Pull CO2 straight from the air? Sure ... for a $10/gallon gas tax

The author of the first-ever university textbook on carbon capture says it might one day make sense to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and store it away somewhere to minimize the risks of climate change. For now, though, chemical-based carbon “scrubbing” of the air would be insanely expensive … on the order of $1,000 per ton of carbon dioxide.

For comparison, modern carbon scrubbing technologies used at some power plants carry a cost of $50 to $100 per ton. Paying for straight-from-the-air carbon capture would require the equivalent of a $10 per gallon tax on gasoline.

“The concentration of CO2 in outside air is 300 times less than in the coal-fired flue gases emitted from a power plant,” said Jennifer Wilcox, an energy and environmental researcher at Stanford University who conducted the carbon scrubbing analysis. “The lower atmospheric concentration makes removal from air much more expensive than removing CO2 directly from the flue gases at the source.”

While scrubbing carbon dioxide straight from flue emissions makes more sense, that strategy itself is far from a reality. Heck, it took 20 years for the US to finally approve standards on mercury and other toxins in coal-fired power plant emissions, and there are still plenty of climate change-deniers in leadership positions who insist more carbon dioxide in the air will be good for us. That put the odds of federal requirements for carbon dioxide scrubbers somewhere in the Koch-Brothers-joining-Greenpeace range.

Instead, the most sensible solution would be to stop producing the carbon dioxide in the first place.

“Ultimately,” Wilcox said, “society needs to move completely away from carbon-based energy resources.”

Wilcox’s soon-to-be-published textbook, by the way, is titled — surprise — “Carbon Capture”. It’s due to be published by Springer on Leap Day, Feb. 29, of this year.