Practically nothing related to the net-zero effort is on target. That isn’t surprising given the magnitude of the task and the myriad societal and infrastructure changes that are required. Given this, I firmly believe we should be making a major effort to advance carbon capture technologies in all their various forms.
Environmentalists hate that idea. They think it’s “cheating” and a “Trojan Horse” strategy to perpetuate the use of fossil fuels.
I have two questions for environmentalists:
- Is the goal to reduce carbon or eliminate the use of fossil fuels?
- If we could actually reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere while we continue to burn fossil fuels isn’t that an acceptable outcome?
Hopefully, because we’re not going to stop using fossil fuels any time soon.
Carbon capture et al isn’t there yet. In fact, it’s not close to being there. But we haven’t made the types of investments in carbon capture that we’ve made in renewable energy. And technological progress is generally directly proportional with the amount of capital applied.
That’s not to say that the answer is always to throw money at a problem. Sometimes that’s a foolish strategy. But if technologies can prove to be viable, and the challenge is to scale and make them cost effective, usually increasing the level of investment is the percentage play.
Enter CarbonFree’s SkyCycle technology. Their goal is to extract calcium from steel slag and transform it into high-value chemicals. If successful, the technology could make carbon capture profitable.
The company recently announced a $150 million project at the U.S. Steel plant in Gary Indiana slated to be completed in 2026. The goal is to capture 50,000 metric tons of CO2 annually.
Here’s the bad news: even if successful that would only be 1% of the approximately 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide that the plant emits each year. But you have to start somewhere.
CarbonFree’s proprietary technology combines the CO2 it captures with calcium that is extracted from slag – a byproduct of steel production. This results in calcium carbonate which has a market value of $500 to $1,000 per metric ton in industries such as food and pharmaceutical. At those prices the $150 million investment could be recaptured within a few years.
Today, carbon capture technologies mimic nuclear: they are too expensive and have too small an impact. Most have relied on government subsidies and have not yielded significant results. Where CarbonFree’s approach differs is that if successful, it pays for itself.
Could this “produce a profitable byproduct approach” be applied to other carbon capture technologies? That’s an unknown, but I for one would like to see sufficient financial resources allocated to find out.
#carbonfree #skycycle #carboncapture #carbonsequestration #ussteel #netzero
