Ross and Christophe are joined by Dr. Klaus Lackner, the director of ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions (CNCE) and professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering. The CNCE is known for advancing carbon management technologies to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air in an outdoor operating environment. Today Klaus explains how he conceived of the windmill-sized structures that could scrub CO2 from the air and how these towers prove to be a more efficient solution than planting trees.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-hosts here with Christophe Jospe. It’s our second day here back at ASU, which either is our quasi-homeland or our alma mater or, well, Christophe, you were here, but you weren’t actually a student. We thought you were, but it turns out you were just an interloper. You were just here for a while. I was a sun devil. That’s right. You’re a sun devil. Yeah. So we’ll consider you one. That’s fine. It’s great to be here, though.
As Klaus was just saying, it seems like Seattle and Phoenix traded their weather. So it’s pretty gloomy out here right now. Right.
Christophe Jospe: I made it very clear to Klaus and on the previous podcast that I only came to Phoenix for the weather. So I’m a little bit...
Ross Kenyon: Serves you right. Serves you right, Kristoff. You messed up. That’s great. Well, why don’t you introduce Klaus? You guys have known each other for a very long time, but we’re new to each other. Why don’t you kick it off there?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, sure. Well, it’s an honor to be sitting across from a dear mentor and I’d like to say indoctrinator of mine. It was a pleasure to work with Klaus to help set up the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, of which he is a director, which is part of Arizona State University. Klaus is, yep, he’s the smartest person I know. So it is wonderful to be sitting across from the table with a certified genius. He’s not blushing too much. But Klaus, we’re going to keep this really simple. But what do you do here at the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions?
And how did you get to where you were today?
Klaus Lackner: I’m trying to capture CO2 from the air. I got there in a long roundabout way. In the late 80s, I began to realize how dependent the world is on energy. I also realized that fossil Special fuels are not running out, which back then was still contrarian. People thought this oil will make it maybe to 2000. Then I realized maybe oil won’t run out, which turns out is wrong too. But coal certainly will not. And so that CO2 problem needs to be solved because the alternative is that we will have good excuses forever.
Why a little bit more doesn’t really hurt anything. What I realized early on is this is a finite carbon budget. We can argue whether we need to stop at 350 or 450 or 550 ppm, but as long as we pump it out, we’ll get higher and higher and higher. To me, there was never the question whether there’s an alternative world where we keep business as usual and keep burning the stuff and don’t do anything about it. The only question is, are we already too late or do we have another decade or two to go?
The comparison has always been to a world which eventually balanced its carbon budget and figured out how to get to zero net emissions.
Christophe Jospe: So you had a eureka moment. As you said, you worked to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and you looked at windmills, which was a source of inspiration to say, hey, well, if windmills can process the air and generate kinetic energy, well, then maybe it’s not so hard to process the air to remove the carbon from it. Can you tell us about that?
Klaus Lackner: Yeah. Well, actually, this started with people wanting to build fancy devices to fan the wind by spraying water into the air. Somebody argued this is physically impossible. And I looked at him and said, no, it’s possible.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know whether it’s useful. What do you mean, fan the air?
Klaus Lackner: They said, build a tall tower and spray water at the top of the tower. The air will evaporate that water. It gets cold and the air falls down through the tower. And then you put a lot of wind turbines around the edge of it. Wow. Somebody argued this can’t work. And so I was contrarian. I said, no, it does work. It’s just, I don’t think it’s all that practical. But the thing which struck me is that there were back then people engineering these and said, you can do that. And I said, well, let me do a back of the envelope design.
And it turns out if you are 300 meters tall and have a 100 by 100 meter opening, you can make maybe three megawatts of power. And You pass 15 cubic kilometers of air, which turns out has about the CO2 from a big coal plant. So I said, if it’s worth doing this for the wind energy, it should be much better For the CO2. And then I backed off from this and said, let’s forget about this funny tower. And simply ask the question, how much CO2 is in the air and how much kinetic energy is in the air?
Because we know we can harness the kinetic energy. And if I’m going to tell you kinetic energy is worth five cents a kilowatt hour, and maybe CO2 is worth $50 a ton, you’ll find that you have 100 times more CO2 in the air by that measure than you have Wind energy. I actually worked it out that the energy equivalent of the CO2, which is if I burn a thimble full of gasoline, I make a little bit of CO2. And if I compare that to the amount in the air, it turns out you get about 10,000 joules worth of heat for putting amount of CO2 out, which you find in a cubic meter of air.
That’s 10,000 joules. If on the other hand, you look at windmills, you put them where the air moves at six meters a second. M over 2V squared comes out to be 20 joules. That’s 500 times smaller. That was the aha moment where I said, well, if that’s true, then I should be able to Build something on the size of a windmill, but I’m 100 times more efficient in reducing the carbon footprint. The carbon footprint of the windmill reduces the carbon footprint because it avoids making a coal plant or a natural gas-fired power plant run, whereas the CO2 capture directly removes the CO2.
So I felt one can be much smaller, much more compact. And if you say the windmill makes 5 cents a kilowatt hour, And you work it all out that CO2 scrubber should scrub out the CO2 if it had the same cost at about 50 cents a ton of CO2. So that made me wake up and say, well, if that’s the case, then it’s worthwhile looking into this more deeply. And figure out whether one cannot come up with a technology which can do it. And then one thing led to the other.
And this is where we are today.
Ross Kenyon: And you did it. You came up with the technology.
Klaus Lackner: We came up with a sequence. The first thing we said, look, it’s very simple. In high school, they showed us that if you blow air through a calcium hydroxide solution, it’ll precipitate out calcium carbonate. And the air coming out is CO2 free. So we knew from the start. You can bind that CO2. Every submarine is doing it. And it turns out every air liquefaction plant, because if you make liquid air and you are not careful, you have sand in there because by the time you’re at those low temperatures, CO2 is a solid and ice is too.
So whoever does that has to first carefully remove all of the CO2 and all of the water vapor in the air. And so technologies to do this have always existed. So the question is not, can you do it, but can you do it affordably? But scrubbing CO2, not a new thing, right?
Christophe Jospe: So just for our listeners, we’re talking about air capture technology. We’re getting a little bit technical. At the end of the day, when you process the air, we’re looking for ways to contact the air, get the carbon dioxide off the contactor, and then regenerate the contactor using the least amount of energy and doing it in the most efficient way possible in order to balance the carbon budget. And Ross, I’m going to put you on the spot. We just walked into the lab over here in Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 4.
And you saw the moisture swing. Put it in English. How does that work?
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah, you’re definitely putting me on the spot. But as far as I understand it, I believe it’s a type of plastic and it’s coated in a resin that when it’s dry, it pulls CO2 out of the air. And then when it’s humid or wet, it releases the CO2. So it doesn’t deal with the storage aspect. So we talked to folks about mineralization and how to deal with CO2 once you’ve captured it. But this is how to like capture from the air CO2 in general. But it’s in a big plastic box and there’s plants and there’s fun gloves and everyone got to put their hands in there and spray water on it except for me.
So I’m going back in there later and I’m going to do it. I’ll let you do it. But yeah, so then you have like the plants that are transpiring. The water is entering the air and creating the moisture necessary to release the CO2. But there’s also a little water bottle you can spray in there. This resin is apparently extremely absorptive when it’s dry for pulling CO2 out of air. Yes. Is that fair? Did I do a good job? That’s a good job.
Christophe Jospe: You get a passing grade. Okay, good. So we figured out an efficient way to extract CO2, and now we need to put it somewhere. And we had the pleasure of having Dave Goldberg on the show earlier, and he was talking about putting it in different carbonate formations. First of all, why would we want to do that?
Klaus Lackner: Why don’t we just plant trees? If you plant trees, you can solve the same problem. I think what you end up with is a scale problem. You can ask, how many trees do you need? How much land do you need? And fortunately, that’s actually quite easy because you know how much sunshine comes on the earth and you know how much sunshine can be converted into biomass. So you can now say, how much sun does it take to collect a ton of CO2? So you now have an area. And if you calculate backwards, if you want to keep up with current emissions or get into that ballpark, you’re talking about more land than we currently have under agriculture.
And I think given a world population which is growing, that’s a very serious challenge. The nice part about the biological approaches are they are essentially very cheap and very affordable, so you can get started. Where I see problems is in the ultimate scalability. You never reach the scales you want because you are starting to seriously compete with food production and you say, well, maybe I go where they don’t grow food, but keep in mind you have the same competition going. You need the land, do the photosynthesis. And that’s exactly what the agriculture does too.
And if they like nice land with good irrigation and fertilizer, you like the very same stuff. So the bottom line is I think biological means are great. I think they are a great way to get started. We have no excuse not to do it. And I’m just skeptical that you reach the scale you have to reach. So then we come along and if you build a tree out of our thing, you can think of us as building a structure the size of a tree. We are about a thousand times faster than a tree collecting CO2.
So a big tree-sized object collects a ton a day. The tree over his lifetime collects a few tens of tonnes. That’s that factor thousand of advantage we have. And a forest of artificial trees is a lot smaller than a real forest having the same CO2 reduction effect.
Ross Kenyon: And you could also put it in places that it’s not in competition with arable land for agriculture. You could put it in, I don’t know, did you put it in like the Sahara or the Gobi Desert or someplace nobody is doing much of anything?
Klaus Lackner: For our particular method, because it’s a humidity swing, we love it when it’s dry. And therefore, a desert is a nearly perfect place. It also turns out, if you don’t talk about carbon sequestration, it also puts you right next door. To photovoltaic panels. If you actually look at where we would like to be and where photovoltaic panels like to be, we are occupying just about the same area. So you could think of a big, big photovoltaic installation using The CO2, which is collected in one small corner of it and converted to fuel.
So if nobody wants the electricity, because right now, high noon, the sun is shining, you have more than you know what to do with. You can take that excess power and convert it into liquid fuel, which you can sell into the transportation market. Or maybe you come back in winter when your sunshine is not quite as much and you burn some of it. To provide electricity when you need it. Batteries are great storing electricity from an hour to a few hours later, maybe a day. If you have to deal with the mismatch between summer and winter, that becomes a lot harder.
Ross Kenyon: The fuel you’re talking about, is this the low carbon fuel? Is that what I’ve been reading about?
Klaus Lackner: Well, it’s low carbon in the sense that the carbon didn’t come from fossil sources. Just like biofuel takes CO2 from the air and sunshine to convert it, if we run a photovoltaic panel and use our CO2 to make CO and hydrogen and then So, it’s a low carbon fuel in the sense that there’s no fossil carbon in it, but it is just as carbon-rich as gasoline or diesel. There’s nothing different. It’s a drop-in fuel. It has no carbon consumption. It’s just neutral. It’s carbon neutral. That solar panel is far more efficient in converting solar energy into chemistry or electricity first than biomass.
So that’s what’s appealing about it.
Ross Kenyon: Looking for ways to monetize carbon in this way and turning it into fuels or selling this concentrated CO2 to greenhouses, this is a way to sort of encourage this industry to take off. Is that your thinking on this?
Klaus Lackner: Yes, but it is still hard. Because as long as a barrel of oil is between $30 and $50, right now it’s a little higher, it’s very, very hard to justify the electricity price to make this work. To put it another way, a gallon of gasoline has 40 kilowatt hours of energy in it. So if you’re 100% efficient and you pay 10 cents a kilowatt hour, you paid $4 for a gallon. If you were 50% efficient, you paid $8 a gallon. So you can’t compete... Unless your electricity price is coming down to a penny.
And at that point, you can compete. The only question is, do you have electricity at a penny? And I think you will have a little, but not all that much. But ultimately, I think the CO2 problem is a waste management problem because there’s just too much of it.
Christophe Jospe: Klaus, I think you read my mind on the next question. What we’re talking about is Reversing Climate Change, and climate change at the end of the day is driven by the greenhouse effect, which comes from there being too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So how does treating climate change like a waste management problem change the game to how we’re, as a globe, addressing it today?
Klaus Lackner: First of all, you see an immediate difference, because if you treat it as a waste management problem, let’s start with a true waste management problem where we all agree it’s waste. So think of my garbage at home. Right now, if I were to dump my garbage in front of your house and you complained, I would say, no, wait a minute. I’m 20% better than I was last year. I want a reward. And you should pay me because I dumped 20% less. This is really all good, right? If you put it in this context, you see it immediately...
It looks silly, right? So the difference is it really changes the way you think about the problem, right? And there are a number of differences, right? The first one is, and this is where we actually always get in trouble, right? Because if you think about it for a moment, then people say, well, but now you are allowed to admit. But with garbage, you are allowed to do it because we have recognized we have no choice. With sewage too, right? We have not aspired to having a society which doesn’t create any sewage.
Instead, we have aspired to making sure that none of that sewage ends up in rivers and is properly disposed of and properly treated and disposed of. The same has to happen to the CO2. The end game for the CO2 cannot be that we just dump it into the atmosphere. We have to take it back out. Unfortunately, it’s way too much to make useful things out of. Because we didn’t mine that carbon because we wanted carbon atoms, We mind that carbon because we wanted the energy associated with sticking in an oxygen on that carbon.
Which is combustion for all our listeners out there. Which is combustion. We burn the stuff. And if you burn a gallon of gasoline, you make 20 pounds of So in the end, you have to figure out, Is it cheaper to dispose of the CO2 safely or not make it in the first place? And so you’re saying there needs to be a street sweeper? There needs to be a street sweeper, but there needs to be generally a waste management approach, right? And that applies to the coal plant, which would be stupid to let it out and then chase after it most of the time, unless it’s in a place where it really doesn’t know what to do with it.
The neat extra feature you have with CO2 is it’s one dump. It ends up all in the atmosphere. And if I take it out in Arizona or I take it out in Australia, it doesn’t really matter because I balance the book no matter where I do it. That is your advantage. In the end of the day, the rule has to be you must not Dump CO2 into the atmosphere. And if you did, you have to take it back out. And yes, the air capture is the street sweeper in this game because it can go after the stuff which has already been spilled.
The same, by the way, would be true if you pull it out of the ocean. And the same is true if you pull it out of the biosphere. If you grow trees and cut them up and do becks on them and put them underground as CO2, you also have reduced the carbon load in the environment. You can’t just say, let’s make 10% less or become carbon neutral. You still sit on a heap of garbage, right? And we have to figure out how to get out from under that. And I suspect we will find out at the end of the day that we are already in an overshoot and therefore we will have to come back.
Which, by the way, makes sequestration impossible to avoid.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds great. I like the paradigm shift that we’re talking about with street sweepers. But yeah, I live in Los Angeles and the street sweepers, I’m like constantly moving my car out there. It’s a terrible part of living in a city. So maybe there’s a branding issue with the street sweeper.
Christophe Jospe: We don’t want to be inconvenient.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, but it sounds good. I like the idea of if I’m creating a certain amount of a waste product and I still want to live the lifestyle that I typically do, what do I have to pay to make that at least neutral, if not better than if I’ve never existed at all?
Klaus Lackner: In the end, it comes down to how much does it cost you to collect it and to safely dispose of it. And I would argue, as it looks, the big cost is the collection. And that’s even true if you think inside a power plant. And the reason behind that is that the oil industry has convinced everybody that injecting CO2 into deep underground reservoirs is a fairly cheap operation. Many people think that is plenty large enough. Personally, I’m agnostic. It could be that it’s big enough. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Big enough for what?
Klaus Lackner: To put all the CO2 away.
Ross Kenyon: Does it stay underground when they do fracking and they inject CO2?
Klaus Lackner: Well, in fracking, they usually only inject water right now, but they have enhanced oil recovery where they put CO2 down and most of that stays. A good example is Sleipner in the North Sea. They are injecting CO2. They extract it out of their natural gas. They can’t sail now. So they have to separate it out. They always did. And they used to just vent it. And then in the mid 90s, Norway said, if you do that, that’s about $50 a ton of CO2. And they said, oh, if that’s the case, then we figure out how to inject it back into a saltwater aquifer.
Which is about 800 meters under the floor of the North Sea. They pull out natural gas, extract the 10% CO2, and re-inject that CO2 into a different formation above the gas, actually, into this formation. It has been done now at the tune of a million tonnes a year for more than 20 years. And it seems to be working just fine. So I think there are some places. Whether there are enough, we don’t know. But I think if you add to this mineral sequestration, if you put biochars away, if you make carbonates and you do all of these things, I think you can make a case that there is far more opportunity to store carbon than we can possibly make from coal and oil and gas.
So I think the ability to balance that side of the It seems like capturing carbon the source of where it’s being created or used, the concentration is obviously much greater, but your work, you’re known for doing...
Ross Kenyon: Diffuse carbon capture.
Klaus Lackner: Because I think it’s necessary. Because if you really want to go to 100%, it doesn’t do you all that much good that the coal plant can collect 90%, right? And then if you do the lifecycle analysis and said, oh, by the way, we had to mine the coal and we consumed energy. We had to transport the coal and we consumed energy. We had to get rid of the ash and we consumed energy. By the time you did all of that. And allowed for the fact that there is 30% more coal consumption.
You actually only reduced emissions by 70-75%, not by 100%. Got it.
Christophe Jospe: So Klaus, what you’re saying is the carbon capture industry can never truly be carbon neutral. And someone ultimately needs to balance the total stock of carbon in the atmosphere, which has to be carbon removal.
Klaus Lackner: Right, because if you take it from a point source, you only get a fraction of what that point source had in the first place. If you think a coal plant is required to give all of its CO2 back, it can only deliver a fraction. So the rest has to come out of the environment. The rest has to come out of the air. And this could be a really big bill if somebody says, now, wait a minute, we are now at 400. By the time we turn that ship around, we are probably closer to 500 ppm.
And we have to get back to 400 or maybe to 300. If we come back 100 ppm, that’s more CO2 than we emitted in the 20th century. And you have to A, get your hands on it, and B, have to figure out where to put all of that. So carbon sequestration, to me, is something which is bound to happen. There’s not a question of, will we do it? But when will we do it?
Christophe Jospe: I wanted to pick up on the coal plant because we, as a globe, I think we get what, around 80% of our energy supply from coal. And coal, as we know, is very abundant and cheap. Right. Right.
Klaus Lackner: I actually very much doubt that, and I always doubted it, and I was into carbon sequestration when it started in the early 90s. The reason I’m skeptical on fixing old coal plants is they were never designed to operate in this environment, and they are designed to be inefficient and cheap, and they cannot afford spending money on efficiency because coal is too cheap. I can prove this very simply. If you look at coal plants in Australia, in the United States, and in Europe, The efficiency goes up because coal in Australia is extremely cheap.
It’s in the middle in the US and it’s expensive in Europe. So the efficiencies have adjusted themselves to account for this. If you now say in many ways, sequestration, carbon capture and storage at a coal plant adds to the fuel price. The more fuel you consume, the more CO2 you make. And if you now tell me it’s an optimistic $30 per ton of CO2, maybe you get a little better at the end of the day, but right now people talk about $100 a ton. That would add $110 to the ton of coal.
Coal in the U. S. is $20 to $40, depending who you talk about.
Ross Kenyon: So it’s like three times the price, something like that?
Klaus Lackner: Yeah. That coal plant can’t compete with natural gas as is, right? If you now tell it that its effective price has tripled or quadrupled, and it has even more than that, because keep in mind, you also end up using more coal because you have to spend the energy to get your CO2 back, right? So by the time you’re finished with this, you have an effective coal price somewhere between $150 and $200 a ton. If I told you nothing happened to the economy except the coal price jumped up by that much, you know they all shut up.
So I think we have to come to grips with sooner or later that all these old coal plants are stranded assets. This is not to say, by the way, that coal couldn’t survive because it could operate on brand new plants, which were designed to do all of that. But to think that you can take the biggest mass flow in the plant and convert it and completely change it while maintaining the same old plant and think it’s anywhere close to being economically optimal. So most of these coal plants will be stranded assets.
In the US, it’s not going to hurt all that much because they’re going away anyhow. I think the problem is much bigger in China, which has built a huge fleet of new coal plants. And India is building it right now. And somehow or another, we have to figure out how to make the transition away from that in a way that is not economically too disruptive. I doubt very much that this is happening by fixing it with post-combustion scrubbers in a retrofit. Also, I would argue that air capture cannot offer you that.
Because using air capture to do the post-combustion scrubbing by waiting until it’s out in the atmosphere doesn’t make it any easier and ends up costing you at least as much. So I think those are stranded assets and they will go away in this discussion. But that also will tell you that there will be a big, long, hard fight. Right.
Christophe Jospe: And as we learned yesterday from Michael Denby with APS, those plants expect that they’re going to I think that brings up very interesting insight that you’ve brought up around plant design, where bigger isn’t always better. Because when you build something that’s quite big, it needs to last you for 50 years to make your money back. And when you build something that’s modular, it can break after five years and you’ll build another one better next time. And that gets into issues around cost and scale. Can you go into that a little bit?
Klaus Lackner: Yeah, that gets you in a very different discussion, but I think it’s worthwhile going there. It struck me many years ago that a standard coal-fired power plant costs about $1,000, $1,500 today per kilowatt. And a car engine, which is a power plant of sorts, costs $10 a kilowatt. So I always wanted to understand why that enormous discrepancy. And the best I can come up with is car engines are mass-produced. Production gets better and better and better at it, and it drove the price down dramatically. So in a way, the mass production, here’s an example, won out over the scaling up, which happened to the coal plants.
And then you see that there are some real downsides of having scaled up. And the first one is, if you only invest a billion dollars into a big power plant, you will have to have licenses. You have to get things in place. You have to get your capital together. And all of that will take you five years. So you can’t really afford to have something which lasts a year and then it goes away again. So you have to think in long time scales. Now you can make small things which last a long time.
A good watch lasts decades. You don’t have to design for longevity. Any car engine, by the way, would burn out in less than a year in a power plant environment. It’s designed to get half a million miles on it. And if you run it steadily at 55 miles an hour, you have that in less than a year. The bottom line is they don’t last, but there is an inherent advantage. And when I started working with a colleague, Gerhard von Reisen at Columbia, he pointed out, he’s in the business school, he says it actually reduces risk.
I don’t have to make a decision where I know things will work for 50 years. I can make a decision for what I think will happen in the next two or three years. And if it turns out after two or three years, my basic assumptions turn out to be incorrect. Then I don’t keep doing it, right? Whereas if you’re committed to a 50-year power plant, you are stuck. So they are now facing the risk of having misjudged this iteration over a 50-year horizon. And all these plants eventually will shut down, is my view.
That this can happen, you have seen in the past. And usually the economic rug is pulled out under you. Classic example is that in 1974, after the first oil crisis, oil basically moved from $2 to $40 a barrel overnight. The French utility industry suddenly realized that they couldn’t make things work anymore because they were running mainly oil-fired power plants. And oil was suddenly so expensive that this didn’t work anymore. They went nuclear, right? They at that point went nuclear. And by the way, it took them About 16 years. If you go to 1990, you can say that transition had happened, right?
So what you’re seeing is that in less than two decades, the economy could actually simply squeeze out these old oil plants and replace them with nuclear power plants. But this was driven by an economic hard reality that this was just not working anymore. And I think if you had a carbon price of $40, $50 a ton, those coal plants are doomed. So if you put real economic constraints on the system, this will happen all by itself. Whether we can figure out the politics of this to get to that point, Remains to be seen.
But the alternative is that you have to have even more negative emissions afterwards because you will have to mop up after yourself.
Ross Kenyon: The politics of this seem really difficult because, you know, politicians, they don’t hold office for that long and they’re concerned with getting reelected. So their decisions tend to be pretty short term. Thinking about something that may be a huge crisis in decades, that’s kind of a hard sell relative to like you might lose your job at the coal plant tomorrow if I do this thing.
Klaus Lackner: Yes. And if you go back to the sewage discussion, you could actually see the same discussions in the 19th century. About sewage? Yeah. A little bit of slop hasn’t hurt anybody. There’s no evidence that stuff makes you sick. Besides, there’s a small-scale industry of using this stuff as fertilizer. Night soil, right? Yeah. And you’re ruining their livelihood if you start dealing with those problems. So just leave it alone. And then eventually it became clear it causes cholera. It is a problem. And then suddenly people figured it out. And I think the same will happen here too.
When it happens, how it happens, I don’t know. But there will be some trigger events where people say, well, we can’t just put up with this any longer. I suspect it will happen suddenly. In the meantime, you’d like to get your act together and be ready for that. And if you fail to be ready, the economic consequences will be died. If the world is convinced that CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem and we are not ready for it, it will stop cars, it will stop airplanes, it will stop electricity from coal-fired power plants.
Ross Kenyon: And that’s That’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about Nori is that we’re doing this on a voluntary market side and hoping to show a better way. We tend to be a little distrustful, I guess you could say, of government action, think that the incentives involved. And that decision-making process are not always the best, but we think that if we could come through a voluntary marketplace to a universal price on carbon, we’re sort of leading the way and hopefully showing a way to do this in a way that’s smart and technologically savvy.
That’s our hope.
Klaus Lackner: I think that’s actually a good hope. I actually don’t think that you can, at the end of the day, solve the problem with volunteers, but the volunteers will show the way. And eventually the politicians say, If there are so many volunteers, maybe we can do it. And so I don’t think you will have ever enough volunteers to get to zero. But if you get a 10% reduction because of the volunteers, then the politics of this will change dramatically. And I can give you examples. If you look at recycling and people say, well, we can’t put things in waste dumps forever.
We are running out of waste dumps. We better do something about it. Well, these were volunteers. These were people making stacks of old newspapers, tying them up and hoping that they’re actually truly taken away and not Put back in the garbage when the truck turns the corner. So this started with volunteers. And now, in many locations, here included, it’s pretty well regulated, regulated. And in some jurisdictions, for example, in many places in Europe, it’s actually obligatory. You don’t have a choice anymore.
Ross Kenyon: I was in some country and they had like seven different boxes. I was like, I had to sort through. I was like, this is a lot of work, guys. I don’t know if I want to do this right now. Germany does that, by the way. Maybe it was Germany.
Klaus Lackner: And you have the garbage police. So if you put recyclables in the garbage, you actually get a citation. It’s very German. Yeah, I would agree with that.
Christophe Jospe: We’re talking about volunteers. We want someone to foot the bill. And I would argue that the way that we’re footing the bill today is not necessarily going to the right pots. And Klaus, if you were king of the world and could take a look at all of the climate work being done and not to say one thing is more important than another, but how could we simplify this?
Klaus Lackner: Actually, in 2000, I wrote a paper on this with a few colleagues. And I think the problem is actually relatively simple. If you draw a big enough box, the carbon problem we are creating is that we are getting fossil carbon, which was perfectly sequestered for millions of years, and mobilize it and put it into the mobile carbon pool. And if you ask how big is the problem, it’s exactly that big. How many tonnes of carbon came out of the ground as coal, oil, and gas? And let’s throw in for good measure whatever limestone be converted into lime.
That basically is it. This is not exactly the greenhouse effect, but that’s the total carbon remobilized. And if you start solving that problem, the easiest way to do this is to say, if you must take a ton of carbon out of the ground, You must show me another ton of carbon which has been put away. And you could call that a certificate of sequestration or a certificate of negative emissions. And you need to balance these two. And I think from a non-voluntary perspective, at the end, from a regulatory perspective, you simply cannot extract carbon from the ground without showing such a certificate.
And somebody has to make them. That’s an air capture device injecting underground. It could also be a coal utility. Putting their CO2 underground for every ton put away, the system will balance out. And this goes to the question earlier, since that coal plant only gets 90% of its CO2 back, it cannot deliver enough certificates of sequestration to the coal mine. To balance its book, it has to get the last 10% from somewhere else because it couldn’t make them that way. Now, it could do that by burning wood in the power plant and then scrubbing 90% of that 120% and say, look, we got over the top and now we have enough certificates.
It could go to somebody who does air capture and puts the CO2 away. But in order to balance the books this way, you need to get some part back from the environment because some of it ended up.
Christophe Jospe: And this goes back to your waste analogy because we’re talking about removing the carbon and proving that you’ve removed carbon. But by pricing it in such a way, you’ve actually motivated replacing carbon and you could see renewable and carbon-free sources of energy really take off in such a top-down regime.
Klaus Lackner: Well, they either take off because it was too expensive to deal with the carbon, or if it turns out dealing with the carbon wasn’t all that bad, then you have competition. So, see, I’m agnostic on the question whether the gasoline in the car, if you still have it, should come from... Oil or from a closed internal recycle. And I think if you think about it this way, it strictly becomes a question of economics. If it turns out it’s cheap to bury the carbon, then you may as well burn it in the car or in the airplane.
Take the CO2 back out of the air and put it underground. If it turns out that storage underground is hard and expensive, then it may be economically smarter to make your fuel synthetically at a solar PV installation or even at a nuclear power plant wherever you didn’t make CO2 when you made the fuel. So both options are on the table and the markets have to decide which one wins. And I think it’s very hard to predict that. And I think a large fraction which goes into this prediction, in my view, is how much of an overshoot we have.
If it turns out there is no overshoot, I would argue sequestration will get relatively cheap. And when you say overshoot, that’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere. If the world decides that 500 ppm is intolerable and we have to come back to 400 or even 350 ppm, then there is an Huge demand for carbon capture capacity, carbon storage capacity, right? And so if you now come along and say, oh, by the way, I want to put that oil or that coal CO2, which I just made today, also into that storage, the prices just shoot up.
And I give you a simple example of this. If you look at 1999 or 1998, Oil prices came as low as $11 a barrel. And then in relatively short order, they shot up to $140, $150 a barrel. And basically, there was a slight excess demand being generated in China, and everybody got caught flat-footed, and there was a few percent mismatch between supply and demand, which settled itself by shooting the price up tenfold. And so the price you pay at the end of the day has nothing to do with How much you could put away, but how much it costs right now, how much capacity you have to deal with the problem.
And if I tell you, no matter what you do, I have 1500 gigatons of pent up demand because 100 ppm reduction in CO2. CO2 is a 1500 gigatons of CO2 storage capacity. So if you developed a new field where you can put it, I’m telling you, I have the CO2 for that. Don’t expect prices to collapse on you until we have dealt with that overhang. So in the meantime, there may be a real advantage of saying, if I want to make fresh fuel, I don’t make it by producing even more CO2 because storage is expensive.
On the other hand, if it turns out we find living at 450 ppm is not all that bad, then the price of dealing with the storage may never get all that high. Besides that, there are details in the technology. How much will it actually cost to have an electrolyzer to make hydrogen? If that gets cheap, we have an advantage for synthetic fuels. If that turns out to stay as expensive as it’s today, we can’t really afford it. So markets have to figure things out. I can’t possibly predict today.
Christophe Jospe: So what matters at the end of the day is the threshold that we decide is a safe one to live in. And if it’s too high, we need to dial it back. And if we can live there, then so be it. One of my concerns, though, is what if the carbon accounting and the carbon budget that the climate community is trying to address, what if they have the numbers wrong? And what if we’re already spending our budget and we don’t have an escape valve or an option?
Klaus Lackner: Well, I mean, we... We can get ourselves into trouble, right? It is conceivable that 400 ppm is already too bad. Where are we right now? We are around 400 ppm, but you don’t know how a world of 400 ppm will look like.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lag in the system, right? There is. Inertia.
Christophe Jospe: And nobody knows how big it is. Just because we try to avoid acronyms, that’s parts per million. Klaus is actually a card-carrying member of A to the 7th.
Klaus Lackner: Eight. Oh, what’s the eighth A? The American Association Against All Acronyms and All Abbreviations. Well, we’re glad to have you as an advisor.
Ross Kenyon: I think we’re all members of that as well.
Klaus Lackner: Paul is very, very strict about this too. PPM stands for parts per million and actually by volume. So for every 2,500 molecules in the air, one is a CO2 molecule. And it used to be 280 parts per million.
Ross Kenyon: Pre-industrial revolution. Pre-industrial times.
Klaus Lackner: During the ice age, it was 180. Then something happened and it jumped up to 280. And then we had a warm time. And we have lived in this warm time since the last interglacial for the last 15,000 years or so, and maybe a little longer. And since the early 1800s, it’s starting to move upward. It sort of hit 300 ppm, if I recall it right, around 1900. In the mid-20th century, it was 315 when Keeling started to measure things. When I got excited about it, it was between 350 and 360, and now it’s over 400, and right now it’s going up about 2-3 ppm a year.
Christophe Jospe: And using that, and you accepted that 450 is the limit that we’d want to stay behind, you crunched the numbers that said that were pretty alarming of how quickly the world needs to decarbonize in order to meet that goal.
Klaus Lackner: Well, look at it this way. The current rate of emissions, we are 2, 3 ppm a year. We are 40 ppm away from where we want to be, so 15, 17 years. We will go over that. And keep in mind so far, the CO2 emissions from year to year are going up. They are not going down. So the system is accelerating and it’s presumably accelerating for two reasons. One is the ocean’s ability to take it away. It gradually degrades. So the same amount of CO2 put out will actually lead to a higher rise in the atmosphere.
The ocean is just full of carbon already. There’s no more room for it. Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it, particularly the surface ocean. Now, the deep ocean will take a thousand years to hear about all of that. So eventually the ocean will take some of that. But over the next hundred years or so, roughly half of the CO2 we put out will stick to the atmosphere. And it takes a thousand years or so for the ocean to take another half down to a quarter roughly. And then from there on out.
And the other reason I assume is development is increasing around the world. Development is increasing. Economies grow, populations grow. And so as a result, economies grow worldwide 3% or so a year. Roughly speaking, the carbon intensity holds up. And so we need to put more out. So as the GDP, world GDP grows, the CO2 emissions grow with it. And as a matter of fact, we are slightly better. It turns out the carbon intensity of the world has gradually been improving. I think it does that all by itself because efficiencies grow.
I mean, like labor productivity goes up, carbon productivity goes up. But if you ask, we want to stop at 450 ppm, you can do a simple calculation and say, how much does the carbon efficiency per year have to go up? It’s about 8. 5% per year.
Ross Kenyon: That doesn’t seem like a lot, but I assume it pretty much is.
Klaus Lackner: This, I would argue, is equivalent to building liberty ships during World War II. Economies change by 1% or 2%. A year, 3% growth. We really feel good. Now you say every process you do, every dollar of GDP made. Needs every year 8% less CO2 than it had or 8. 5% less CO2 than it had the year before. That is an enormous effort. And if you look historically, it improves sort of by 1%, maybe 1. 5% a year.
Christophe Jospe: So Klaus, just so our listeners when they’re driving in the car don’t drive off a cliff in deep despair, let’s talk about the next level of scale. I was about to ask a very depressing question too. I’m taking us out of the doom and gloom because we’re talking... Talking about Reversing Climate Change, it is possible and it is possible from managing the total stock of carbon in the atmosphere. And you have recently moved the device that you have been working on to the Polytechnic campus. And for me, that’s really exciting.
I think here we have the only place in the world which is publicly demonstrating that this is possible. We’re not making this a commercial effort. We’re making this, hey world, come check us out. How does this work?
Klaus Lackner: Right. I think that’s the difference to the other efforts. But the other efforts also are starting to demonstrate. It’s hard to disagree with ClimbWorks. Building a device, feeding CO2 into a greenhouse. And what I like about it, they are now actually doing it. It’s real. They have data to report. They have data to report. If nothing else, they have a balance sheet and they’re still alive, right? So they must be doing something right. They also said, well, it costs us $600 a ton, right? I heard indirectly that they are now maybe down to $400 a ton in Iceland where they are doing it too.
Now, those numbers sound horrible, right? Because if you think $600 a ton, this is where the APS report some years ago said, the American Physical Society report says, it’s going to cost $600 a ton, it’s hopeless. But keep in mind, these are first of a kind, right? If you look at the first photovoltaic panels, they were 100 times as expensive as they are today. And I’m not holding hope out that we can get down to $6 a ton, right? But Put another way, our learning has to be much less than the learning has to be photovoltaics or wind.
They gained factors of 100, factors of 40, light today is roughly 10,000 times cheaper. So technologies can drive costs down. And part of it is to just do it. Mass production. And there’s a rough rule of thumb. Every time you double your output, your cumulative output, your cost drops to 80%, 85% where it was. And photovoltaics has held onto this for huge numbers of doublings. Well, today we have collected from the air maybe a thousand tonnes of CO2, if you count the old air liquefaction plants, maybe a little more. But to go to billions of tonnes is going to be growing by many, many doublings.
And if you apply those doubling rules and pretend they’ll work here too, which likely they will, maybe not perfectly, but roughly... Coming from $600 down to $60 is actually a short, short trip.
Christophe Jospe: Part of those cost curves come from being able to have a design that’s easily replicable and can be mass produced and requires little human interaction because one of the dominant costs in our earlier discussion today, we were talking about how bigger is better, but that’s maybe because you only have very few plant operators operating a big plant.
Klaus Lackner: Right. The argument we’ve found behind all of that is there’s actually no obvious reason why big is always better, except for one, tends to drive personnel costs down. So a very simple example are big mining trucks. Why are mining trucks 400-ton payload? Well, they have 400-ton payload because you then have one driver moving around 400 tonnes. It turns out the driver, over the life of the truck, the drivers cost you about as much As the truck, if not more. So you have every incentive to make the trucks big. But if you now tell me I can automate the truck, I don’t need a driver in the truck, and one driver can take care of 100 trucks, then maybe a four-ton truck is perfectly good, right?
And it turns out a four-ton truck is actually 100 times cheaper than a 400-ton truck. So there’s no obvious gain going up except squeezing out the drivers. So it seems to me... If you want to make that revolutionary change, one of the critical ingredients is to have automation. But with the Internet of Things, now that we’re talking in 2019, GM is going to have cars which drive themselves. You argue, why couldn’t an air capture device pay attention to its own needs all by itself and do 90% of the maintenance and the controls and all of these things so that it’s actually working fine?
And you need that because if you build a one-ton-a-day device, which sort of fits into a shipping container and you can put wherever you want it, I cannot afford an hour a day of a person to maintain and run this machine because I’m only getting one ton a day, right? So that machine has to be basically autonomous and doesn’t have to have help. But with today’s technology, that’s quite feasible. So we can build a whole forest of these things and there are two or three people paying attention to the forest.
And at the end of the day, you have thousands of tonnes of CO2 collected on a few acres of land.
Christophe Jospe: Well, getting top of the hour, so thinking to give you some final words, Klaus, what are you looking forward to in the coming years and what can we expect for the air capture industry?
Klaus Lackner: I would hope we make the transition to thinking about it as a waste management problem. I would hope that air capture technology develops like any other technology and gets cheaper in price. I do look towards finding volunteers who are starting the market because I think waiting for government regulations to solve the problem will take too long. Whether those are individuals who press a button at the pump or their smartphone in lieu of the missing button at the pump. Or whether these are large corporations who have decided that they want to be carbon neutral remains to be seen.
But I do think getting it into the hopper is one of the options. I think it’s important and see that air capture becomes a big player in the game. I don’t think they will take care of all of the CO2 because there are other ways of doing it too and the markets have to figure out. Where the optimum is. I’m pointing out there’s no way that the world could run on hydroelectricity, yet we don’t give up on hydroelectricity because it’s extremely affordable. So you will see point source capture, that ammonia plant should get rid of its CO2, that corn ethanol plant That fermenter should deal with that CO2 and take care of it.
And if you add it all up, in the end, you need a price on CO2, whether that’s driven by regulations or indirectly. I don’t know. But at the end of the day, if CO2 will cost you $30, $40 a ton, the world can balance its carbon budget. And that’s where I gradually see it going. And I think progress in this direction has been made. Not enough to put an optimistic hat on it for a moment. If you look at it in California right now, you get $15 for a ton of CO2.
And taxes in Sweden put it at between $100 and $200 a ton, if it’s the right kind of CO2. It doesn’t apply on everything. Norway has it. So net total, we have started to bend the curve a little, but the innate trend upward has always been underestimated. So I think you are seeing us on the high end of the past estimates. Where CO2 emissions should be. And in my view, they always were too optimistic on the curves. And what you actually see is a combination of some start of pushing the thing around to versus a much larger, faster growth than we anticipated.
And I think solving the problem by stopping growth is a recipe for disaster. We need to make room. For China to grow, we need to make room for India to grow. There are estimates that by the end of the century, there could be 4 billion people in Africa. And if they live a standard, decent level of life, they will consume a lot of energy and produce a lot of CO2. And we’ll better figure out how to balance this. And it’s not new. We have done it before for other things. And the problem has to be big enough that we say, well, this is a problem.
When there’s one coal plant, we don’t worry about it. When there’s one household dumping sewage into the river, nobody paid any attention. Once you’ve got big cities and big stinks and then rivers on fire, people started to think about how to fix these problems.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you, Klaus. That was very informative and fun. It’s fun having you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. No problem. Thanks so much.
