Modern societies are very familiar with the topic of recycling. We know that aluminum cans, plastic containers, cardboard, paper, glass and metals can be recycled to reduce the exploitation of natural resources and the impact on the environment. But, what about the CO2 that has already been emitted? Could we recycle it?
This idea is being developed strongly in Europe and other countries of the world. It is a different process from CO2 sequestration and storage, where equipment is installed to capture it directly from the chimneys of combustion or production processes and it is stored underground. In this case, CO2 is captured directly from the air; this implies that gas that was already emitted can be recovered and without installing mechanisms next to fixed sources of emission.
Mining the air to capture CO2 already emitted —recycling it, then— is particularly useful if we consider that between 15% and 20% of greenhouse gas emissions come from mobile sources, particularly motor vehicles, airplanes, railways and ships.
Climateworks, a Swiss company, installed the first commercial plant for direct CO2 capture that uses the adsorption-desorption technique. This means that the gaseous substance comes into contact with an adsorbent solid and adheres to the surface; then it is released through the surface, which allows the CO2 from the air that came into contact with the system to be filtered.
Climateworks’ solution is capable of capturing 900 tons of CO2 per year and its estimated cost is around 600 dollars per ton of captured gas. This is around 0.60 dollars per kilo of CO2. What does this imply? That recycling this gas would increase by almost 300% the cost of electric energy in the cheapest and least polluting plant in the world.
From this, two conclusions are extracted. First: the cost of recycling CO2 directly from the air is still very high; second: the cost of energy still does not reflect the total cost of the negative externalities related to the use of fossil sources.
Despite this, this effort has a lot of room to incorporate technological efficiencies and reduce its costs in the future.
Finally, since close to 75% of global CO2 equivalent emissions come from the energy sector, we can say that it would be one of the first efforts aimed at the development of an energy sector based on circular economy, that is, the first steps to introduce circular energy into practice.
This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: March 30, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/co2-reciclado/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240523093445/https://businessinsider.mx/co2-reciclado/ [Archived]