Direct Air Capture: Climate Savior or Distraction?

Direct Air Capture, or DAC, represents a significant shift in our approach to managing carbon dioxide emissions. Unlike traditional carbon capture and storage, CCS, that targets point sources of emissions like factories or power plants, DAC can be set up anywhere, it doesn’t need to be in the same place or even at the same time as emissions are occurring.

The flexibility be able to suck carbon out of the air anywhere is nice, but that flexibility comes at a big cost in terms of both money and energy use.

In this video we dive into the world of DAC: how the technology works, who’s doing it and the controversial role of DAC in our mission to combat climate change.

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Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
01:18 DAC vs. CCS
02:41 How does direct air capture work?
03:12 Liquid DAC
03:52 Solid DAC
04:33 Aura Health sponsored segment
06:01 Progress on DAC Projects
08:56 Controversial aspects of DAC
10:09 Oil and Gas using DAC to delay climate action
11:12 DAC costs a lot of money
12:26 DAC uses a lot of energy
14:14 DAC compared to other climate action
15:23 Scaling up
16:09 DAC's place in the energy transition

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Sources:
Journals & Reports

The Engineering with Rosie team is:
Rosemary Barnes: Presenter, producer, writer

[texanplayer]

DAC is the equivalent as trying to suck out water from a bathtub with a straw when the tap is still at full capacity.
If you want your tub to have less water, reducing the capacity of the tap first might be a smarter thing to do. You can always think of ways to suck out the remaining water once the tap is closed.

[scottmuench]

Thank you for explaining direct air capture and the relationship to Fossil fuels. How crazy is it that we use energy to extract fossil fuels, to refine and transport fossil fuels, then burn it to get a small percentage of work out of it - now propose use additional energy in direct air capture to remove those emissions from the air!

[alsfast]

Brilliant video! Clear/logical/coherent structure. Comprehensive, well-balanced and insightful. Keep up this excellent, important work!

[stephenbrickwood]

Solving the right problem is critical for professional engineers.

[cm-pkkq]

Direct Air Capture is almost as ridiculous as capturing carbon from exhaust streams and directing it through a sewer and to a colossal chimney into space!

[kokopelli]

My DAC system is over 100 years old. Using photons from a fusion reactor, it combines CO2 with H2O converting them into soluble hydrocarbons that are pumped underground annually as well as being converted into structures, expanding its own infrastructure supports.
Underground hydrocarbons are further converted throughout transport and assimilation networks to form a living substrate that support the DAC subsystems.
Unfortunately these DAC systems are being regularly destroyed using the end products of former, less efficient DACs

[sebastianeckert]

Excellent video. What a shame that these companies don't simply invest in renewable energy rollouts, instead this wasteful diversion...

[karlInSanDiego]

Appreciate the engineering deep dives you do on Climate, Rosie. Thank you for the work you do. It's great to see people in the middle of the renewable energy bubble who can remain clear headed about the real challenges we face instead of being unrealistically optimistic about how straight forward all this is.

[Triforian]

Thank you very much for this video. I've seen even my colleagues, who are scientists in the field, taken in by DAC green washing. They often aren't careful enough to write in their motivations exactly what you said in the end: it's an important technology, but only after everything that can be has been decarbonized. I'll share the video around.

[BillMSmith]

This is the kind of analysis that keeps you on top as my favorite Australian engineer. 😉 Seriously, this was very well done. Lots of well presented points, and excellent rebuttal to those proclaiming that they have found the answer to let us continue to burn fossil fuels. The OPEC PR machine is really in high gear on this. I hope everyone shares your videos to help counteract all that money. Thank you for all you do.

[sunspot]

The only use I could see for this in a decade or two is when there's so much excess power flowing onto the grid between 11am - 4 pm weekdays in the summertime due to solar power that grid operators are desperate to get rid of it and shunt it off to massive DAC installations, who essentially convert the unwanted energy into sequestered carbon.

[andrewday]

The US Navy actually looked into this with nuclear powered ships. It was to produce liquid fuels for the ships and aircraft out at sea. The proposal was to use a liquid solution based CO2 capture combined with hydrogen from hydrolysis of ocean water. This would supply the carbon and hydrogen needed in fuels produced and be sent through a Gas-to-Liquid reactor. This produces the liquid hydrocarbons our navy requires. The theory was having a ship like this with each carrier battle group would keep them far more independent on deployments.

[nicennice]

They should have played this video at COP28. Informative and well-presented.

[MichaelSkinner-ej]

This is a very good idea, but the reason for growing algae is that after you rupture their cell walls and get to the oils, you could use the biomass for feed and other products (cosmetics, icecream, emulsifiers, etc)

Using your method is excellent. And that would be a more direct method for getting fuel, but growing plants like bamboo, algae, and trees you get a lot of other extra bonuses and industries.

On top of that, when you’re growing those plants, you are Employing More People. I can see this as a way to get more out in addition to growing bamboo, algae, and other industrially important organisms, but you also have to think about the social impact of what you are doing, and sometimes that is More Valuable in the long run (Larger Impact)

[richardbrice]

I heard somebody say that it's like telling your neighbours that they can urinate in your swimming pool because you've installed a filter.

[WhichDoctor]

i see carbon capture in any form as like a dehumidifier. If your house is flooding they would be expensive and pointless, you're better off spending that money on mending the broken pipe spewing out water. But after you've fixed the water leak, they are good at drying your house out and stopping any further damage.

[NeilBlanchard]

Restoring native grasslands (and the large herds of herbivores that used to live there) would have a HUGE effect in capturing carbon, and it could be MUCH quicker than any other method. Take a look at Tony Lovell's TEDx talk on this.

[paulcoffey]

This 'technology' should be renamed Direct Gullibles Capture

[andrewclark]

One way to capture carbon in a solid form is the pyrolysis of wood. Obviously the trees capture the carbon dioxide and the pyrolysis process reduces the wood to charcoal which then can be used of something useful or stored in an old mine. About 40% of the carbon from the original wood remains as charcoal.

[thomasstuder]

An oversight in the logic: Power plants as point sources will run an ever lower number of hours a year. This means the point source CCS amortization will become ever more challenging, reducing that cost gap to a DAC facility that doesn't face this issue.