3/14/2024 0 Comments Carbon capture and storage companyThe facilities are modular, Samala says, so it’s a matter of putting limestone on larger trays and stacking more trays. Heirloom has received a $600m award from the Department of Energy to build a hub in Louisiana that can process up to a million tons a year. View image in fullscreen Shashank Samala, the co-founder and CEO of Heirloom Carbon Technologies, at the company headquarters in Brisbane, California, on 9 October 2023. “We felt the space needed leadership and values and we wanted to make sure that the carbon dioxide pulled from the air is not used as an excuse to put more CO2 into the air,” said Samala. One use for carbon captured from DAC plants is to enhance oil extraction by injecting carbon into oil wells to make them more productive, but that doesn’t align with the company’s values. Heirloom says it’s powered by renewable energy from a local provider, and that it won’t take investments from oil and gas companies. A fund called Frontier has pledged $46.6m to Heirloom and another carbon-sucking venture. The company hopes to remove 1bn tons of carbon dioxide by 2035, though Samala admits scaling up will be a challenge: to reach the company’s goals in the next 12 years, they’ll have to increase their capacity by three times each year.Īll that scaling up will also take money, and tech firms are going in for direct air capture: Microsoft has signed a long-term contract with Heirloom to suck up to 315,000 metric tons of CO2, to offset the tech company’s own emissions and reach its net-zero goals. The facility can absorb a maximum of 1,000 metric tons of CO2 per year – just a fraction of the annual emissions from a gas-fired power plant. Making a noticeable dent could take some time. “For me, it’s really important to work on a solution that actually has a meaningful, scaled impact on climate change, to actually make a dent on this,” he said. The Heirloom chief executive, Shashank Samala, says he was inspired to climate action by his childhood in south-east India, where he grew up among heatwaves and droughts, and hopes the warehouse will be the first of many. Other direct air capture systems use huge fans to pull air, and Heirloom says it uses a few but that their system takes less energy because it leverages limestone’s natural ability to pull carbon molecules out of the air. View image in fullscreen A person points at a stack of trays holding treated limestone in Tracy, California, in this handout picture obtained on 9 November 2023. The process then begins all over again, using heat to separate out the newly captured carbon. The powder absorbs carbon, naturally binding to the gas. The remaining powder – calcium oxide – is spread on trays that are sprayed with water and sit in the open air. The carbon dioxide is then stored in concrete, which can be used for construction projects. The process begins when industrial kilns heat the limestone to 1,650F (899C), which breaks it down into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide. Heirloom’s facility uses limestone – the second most-mined material on Earth – to sponge up carbon from the air. Money from both private and public sources is pouring in, and the Biden administration has committed to spending at least $3.7bn to kick-start DAC and other carbon-removal projects across the United States. Today, scientists and political leaders see it as an inevitable tool in mitigating the climate crisis. Capturing and stowing away carbon from the air was once considered a far-fetched idea.
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