Canadian firm to pull carbon from air

CO2 out of the atmosphere will be used ‘to produce net zero emission fuels’

CANADA/ SQUAMISH: A company with global plans to pull carbon from thin air to make fuel, while tackling climate change, opened a pilot plant in a remote western Canadian community.

Carbon Engineering, backed by Bill Gates and other investors, unveiled a test facility able to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using giant fans.

The company was founded in Calgary in 2009 by David Keith, a Harvard University climate scientist, with funding from private investors.

That carbon goes through a series of chemical processes and emerges as pellets, which can be used to make fuel, or simply be stored underground.

“Unlike existing machines that capture carbon from smokestacks like those of coal-fired power plants, the direct air capture plant deals with emissions from sources you just can’t otherwise capture,” said Carbon Engineering Chief Executive Adrian Corless.

“It’s now possible to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and use it as a feed stock, with hydrogen, to produce net zero emission fuels,” he said, adding that the benefits of those synthesised fuels was that they could be tailor-made for use in existing systems, from petrol pumps to automobiles and airplanes.

“You don’t have to re-tool the $30 trillion in (global) infrastructure now used to deliver fossil fuels.”

Corless said while alternative energies, from wind to solar, were being developed, there were not a lot of options to power airplanes and vehicles. “For me, this is most exciting.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 11^th, 2015.

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