The Pacific Northwest’s lush forests are a pretty obvious place to store carbon dioxide pulled from the atmosphere. But the region has another vast resource for trapping carbon that’s more easily overlooked: the basaltic rock formations covering swaths of Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
Now a regional consortium is investigating whether the area could become a carbon capture hub, locking away planet-warming CO2 in rocks or turning it into other compounds. The group, called the Ankeron Carbon Management Hub, has landed $3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to do a two-year study on the science, feasibility, job creation and community impacts of carbon removal in the Pacific Northwest.
“It’s very clear to us, based on the science, that we need to find tools to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale,” said Daniel Pike, director of the project. “Promising technologies need to be tested as soon as possible.”
The Biden administration has committed $3.5 billion to regional carbon removal hubs. This summer it awarded $1.2 billion to hubs in Texas and Louisiana, plus smaller grants to 19 early-phase projects including the proposed Ankeron hub.
The climate tech has two elements: direct air capture (DAC) devices that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and hold on to it, and a means for using or permanently storing the carbon.
The Ankeron project includes three DAC companies: U.S. startups Heirloom Carbon and Sustaera, and Norway’s Removr.
And it has four companies with plans for disposing of the carbon:
- Carbfix, a Reykjavík, Iceland, company with a technology that dramatically speeds up the natural mineralization of carbon dioxide when it reacts with basaltic rock. Carbfix dissolves the CO2 in water and injects it underground where it mineralizes in about two years.
- Blue Planet, a California startup combining carbon dioxide with waste calcium from sources including demolished concrete, cement kiln dust and steel slag. The resulting product is a synthetic limestone that can be used in concrete.
- Twelve, a startup manufacturing sustainable aviation fuel that recently broke ground in Moses Lake, Wash. Twelve describes its fuel-making process as “industrial photosynthesis,” riffing on the reactions in which plants take CO2 from the air and use sunlight and water to transform it into starches.
- LanzaTech, an Illinois company feeding CO2 to bacteria that are used to make ethanol and other chemicals for manufacturing sustainable fuels, fabrics, packaging and other products.
In addition to the abundance of basalt as a selling point, the Pacific Northwest also has clean, renewable energy that’s needed to power the technologies that capture or dispose of the carbon.
The region has recently landed other climate-related federal hub designations, including hydrogen fuel, sustainable mass timber building materials, and lightweight aircraft hubs.
Elements of a carbon removal hub
RMI is leading the design of the Ankeron hub’s business model, and Carbfix and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are in charge of the study’s scientific and technical elements.
Other partners include clean energy developer AES; Washington’s Department of Natural Resources as a technical advisory partner; and Fluor, which will advise on engineering, procurement, and construction.
Washington State University Tri-Cities is working on community engagement — a role that has important implications based on experiences elsewhere. Government regulators in the Midwest this year rejected plans for CO2 pipelines associated with carbon capture, with local landowners raising concerns about the projects.
Communities need to be involved from the outset, said Jillian Cadwell, a WSU research associate and its hub lead. If you get local buy-in, she said, “there’s a lot less misinformation around what the technology is, or if it’s helping somebody outside the community, but not the community itself.”
Carbon removal is a critical problem to solve. Scientists internationally say that to avoid the worst climate change scenarios, it will be essential to slash carbon emissions across every sector of the economy as well as remove it from the atmosphere using natural methods and technology. But the strategies deployed so far are barely nibbling at the planet’s massive carbon debt.
“At this early stage, the capital requirements and the costs of those technologies are high,” said Pike, who also runs RMI’s Carbon Dioxide Removal Initiative. “And on the other side of the ledger, the revenue streams are also very uncertain.”
The Biden administration’s Carbon Negative Shot aims to improve the economics of the challenge. The initiative strives to reduce the cost of capture carbon plus a minimum decade of storage to less than $100 per metric ton. The costs right now are at least six times higher.
Experts say that by 2050, 10 gigatons of CO2 need to be removed from the atmosphere annually. The U.S., by comparison, released 5 gigatons of greenhouse gases last year.
The Ankeron project will begin next year after DOE finalizes the funding. Project partners are additionally committing roughly $1.1 million towards the effort.
Big tech’s support of the sector
Seattle-area tech companies are playing a significant role in private sector support of the carbon removal market.
In September, Microsoft announced it’s paying Heirloom for carbon removal in an agreement that could be worth $200 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Heirloom is using a technology that includes limestone to sponge up CO2.
A week later, Amazon announced a deal with 1PointFive that permanently traps carbon in underground rock formations that are saturated in salt water.
The agreements came on the heels of the DOE selecting Heirloom and 1PointFive projects as the first two major carbon hubs.
Microsoft made its first long-term carbon removal purchase last year when it signed a deal with DAC startup Climeworks, which is partnering with Carbfix on a project in Iceland.
The two tech giants have additionally invested in carbon removal startups through their respective climate funds.
Microsoft has backed Heirloom, LanzaJet, Twelve, Climeworks and two carbon-negative concrete companies — CarbonCure and Prometheus Materials. Amazon’s investments include CarbonCure and a second carbon-cutting startup called Brimstone.
