MechanicalTree™ will collect carbon from the atmosphere and help accelerate the fight against climate change

Business Announcement

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

In a major innovation in the fight against climate change, Carbon Collect Ltd. has developed a MechanicalTree™ which is primed to become a leading technology in the global drive to reduce carbon emissions. Incorporating research and innovations by Arizona State University engineering professor Klaus Lackner, and following a concentrated two-year design and engineering program, the first commercial scale MechanicalTree™ was unveiled this week by Carbon Collect on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus. Carbon Collect is incorporated in Ireland.

Carbon Collect’s MechanicalTree™ is up to a thousand times more efficient at removing CO₂ from the air than a natural tree. The captured carbon from the Mechanical Tree™ can be sequestered or sold for re-use in a variety of applications including food and beverage, industry, agriculture and energy. Future research in emerging sectors such as synthetic fuels promise to expand the use cases for captured carbon.

Unlike other Direct Air Capture technologies, the MechanicalTree™ can remove CO₂ from the atmosphere without the need to use blowers or fans. Instead, the technology uses natural wind to deliver air through the system. This makes it a passive, lower cost and scalable solution that is commercially viable. When deployed at scale, the technology could help curb the growing amount of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere and help to combat the effects of global warming. 

“We are delighted to launch our first commercial scale MechanicalTree™ at Arizona State University, which is a valuable partner in the development of our project. We believe we have developed a real and scalable solution to combat the effects of C0₂. Our goal now will be to accelerate the global climate effort and to contribute to reversing carbon emissions over the next decade and beyond. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable work on our project by Klaus Lackner and the ASU Center for Negative Carbon Emissions,” said Reyad Fezzani, Vice Chairman of Carbon Collect.

The MechanicalTree™ installed on the ASU campus represents a radical new geometry for direct air capture systems, a tall column and disks. If widely deployed, the tree could help alleviate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In operation, the MechanicalTree™ rises to a height of 33 feet (10 meters) to collect carbon from ambient air. Once loaded with carbon, the stack of discs will retract into the base unit and give up the carbon drawn from the air.

An engineering program was initiated by Carbon Collect in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. In two years, the company has moved from concept to the first commercial scale MechanicalTree™. Carbon Collect and ASU are working with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop engineering blueprints for carbon farms in the United States.

“Carbon dioxide is a waste product we produce every time we drive our cars or turn on the lights in our homes,” Lackner said. “Carbon Collect’s MechanicalTree™ can recycle it, bringing it out of the atmosphere to either bury it or use it as an industrial gas.”

Carbon Collect is presently operating off its first funding round, with a focus on delivering the initial engineering program and launch of the first MechanicalTree™. The company intends to progress to a second funding round prior to the end of 2022, which will be a key preparatory step for scaling and executing its business plan. 

Carbon Collect plans to scale the technology starting with a series of direct air capture carbon farms which will capture approximately 1,000 tons of CO₂ per day, designs for which are being completed.

“Our passive process is the evolution of carbon-capture technology, which has the ability to be both economically and technologically viable at scale in a reasonably short time frame,” said Pól Ó Móráin, CEO of Carbon Collect Ltd.

Carbon Collect’s team comprises a group of leading business and technology executives, as well as experienced engineers and scientists. The company holds exclusive global rights to key innovations of Dr. Klaus Lackner at ASU, and the company licensed ASU’s designs invented by Dr. Lackner. The company then engineered and fabricated the MechanicalTree™ and continues to sponsor ongoing research on carbon removal at ASU. Arizona State University is one of a group of shareholders of Carbon Collect Ltd. The company is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland and has a wholly owned subsidiary, Carbon Collect Inc. in Delaware, United States. The Vice Chairman and Executive Director is US-based Reyad Fezzani, and the CEO, Pól Ó Móráin, is based in Europe.

From EurekAlert!

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via Watts Up With That?

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April 24, 2022 at 08:05PM

via Real Climate Science

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April 24, 2022 at 07:53PM

The big question was asked again. Remember, a few posts ago, our Minister of Energy tried to answer the question “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?”, a question she apparently got asked a lot. Back then she managed to evade answering that question.

The question came back in an interview Dutch ahead) about the energy transitions she gave to a news magazine from Brussels. Initially, it seemed we would not get an answer (the interview was interrupted at the exact moment when the question was asked), but fortunately the reporter was persistent enough to ask the question again later in the interview (translated from Dutch, my emphasis):

Reporter: … what when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?
Minister of Energy: Batteries! Our electric cars actually act as one large battery, especially if they can charge bidirectionally, and the car battery can be used as a home battery when the demand is high. In addition, a very large battery of 100 megawatts will be built in Zeebrugge, where the power from the wind turbines comes ashore. It can supply energy for four hours.

Reporter: Four hours…
Minister of Energy: At peak times, eh.

Reporter: Okay, but sometimes there is no wind for a few days.
Minister of Energy: These situations are rare, but that’s why we still need those gas-fired power stations: only for a short time, at the very beginning. We will gradually replace them with green hydrogen power stations. We already have agreements with Oman and Namibia, two democratic countries, regarding the import of these products. Although it is not the intention to replace one dependency with another.

What I understand is that batteries will do a lot of the balancing. She proposes a vehicle-to-grid solution combined with a “very large” battery acting as a peak shaver (loads when there is surplus production and discharges during peak demand) and gas-fired power plants to fill in where needed. Only in the “very beginning”, she wants to replace natural gas with imported hydrogen from “democratic” countries. I think her definition of a “democratic country” is a bit different from mine (Oman is a absolute monarchy in which all legislative, executive, and judiciary power ultimately rests in the hands of the hereditary sultan) and neither of the two countries score particularly good on the corruption perception index). Also not sure how “green” that hydrogen would still be after being hauled from the other side of the globe to Belgium. That aside.

She did answer the question, but unfortunately, she took the question super literally, making it seems like the issue with intermittency is some rare days without any wind whatsoever (that would indeed be extremely rare).

This reminds me of a post I wrote a couple years ago in which I was looking into the statement that “wind power needs to have enough backup to bridge five consecutive days of no wind”. At that time I tried to model the ideal scenario of just enough solar and wind plus batteries to meet demand at all times. The output of that model run showed something unexpected. After the accumulation of power into the batteries during spring and summer, these built-up reserves were almost completely drained between the second half of October and the end of November (the drop in the orange square):

Something was creating a serious deficit during that time and it was not just a few rare days without any wind. It was an array of factors like subpar electricity generation by solar and wind during those 1.5 months, shorter days in autumn and winter, sub-zero temperatures and therefor higher demand, finally leading to a situation where the reserves could not be replenished before the next deficit came along. It also shows the limitations of those batteries: all the electricity that they provide needs to be in the battery before the deficit starts and for as long that the deficit lasts.

The problem at our latitude is that there is a discrepancy between intermittent production and demand. In summer, supply by intermittent sources is rather regular. There is a lot of electricity produced by solar (long days with lots of sun) and less by wind. Electricity is produced at the time when most electricity is used (during the day) and demand is the lowest of the year. Filling in with for example batteries would be relatively easy because of this regularity and low demand.

It is a completely different story in winter. Then there is much less sun (short days, often cloudy), so it mostly will be on wind to produce electricity. Although wind is stronger during winter time, it is still intermittent and not reliable. At the same time, demand is highest of the year, that is what is causing that big drop of battery load from half October until the end of November. Meaning that there is a need for seasonal storage at our latitude. Solving that with batteries will require a massive amount of them and that comes with a cost.

Looking at it more fine-grained, the highest demand will be at peak demand in the morning peak and even more pronounced in the evening peak of working days in winter. During that time, the sun isn’t shining yet (at the morning peak) or is already set (at the evening peak). When there is no(t much) wind at that time, where does the electricity needed to meet peak demand will come from?

Let’s look at what will change in our grid and its impact on peak demand in winter:

• Belgium will keep 2 GW nuclear capacity for the next ten years, so luckily there will be some base load at peak demand in the coming years
• The other 4 GW nuclear capacity will be replaced with only 2.3 GW natural gas capacity → that is 1.7 GW less capacity than Belgium currently has
• There will be more solar and wind capacity to compensate for this. However, solar will be irrelevant during peak demand in winter and wind can’t be relied upon (it is not necessarily windy during peak demand)
• That “very large battery” of 100 MW can discharge for about 4 hours. That is just peanuts in the Belgian grid and it is also possible that it will not be able to reload before the next day in winter, meaning that there might be no peaks to shave
• The vehicle-to-grid solution doesn’t exist yet, it still seems to be a distant dream (no information on her website or that of her party and when it is mentioned somewhere, it is in passing and rather vague). It is likely that it could be implemented after the last 2 GW of nuclear is decommissioned.
  If implemented, the system will also be more restricted in winter:
  • Batteries don’t work that well under cold conditions
  • Cars will need more battery power themselves in winter
  • Not all cars will be connected to the grid when they are needed most, some will for example in the process of commuting
  • Some cars will need to load their battery when it is not convenient for the grid
  • Some owners probably don’t want to participate in this scheme in the first place (for example because of battery degradation)
  • …
• Import from abroad is possible, but remember, neighboring countries like Germany and the Netherlands will experience the exact same problem because they are focusing on the same intermittent power sources in their transition. Electricity will be in high demand during winter peaks.

Basically, Belgium will end up with less dispatchable power than it currently has, so hopefully the neighbor countries keep enough dispatchable power to share with Belgium.

In the end, she managed to evade the tricky subject of seasonal storage, so it is still not entirely clear how she envisions to keep the lights on in winter with the changes in the grid she proposes and that is not exactly reassuring.

via Trust, yet verify

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April 24, 2022 at 06:00PM

This morning at sunrise the wind across the NEM was average (29% of capacity) with interesting variations between the states. Most of the states were close to balance with some flow of power from Queensland through NSW and Victoria to Tasmania.

My main purpose to track these numbers is to see how often SA depends on coal power from Victoria which is always when the wind is less than average between sunset and sunrise.

The other purpose is to see how much coal and gas contribute between sunset and sunrise to assess the feasibility of getting through nights on the back of hydro, wind and storage.

Across the NEM wind was delivering 14% of power at 29% capacity, with coal 75% and gas 3%. NSW, wind 13% at 40% capacity and coal 85%. Queensland, wind 7% at 60% capacity and coal 86%, Victoria, wind 10% at 11% (wind drought) and coal 82%. South Australia, wind 75% at 45% capacity and gas 25% (no imported power).

Tasmania, wind 1% power at 3% capacity, hydro 83% and oil 16%. That would be diesel generation. The state has had practically no wind power for the best part of a week.

So the message […]

via JoNova

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April 24, 2022 at 04:38PM