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Squamish-based Carbon Engineering has partnered with Storegga in the UK to expand Europe’s first large-scale air carbon facility (DAC) in Scotland.
On June 24, the company announced that it had begun working with Storegga to design and design a DAC facility that will permanently remove between 500,000 and 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from the environment annually. number of proposed sites under consideration, the facility is expected to be operational from 2026.
As the UK seeks to invest heavily in decarbonisation technology, the installation is likely a sign of what is to come in Europe, said Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering.
“The UK was the first primary commercial [economy] to create a net emissions target of 0, and its net 0 plan includes around 20 million tonnes of direct air capture, so yes, I think it will be the first of several factories. “he told the chief. ” It will be the same story in other countries, because cutting or preventing all their carbon emissions is really complicated to do. We believe there will be a safe amount of carbon removal that is needed, and of course, that’s what our solution does. “
In its simplest form, Carbon Engineering has developed a generation that captures CO2 directly from the air, a mechanically designed formula that, through a series of chemical reactions, extracts CO2 while returning the rest of the air to the environment, before returning it. in compressed form that can be stored underground or reused.
Scotland is a place for installation, Oldham said, because of its proximity to the North Sea.
“The North Sea has abundant reserves of oil and fuel that the UK has been using for 50 years, so it’s a wonderful position to put CO2 back underground; I don’t mean the sea itself, I mean the land under the sea. “”The UK has recently set up this site and is making a cash investment to expand the North Sea hijacking site. Scotland is literally right next door, and all the pipelines are coming ashore in Scotland, so it makes a lot of sense to put one of our amenities in position. »
In partnership with several other companies, Carbon Engineering is designing another facility that, once completed, will be the world’s largest DAC facility, in the Permian Basin in the southwestern United States.
But as highly industrialized countries begin to interact in direct carbon capture in the air as the effects of climate multiply, the same cannot be said of the world ahead, which may not have the resources or geography to build such facilities. .
“One of the things that direct air capture can play a role in here is because we remove CO2 directly from the environment, we eliminate emissions from anyone. So if someone in country XYZ emits, we can eliminate that emission by capturing it. in the environment and put it underground in some other country,” Oldham said. Then Canada can build a facility and we can also capture the CO2 emissions of country XYZ, and that solves the challenge of climate justice because you don’t force that country to decarbonize when you probably wouldn’t have the means to do so. “Direct air capture also has a significant economic outlook for countries like Canada that can use their generation to gain advantage of the world to come.
“If Canada were to look to build a lot of those facilities, it could simply provide a service to the rest of the world to decarbonize it,” Oldham said.
“I think what you’re going to see here in the next few years, the next decade, is the beginning of a position in the carbon market because countries wouldn’t possibly have the means to decarbonize. The other thing is that not all countries have a position to put CO2. So if you’re in Japan, you’re a densely populated country in a seismic zone. There is no position to bury CO2 safely, so you depend on a country like Canada to do it for you. “
Oldham noted that Carbon Engineering is just a few months away from opening its new innovation center, a 1,250-square-foot facility in Squamish’s Newport Beach Oceanfront progression that will serve as a hub for the company’s progression.
“It’s a smaller edition of those big factories that we’re building in the U. S. U. S. And Scotland, but it allows us to do all the testing, all the functionality measurements, the generation and optimise it,” Oldham told the chef. the generation here in Squamish, then we license it and factories are built all over the world.
“I think it’s wonderful that we can stand out for more than just our landscapes. “
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