A carbon capture and sequestration/storage (CCS) system is designed to remove CO₂ at the source of emission, such as a coal or natural gas plant, or from the environment. The CO₂ can be stored in a sealed underground chamber or used for another purpose. Currently about 40 million tons of CO₂ are captured each year, about 0.1% of total emissions 1.
For industrial heat and process emissions from major commodities, CCS may be the only economically viable tool to reduce emissions by more than 30% 2.
We estimate the following costs of carbon capture from various industrial sources.
Seawater may also be a promising venue for extracting carbon dioxide 13, though reliable potential costs estimates are limited. Recent analysis suggests that the CO₂ abatement cost of synthetic diesel from seawater may range from $373 to $717 per ton 14.
A major determinant in the monetary and energy costs of CO₂ capture is concentration, with lower costs from higher concentrations. The following are estimates of primary energy requires to capture a ton of CO₂ from various sources.
While industrial sources of carbon tend to be cheaper than diffuse sources such as direct air capture, only limited amounts of them are available, and fossil fuel-based sources in particular will hopefully be phased out eventually. Following are estimates of how much carbon will be available at midcentury from non-fossil sources.
Most captured CO₂ today is used for enhanced oil recovery, with most of the remainder stored geologically.
A barrel of oil releases about 500 kg of CO₂, and if CO₂ enhanced oil recovery is used, about 300-600 kg CO₂ are injected into the well 19.
For the industrial CO2 market more broadly, the dominant uses are urea for fertilizer and enhanced oil recovery. The world market of 230 million tons of industrial CO2 is less than 1% of world emissions of about 40 billion tons annually as of 2022.
Potential future uses of captured CO₂ include methanol, hydrocarbons, methane, mineralization into building materials, working fluids for coal and geothermal power plants, fertilizing plant growth in greenhouses 21, feedstock for the chemical industry, and several niche industrial uses 22, 23.
If CO₂ is captured from fossil fuels or cement, and then used to produce synthetic fuels, the overall process may have lower emissions than the conventional alternative, but it is not a true low-carbon process. Rather, in this scenario, each molecule of CO₂ is emitted over two processes rather than one.
Direct air capture (DAC) refers to a system that captures and removes carbon dioxide from the ambient atmosphere, rather than a concentrated industrial waste stream. The International Energy envisions that DAC will remove 980 million tons of CO2 per year by 2050, compared to just 0.01 million tons per year now 24. The two leading technologies are liquid solvent DAC (L-DAC) and solid sorbent DAC (S-DAC). Following are estimates of the resources required for 1 billion tons of DAC per year, about 2.5% of current emissions.
Resource | 1 billion tons L-DAC | 1 billion tons S-DAC | Present annual consumption |
---|---|---|---|
Land Use | 400 km² | 1200-1700 km² | 149 million km² (Earth's land area) |
Water | 50 billion tons | 0.2-2 billion tons | 4600 billion tons |
Energy | 5.5-8.8 exajoules | 7.2-9.5 EJ | 600 EJ |
Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions | 100-400 million tons CO₂ | 30-91 million tons | 40 billion tons |
Cost | Up to $340 billion | Up to $540 billion | World GDP about $85 trillion in 2020 |
S-DAC can operate with lower temperature heat, enabling it to use geothermal or solar thermal energy. L-DAC requires high temperature heat.
If an L-DAC system had to desalinate its own water usage, it would add $3.50 - $9.50/ton CO₂ to the cost of carbon removal 24. It is possible to run a DAC device intermittently on renewable electricity as a load balancing strategy, but this would further raise the cost 24.
It is estimated that the world could store 8,000 to 55,000 billion tons of CO2, the equivalent of 200-1275 years of emissions at current rates 24. In the United States, it is estimated that over half of onshore storage could be developed at less than $10/ton CO2, while more than half of offshore storage could be developed at less than $35/ton 24. Carbon leakage is estimated at less than 0.01%, slow enough for CCS to be secure as a mitigation solution 25.
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