MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

58 MLCM WINTER/SPRING 2019 “E very tool in the tool box” is an increasingly popular mantra in climate science circles. And as problems get worse and technology gets better, the tools are getting more radical. One example is carbon capture— sucking carbon directly out of the atmosphere. Long discounted as unfeasible at best (because of the cost) and dangerous at worst (because it diverts attention from more viable solutions), a humble facility on Howe Sound has spent the last three years working to prove that carbon capture is not a pipe dream—it’s here. “Direct Air Capture (DAC) is a technology that processes atmospheric air, removes the CO2 and delivers it in compressed, purified form ready for use or storage,” says Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering (CE), a Vancouver-based company that’s been scrubbing one ton of carbon dioxide per day from the skies above Squamish since 2015. CE has brought the cost of this technology down to under $100/ton. At that price, they believe scaling up to a global scale isn’t just possible, it’s profitable. In the short term, that profit is most likely to come from the second half of CE’s patented process: using electrolysis to turn crystalized CO2 into liquid fuel, a process CE calls Air to Fuels™. Their Squamish facility can produce one barrel of this (nearly) carbon-neutral fuel a day. This fuel could replace the gasoline, diesel, or even jet fuel in any internal combustion engine currently in use. That’s an appealing prospect for a world with more than one billion vehicles, the vast majority of which still run on fossil fuel. Consider that there are more than 150,000 gas stations in the US alone (and 12,000 in Canada). As the world transitions to battery-powered transportation, CE is betting their technology can provide a bridge that will buy us time to deploy the necessary infrastructure. The company claims facilities can be built today that would suck onemillion tons per year of CO2 from the atmosphere— equivalent to the average annual emissions of 250,000 cars. That’s still a drop in the bucket (humans are adding 100 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every day) but, says Oldham, “There are no fundamental limits to how many DAC and Air to Fuels ™ facilities can be built. The pace of deployment will be set by how jurisdictions tackle their climate commitments and create markets that favor low-carbon fuels and carbon removal.” CE’s technology won’t solve the problem on its own, but they’re betting it can help. carbonengineering.com BIG WINDS, CLEAN AIR Squamish is a new leader in carbon capture technology Moonshine of the future? No, but it's a good transitionary fuel. COURTESY CARBON ENGINEERING