A few months ago, as world leaders were preparing for the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the burning question they had to address was whether major economies – that is to say, countries— can, by 2050, reduce CO2 emissions to the extent where we will have created a carbon-neutral world in which humanity can live sustainably without adding planet-warming gases to the atmosphere.
That’s the agenda and the end goal, but how will it be reached? The means by which these world leaders will make their dreams into reality are less talked about than their ambitious aims, but at the summit it was inevitable that specific tools and techniques for reducing CO2 emissions at some point had to be discussed. In addition to discussing the necessity to drastically reduce emissions— which took up much of the time at the summit— there was discussion about proactively removing CO2 directly from the air. The process of removing CO2 directly from the air— which is known by several names including: “Carbon Dioxide Removal” (CDR) and “Direct Air Capture” (DAC), both types of “negative emissions”— is looked upon by many climate scientists with skepticism, but in spite of their doubts, they agree that it will be very difficult if not impossible to meet the Paris Agreement goal of capping global warming below two degrees Celsius if it is not implemented.
Glen Peters, research director at the Centre for International Climate Research stated that, “We need drastic, radical emissions reductions, and on top of that we need Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).
Strategies for Reducing CO2 Levels
To simplify, there are basically two ways to extract CO2 from the air. One is to embark on the epic task of healing degraded, clear-cut forests and restoring mangroves by implementing industrial-scale tree planting (i.e. afforestation) efforts across the globe; as well as boosting carbon uptake in rocks or the ocean. While these much debated “nature-based solutions’ are appealing and worthwhile they take a long time, too much time according to climate scientists who are aiming to significantly reduce emissions by the 2050 date set at the Paris Agreement.
The second way to extract CO2 from the air is the aforementioned method of direct air capture (DAC). DAC is a chemical process that strips CO2 from the air then recycles it mainly for industrial use such as concrete product, or permanently sequesters the CO2 in porous rock formations, unused coal beds, or saline aquifers. While DAC has already gotten significant corporate backing from the likes of Elon Musk and his $100M X-Prize for CO2 removal technology, and Bill Gates, who through his Breakthrough Energy venture has partnered with American Airlines, ArcelorMittal, Bank of America, Microsoft, The BlackRock Foundation and General Motors, all with the goal of developing direct air capture technology which will help fuel (no pun intended) sustainable aviation and automobile fuel technologies, as well as other new energy technologies.
Johanna Forster and Naomi Vaughan of the University of East Anglia commented a few weeks ago that, “A global carbon removal industry is coming.” It is hard to disagree with them considering that two of the richest men in the world have already invested in this burgeoning market space.
Remora Carbon and Mobile Carbon Capture
While planting trees and extracting CO2 out of the air are feasible ways of dealing with excess emissions, they require a lot of labor and energy and are farther off from being actionable than most climate scientists would like. As a response to these challenges in the emissions reduction space, one of our customers, Remora Carbon, has created their own immediate, elegant, and actionable way of dealing with excess emissions and therefore global warming.
Put simply, Remora has built a device that captures the carbon emissions from a semi-truck. Instead of expending tons of energy to pull CO2 emissions out of the air, Remora’s technology simply sucks it up from the tailpipes of semi-trucks, temporarily sequesters it in their proprietary holding tanks, and then permanently sequesters it by using the captured CO2 in the manufacture of concrete and other industrial products. In short, they are working to turn America’s two million semi-trucks into a fleet of carbon removal devices.
In her dissertation, Christina Reynolds, Founder and Co-CEO of Remora Carbon sets out what would become the mission of Remora Carbon when she writes,
Predictions for future carbon dioxide emission reductions largely rely on power generation shifts to renewable energy sources and passenger vehicle electrification, while emissions from on-road freight shipping using heavy-duty vehicles (HDV) are expected to increase significantly over the coming decades. Mobile carbon capture (MCC) using porous solid adsorbents is a yet unexplored decarbonization strategy, the evaluation of which requires a study of the ideal materials and conditions for capture as well as the environmental, economic, and social implications of a global mobile carbon capture program for heavy-duty vehicles (HDVCC).
Well, several years after writing these words in her dissertation, Christina and the team at Remora have explored this decarbonization strategy thoroughly and are now well on their way to making her dissertation into a carbon sucking and sequestering reality.
We are proud that our exhaust gas analyzers are helping customers like Remora Carbon solve large, real world problems such as climate change. Contact us to find out how we can help you solve your problems through better exhaust gas and modified atmosphere packaging gas analysis.