The opportunity in direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide is reaching real maturity and from here should start scaling fast, just as other CO2 opportunities like biogenic also develop.
That was the message from Bjørn Utgård, Vice-President of Strategic Development at Skytree, the Amsterdam-based DAC company, who presented at the recent British Compressed Gas Association event in Manchester.
His stand-out comment was that the opportunity is certainly “hundreds of millions of tonnes per year, but most likely billions of tonnes of CO2 per year over the next few decades.”
One of the opening slides illustrated how Skytree’s technology works, explaining how “it’s basically like an ASU, except we don’t extract nitrogen but CO2.” Alongside concentrated CO2, some water is also captured from a sorbent, with more than half of its energy consumption is heating up the sorbent to release the CO2.
“We’re focused on keeping this more like a machine than a chemical facility – it’s how you cost [the] risk,” he said. “If you look at how big projects get over-run, it tends to come from uncertainties and risks in building the project. We try to deal with all the risk in development and manufacturing.”
Driving future efficiencies will involve reducing the cost of machines’ capital expenditure, making the sorbent last longer and using less energy.
Skytree delivered its first commercial product to customers last year and its pipeline is quite long.
“We have a lot of big opportunities around the world,” added Utgård.
Turning to applications, he said around 6.5 million tonnes of CO2 is used in the Netherlands’ greenhouses every day.
“Carbon removals is another big story – basically it’s like CCS just with atmospheric CO2 – and then there’s Power-to-X.
“And I need to address the elephant in the room’ and that’s if you capture CO2 from fossil sources then you spend energy on liquefying that, and then energy on distributing it, you’re actually increasing global emissions; [and] if that CO2 is going into tomatoes, then it’s not being sequestered.”
Despite all the work on liquid hydrogen, Utgård said it’s very clear that we’re going to be transporting molecules that we already know the shape of – such as methane and methanol.
“And if you’re going to do that, you’re going to need CO2, because hydrocarbons are hydrogen and carbon. Since we’ve heard how hydrogen costs are a much more important factor than CO2 costs, you’re going to locate DAC facilities next to hydrogen generation facilities – which are going to be next to the big renewable energy resources.”
He concluded his presentation by outlining the differences between biogenic CO2 and DAC. “Biogenic allows us to start differentiating between what’s fossil and atmospheric, and DAC allows … a reliable, large-scale source over time –and there are even some great opportunities for integrating them.”
Delegates heard the UK is becoming increasingly reliant on imported CO2, leaving the industrial gases sector vulnerable, and another session shone the spotlight on construction, which is central to decarbonisation.
