{"id":255,"date":"2021-09-10T10:54:22","date_gmt":"2021-09-10T15:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/?p=255"},"modified":"2023-05-03T16:05:45","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T21:05:45","slug":"why-orca-matters-the-point-of-climeworks-new-direct-air-capture-facility-in-iceland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/2021\/09\/10\/why-orca-matters-the-point-of-climeworks-new-direct-air-capture-facility-in-iceland\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Orca matters: long-term climate policy and Climeworks’ new direct air capture facility in Iceland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Authored by <\/span>David Morrow<\/span><\/a> & Michael Thompson<\/a><\/p>\n

Prepared for the\u00a0Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy<\/a><\/p>\n

Earlier this week, the Swiss company <\/span>Climeworks<\/span><\/a> fired up its <\/span>new Orca<\/a> direct air capture<\/a> facility<\/span> in Iceland, which will remove 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO<\/span>2<\/sub><\/span>) per year and <\/span>turn it into stone<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, 4,000 metric tons is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to today\u2019s emissions. Each year, Orca will clean up about three seconds\u2019 worth of global CO<\/span>2<\/sub><\/span> emissions at today\u2019s rates.<\/span><\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the point. Orca is a baby step toward a larger carbon removal<\/a> industry that could one day <\/span>clean up emissions from the hardest-to-abate sectors or, even better, start cleaning up \u201clegacy carbon\u201d that remains in the atmosphere from our past emissions<\/span><\/a>. Without baby steps like Orca, though, we would never get there. In that respect, Orca is a bit like <\/span>the tiny, 3.5 kilowatt solar power station that NASA\u2019s Lewis Research Center installed on the Papago Indian Reservation in 1978<\/span><\/a>; it\u2019s only the beginning. Global solar power capacity <\/span>now stands at more than 200 million times the capacity of that little installation<\/span><\/a>. While direct air capture isn\u2019t likely to grow at such a pace, the point is that we shouldn\u2019t judge the potential of an industry by its output in its earliest days.<\/span><\/p>\n

One reason that direct air capture won\u2019t grow at the same pace as solar power is because solar panels provide energy, whereas direct air capture consumes it. So, at least for the next couple of decades, it will almost always make more sense, from the perspective of climate change mitigation\u00a0 and energy justice, to spend money on installing more clean energy and replacing old fossil fuel infrastructure than on building more direct air capture facilities. The reason to spend some money on direct air capture now, though, is to help the technology grow so that once we\u2019ve drastically reduced our emissions, we can use direct air capture and other approaches to carbon removal to get to net-zero and maybe even net-negative emissions. By analogy, four decades ago, the reason to spend money on solar panels was not because they offered a cost-effective way of reducing emissions or supplying energy, but because those investments helped the technology grow. If everyone had dismissed solar at the time as too small and too expensive, we wouldn\u2019t have the solar industry that we do today.<\/span><\/p>\n

At any rate, one of the compelling things about Orca is that it\u2019s running on renewable geothermal energy that was basically stranded in Iceland. Because Iceland already runs almost entirely on renewables, the clean energy that Orca uses couldn\u2019t easily have been used to displace dirty energy instead. (Arguably, one could have instead built a facility to produce <\/span>green hydrogen<\/span><\/a> to ship to Europe or North America, but again, the point of Orca isn\u2019t to reduce emissions today but to help build a technology that will be useful in the future. Besides, there\u2019s plenty of renewable energy to go around in Iceland, so why not both? Build a hydrogen plant there, too!)<\/span><\/p>\n

Another compelling thing about Orca is that it sits atop the perfect geology for mineralizing CO<\/span>2<\/sub><\/span>. Orca can inject its captured CO<\/span>2<\/sub><\/span> directly into basalt, where it will turn to stone in a matter of years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The combination of abundant, stranded clean energy and good geology for sequestration makes Iceland an ideal place to build early direct air capture facilities\u2014which raises an interesting question: where else in the world can we find that combination?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Authored by David Morrow & Michael Thompson Prepared for the\u00a0Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy Earlier this week, the Swiss company Climeworks fired up its new Orca direct air capture facility in Iceland, which will remove 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year and turn it into stone. Obviously, 4,000 metric tons … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Why Orca matters: long-term climate policy and Climeworks’ new direct air capture facility in Iceland”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[32],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-post","tag-direct-air-capture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/carbonremoval\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}