![]() ![]() It was July, and on the day I arrived the temperature in the city reached a hundred and twelve degrees. ![]() Most of these owe their origins to the ideas of a physicist named Klaus Lackner, who now works at Arizona State University, in Tempe, so on my way home from British Columbia I took a detour to visit him. Others include Global Thermostat, which is based in New York, and Climeworks, based near Zurich. Depending on how you look at things, the technology represents either the ultimate insurance policy or the ultimate moral hazard.Ĭarbon Engineering is one of a half-dozen companies vying to prove that carbon removal is feasible. Construct enough of them and, in theory at least, CO 2 emissions could continue unabated and still we could avert calamity. Carbon-removal plants could be built anywhere, or everywhere. The process is sometimes referred to as “negative emissions”: instead of adding carbon to the air, it subtracts it. Even if every country fulfills the pledges made in the Paris climate accord-and the United States has said that it doesn’t intend to-carbon dioxide could soon reach levels that, it’s widely agreed, will lead to catastrophe, assuming it hasn’t already done so.Ĭarbon-dioxide removal is, potentially, a trillion-dollar enterprise because it offers a way not just to slow the rise in CO 2 but to reverse it. This year’s record will be surpassed next year, and next year’s the year after that. The amount of CO 2 in the air now is probably greater than it’s been at any time since the mid-Pliocene, three and a half million years ago, when there was a lot less ice at the poles and sea levels were sixty feet higher. This past April, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record four hundred and ten parts per million. “If we’re successful at building a business around carbon removal, these are trillion-dollar markets,” Corless told me. The calcium can then be recovered, and the process run through all over again. The pellets are subsequently heated, and the gas is forced off, to be stored in cannisters. ![]() Garibaldi or the Chief is converted into calcium carbonate. Every day at the plant, roughly a ton of CO 2 that had previously floated over Mt. They’ve devised a process that allows them, in effect, to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. This, Corless explained over the noise, was limestone-pellets of pure calcium carbonate.Ĭorless and his team are engaged in a project that falls somewhere between toxic-waste cleanup and alchemy. ![]() In one corner, what looked like oversized beach bags were filled with what looked like white sand. The thrum of machinery made it hard to hear. Inside, pipes snaked along the walls and overhead. If so, I’d have to take extra precautions, because some of the chemicals used in the building could cause the lenses to liquefy and fuse to my eyes. “Do you wear contacts?” he asked, as we were suiting up to enter the barnlike building. When that’s done, it’s hoping to sell the site for luxury condos.Īdrian Corless, Carbon Engineering’s chief executive, who is fifty-one, is a compact man with dark hair, a square jaw, and a concerned expression. To protect the spit against rising sea levels, the local government is planning to cover it with a layer of fill six feet deep. Garibaldi, which rises to a snow-covered point, and of the Chief, a granite monolith that’s British Columbia’s answer to El Capitan. The offices, inherited from the business that poisoned the site, provide a spectacular view of Mt. Until recently, the land was a toxic-waste site, and the company’s equipment occupies a long, barnlike building that, for many years, was used to process contaminated water. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.Ĭarbon Engineering, a company owned in part by Bill Gates, has its headquarters on a spit of land that juts into Howe Sound, an hour north of Vancouver. ![]()
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