Scotland Building Massive Plant Capable of Removing One Million Tons of CO2 from Air Yearly
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The new project in Scotland will be carried out between the UK firm Storeega and the Canadian company Carbon Engineering. It's at a very early stage of development, with a long way to go - but if all goes ahead, it will be one of the biggest CCS plants in the world. A site for the plant won't be selected until next year.
Even if all the other measures that we're taking to avoid emissions, electric cars, renewable energy, those types of things, even if those succeed, you still need carbon removal," Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, told the BBC. A typical facility is about a million tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That's the equivalent of 40 million trees."
The CCS system that will be deployed involves a fan to suck in air, which is exposed to a liquid mixture that binds the carbon dioxide. The liquid is then turned into calcium carbonate pellets. When these are treated at a temperature of about 900C, the pellets decompose into a CO2 stream and calcium oxide. That stream of pure CO2 is cleaned up to remove water impurities. At that point, it can be pumped underground and buried permanently or sold for commercial use.
Scotland has significant advantages for this type of technology, as it has an abundant flow of renewable energy and a skilled workforce from the oil industry. But the technology has its fair number of critics. Researchers and campaigners have expressed concern that if CCS capture becomes economically viable, then governments might stop cutting emissions as they will rely on capturing CO2 - instead of the far more efficient strategy of not producing it in the first place.
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