FIGLEAF WASTE TIMER SERIES

The $68 million split between three companies is advertising dollars. That’s a real investment in real business for Chevron. How much bigger is $33 billion than $68 million? Almost 500 times bigger. That’s from Canada’s National Post, but it’s repeated in various forms in business outlets globally. Let’s compare this to another recent Chevron-related headline: Chevron to buy Anadarko in $33-billion bet on shale oil and LNG - the biggest energy deal in four years. That’s about 0.03% of their annual revenue going to this initiative. So that’s $220 billion combined annual revenue vs $68 million in ‘investment’. What could they want with an investment in air carbon capture of one of their products’ primary wastes, CO2? One that uses massive amounts of one of their primary products? And makes them look good on casual inspection?Ĭhevron had a revenue of $159 billion in 2018. What are those? Are they all fossil fuel companies? Yes, of course. It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP.

The BBC magic bullet article has a very telling point about Carbon Engineering: And it includes the use case that Carbon Engineering and its fossil fuel investors are probably thinking of. Instead, the company is pumping a lot of fossil fuels into its process instead of leaving them in the ground.Ī workup later in this article posits the criteria for air carbon capture to make sense.

If Carbon Engineering was using waste wood from the various lumber mills near its location in Squamish, BC, and capturing the CO2 produced by burning the wood and sequestering it, that would be something more interesting. Oh, and you get that waste industrial heat you need for another part of the process to reduce overall energy costs. The density of the CO2 is much, much higher in wood smoke than in the atmosphere it’s already been massively concentrated by nature. And the carbon in that came from the atmosphere and was concentrated naturally without a huge wall of fans over an extended period of time. A kilogram of wood turns into 1.9 kilograms of CO2. Want concentrated CO2? Burn some wood and work with the gases which are produced. And there were hundreds of coal plants and then hundreds more gas plants in the USA. That massive operation consumed the output of only 13 coal plants for a year. I did the math a couple of years ago for the largest single consumer of industrial CO2 in the USA, the enhanced oil recovery wells in the south. There isn’t a lot of use for CO2 at anywhere near the scale of the problem we are facing. And its numbers exclude massive follow-on costs, so the $100 per ton is just the start of the cost build up. It won’t run off otherwise unused renewable energy. There is zero net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere if air carbon capture is used for enhanced oil recovery.Īs a reminder of what the last article found, Carbon Engineering’s solution would require 2-kilometer long, 20-meter high walls of noisy fans to capture 4 orders of magnitude less carbon than would be useful.

The final article will address the key person behind this technology and the expert opinions of third parties. This fourth article will look at the market for air carbon capture CO2 and assess why three fossil fuel majors might be interested. The third piece returned to the insurmountable problem of scale and deals with the sheer volume of air that must be moved and the scale of machinery they have designed for the purpose.

The second piece stepped through Carbon Engineering’s actual solution in detail. The first piece summarized the technology and the challenges, and did a bottoms-up assessment to give context for what Carbon Engineering is actually doing.

FIGLEAF WASTE TIMER SERIES

This is part 4 of the 5 article series assessing the technology and the value of the investment. Carbon Engineering recently garnered $68 million in investment in its air-carbon capture technology from three fossil fuel majors.

Figleaf waste timer