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'Swiss Re' Signs World's First Long-Term Carbon Capture Deal (bloomberg.com) 64

Posted by BeauHD from the decade-deals dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Reinsurance giant Swiss Re announced Wednesday that it had signed the world's first long-term agreement to take carbon directly out of the air. The contract with Climeworks AG, one of the world's leading direct air-capture startups, will net the climate technology company $10 million over 10 years. Mischa Repmann, a senior environmental management specialist with Swiss Re, said the deal would not only help his company reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, it could inspire other business considering the use of carbon capture technology. "It's a call for action, and we're hoping that others will follow," he said.

Climeworks, a Switzerland-based company, is set to open a plant in Iceland in September that will filter CO from ambient air using geothermal energy. The captured CO will then be dissolved in water and pumped deep underground for permanent storage in nearby rock layers. While underground, the gas reacts naturally with its surroundings to form rock, preventing the carbon from reentering the atmosphere. The company says the facility will have the capacity to capture and store 4,000 tons of CO per year. [...] Swiss Re and Climeworks didn't specify how much carbon would be removed in fulfillment of their contract and were vague about the cost, saying only it would be several hundred dollars per ton. Climeworks says the average price will decline as its operations grow, and may be as low as $200 a ton by 2030.
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'Swiss Re' Signs World's First Long-Term Carbon Capture Deal More

'Swiss Re' Signs World's First Long-Term Carbon Capture Deal

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  • Billionaire CEOs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
    Eventually $200 a ton? Hmm I could pay for your service in order to make Earth habitable for future generations..or.. hear me out. Do nothing and pocket it, I need a 27th yacht, and those politicians don't come cheap either.

  • 4,000 / 35,000,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DavenH ( 1065780 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @09:27AM (#61735279)
    35 GT in 2018, and assuming 50 gigatonnes of anthopogenic emissions per year in 2030, we need over 10 million such companies to follow. I worked out some napkin math, and it would take loading a 100-car train filled with solid diamond once every few seconds to capture enough carbon.

    • Re:4,000 / 35,000,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @09:55AM (#61735371)

      It is a truly staggering undertaking.

      If, say, the entire global car manufacturing industry stopped producing cars and instead, turned its collective hand to producing the components for carbon capture plants that could feasibly be installed and operational in areas where geothermal energy is prevalent and viable, it still wouldn't be enough.
      And that's without taking into account a complete loss of revenue for such a manufacturing industry, as well as the loss of all profits. Add to that, trillions of dollars required to be invested in this, by countries worldwide and you have yourself an impossible challenge.

      That is the scale we are looking at.

      The reality is, this is actually the only shot we have. Net Zero carbon means a considerable amount of aerosols no longer providing cooling. Given the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere would keep global temperatures at the current level, assuming we hit Net Zero, for centuries, the loss of aerosols could potentially create a further 0.5c of warming, with catastrophic consequences, as it would be exceptionally rapid.

      So, a balance HAS to be struck, as we aim toward Net Zero, we have to be using carbon capture devices at a massive scale, to initially combat the loss of cooling from aerosols.

      It isn't looking good for the future of our civilisation.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by RemindMeLater ( 7146661 )
        The problem with carbon capture is that you need massive quantities of green energy *at* the location of geologically friendly areas into which you can pump megatons of CO2. Or you build huge transmission lines to such areas knowing that once your reservoir is full you have to shutdown the entire facility. Meanwhile green energy is not even keeping up with the overall growth in energy consumption. So exactly where we get these surplus gigawatts is unknown.

        Nevermind that large portions of the Amazon ra

        • The fact that green energy isn't keeping up is a myth - FUD sown by the gargantuan fossil fuel industry and all those heavily invested in it.

          Taking the country I live in as an example, we currently have 40% of our electricity from renewables and we've barely scratched the surface of the amount of places we can get energy from wind, not to mention waves. That country is the UK, so it's not exactly a country with a tiny population or low energy use.

          Solar is now cheaper per KWh than fossil fuel generation, mos

        • Nevermind that large portions of the Amazon rainforest are now emitting carbon. Or that there's 1,400 of gigatons of carbon (C, not CO2) locked in organic matter in the permafrost that is rapidly melting. This will be digested by bacteria and emitted as either CH4 or CO2.

          There are precious few negative feedback loops in this whole planetary meltdown.

          Yeah, it is a helluva pickle we are in.
          The permafrost issue depends on how fast the release will be and from what I've read, climate scientists are still unsure. The hope is it'll be slow, but the reality is, this is just another feedback loop we really could do without. Regardless of how slow it may be, it is still a staggering amount of CO2 that is going to be released ... probably for centuries.
          The fact that artic has gone past the tipping point and that it is just a matter of years before we see an ice-

      • Not today (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @10:32AM (#61735457) Homepage Journal

        It is a truly staggering undertaking.

        If, say, the entire global car manufacturing industry stopped producing cars and instead, turned its collective hand to producing the components for carbon capture plants that could feasibly be installed and operational in areas where geothermal energy is prevalent and viable, it still wouldn't be enough.

        ...today it wouldn't be enough.

        Carbon emission reduction is only a stop-gap measure, it won't reverse the problem and it requires massive reductions in standard of living. It also requires other countries (China, and later India) to do the same thing, and there's no good way to convince them of this.

        What climate alarmists don't seem to account for is the advancement of technology. We're reducing carbon emission at a tremendous rate, and this will accelerate. We had just about no wind farms or solar farms in 2000, now 20 years later we're at about 7% of our *total* energy consumption.

        Much of that was in the last 5 years, the doubling time for renewables is probably around 7 years.

        This sort of technology can be exported to other countries, and so we won't have to convince them politically to do this - it'll just be a good idea.

        New technologies are coming out that will reduce this even further; notably, electric vehicles weren't a thing 20 years ago, in 20 years this will have reduced emissions by several tens of percent. Grid-scale batteries aren't a thing today (there are something like 6 of them worldwide), but these should be common in another 20 years.

        Capture is the next logical step, and a few key advances should make this possible, and it's not hard to imagine what steps are needed.

        If AI gets a little further, it should be possible to make an automated(*) solar panel factory that automatically installs the solar cells at its location. After a startup period, this would provide enough energy to be self-sufficient, and continue to grow its energy output.

        Lots of places on Earth get a lot of sun and have lots of uninhabital area, it's not unreasonable to imaging installations such as these capturing carbon and growing exponentially to solve the problem in a couple of years.

        This is only one idea that I've seen put forth, another one has to do with growing algae in the ocean. Again, lots of sun in an uninhabitable space, an automated system that creates biomass from almost nothing, and the biomass can be put back into the Earth as captured carbon.

        Who knows what other solutions we'll come up with?

        We're working on the problem, the rate of solutions is growing, and it appears that we're going to solve it permanently.

        (*) A small number of humans controlling things, but no one actually making the panels.

        • Carbon emissions, overall, are going up not down. Technology has not yet delivered overall. And 'alarmists' are very aware of technology as solar, wind, electric cars are technology.

        • What climate alarmists don't seem to account for is the advancement of technology. We're reducing carbon emission at a tremendous rate, and this will accelerate.

          I'd love to believe your claim, but Citation needed.

          Here are some graphs I found, all of them increasing. If anybody has more authoritative sources, please do post.
          Worldwide oil production: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
          Worldwide gas consumption: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
          Worldwide coal production: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

          Storage is quite limited, so I suppose that production is more or less equal to consumption, that is CO2 emissions.

        • 20 years ago, after deciding that I wanted to spend my career working on the climate change problem, I basically came up with a similar set of possible, even probable, solutions to climate change. That list was a comfort. Unfortunately, as time went on, I had to cross many items off that list as they had unforeseen issues that made them unable to scale. And I really wasn't able to add much to the list.

          Fast forward to the present day, and a few of the items on my list are finally bearing fruit. Renewables

      • It isn't looking good for the future of our civilisation.

        Not something one wants to read and agree with on this Friday morning, but here we are.

        You're right though—it's going to take a massive overhaul and multiple points of alignment to even make a dent. We've dragged our feet on this with decades of forewarning. Worse than dragged our feet, we dug in our heels. But, I want to remain hopeful. There's incredible technology in the works to help with carbon capture and rebuilding ecosystems to better recapture carbon. Some projects like Running Tide [runningtide.com] are doing

      • "The company says the facility will have the capacity to capture and store 4,000 tons of CO per year." Woww... That's about the carbon dioxide production for one round-trip transcontinental flight. One person! Not One planefull!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There's no point even trying to do anything about the climate because someone will just assume your pilot scheme is the finished product at maximum scale and efficiency it can ever achieve and write it off.

      Reminds me of that time NASA put the first American in space. Everyone was like "meh, the USSR already put a man orbit, and you would need a rocket 10x larger than this to get to the Moon, so just give up now and don't even bother. It's going to cost you billions and I'm assuming this is the best rocket y

    • Those who see it as an insurmountable challenge will be left behind those who see it as a gigantic business opportunity.

      The scale of the necessary developments is huge, but comparable to the existing fossil fuel industry. In fact, I'd argue that the fossil industry should incorporate that very technology to clean up after themselves. Absolutely doable given the political will.

  • 4000 tons per year (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Friday August 27, 2021 @09:27AM (#61735281) Homepage
    Just to put that in perspective, the average Earthling emits around 5 tons of CO2 per year. [ourworldindata.org] And there are a lot of Earthlings. However, if we assume that $1,000,000 per year (from the numbers in the summary) then sequesters the equivalent of the carbon produced by 800 average people, that's $1250 per person per year. World GDP per capita is roughly $11,000 [worldbank.org]. So at current cost of carbon removal, that would mean we'd have to spend 11% of our world's GDP to offset our current emissions. Clearly the cost will fall, but there are some ways to avoid emitting carbon that's cheaper than that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      That's surprisingly reasonable. Provided they can actually do it for that price.

      Unfortunately, I doubt it scales up at that price. They've picked the ideal situation: Iceland, with gobs of cheap hydrothermal, and what's likely a pretty best case geologic formation.

      If we *could* do large scale carbon capture we could just price it in to emissions. Then those cheaper non-carbon emitting processes could compete in a fair market without endless bickering about carbon taxes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RobinH ( 124750 )
        It sets a target for a carbon tax. Right now carbon taxes are in the $10/ton range, but they're highly variable around the world. I suspect we'll see them rising to around $40 per ton in the next 5 years, but some places might raise them higher faster. If you put that money directly into sucking CO2 out of the air, you need to either increase the taxes to $200/ton, or figure out a way to scale the technology so the price comes way down. But it's do-able.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          It's better than a carbon tax, because it captures the actual cost. If carbon capture is worth it, you pay the price, the technology develops, and the price comes down. If it's not, you use alternatives. It also causes the money to go towards developing the most effective technologies, rather than what some politician can be convinced are the most effective technologies, or something else entirely.

          Yes, carbon taxes, even where they exist, presently vastly undervalue the current cost of carbon emission.

  • When you store CO2 without stopping to produce it from oxygen, you are really just storing oxygen. Just like in the Biosphere II experiment, where the concrete took CO2 out of the air.

    The problem is not CO2 itself, the problem is that we are actively producing so much of it that we destroy the natural balance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      It's a first step, but even massively scaled up this isn't a long term solution, and storing oxygen along with the carbon seems doubly wasteful. The specific problem we have to solve is the quantity of the combination of carbon and oxygen as CO2 free in the atmosphere. On their own, or recombined with other elements, they are both incredibly useful, so we ideally need to figure out how to efficiently split the CO2 into carbon and oxygen, potentially introducing some other elements into the mix so we someth

  • These seem like great first steps. Offsetting seems like the most fair immediate solution but long-term in the sense of civilization we really need to prepare better for carbon-neutral energy sources. This being said, no matter what we need these start-ups to gain traction. If predictions are right governments will likely need to finance this kind of industry, no matter if we achieve carbon neutrality. The fact is the carbon in the atmosphere is already too much and it needs to be moderated somehow. The onl

  • I can believe this silly scam is back and nobody yells to them:

    Pump it from coal plant exhaust instead of the atmosphere!

    CO2 in air: 0.04% , hard to capture in large quantity;
    CO2 in coal plant exhaust: 14% (vol) : much more effective.

    It goes into the atmosphere anyway if you don't capture it, why are you waiting for it to be diluted from 14 to 0.04 !!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Not so much super cheap hydrothermal laying around near coal plants.

      • Yes, this is always a problem with sequestration. You have to do three things; transport the CO2 (source location based), concentrate the CO2 (energy location based), and store the CO2 (storage location based). I don't think you can ever have all 3 in close proximity (in space and time) or it would just be replaced by the energy source you would do the work with.

        Air capture to storage projects only have to have cheap energy and be close to where they want to store it.
        Capture at the source projects have to d

    • Coal is already fading away. Atmospheric CO2 persists, and is emitted by domestic heating, cars, etc. So either you need to change domestic heating, cars, etc. en masse too and/or atmospheric capture. Even if domestic uses could be carbon neutral tomorrow, would CO2 be removed fast enough by natural processes? In reality domestic change will take more like twenty years, and with capture on gas power stations too.
    • I am a chemical engineer, work in this space, and I question direct air capture of CO2 for this very reason. As long as there are higher concentration sources of CO2 that are not being captured, from a mass transfer driving force basis, it doesn't make sense to do direct air capture from a low concentration source while there are other higher concentration sources available.

      Maybe it will make sense in a future where all the high concentration sources have been captured, or maybe currently as a demonstrat
      • So I went and read about it, and my assumptions seem validated - the energy required to remove CO2 from air (0.045% or 450 ppm concentration) is 500-800 kJ/mol CO2 vs from stack exhaust (12% = 120,000 ppm concentration) 115-140 kJ/mol CO2. Best case it takes 3.5 times more energy, worst case, 7 times more energy, to remove CO2 from air.
        Read more:
        https://www.pnas.org/content/1... [pnas.org]

        Projected energy and dollar costs of air capture processes that have appeared in recently published technical analyses. The projected dollar costs are in the range of $100–$200/tCO2—although the energy requirements vary widely, with most of those for NaOH scrubbing/lime causticization systems clustering around 500–800 kJ primary energy/mol CO2. By contrast, a larger body of work has focused on systems to capture and purify CO2 from coal-fired power plant flue gases, where the CO2 concentration is approximately 12% by volume (“flue-gas capture”), approximately 300-fold higher than air. Estimates of avoided cost for flue-gas capture using current-generation capture and compression technologies are in the range of $50–$100/tCO2 (15). The most developed flue-gas-capture solvents currently used for absorbing CO2 from industrial gas streams are aqueous solutions of amines (16), particularly monoethanolamine. The primary energy required to strip CO2 from the rich amine stream (115–140 kJ/mol CO2; ref. 13) dominates the energy requirements of the process. The driving question of our study is how the energetics and costs will scale with input CO2 concentration ranging from those found in air capture systems to those found in flue-gas-capture systems.

        ...In all of these analyses, it is clear that the cost to separate a given substance from a mixture scales inversely with the initial concentration of that substance...

        Our empirical analysis of energetic and capital costs of existing, mature, gas separation systems indicates that air capture processes will be significantly more expensive than mitigation technologies aimed at decarbonizing the electricity sector. Unless a technological breakthrough that departs from humankind’s accumulated experience with dilute gas separation can be shown to “break” the Sherwood plot and the second-law efficiency plot—and the burden of proof for such a process will lie with the inventor—direct air capture is unlikely to be cost competitive with CO2 capture at power plants and other large point sources.

        Our assessment indicates that air capture will cost on the order of $1,000/t of CO2. Through 2050, it is likely that CO2 emissions can be mitigated for costs not exceeding about $300/t of CO2 (33). However, at some point in time, air capture conceivably could be a useful tool to mitigate emissions from distributed sources, and may even be deployed to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 below current concentrations. Air capture for negative net CO2 emissions would follow the decarbonization of our electricity system and other large anthropogenic point sources and assumes abundant and inexpensive non-carbon energy sources.

        • Normally I would MOD you up but since I commented as well I just wanted to leave a quick thank you. I spent some time today looking for this exact information and couldn't find it.

    • To put it in 'Murican terms: coal plants are located in and run by Red-staters, MAGA men, God-and-guns types.

      They malign vaccines and make it illegal to wear face-masks -- even for their own children -- during a global pandemic because, ya' know, FREEDOM! They sure as hell ain't gonna allow the stifling of their beloved coal plants just so you libtard, commies can force your wokedness on 'em.

      In all seriousness, though, the US is still #2 on the CO2 emissions list. We can't solve climate change without
  • Technological solutions are going to be a key component to solving this. They may not feel as good as pummeling infidels, but they will work better in the long run.
  • When fracking injected a lot of fluid into the ground in the US, this triggered a number of earthquakes. It doesn't seem like a smart idea to repeat this experiment in Switzerland, which is mainly mountainous terrain.

  • Yeah, these industrialised CO2 capture projects are pretty small, primitive, not very imaginative, & very inefficient.

    Here's what an efficient, elegant one looks like: https://internationaltreefound... [internatio...dation.org] Not only a massive carbon sink (the trees push back desertification & re-green vast areas) but also provides habitats for wildlife & food & jobs for the people who live there, among other benefits. There's opportunities to do this at low cost all over the world.

  • You can capture 103 metric tons per acre [bloomberg.com] with a farm of Paulownia tomentosa [wikipedia.org] (aka empress trees, princess trees, or foxglove-trees). Most trees capture 1.1 to 9.5 metric tons per acre.

    If this new technology is aspiring to a cost of $200/ton/year, that needs to be cheaper than the one-time cost to plant and the annual cost to maintain a 423 square feet (40 square meters) of empress trees. Frankly, that doesn't seem likely.

    (Math: 1 ton / 103 tons/acre * 43560.04 sqft/acre = 422.9 sq ft/ton)

    • The One Tree Planted [onetreeplanted.org] charity will plant a tree for each dollar you donate to them (tax-deductible in the US).

      One Tree Planted has a carbon offset program [onetreeplanted.org] that costs $150 to offset 10 tonnes (9.07 tons) of carbon a year. Comparing that to an aspired $200 for just one and we get standard trees can offset a ton of CO2 for $16.54, so why aim for $200 via fancy technology?

      (One Tree Planted noted [twitter.com] that they do not have records of having planted empress trees as of May 4, but maybe that could change. This means t

  • When you actually run the numbers, this will have such a small impact compared to the trees in the Amazon being chopped down due to financing from this firm's owners.

    Carbon capture and carbon offsets almost always are a scam.

    We all know what we need to do right now:

    1 - expire all fossil fuel infrastructure tax depreciation, deductions, set-asides, exclusions, and subsidies.

    2 - quadruple construction of renewable energy systems like solar, wind, geothermal and tidal.

    Everything else will have no positive impa

  • The Reinsurance sector is super interesting.
    Giants like Swiss Re are the ones that'll have to pay up if e.g. in 50 years a civil war breaks out in some african country, and they know it. So they hire all kinds of experts and even have social programs - not out of the good in their heart, but because of ice cold calculations that it's cheaper to try to diminish the risk of climate change, water shortages, civil wars, etc. than to have to pay up later on.

  • Why not just turn it back into something like coal or oil, and put it back where it came from? Duh.

    Or turn it into trees, to actually fight human climate destruction? ("Climate change" is an euphemism that puts lipstick on what it really is, and refuses to accept the blame.)

    And Iceland, of all places... A country where the mountains can crack open and the contents of the ground spill out at any moment. --.--

  • I guess we should read CO2 and not CO.

    BTW, we need one million copies of that plant to absorb worldwide CO2 emissions.

  • I salute the efforts, but I don't understand the business logic and reasons, why some company would be interested to pay for this. A high morals country, probably we are close to that. But a private company? They do not get any return on investment, as I see it. Publicity, can that alone be worth it?

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