A prototype Australian machine the size of a tent that can inhale CO2 from the air has secured a $ 700,000 contract to capture and store carbon.
The deal, part of a project backed by companies including Google and Facebook owners, is believed to be the first time an Australian company has reached an agreement to eliminate CO2 using direct air capture technology (DAC). ).
AspiraDAC will deploy about 180 of the machines, developed and manufactured in Australia, to capture and store 500 tonnes of CO2 by 2027 at US $ 1,000 (AU $ 1,469) per tonne.
In April, several large corporations, including the owners of Facebook and Google, announced a new company called Frontier that would allocate 925 million US dollars (1,359 Australian dollars) to projects that extract CO2 from the air and then store it. .
In the company’s first major purchase, technology company Stripe, one of Frontier’s partners, announced this week that it would spend US $ 2.4 million (US $ 3.5 million) on six direct capture projects. of air all over the world, including AspiraDAC.
AspiraDAC CEO Julian Turecek said up to 180 modules would be needed to fulfill the contract and these would cover an area of less than half a hectare.
He said the company had not confirmed the location or geological storage of the site, but confirmed that depleted oil and gas deposits were being considered in Moomba, South Australia.
“We really think this is a launch time for direct air capture in Australia,” Turecek said. “This is the beginning of what could be a major industry.”
He said the carbon removal deal with Frontier would likely be the first of several that AspiraDAC would deliver.
Southern Green Gas has developed the machines in collaboration with the University of Sydney and will build and deliver them to AspiraDAC.
Southern Green Gas business development manager and co-founder Brett Cooper believed the contract to offer emission reductions through DAC was the first in Australia. Each module can capture two tons of CO2 per year.
Cooper said: “This is an Australian solution par excellence because not everyone has the earth’s surface which also has the intensity of solar energy we have.”
The amount of CO2 reduction with the new contract is small, but Cooper said the deal is an important step for the industry which he believes has great growth potential in Australia.
At the core of the Australian machine is a sponge-like material developed at the University of Sydney that sticks to CO2 molecules as air passes through it.
Fans attract air to the containers containing the sponges, and then the heat is used to extract the pure CO2 that can be pumped and stored underground. All of the energy comes from the solar panels that cover the units like an A-frame tent.
Sydney’s team of scientists and research students won a $ 250,000 award last year to support the development of the $ 100 million X award material from technology billionaire Elon Musk trying to establish carbon removal projects on a large scale.
Professor Deanna D’Alessandro, who oversees the Sydney team, said: “Carbon removal will be absolutely essential. This is directly addressing the problem and this is really powerful.”
“Students are seeing that the materials they are making have a real impact on carbon removal.”
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Turecek said: “Nature has designed the perfect air capture machine and this is a tree. But the DAC does it mechanically and once we can scale it, we can control this CO2 removal and do- the permanent “.
An International Energy Agency plan for the world’s economies to reach zero net emissions by 2050 says direct air capture technologies will have to produce more than 85 million tonnes of CO2 capture by 2030. Currently , the agency says the technology can produce only 10,000 tons worldwide. .
In May, the U.S. government announced a $ 3.5 billion program to build four major centers for direct air capture projects.
The world’s largest direct air capture plant is in Iceland and the company behind the plant, Climeworks, announced this week that it would expand its capacity to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
Dr. Paul Feron, a scientist working on carbon capture technologies at CSIRO, said the agency was working on three different DAC technologies that he hoped would be commercialized in a decade.
“We’ve gotten to the point in terms of CO2 levels in the atmosphere that we need to have an‘ all of the above ’approach,” he said.
“We need to be good at using as little energy as possible and we need to replace our fossil fuels with renewable energy as soon as we can. But that probably won’t be enough and we need to manage the carbon that is already generating climate change. That’s why there are a huge interest in the DAC.
“We have to plant as many trees as we can, but it is a reflection on the seriousness of the problem that we now have to look at. [DAC] too.”