CO₂-removal News

Calls

The Green Carbon Webinar is starting again

Deadline Call for speakers: 6th February 2022

The 5th webinar series (UK Biochar Research Centre, University of Edinburgh) will be running from February to June 2022 with 2 bi-weekly presentations. Therefore, they are looking for enthusiastic academics and professionals to present their work. The webinar series will focus on the production, characterisation and application of advanced carbon materials from biomass, i.e. biochar, hydrochar and activated carbon.

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New Publications

Zuraiqi et al. (2022): Direct conversion of CO2 to solid carbon by Ga-based liquid metals

Karma Zuraiqi, Ali Zavabeti, Jonathan Clarke-Hannaford, Billy James Murdoch, Kalpit Shah, Michelle J. S. Spencer, Chris F. McConville, Torben Daeneke, Ken Chiang IN: Energy & Environmental Science, 2022; DOI: 10.1039/d1ee03283f

The authors report a robust and highly selective method for the direct conversion of CO2 to solid carbon over EGaIn liquid metal (LM) alloy. They concluded that the presented method creates a pathway to transforming CO2 to perpetually stored solid carbon and can therefore set a trajectory for making a measurable impact on carbon intensive industries.

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Calls

UK Request for Proposals On Emerging Climate Technology Projects

Deadline: 15 April 2022, informational webinar: on 1 February 2022

At the 2021 Global Investment Summit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Bill Gates, the Founder of Breakthrough Energy, announced a new partnership to mobilize public and private funding in emerging climate technology projects located in the United Kingdom. The RFP is expected to remain open for submissions until 31 December 2027 (RFP close date) or until all Catalyst funds are fully committed. All respondents seeking funding in the first half of 2023 must provide their Part I Submission by 15 April 2022.

Catalyst invites responses from projects located in the United Kingdom across the following four technology sectors:

  • Clean hydrogen
  • Direct air capture
  • Long duration energy storage
  • Sustainable aviation fuel

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Events

Carbon-Negative Hydrogen from Wood Waste — Mote

Tue, January 25, 2022 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM CET

by „This is CDR„

They welcome Mac Kennedy and Josh Stolaroff from Mote to present the company’s wood waste to carbon negative hydrogen CDR pathway, which was recently funded by investors and will be opening a 150KtCO2/yr demonstration plant in Bakersfield CA in 2024.

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Jobs

Lead Process Engineer

No Deadline

As Lead Process Engineer at the company Mote (Los Angeles), you will develop the next generation of system-integration technologies for Mote’s carbon removal facilities, which gasify woody waste biomass and convert it to hydrogen for transportation and CO2 for geologic storage. Working with Mote’s Technology team and reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, you will design, evaluate, and innovate on Mote’s process.

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New Publications

Clingerman (2022): Thinking negatively about negative emissions technologies: the via negativa, carbon thinking, and climate ethics

Forrest Clingerman IN: Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-022-00748-y

Following a brief description of the “way of negation” as a theological method and a discussion of NETs and carbon removal, this essay suggests three lessons for ethical and political discussions of NETs: the need to use the phrase “NETs” as a metaphor, the inseparability of negative and affirmative proposals in climate policy, and the recognition that the phrase “NETs” is used as a practice of thinking, not a technological object for deployment.

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New Publications

Ferderer et al. (2022): Assessing the influence of ocean alkalinity enhancement on a coastal phytoplankton community

Aaron Ferderer, Zanna Chase, Fraser Kennedy, Kai G. Schulz, Lennart Thomas Bach IN: Biogeosciences Discuss. [preprint], in review, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2022-17

To investigate the influence of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) on phytoplankton communities the authors enclosed a natural plankton community from coastal Tasmania for 22 days in nine microcosms during a spring bloom. They found that OAE had significant but generally moderate effects on various groups in the phytoplankton community and on heterotrophic bacteria, but state that the inadvertent effects of increased alkalinity on the coastal phytoplankton communities appear to be justifiable, relative to the enormous climatic benefit of increasing the inorganic carbon sink of seawater by 21 %.

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Media

These machines scrub greenhouse gases from the air – an inventor of direct air capture technology shows how it works

by „The Conversation“

Technology to remove carbon mechanically is in development and operating at a very small scale, in part because current methods are prohibitively expensive and energy intensive. But new techniques are being tested this year that could help lower the energy demand and cost. Arizona State University Professor Klaus Lackner was asked, a pioneer in direct air capture and carbon storage, about the state of the technology and where it’s headed.

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New Publications

Surhoff (2022): Phytoprevention of Heavy Metal Contamination From Terrestrial Enhanced Weathering: Can Plants Save the Day?

Tim Jesper Suhrhoff IN: Frontiers in Climate 3, 2022, https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2021.820204

This paper investigates how environmental risks of enhanced weathering may be mitigated by (1) choosing basalt that has low heavy metal concentrations, and (2) by using (hyper)accumulating plants that remove heavy metals from the soils, „phytopreventing“ their accumulation. The latter approach may have additional synergies with phytomining and BECCS, increasing the amount of CO2 fixation by biomass through the release of nutrients and allowing for the economic retrieval of metals from the ashes of burned biomass.

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