already dire, will get worse [and more and more people are directly aware of it]. … …The only choice,  Klaus Lackner, the director of Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and professor at ASU says, is to “draw down” the atmospheric carbon dioxide — or to suffer unknown, devastating consequences. …

Changes to our atmosphere associated with reactive gases are relatively short-lived. Carbon dioxide is a different animal, however. Once it’s added to the atmosphere, it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years. Thus, as humans change the atmosphere by emitting more carbon dioxide, those changes will endure on the timescale of many human lives.

Scientific measurements of “fossil air” bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice sheets indicate that over the past four hundred and twenty thousand years the concentration of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere has repeatedly fluctuated between about 180 ppmv and 300 ppmv.  Very simply, we appear to be in uncharted waters with 415 ppm. 

Carbon dioxide on its own is about 1.5 times heavier than air. The reason why you don’t see carbon dioxide sinking to the ground is that although there is carbon dioxide present, seeing carbon dioxide in a concentrated form out in nature is quite unusual. 

We need all the DAC ideas!

THE DAY BEFORE SOMETHING IS TRULY A BREAKTHROUGH, IT’S A CRAZY IDEA.

PETER H. DIAMANDIS

Pull it Down, Pull it Out

A Balloon DAC

Israel & Germany
https://www.highopeslabs.com/

A stratospheric balloon to capture cold CO₂

The company High Hopes Labs Ltd. was founded by Nadav Mansdorf and Eran Oren in 2019 and aims to develop a new and cost-effective DAC approach. The company is from Israel; the German partner IMPACTECH has a laboratory and is located in Stuttgart, Germany. At its Stuttgart site, High Hopes is testing prototypes and CO₂ capture from ambient air. The company’s goal is to attach DAC technology to high-altitude balloons and send them to altitudes of 10-15 km. At this altitude, with low ambient temperatures, the CO₂ is supposed to have cooled down to -80°C in order to turn it into dry ice (“snow”) and be able to collect it. The dry ice is to be collected in a container and enclosed. Back on earth, the frozen CO₂ becomes gaseous again and cannot expand due to the closed container – i.e., it is compressed without energy input and ready for transport (CCUS) or to be pumped underground for storage (CCS).

The stratospheric balloon is supposed to use hydrogen as an energy source, but there is no information yet on how much hydrogen needs to be produced to raise the balloon. High Hopes estimates that a balloon needs to remain in the air for 12-24 h to collect 1t of CO₂. The full tank is then exchanged for an empty one and the process starts anew. In April 2021, a DAC-test was conducted in Germany, during which the balloon flew about 16 km high.

Israeli balloon tipped as world’s 1st affordable, scalable method for carbon capture
3 May, 2022 – Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office informed the lab that Eran Oren’s innovation will be receiving a patent.

High Hopes claims stratospheric breakthrough in direct air CO2 capture

May 2021 – …Eran Oren, CTO continues. ” The balloons will carry two-step carbon-capture systems. As air flows in, a simple absorption process will slightly enrich the levels of carbon dioxide. Then, using a small amount of energy, some aluminum plates are cooled down to the freezing point of CO2. Dry ice freezes out of the air and settles on these plates like snowflakes, and these snowflakes are collected into the pressure tank.

“None of this is new,” says Oren, “this is a very basic process called cryodistillation. The only thing is that when you do it at high altitude, you really don’t need a lot of energy to extract carbon dioxide.”

Ten miles above the Earth, these machines can capture CO2 from the air

At full scale, the box holding the equipment will be roughly the size of two regular refrigerators, carried by a balloon around the size of the balloons tested by Google’s satellite internet tech, Project Loon. Each will float upwards for 8 to 10 hours, capture the cold CO2, bring it back down to a ground station to unload, and then immediately return to capture more. The company hopes to begin operating a site within the next year, and to continue tweaking the technology so that a single balloon can capture a metric ton of CO2 each day. It’s expected to cost around $100 to capture a ton, and could drop further to $50 a ton

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A DAC Blimp – Zeppelin – Dirigible

Mexico City, Mexico
https://www.facebook.com/trazecoac/

TRAZECO, AC presents a proposal to clean our planet’s atmosphere. Ecological Traceability Civil Association. June 2016

The original purpose is to use the dirigible to clean the atmosphere above Urban areas and investigate what types of elements are suspended in the air we breathe in densely populated areas.

The process of pollution filtering is described in the video below, but after heating up the pollutant gases and filtering the particles, we end up with mostly CO₂, due to the complex chemical interactions occurring.

So, as part of our research we are considering an additional module in our zeppelin.
We have found that we can add a module to separate CO₂ by means of plasma discharges and then adsorb the residual CO₂ in a bed with an adsorption catalyzer. To complete the capture process, after 20 hours each day we take these saturated beds with the captured CO₂ down to land, where in our facilities will desorb/release the CO₂. We then make sure this CO₂ is used in CO₂ hungry processes where it can be used; both in industry or fixed permanently. The captured carbon is in a pure state and can be used for graphite or battery production.

A discussion about the Atmospheric filter for the Project.

It is possible to reach TRAZECO at:

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DAC Mechanical Trees

Dublin, Ireland
https://mechanicaltrees.com/direct-air-capture/

PASSIVE, SCALABLE CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY

Using proprietary passive Direct Air Capture (PDAC^TM) technology, we have overcome the economic challenges of Direct Air Capture solutions. Our MechanicalTrees^TM use ambient wind to deliver CO₂. This passive approach removes the need for fans and blowers typical to other DAC systems. Energy use is required only for processing the captured CO₂.

Based on two decades of research and development, MechanicalTrees^TM are a thousand times more efficient than natural trees at removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. 

Our optimised column shaped MechanicalTrees^TM are 10 meters tall when extended to capture CO₂ and contain sorbent tiles that extend and retract on a constant capture and regeneration cycle. Because CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere is consistent regardless of location, MechanicalTree^TM farms don’t need to be located at or near an emission point-source to be effective in reducing the level of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Carbon Collect will begin deploying small-scale MechanicalTree^TM implementations whilst preparing for mass production and larger scale deployment. The company plans to deploy MechanicalTree^TM farms with an annual capacity of up to 4m tons annually per farm in the second half of the 2020’s. The technology’s flexibility will enable deployment ranging from a single MechanicalTree^TM up to around 120,000 units at maximum configuration.

HOW “MECHANICAL TREES” COULD SOLVE A HUGE GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM

For example, we stumbled into a material that attracts CO₂ when it’s dry and releases it when wet. We realized we could expose that material to ambient wind, and it would load up with CO₂. Then we could make it wet, and it would release the CO₂ in a way that requires far less energy than other systems. Adding heat created from renewable energy raises the CO₂ pressure even higher, so we have a CO₂ gas mixed with water vapor from which we can collect pure CO₂. …

…By using moisture, we can avoid about half the energy consumption and use renewable energy for the rest. This does require water and dry air, so it won’t be ideal everywhere, but there are also other methods.

Carbon Collect’s MechanicalTree selected for US D.O.E. award

July 2, 2021 – A passive carbon-capture system, based on the research of Klaus Lackner, an engineering professor at Arizona State University and director of the ASU Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, is among six projects being funded in a Department of Energy (DOE) program targeting carbon-capture and sequestration technologies.

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A Train – Railroad DAC

Texas, USA
https://www.co2rail.com/

Direct air capture trains

It requires no external power as this is provided on-board by the regenerative braking of a slowing and stopping train.

June 2021 – …Co2Rail is using the significant amount of wasted energy produced in the dynamic braking system of freight trains to drive their direct air capture system. This unique approach can enable gigaton-scale CO₂ capture in an energy efficient manner, making it affordable for downstream CO₂ users to make economical use of the captured CO₂.

One of the most efficient forms of large-scale, land-based transportation systems is rail. Per unit of freight, trains use roughly 90% less energy than trucks. Slowing and stopping trains, however, require a braking system that generates a substantial amount energy, much of which is lost as heat. Imagine utilizing this energy loss to put a brake on greenhouse gas emissions by capturing them instead in a direct air capture system integrated into the train and operating on the fly.

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A Building Ventilation DAC

Lappeenranta, Finland
https://www.soletairpower.fi/

USING BUILDINGS AS CARBON SINKS via their internal ventilation system

Soletair Power develops breakthrough Direct AirCapture technologies for capturing atmospheric CO₂ in buildings or industrial premises, making commercial-scale carbon capture a reality for companies, boosting worker productivity and accelerating a sustainable future.

Unleashing brain potential by minimizing CO₂ indoors.

Most of us are living with high CO₂ concentrations without even thinking about it. CO₂ exposure can reduce cognitive and decision-making performance dramatically. Are you in an unventilated office space? You can calculate the CO₂ concentration in your room from our website.

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A Sea Water DASC

UK, SeaCURE:
https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/seacure/

SeaCURE marine mediated anthropogenic carbon removal
(Sea Carbon Unlocking and Removal)

January 2022 – Led by the University of Exeter together with the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Brunel University London and TP Group.

Direct removal of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from air is hampered by its very low concentration on land. The concentration of CO₂ in seawater is however approximately 150 times higher. SeaCURE technology will process seawater to temporarily make it more acidic, which helps to get the carbon dioxide to ‘bubble out’. The technology will then trap that CO2 and concentrate it to form a near-pure stream of gas to be compressed and stored. The carbon dioxide-depleted water will then be released back to the ocean, where it will take up carbon dioxide from the air.

SeaCURE will study a new method of capturing carbon from seawater
The process – similar to capturing the CO2 bubbles in a fizzy drink – makes use of natural processes and renewable energy to remove carbon from seawater.
May 2021 – SeaCURE – has won a £250,000 grant for an initial study. The funding comes from the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio, run by the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
Dr Paul Halloran, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, said:
“The challenge with capturing carbon from the atmosphere is that CO2 makes up only around half of one percent of the air around us, so you need to push vast quantities of air through capture facilities to extract a meaningful amount of carbon. Our approach sidesteps this challenge by allowing the ocean’s vast surface area to do the job for us, tipping the natural process of CO2 exchange between the atmosphere and ocean in our favour.”
>>>The only input required by SeaCURE, apart from seawater, is electricity – and the team will use wind to power their process.
Dr Tom Bell, of Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), said:
“Combining our understanding of the ocean with a scalable engineering approach fuelled by renewable energy, SeaCURE has incredible potential to support the UK’s net zero carbon ambitions. PML is excited to be able to apply our expertise to address the urgent issue of excess CO2 in the atmosphere.”

Written evidence from SeaCURE, University of Exeter, Plymouth Marine Lab and Brunel University London – of NET – Negative Emissions Technology
October 2021 – SeaCURE has developed and demonstrated all the components of a marine-based Negative Emissions Technology (NET) with the potential to be applied at very large scales. … We will begin building a demonstration site to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of 100 tonnes of CO2 per year in 2022/2023.

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A Retrofited Cooling Tower DAC

San Francisco, CA
https://www.noya.co

Capture CO₂ with your cooling tower.
Get paid to fight climate change.

We are Noya

1. We’ll add ducting and CO₂ capture equipment alongside your cooling tower that won’t affect its operation.

2. We’ll install CO₂ processing equipment downstream from your cooling tower that doesn’t have a large physical footprint.

3. We’ll share the carbon credits generated through capturing and permanently removing CO₂ so you can offset your building’s emissions.

We’ll retrofit your cooling tower to capture CO₂ and give you some of the carbon credits we create — all at no cost to you.
CO₂ Users: Buy CO₂ for as low as half the price you are pay now
Run your business with the country’s first source of commercially available reclaimed CO₂.

One cooling tower down, 1,999,999 to go

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A Jet Plane DAC direct to Jet Fuel

University of Oxford, UK
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20214-z

Pull in CO₂ during flight – directly convert it to Jet Fuel
Could this work? An article from Good News Network suggests:

Researchers Pull Carbon Out of the Sky And Convert it to Instant Jet Fuel, Reshaping Aviation For Good

A simple, yet world-altering method [is suggested] of sucking CO2 from the air into airplanes where it is converted directly to jet fuel is described in a new paper published in Nature. … …, the invention of an onboard system for carbon-neutral flight would represent a massive step towards addressing [aviation’s part of] the climate crisis…
…. The University of Oxford’s Peter Edwards, Tiancun Xiao, Benzhen Yao, and colleagues designed a new iron-based catalyst that represents an inexpensive way of converting CO₂ into a jet fuel-range of hydrocarbons. The process would need to climb to about 300°C (572°F) to work. …

Transforming carbon dioxide into jet fuel using an organic combustion-synthesized Fe-Mn-K catalyst

December 2020 – …We report here a synthetic protocol to the fixation of carbon dioxide by converting it directly into aviation jet fuel using novel, inexpensive iron-based catalysts. We prepare the Fe-Mn-K catalyst by the so-called Organic Combustion Method, and the catalyst shows a carbon dioxide conversion through hydrogenation to hydrocarbons in the aviation jet fuel range of 38.2%, with a yield of 17.2%, and a selectivity of 47.8%, and with an attendant low carbon monoxide (5.6%) and methane selectivity (10.4%). The conversion reaction also produces light olefins ethylene, propylene, and butanes, totalling a yield of 8.7%, which are important raw materials for the petrochemical industry and are presently also only obtained from fossil crude oil. As this carbon dioxide is extracted from air, and re-emitted from jet fuels when combusted in flight, the overall effect is a carbon-neutral fuel….

A series of Fe-based catalysts were prepared by the OCM for the conversion of carbon dioxide into jet fuel range hydrocarbons. This synthetic process can be used to produce homogeneous, ultrafine and high-purity crystalline metal oxide powder catalysts. The as-prepared catalysts, following activation, showed high carbon dioxide hydrogenation activity and high jet fuel range selectivity as a consequence of the small (ca. 15 nm) nanoparticle size and the presence of two catalytically active Fe phases that operate in tandem. The first phase corresponds to Fe₃O₄ which catalyses the conversion of carbon dioxide to CO via the RWGS reaction whilst the second active Fe phase (χ-Fe₅C₂) catalyses the hydrogenation of CO through the Fischer-Tropsch process.

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I have added this one, to emphasise that these ideas/projects are going on worldwide. Most of them are so new, that there is little information about them, patents are pending, and in this case, all we know is that hif.cl is going to use some kind of technology to capture and condense CO₂ via a filtration process.

Some kind of DAC + Clean Fuel at edge of earth

Magallanes, Chile
https://www.ame.cl/centrales-y-proyectos/hif/
GLOBALlY AUSTRALIA& USA
https://hifglobal.com/home

Haru Oni
Demonstration Plant
Punta Arenas, October 2, 2020 – AME, together with its future partners Enel, Siemens, Porsche and Enap, launched HIF, “Highly Innovative Fuels” a company that will produce clean fuels from 100% renewable energy and whose main input is the Magellanic wind.

From Magallanes, one of the southern most points in the world, we begin our journey towards decarbonization.
With the help of the wind. A wind as constant and unique as the one that blows in southern Chile.
The wind will provide us with energy, the clean energy we need to make this happen.

***We will use wind-generated energy to obtain hydrogen, by way of electrolysis.
***We will capture directly and condense CO₂, via a filtration process .
***We will then combine the hydrogen obtained by electrolysis with the CO₂ captured from the atmosphere through a process called synthesis.

HIF – This is the largest project to be developed in this area of Latin America that allows faster progress in the decarbonization process.

Construction begins on world’s first integrated commercial plant for producing nearly CO2-neutral fuel in Chile

October 2021 – Stuttgart/Munich. Sports car manufacturer Porsche and Siemens Energy have joined forces with a number of international companies to build an industrial plant for the production of nearly CO₂-neutral fuel (eFuel) in Punta Arenas, Chile. The ground-breaking ceremony for this pioneering project took place today in the presence of Chile’s Energy Minister Juan Carlos Jobet. A pilot plant is initially being built north of Punta Arenas in Chilean Patagonia, which is expected to produce around 130,000 litres of eFuels in 2022. The capacity will then be expanded in two stages to around 55 million litres by 2024 and to around 550 million litres by 2026. The necessary environmental permits have now been obtained by the Chilean project company Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF). Siemens Energy has also already started preparatory work for the next major commercial phase of the project.

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A little “D.I.Y.” DAC

Denver, COLORADO, USA
https://github.com/openair-collective/openair-cyan
https://deepscience.ltd/index.html

Hello, Cyan!
Cyan Decarbonizer v.1

Could even little bits help?

Do-It-Yourself Carbon Capture – at under $100 >> The output material, calcium carbonate can be used in building materials (cement-lime) or as agricultural lime.

~1:30 hours — SEE How to build your own DIY direct air capture machine: Cyan!—w/ Dahl Winters of OpenAir Collective. By 25:00h you will be close to having the basic basics of Dahl’s process
 Nori, a carbon removal marketplace based out of Seattle that works to mitigate carbon emissions in multiple ways. !!! – CLICK THE CC FOR SUBTITLES……..

If you have twenty-five minutes; details about the device design, current challenges, opportunities and big questions, and the Cyan mission’s general goals and aspirations are available here:

This portable system operates at a small enough scale to give individuals a tangible experience of carbon removal.

The input material, calcium hydroxide, can be found in any home improvement store as hydrated lime. However, for Cyan to be carbon-negative the input must either be sourced from a low-carbon supplier or obtained from waste cement.

Dahl Clark Winters
Openair-cyan on GitHub – Open Source
Member of OpenAir, which is an entirely volunteer-led network that aims to creatively capitalize on opportunities to advance, accelerate and co-invent carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in the real world through collaborative advocacy, research & development missions. Our collector-curated library should be helpful to learners on all levels; new to the already immersed. It includes a special section on DAC

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as many solutions for DAC as possible….
Is there money for this?

CAN GLOBAL INNOVATION COMPETITIONS
HELP UNEARTH THE NEXT SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTION?
Why not?!

Some of the world’s biggest problems waiting to be solved are in countries where entrepreneurs don’t have access to the same type of resources as, say, their counterparts in Silicon Valley. Yet the people facing those problems day to day may be the best source for solutions. With programs like UpLink and the ClimateLaunchpad, innovative ideas from anywhere could have a better chance of turning into solutions — and helping people everywhere.

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Registration will re-open on February 15, 2022
XPRIZE Carbon Capture Technology Prize

The Big winner will be declared in 2025 !
$5 Million set aside just for students

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Developed in partnership with XPRIZE and Creative Destruction Lab, AirMiners Launchpad is a 6-week program for early teams or individuals interested in the $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal.
Innovators and entrepreneurs hoping to compete for the prize should join the AirMiners Launchpad for startup support. Apply Now

AirMiners is the place for carbon dioxide miners.
AirMiners is the place for entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists, investors, and designers working to extract carbon from the air. It exists to support the global carbon negative community with networking, education, inspiration and access to funding.
Explore air mining solutions
Discover startups and projects working to capture, store, and transform carbon dioxide into useful products.
Become an Air Miner – Apply to AirMiner’s Community – Slack
AirMiners is a community of those who are very close to the carbon removal industry, specifically those working in carbon removal, either at a company, government entity, or nonprofit, or as a student. Come meet others with shared interests and experience!

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other posts that discuss aspects of the greenhouse gases and capture:
Can We, Are We Pulling In The Excess Co₂ ?
The Greenhouse Gases List …..A Re-Review
Fuel from Air? – capture CO₂
#4 We have 12 years to cool off planet Earth?
Industrial Zone – closed-loop networking
“direct air/CO2 capture”
Slow Down ?? Yes – No, Changes Are Urgent , BUT…..
Bhutan – ESG & The Little Kingdom Of Bhutan A carbon sink country!
CLEAN AIR – IS, ALREADY – IN OUR GRASP!
2 Reports To Help GREEN Small Business Find Money Investors want Clean Air.
Summer Solstice 2021
I Say, “Heal The Land With Vetiver” and AIR