The video explores the innovative efforts governments and tech giants are investing in for carbon dioxide removal technologies. It highlights various methods companies employ, such as capturing carbon to store it underground, converting it into products like jet fuel and sunglasses, and discussing startups like Climeworks that offer carbon removal at a high cost. The narrator examines Iceland's unique role in these efforts and the integration of renewable geothermal energy in carbon capture operations.

The narrative further elaborates on the processes used in Iceland and the United States, where plants and biomass are repurposed for carbon capture and storage. Companies such as Climeworks and Carpfix are at the forefront of capturing carbon and mineralizing it into stone. Despite significant technological advancements, the scale of current operations remains inadequate compared to the annual emissions.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. carbon dioxide [ˈkɑːrbən daɪˈɑksaɪd] - (noun) - A colorless, odorless gas produced by burning carbon and organic compounds and by respiration. - Synonyms: (CO2, greenhouse gas, carbonic acid gas)

Governments and tech giants are pouring money into the wildest ideas for removing carbon dioxide from the air.

2. retrofit [ˈrɛtroʊˌfɪt] - (verb) - To add a component or accessory to something that did not have it when manufactured; to modify. - Synonyms: (update, modify, improve)

We capture CO2 from the tailpipe of a semi truck with a retrofit device.

3. geothermal [ˌdʒiːoʊˈθɜːrməl] - (adjective) - Relating to or produced by the internal heat of the earth. - Synonyms: (subterranean, earth heat, tectonic heat)

So we are surrounded by volcanic rocks that have been solidified, and in the distance we see these big, huge towers of steam just going straight up into the air, which I expect is the geothermal power plant

4. mineralization [ˌmɪnərələˈzeɪʃən] - (noun) - A process by which organic matter is converted into a mineral or is otherwise made rock-like. - Synonyms: (crystallization, fossilization, petrification)

And then we send it through an underground pipeline over to carb fix for the mineralization.

5. sequestration [ˌsɛkwəˈstrɛɪʃən] - (noun) - The action of sequestering or being sequestered, especially relating to carbon dioxide capture. - Synonyms: (isolation, sequestration, detention)

An estimate suggests we will need to capture and remove 2 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year.

6. pyrolyzers [paɪˈrɒlaɪzərz] - (noun) - Devices used to decompose organic material at elevated temperatures in the absence of oxygen. - Synonyms: (burners, incinerators, decomposers)

Once the biomass arrives at one of our pyrolyzers, it goes through, first a step of grinding to less than half an inch in size.

7. basalt [bəˈsɔːlt] - (noun) - A dark, fine-grained volcanic rock that sometimes displays a columnar structure. - Synonyms: (volcanic rock, lava rock, mafic rock)

And basalt rock is really good at capturing carbon dioxide.

8. biomass [ˈbaɪoʊˌmæs] - (noun) - The total mass of organisms in a given area or volume; plant or animal material used for energy production. - Synonyms: (organic matter, plant material, biological mass)

Once the biomass arrives at one of our pyrolyzers, it goes through, first a step of grinding to less than half an inch in size.

9. geological time scales [ˌdʒiːəˈlɑːdʒɪkəl taɪm skeɪlz] - (noun) - A system of chronological dating that relates geological strata to time, used by geologists to describe the timing and relationships between events that have occurred throughout Earth's history. - Synonyms: (deep time, earth history, stratigraphic time)

Yeah. We are talking about geological time scales there.

10. arsenal [ˈɑːrsnəl] - (noun) - An array of resources available for a particular purpose; a collection of weapons and military equipment stored by a country. - Synonyms: (barrage, armory, collection)

So not a magic bullet, but a part of the arsenal that we have to fight climate change.

Is CO2 Removal Ready for Its Big Moment?

Governments and tech giants are pouring money into the wildest ideas for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Once you capture it, you can bury it deep underground, or you can sink it into the sea. And some startups are even trying to turn captured carbon dioxide into products. Jet fuel, laundry detergent with tide, and even sunglasses.

With pangaia, I found that one of the biggest carbon removal companies, a swiss startup called Climeworks cells, removed carbon to individuals at more than thousand dollars a tonne. So that got me thinking, can I buy some captured carbon from any of these companies and display it on my desk? All right, so, hi. I understand you capture carbon dioxide and store it somehow, is that right? That's exactly right. We capture CO2 from the tailpipe of a semi truck with a retrofit device. So if I wanted to buy some of that stored carbon so that I can put it on my desk and show people that it's a real technology, can I do that?

Unfortunately, we can't really share a cylinder of liquid CO2. I'm not sending you a ton of CO2? No, I won't have space for a ton of CO2 in my face. And do you have some of it right now? I could go grab some. Should I go grab? That'd be great. There you go. Show it to me a little bit. And so, like, what the hell is that? I mean, yes, it's black, so maybe it's carbon, but what is it? This is bio oil, and it's very rich in carbon.

Can I get some of the captured carbon? Unfortunately not, but for the best reasons. Right. Captured a stone? It's mineralized? No. Okay, so you won't sell me this captured carbon, but can I come and visit you in Iceland and see it? Absolutely. Very welcome to visit us anytime and touch it. Can I touch it? Absolutely. Great. I expected to see a barren landscape and some mountains, but seeing it from up close is a thing of beauty.

Under the Paris agreement, all the world's countries agreed to keep global warming below two degrees celsius, or if possible, below 1.5 degrees celsius. Now, what does that translate to? It means that the world needs to not just stop emitting carbon dioxide, which it is doing currently at nearly 40 billion tons every year, but also remove existing carbon dioxide that's already in the atmosphere. An estimate suggests we will need to capture and remove 2 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year for the rest of centuries, starting from 2050.

Somehow, Iceland is the only country in the world where you can witness climate change. The melting of the ice on the glaciers firsthand. But you can also discover the solution. This is Olafur Ragnar Grimsen, the former president of Iceland. The solution he's talking about is one he facilitated between two of the biggest players in the carbon removal space, climeworks and carp fix.

Oh, wow. This is stunning. So we are surrounded by volcanic rocks that have been solidified, and in the distance we see these big, huge towers of steam just going straight up into the air, which I expect is the geothermal power plant. This is energy that you can draw from just beneath the land here in Iceland. Not very deep, maybe a few hundred meters, and you can convert it into electricity or just heat.

We are headed to go and see the biggest startup in the world that removes carbon dioxide from the air and then turns it into stone here in Iceland. The reason these startups are here is because of this geothermal power that is carbon free, so that they can do the work to remove carbon dioxide from the air. So what are we looking at?

So this is the world's first direct air capture and storage unit, called Orca, operated by Climeworks. It is the first of its kind, and it's also the largest direct air capture unit in the globe. So the whole process works that you have six chambers on each container sized unit. So each chamber has a specialized filter and vents that pull in the air from the outside. So you have the ambient air flowing through there.

The CO2 is captured in the filter, and the cleaner air leaves directly. Right. But what do you do when the filter is full? Well, then we have to close the compartment, and then what's happening behind the closed compartment when it's closed, behind the closed doors, we apply heat, so around 100 degrees celsius, and that releases the CO2. This releases the CO2, which is then captured and vacuum sucked back into the processing hole, where it's further processed. So it's 100% CO2, and then we send it through an underground pipeline over to carb fix for the mineralization. Carpfix is further down that way.

The surprising thing, which I kind of knew going in, but when you see it, it really strikes you, is that the world's largest carbon removal plant is tiny. It's tiny in the sense of the grand scale things, right? Like this plant is doing something that's science fiction, and it's doing it in a place where you get to see a large geothermal power plant that's pumping out big steam plumes. There's, like, real activity happening elsewhere.

If you look at the actual facility capturing carbon. It's a small, tiny thing sitting in the corner, not doing anything. As far as you can tell, the plant captures 4000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. But that only makes up the annual emissions of about 250 us residents. The important bit is that it's the first step in the scale up process.

So what's next? Well, you can actually see it here right next door. This is the construction of mammoth, which is the next orca type plant in the scalar process. And this will capture 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Almost nine times. Yes. But right now, the problem is 40 billion tons of CO2 being pumped into the air. Yeah. We need to reduce emissions first and foremost. This is not a magic solution that will remove that problem.

So what we need to do is like 90% reduce emissions drastically and then this is 10%. This is for the historic emissions, this is for the unavoidable emissions in the future. So not a magic bullet, but a part of the arsenal that we have to fight climate change.

We are inside a lava tunnel. About 5000 years ago, there was a lava explosion here in Iceland. And when volcanoes erupt and cool down, they leave behind lots and lots of basalt. So all this rock is predominantly basalt. That's pretty much what all of Iceland is made of. And basalt rock is really good at capturing carbon dioxide.

basalt is made of lots of salts from different metals, iron, magnesium, calcium. And when carbon dioxide reacts with calcium, it forms calcium carbonate and it traps the gas as a rock carp fix imitates and accelerates these natural processes to permanently store carbon dioxide in basaltic rock. These futuristic pods is where it all happens.

So here we are actually doing something for the first time in the world. In collaboration with our Fransat climeworks, they are capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere, which we then take and inject into the ground and turn it into stone. And how do they move their CO2 to your system? Once they have collected enough CO2, it's piped towards our injection well, just as this one. And there, we co inject the CO2 with water to ensure that the CO2 gets dissolved in the water. And once the CO2 is dissolved in the fluid and we have this sparkling water, we inject it into the bedrock.

There, the sparkling water reacts with the bedrock and dissolves metals out of the rock that combine with the CO2 and turn it into stone. So when you inject CO2 underground, you can actually now show us what exactly happens. Yeah, this is actually a nice example of kind of before and after. Can I touch it. Of course, it is rock like, but it also feels a little soft to me. Like, it feels like I'm going to be able to crumble it. You will.

Okay. Now, this is basalt, right? Yes. It kind of looks like a sponge. And this, these pools and fractures and vesicles, they can actually host the CO2 once you've turned it into stone. And that's what you see here in this rock. We have already stored some CO2. You can see all these white spots. So here the pores are actually filled with these white minerals. And this is just simply CO2 turned to stone. How long does that stay in the form of stone? Forever. Oh, really? Yeah. We are talking about geological time scales there. Okay, so you're gonna. The bottle you'll send me has to be tightly sealed. Yes.

Okay. But can you show me the process of how it actually works? Yeah, let's walk it back. Alrighty. Well, this is the corn stover, an agricultural residue of choice for us. And it's a mixture of things like corn cobs, as well as the stalks and leaves of corn plants.

Capturing carbon dioxide from the air isn't the only way to do it. A lot of carbon dioxide is naturally captured by plants. The problem is the plants release it back into the air when they die and rot. 100 million acres of corn grown every year all over the US, that's capturing something like 600 million tons of CO2. About 95% of it rots on the field every year. And it's a shame we just let it rot on the field. And all that CO2 that we've already done the hard work of capturing by doing all this plant growing just goes straight back into the atmosphere.

Cham industrial saves. Why not take these dead plants and bury their captured carbon in the ground so it can't escape? So today we have farmers take the corn stalks up off their fields, rake them into windrows, bale them, transport the bales to the edge of the field, then load the bales onto a truck and drive those bales to one of our test sites. So once the biomass arrives at one of our pyrolyzers, it goes through, first a step of grinding to less than half an inch in size, and then those very small pieces of biomass get very rapidly heated to about 500 degrees c, and that effectively vaporizes the biomass.

And so a really important thing to understand is that the pyrolyzers energy to drive that heat is coming from the biomass itself. It's not consuming power off grid or. Or something like that. Aside from a little bit of propane at startup. It has then become self sustaining on the energy in the biomass, and from there, then we separate out, first the solid char particles. This is what goes back into the field, improves the soil health. Then that vapor stream continues to the next step where we condense the bio oil out. This is the bio oil. So this is the barbecue sauce.

That barbecue sauce, it literally is the natural smoke flavor ingredient in barbecue sauce is very rich in carbon and it's a dense fluid and we can inject that into old oil and gas reserves. In the US today, there's about 2 million end of life oil and gas wells, places where we extracted oil previously. So in many ways we're sort of putting oil back where it came from.

Late last year, Cham announced the removal of about 5500 tons of carbon dioxide. So far, none of these companies are capturing carbon dioxide on a scale. To make much of an impact on addressing climate change today, the industry must remove tens of billions of tons from the atmosphere this century, which will require growth that eclipses even that of the computer and software industries in recent decades. So carbon removal technology, it's not that difficult.

The ideas are quite basic chemistry, quite basic chemical engineering, and all they really need now is money. So far, most of the money has gone towards electricity and for transport, very little money has gone towards carbon capture. So currently, some hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent, spent on these startups like climeworks. Every year that number will have to go into the billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars to be able to make an impact on actually removing lots and lots of carbon dioxide from the air. And the more you do it, the cheaper it becomes.

Some governments, including the US, are finally starting to step up and put money towards carbon capture. But most of that money currently is coming from large corporations wanting to reach those net zero goals. There is proof right here on my desk that this technology can work. We just need to make it work at scale.

Climate Change, Innovation, Technology, Carbon Capture, Geothermal Energy, Sustainable Solutions, Bloomberg Originals