The author is the vice president of research at Bilin Lapidot.
The greenhouse effect and climate crisis are no longer pessimistic forecasts for the future but the reality we live in. According to studies, a rise of 2-1.5 degrees Celsius in the average temperature of the earth relative to the temperature that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution will have catastrophic consequences for our lives, and we are already close to that. One of the main causes of the crisis is the manufacturing habits in the global industry, which cause pollutant emissions and contribute to the rise in the average temperature of the earth.
Our atmosphere is full of gases that trap the earth’s heat, such as nitrogen dioxide, methane, ozone and more – and the main one is carbon dioxide. Basically it is a positive phenomenon: without the greenhouse effect, our planet would have frozen, but excessive emissions of greenhouse gases increased the effect and led to excessive warming that causes damage.
In order to reduce global warming, it is necessary to reduce as much as possible the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air. Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016, tremendous efforts have been made by countries and companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – including through the transition to green energy production, at the expense of coal-based polluting power plants; Collection of taxes for production in countries without emissions control; Tax benefits for CO2 storage; And development of carbon markets and trade in pollutant emission permits.
To meet the required target – a reduction of about 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050 – reducing emissions will not be enough, and there is a real need to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. The simplest way is to plant trees, but unfortunately, there are not enough trees and not enough areas to capture the amount of carbon dioxide required in the amount of time we have. Therefore, the need to capture carbon has in recent years spawned a new market for start-ups and high-tech companies, which are developing efficient and diverse technologies to solve the problem of pollutant emissions into the atmosphere.
It is difficult to find tradable companies in the field today, but in the last two years billions of dollars have been invested and made in this market, and among the investors you can find countries, as well as reputable companies such as Shopify, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, McKinsey, Alphabet, Stripe and more.
Carbon shanks: Good idea – only it does not work
Currently, about 40 countries and about 20 cities and counties have established a CO2 market. It is a trading system in which units of greenhouse gas emission permits are traded, and it allows companies another way to move to zero net emissions, in accordance with the requirements in many countries.
The market is based on the American Cap and Trade system, according to which the government sets an upper limit of CO2 that the industry is allowed to emit, and it divides the quantity into a large number of permits. A company that manages to reduce the pollution below the threshold set for it – can sell its “pollution balance” to others, which creates for it a positive incentive to reduce the pollution. On the other hand, a company that pollutes more than it has been assigned must buy “pollution rights” – and this creates an incentive for it to reduce pollution, so that it does not have to pay money for it.
Although the method sounds great, CO2 emissions have continued to rise over the years, due to the fact that the price of a CO2 permit was too low, and did not provide a good enough reason to save emissions. In addition, the fines imposed for exceeding the emission quota are low, ineffective and very close to the price of the permit in the CO2 market. And on top of all that, it is difficult to accurately measure CO2 emissions in factories, and give scores to companies.
New market: technologies that capture carbon dioxide from the air
The fight against global warming has tremendous growth potential, and experts estimate that this is a market with a potential of about $ 500 billion a year. Among the many companies that develop technologies in the field, there are some that are worth paying attention to.
Swiss Climeworks and Canadian Carbon Engineering, founded in 2009, have developed huge fans, which together with complex chemical processes and filters capture CO2 from the air. Since until recently the US did not provide incentives for burying CO2, they sold it.
The two prominent companies are joined by the American Global Thermostat, which was founded in 2010 and invented technology for capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere and polluting plants, and the Canadian company CO2 solutions, which was established in 1997 and developed CO2 capture technology based on imitating human lungs.
Another company in the field is the American Mission Zero, which was founded in 2020 and is developing a system for capturing CO2 from the air. Its uniqueness is in the low costs and energy that its system consumes. Inspired by the way our bodies excrete the CO2 we breathe, the company has developed a process that captures CO2 in its organic form, and concentrates it as pure gas.
Until 2017, Climeworks sold the CO2 to agricultural greenhouses in Switzerland, where it was used to grow vegetables, as well as to beverage companies, which used it to make carbonated beverages. In 2017, the company began working with Icelandic Carbfix, which dissolves CO2 in water and injects it into porous basalt rocks deep in the earth. When CO2 is underground, it binds to calcium, magnesium and iron, and within about two years solidifies into minerals, turns to stone and is buried forever. Carbfix raised $ 650 million this year – the largest fundraiser to date in the field of CO2 capture.
Carbfix plans to capture about 4,000 tons of CO2 this year, and its target is a more significant size, of about a billion tons. The company has expanded the use of water to use saltwater as well, and this is the next project it is working on. Climeworks currently charges about $ 1,000 per tonne of CO2, but it is estimated that the price is expected to drop to about $ 200 per tonne by 2030.
Another method of capturing CO2 from the air is based on the constant balance between the concentration of CO2 in the ocean waters and its concentration in the air. Developed technologies are based on reducing the concentration of CO2 in ocean waters (which have become more acidic as a result of rising CO2 concentrations), causing the oceans to absorb CO2 from the air.
Canadian Planetary Technologies neutralizes some of the CO2 in seawater, turning it into sodium bicarbonate, which remains in this state in seawater. The cost of carrying out this method is about $ 800 per ton, and the goal is to reach about $ 75 per ton in the future.
Vesta works on the same principle – it adds unique sand to beaches, which prevents the oceans from oxidizing, thus causing the oceans to absorb CO2 from the air.
Other companies can be seen developing technologies based on the principle of balance – Ebb, which reduces acidity through electrolysis, Running Tide, which absorbs CO2 using special algae, and Seachange, which turns the carbon in seawater into an oyster-like substance.
Another way to capture CO2 from the air is to increase the adsorption of CO2 from the air into minerals on land – a technology developed by companies such as Eion and Heirloom.
To highlight how burning the issue is for countries, last May the US Department of Energy launched a $ 3.5 billion plan to develop four plants to capture CO2 from the air. Currently, it appears that capturing CO2 from the air and existing plants is still expensive and unprofitable to carry out, and that capturing CO2 in an existing polluting plant harms the plant’s output.
The expectation is that the price will fall over the years, and that outputs will be less harmed, until a situation arises where it will pay off for private companies to set up carbon capture facilities themselves. Now, such a government decision seems to emphasize that despite the heavy cost, governments should deal with the capture and storage of CO2 more than with the consequences of inaction in the face of the current situation.