Plant Sucks CO2 out of the Air and Feeds It to Vegetables

While there are those who want to discuss the causes of climate change and how much humanity has contributed to it, others are looking to address greenhouse gas emissions through technology. A first-class commercial plant began to operate recently in Switzerland, which sucks CO2 from the air to sell to buyers.

The Climeworks AG plant near Zurich is the first to capture CO2 on an industrial scale, selling about 900 tonnes of gas per year to help grow vegetables. That's how much carbon dioxide 200 cars would loose.

Climeworks sees this as a first step, with the company's goal is to capture 1% of global CO2 emissions by using this type of negative emissions technology. Its long-term goal can be achieved with 250,000 additional plants like this.

The company emphasizes the scalability of its plants as a favorable factor to achieve its objectives.

"Highly scalable negative emission technologies are crucial if we are to stay below the two-degree goal of the international community," said Christoph Gebald, co-founder and managing director of Climeworks.

Preventing temperatures rising more than two degrees Celsius is the goal set by the Paris agreement on climate change.

The plant is located above a waste heat recovery facility that also powers. Giant fans push the air through a filter collecting CO2, which is then spread out at higher temperatures. The gas is then delivered through an underground gas pipeline to the customer, which in this case is a greenhouse that grows vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers.

"You can do this over and over again," Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher told Fast Company. "It's a cyclical process, you get CO2, then regenerate, saturate, regenerate." You have several of these units, and not all of them go in parallel, some are taking CO2, others are releasing CO2. Has a continuous production of CO2, which is also important for the customer. "

Other uses for CO2 include carbonated beverages, "climate neutral" fuels and others.

The goal of Climeworks is to run the first floor as a three-year demonstration project, while launching additional commercial facilities. Another idea of ​​the company to achieve negative emissions is to bury underground gas.

"With the energy and economic data of the plant, we can make reliable calculations for other larger projects," said Wurzbacher.

Some critics of the project think that it would be cheaper to capture CO2 directly in fossil fuel plants, when it is more concentrated, rather than trying to get it from the air. The founders of Climeworks see their technology as one of the methods necessary to address emissions. They also point out that their plant is more efficient and leaves less carbon footprint than planting trees that would process a comparable amount of CO2.

The Climeworks plant outperforms a Canadian plant backed by Bill Gates in the race to become the first to industrialize the CO2 capture process. That pilot plant is still in testing stage in British Columbia