Carbon Recapture Begins in Iceland

And doesn't really do much of anything

The news lately about climate change has all been grim. The IPCC report does not paint a rosy picture about our future, and it urgently appeals for action to be taken immediately in order to stave off the worst of the impacts to come. One baby step in the right direction has just occurred.

The new Orca project in Iceland has come online. It operates on the abundant geo-thermal energy there to capture carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere. So instead of a big machine burning fossil fuels that were in the ground and expelling global warming exhaust into the air, this machine runs on the Earth’s natural warmth and sucks the bad stuff out of the air and puts it back into the ground.

The machine has big fans that draw air through filters. Those filters collect CO2, and once they’re full, they are heated up to release the gas. It is collected, mixed with water, and then injected 1000 meters below the surface of the Earth into basalt rock, where it is harmlessly mineralized.

The Orca plant (which comes from the Icelandic word for energy, not from killer whales) will be able to pull out 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. That sounds great, but how much difference will it make?

Currently we are pumping 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every 4 seconds! So if my math is right, we need 7,883,999 of these Orca plants just to offset our current emissions. And one costs a little over $10 million to build, so multiplying that out comes to a price tag of $79 trillion dollars (unless the company will give us a bulk discount).

And more bad news: the IPCC report says that even if we were to cease all greenhouse gas production today (which isn’t quite the same as starting up all these Orca plants, because there is also methane, which is worse than carbon dioxide in some respects), we’re still in for 30 years of the climate getting worse. That’s because of the build up effects of what we’ve already done. You’d think $79 trillion could keep us from reaping what we’ve already sown. But not using this technology.

Still, we should celebrate what we can, right? When the Wright brothers flew the first plane at Kitty Hawk, they probably didn’t have trans-Atlantic flights in mind yet. We have to crawl before we can walk… or fly.

And the response to the plant has been has been positive. The company that built Orca has plans now to build a similar plant with ten times the capacity. OK, that gets us up to removing the amount carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year that we put into the atmosphere every 40 seconds. I’m afraid this is not solution.

Perhaps carbon recapture can play a role in helping to mitigate the climate change that is coming (and is already here). But in order to make a meaningful change, we’re going to have to address the emissions side of the equation.