Type Private | Industry Carbon Capture | |
Headquarters Calgary, Alberta, Canada Key people Adrian Corless, MASc, Chief Executive Officer
David Keith, PhD, Executive Chairman Website www.carbonengineering.com | ||
Carbon Engineering is a Calgary, Alberta-based company commercializing technology to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the atmosphere. The company was founded in 2009 by David Keith, now a professor of public policy and applied physics at Harvard University. It is based on his research conducted at the University of Calgary. Carbon Engineering is funded by several government and sustainability-focused agencies as well as by private investors, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and oil sands financier N. Murray Edwards.
Contents
Technology
Carbon Engineering’s Direct Air Capture (DAC) system integrates two main cycles. The first cycle is the absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere in a device called an “air contactor” using an alkaline hydroxide solution. The second cycle regenerates the capture liquid used in the air contactor, and delivers pure CO2 as an end product. These cycles operate in tandem continuously, producing a concentrated stream of CO2 gas as an output, and requiring only energy, water, and small material make up streams as inputs. Energy is used in such a way that no new CO2 emissions are incurred, and thus do not counteract what was captured from the air. The captured atmospheric CO2 can be stored underground, used for enhanced oil recovery, or turned into low-carbon synthetic fuels.
Pilot Plant Demonstration
In 2015, Carbon Engineering started operations of its full end-to-end pilot plant, located in Squamish, B.C. The facility is designed to capture roughly 500 tons of atmospheric CO2 per year.
Based on the data obtained from the pilot plant, Carbon Engineering intends to scale up its technology to build commercial plants, which eventually would each have the capacity to capture 1,000,000 tons of CO2 per year. At that scale, one Carbon Engineering air capture plant could negate the emissions from ~250,000 cars – either by sequestering the CO2 or by using the recycled carbon dioxide as a feedstock to produce synthetic fuel.