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Take a bird’s-eye view of the decarbonisation landscape, and the divergence between the fortunes of the different technologies is striking.
For those relying on smallish equipment that can be made in factories — think solar panels — costs have plummeted and adoption soared. Those that require big, bespoke engineering projects, such as conventional nuclear plants, have suffered delays and cost increases. Wind turbine troubles also suggest that scale works best when what is being scaled up is manufacturing capacity, rather than the size of the product.
Proponents of direct air capture (or DAC) are hoping to harness the magic of the learning curve. This nascent technology sucks CO₂ out of the air and then stores it underground. The world’s largest plant, inaugurated by Climeworks in Iceland, will capture 36,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year — roughly the amount emitted by 4,500 UK households. At an estimated cost of $1,000 per tonne of CO₂ today, it is also eye-poppingly expensive.
Yet unlike large-scale nuclear, DAC plants are modular — made up of lots of boxes with fans and filters. That raises hopes for an entirely different sort of cost curve.
Take the boxes. Spreading their cost over the CO₂ they will capture over their useful life yields a capex cost of $330/tCO2, or a third of the total. As this kit moves from being custom-made to manufactured at scale, however, its price will fall sharply. Add in improvements in energy efficiency and operating costs, and — if DAC really does scale up to the multi-gigatonnes of capacity required by most net zero pathways — its cost may end up in the region of $100-150/tCO2 by 2050.
Of course, 25-year forecasts are not much more than lines on charts. Yet the DAC story looks broadly plausible, and would make it competitive with some of the costlier carbon-abatement options.
For example, one of the (speculative) options for decarbonising long-distance flying relies on making synthetic jet fuel using green hydrogen and then reacting it with CO₂ captured from the air. That is an expensive way round the problem: rough numbers suggest it might cost $220 per tonne of avoided CO₂, twice as much as DAC.
It is not hard to see why airlines might well prefer homegrown decarbonisation options, which create a supply chain they can work with and even perhaps invest in. Current regulation pushes them in that direction too.
But such hard-to-abate sectors would do well to support the scale up of DAC. Its projected cost decline could reduce the growing burden of the energy transition.
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