A Solution to Global Warming That Sucks

In the year 2012, with the two biggest greenhouse gas creators in the world (the U.S. and China, of course) unwilling to do much of anything to cut emissions, we’re basically light years and an autocratic world government away from staving off catostrophic climate change through reductions. So, that leaves us with the ignoble options of just dealing with the rising sea levels and extreme weather and famines etc. as they come or, maybe just maybe, digging our way out with some new technology. Civilization at large deals with — or ignores — problems via this latter mindset more than it would like to admit. Meet Kilamanjaro Air, a tech startup in the would-be business of capturing and selling carbon dioxide, e.g. closing the carbon cycle.

The science is essentially the same as that used on submarines and spaceships to scrub CO2 from the air, albeit writ very large. Writer Mark Gunther, a contributing editor at Fortune, details the history of Kilimanjaro in a new e-book called Suck It Up, excerpted at the “Ecomagination” blog. (Ecomagination is a blog apparently run by GE, of nuclear weapons engineering, railway locomotive, and 30 Rock fame, so let’s help ourselves to some grains of salt.) Anyhow:

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The company stumbled at first. As Lackner explained it to me, air capture is a multi-step process — a chemical absorbent first has to bind with CO2, after which the CO2 needs to be separated from the absorbent and compressed into a liquid to be sold or stored. “The hard part is getting the CO2 back off,” he said. GRT’s first absorbent was sodium hydroxide, which effectively captured CO2. But the bond between them was so strong that separating the CO2 required a great deal of energy. In 2007, after testing other absorbents, GRT had devised a new air-extraction technology that uses a plastic resin that bonds with CO2 when dry and gives it back when wet. This was hailed as a breakthrough in a company press release quoting, among others, Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia. “This significant achievement holds incredible promise in the fight against climate change,” Sachs said. “Thanks to the ingenuity of GRT and Klaus Lackner, the world may, sooner rather than later, have an important tool in this fight.” It would be later rather than sooner. In 2008, Wright was replaced as CEO by William “Billy” Gridley, an investor in the firm and a former managing director at Goldman Sachs.

Kilimanjaro has a staff of 12 working on prototype machines that “catch” C02 via large flat filters via an absorbent and then, once captured, release the C02 and concentrate it into liquid form, where it can be used as fuel (more dirty fuel and then only after being converted to carbon monoxide). I can’t find anything on Kilimanjaro’s website about the machine’s efficiency, which would seem to be a primary limiting factor of the technology. (If it costs more energy to produce a lesser amount of energy, that’s kind of a slim victory.) It’s addressed a very little bit below:

Because greenhouse gases are dispersed around the globe, they can be extracted from the air anywhere. Carbon dioxide spewing from a tailpipe in Sao Paulo or a coal plant in China can be captured by a machine in Iceland or the Middle East because the atmosphere functions as a conveyor belt, moving CO2 from its sources to any sink. That’s important because while we can envision a world where most or all of the electricity we use comes from nuclear, solar or wind energy, or from fossil fuels where the CO2 is captured at the power plant, it’s harder to see how emissions from cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes can be eliminated. The beauty of air capture, Lackner and his colleagues explained, is that “one could collect CO2 after the fact and from any source….One would not have to wait for the phasing out of existing infrastructure before addressing the greenhouse gas problem.” Air capture plants, they wrote, could be located atop the best underground reservoirs for storing CO2, which may be in isolated locations. This fact is key to the business plans of all the air-capture startups. In only one regard was Lackner’s paper clearly mistaken — he estimated that the cost of air capture would be “on the order of $10 to $15 per ton,” a target that now looks wildly optimistic.

Actually, what’s even more wildly optimistic is the widespread, worldwide deployment of a new industry based upon the harvesting and sale of enriched carbon dioxide any time before we’re living on a pseudo-Venus. While I’m sure Gunther and anyone involved in Kilamanjaro would argue that this technology isn’t meant as a stand-alone solution — though the title Suck It Up kinda suggests otherwise — and there needs to be reductions as well, one can’t help but think diversions like this are just that — less about addressing the problem than addressing our anxiety about the problem.