Squamish-based Carbon Engineering has teamed up with U.K.’s Storegga to develop Europe’s first large-scale direct-air capture (DAC) carbon facility in Scotland.
On June 24, the company announced it had begun working with Storegga to engineer and design a DAC facility that will permanently remove between 500,000 and 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Targeted for northeast Scotland, with a number of proposed sites being considered, the facility is expected to be operational as early as 2026.
As the U.K. looks to invest heavily in decarbonisation technology, the facility is likely a sign of things to come across Europe, explained Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham.
“The U.K. was the first major industrial [economy] to create a net-zero emissions target, and their net-zero plan includes about 20 million tonnes of direct-air capture, so yeah, I think this will be the first of several plants,” he told The Chief. “It’s going to be the same story in other countries, because removing or stopping all of your carbon emissions is really hard to do. We think there’s always going to be some amount of carbon removal that’s necessary, and of course, that’s what our solution does.”
At its simplest, Carbon Engineering has developed technology that captures CO2 directly from the air using an engineered, mechanical system that, through a series of chemical reactions, extracts the CO2 from it while returning the rest of the air to the environment, before delivering it in a compressed form that can be stored underground or reused.
Scotland serves as an ideal location for the facility, Oldham said, because of its proximity to the North Sea.
“The North Sea has got considerable oil and gas reserves that the U.K. has been using for 50 years, so it is actually a great place to put CO2 back underground—I don’t mean the sea itself, I mean the land under the sea,” he noted. “The U.K. is actually developing that site and putting the money in themselves to develop the North Sea’s sequestration site. Scotland is literally right next to it, and the pipelines all come onshore in Scotland, so that’s a very logical place to put one of our facilities.”
In partnership with several other companies, Carbon Engineering is engineering another facility, which, when completed, will be the largest DAC facility in the world, located in the Permian Basin in the southwestern U.S.
But while heavily industrialized nations are starting to get onboard with direct-air carbon capture as the impacts of climate change grow more prevalent, the same can’t always be said for the developing world, which may not have the adequate resources or geography to build such facilities.
“One of the things where direct-air capture, I think, can really play here is, because we remove CO2 directly out of the atmosphere, we’re effectively removing anybody’s emissions. So if somebody in country XYZ is emitting, we can eliminate that emission by capturing it out of the atmosphere and putting it underground in another country,” Oldham said. “So Canada can build a facility and we could capture the CO2 emissions of country XYZ, and that kind of solves the climate justice problem because you’re not forcing that country to decarbonize when it maybe cannot afford to.” There is also significant economic potential in direct-air capture for nations like Canada that can use their technology to the benefit of the developing world.
“If Canada decided it wants to build many of these facilities, it could offer a service to the rest of the world to decarbonize,” said Oldham.
“I think what you’re going to see here over the next few years, maybe the next decade, is the start of a market in carbon removal because of the fact that countries may not able to afford to decarbonize. The other thing is, not every country has somewhere to put CO2. So if you’re Japan, you’re a heavily populated country in an earthquake zone. There’s no room to bury CO2 safely, so maybe you rely on a country like Canada doing it for you.”
Oldham noted that Carbon Engineering is months away from opening its new Innovation Centre, a 1,250-square-metre facility in Squamish’s Newport Beach Oceanfront Development that will serve as the company’s hub for research and development.
“It’s a smaller version of those large plants we’re building in the U.S. and Scotland, but it allows us to do all the testing, all the performance measurements, improve the technology and optimize it,” Oldham told The Chief. “We’re developing all the technology here in Squamish, and then we license it and plants get built around the world.
“I think it’s great that we can be famous for something other than our fantastic scenery.”
