Various posts on the list mention that House et al or APS have demonstrated that DAC costs 1000 or 600 $/tCO2. One might respond that other academic papers by folks like Lackner or Eisenberger have demonstrated that's its cheap.
Neither assertion seems true, and both go beyond the claims in the literature itself. (E.g., the APS report was careful not to say that their cost was for all air capture, but rather that it was for a particular design they devised for the report and that other designs might be cheaper.) It would be great if you could figure out the cost of some not-yet-commercial technology by just doing an academic study or holding a panel. In fact, academic papers are often a poor source of information on the costs of technologies that are already commercial, let alone on technologies that are in early phase development. If you want good cost estimates of a particular design one needs to go to industrial engineer from engineering firms with experience in the relevant area. At Carbon Engineering we are trying to do just that working iteratively between design and costing, were we work with engineering firms to do our costing using standard methods. nuts-and-bolts engineering. We then try to reduce specific technical risks by building an operating prototypes. Regarding the APS study and the recent Calgary meeting. For my part I think the interaction with the APS authors has driven home to me the fact that differences in our cost estimates arise from differences in design rather than from differences in cost mythology (e.g., capital charge factor, contingency, and scaling factor between bare equipment costs and installed costs.) I think the APS cost estimate for their system is sensible. But, no group developing air capture is proposing to build a system using the APS design. For our design the big questions are: (a) is our costing reasonable and (b) can we manage the risks? We have comments on the APS report at http://www.carbonengineering.com/?page_id=17, and we have a paper accepted at Philosophical Transactions A of the Royall Society that gives many more details of the engineering and costing of our contactor. It suggest that the cost of our contactor design (without a backend) would be about 60 $/tCO2. I will post a final version of that paper by Monday. Finally, on a more personal note. Greg Rau has asked why folks like me work on DAC since other CDR technologies (e.g. Greg's clever Ca dissolution scheme) are, in his view, obviously better. In a post from October 09, 2011 Greg ended one of these posts with a dig saying, "perhaps we can borrow from (the amazing) marketing skills of the physicists [promoting DAC]" to push the technologies Greg views as more sensible. In answering it's worth noting that I have worked technology assessments of many CDR technologies including some of the early work on biomass with capture and on project to assess geochemical carbon management and specifically the addition alkalinity to the ocean. As part of these efforts I have seen the details of some real business estimates of the cost of CO2 mitigation using biomass with CCS and biomass burial. I have spent time working with the engineers at Babcock and Wilcox who did the costing study of Greg and Kens very clever Ca dissolution method. More recently I have also been supervising the student whose work hard on a scheme to make MgO from magnesium silicates. I am a technological agnostic. If I thought that one of these clearly dominated DAC on cost, scalability and environmental impact I would not waste any time on DAC. This is not a claim that air capture will necessarily be useful or that it necessarily trumps other methods. I think more hard-nosed research on all of these methods, their costs and environmental impacts is essential. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
