Gotta catch it all!

As I explained in the last post, the Government is exploring the avenue of CCS, here's an overview of the capture process involved.

The capture process involves the use of a sorbent material (such as sodium hydroxide, NaOH) that selectively traps CO2 (Zeman 2007; Keith et al. 2006; Elliot et al. 2001).

The capture of CO2 can either be ambient (artificial trees) or an active flow (Keith et al. 2006). There is a greater cost in terms of energy attached to active flow, however it is not dependent on wind speed to work effectively.

The whole processes of regenerating the sorbent, compression and transport have an energy cost placed on them, so the net effect of this process on atmospheric CO2   will be less if met by fossil fuels (without CO2 capture and storage).

The capture of CO2 using bio-energy production (BECS) (bio-energy is explained in an earlier post) also generates pure streams of CO2 for storage. Both methods of capture remove atmospheric CO2 and share the same storage mechanisms; however we have discussed BECS with other land carbon options due to the similarity of constraints, such as land availability and possible ecosystem disturbance. BECS is estimated to have a better cost-benefit ratio than chemical air capture (Keith et al. 2006).

The size of the carbon sink for air capture and storage is solely dictated by how much societies are willing to pay, as it seems unlikely to have land or substrate availability limitations. The ultimate limitation surrounds storage capacity.

There are few side effects of air capture, aside from the energy and material costs of the infrastructure required if met by fossil fuels.

I’ll discuss storage options and amount of possible carbon stored in a later post….