Transcriber: Zeddi Lee Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
So what can businesses do to help the countdown to net zero emission?
There are two things that businesses can do,
and one is to start reducing emissions or removing emissions,
and then what we at Climeworks do
is we provide solutions to take CO2 from the atmosphere.
And the reason why we need to start thinking
about taking CO2 from the atmosphere
are twofold.
So firstly, we need to get to zero.
This is what Countdown is about.
But no matter how good the technologies that we will develop and have developed
will become,
it is very unlikely that we will get to zero.
So we will have residual emissions,
and we need to start finding ways of removing these.
And the other thing
is that in order to get or stay within our global carbon budgets
in order to stay below the goals of the Paris Agreement,
we need to get to zero pretty rapidly.
And the chances are that we will not be able to do that globally.
So let’s say we achieve global net zero in 2050,
we will then have to enter a period of net negative emissions,
so we have to remove more emissions from the atmosphere than we emit into it.
And for that, we also need solutions that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere
at a massive scale.
And there’s maybe one third way we need to think about,
and that is to have less CO2 that we emit into the atmosphere.
And obviously, you know, we need to think about clean energy and so forth.
But also a lot of our products are based on CO2,
and these are currently still,
to a large extent, based on fossil CO2.
But again, here we can think about ways
of taking CO2 that we can take from the atmosphere
and basically recycling it like nature does
in a closed carbon cycle.
And this is why we at Climeworks
have developed what we call “direct air capture,”
and these are basically machines,
as a technology, that can take CO2 directly from the air.
And I quickly want to go into how this works.
So CO2 is an acid,
and we have developed a special filter that is very highly selective
where only the CO2 binds to it.
And then, you know,
once the filter’s saturated, we can release that,
and then we have a pure CO2 stream
that we can use either to store permanently underground,
where with our partners at Carbfix in Iceland,
we have developed a way to mineralize the CO2 underground
so it’s really safely gone forever,
or we can use the CO2 in sustainable fuels and products.
Because if you have CO2 and renewable energy,
you can make basically anything you can make from oil or gas.
And obviously, you know,
there are other ways to take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
You know, basically, trees can do the same.
But around that are several challenges.
So for one, you know,
we need to take a lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
And it turns out
we would need around three planets of current tree coverage
to achieve the global climate goals.
So we need to think about ways to make this smaller,
and direct air capture is about 400 times more space-efficient than afforestation.
And that includes the energy,
the renewable energy that is needed to to run these systems.
And the other thing is that we need to,
you know, have permanent storage.
And as you know,
thinking about currently the wildfires that are raging all over the world,
trees are not very permanent in the way they store the CO2.
So again, it is the combination
of taking massive amounts of CO2 out of the air
and storing it safely and permanently
And ...
we have started this process 10 years ago,
but the challenge now is to arrive at a scale of several gigatonnes
to become what we call “climate relevant.”
So what does the coming climate relevant mean besides reaching large scale?
I want to go into two examples.
The first one is we need to build a circular carbon economy.
Especially in industries like aviation,
we are still dependent on fuels containing carbon,
and in order to make aviation carbon neutral in order to get to zero,
we need to stop using fossil carbon or fuels
and start making fuels from CO2 from the atmosphere
and renewable energy.
Because if you take CO2 from the atmosphere
and you combine it with renewable hydrogen,
you can then methanize this Fischer-Topsøe
and then you arrive at a drop-in fuel
that you can put into any aircraft that is being used at the moment.
And because you have taken the carbon out of the air first,
once you burn the fuel, you close the carbon cycle -
the whole thing becomes carbon neutral.
So you can make industries like aviation carbon neutral.
So that’s the one thing that we really, really need to do:
arrive at a circular carbon economy
for products that contain CO2.
The second thing that we need to do
is because we will very likely, as I said before,
overshoot our carbon budgets.
We need to think about ways to take CO2 back out of the atmosphere,
and here the key is that you can achieve the scales that are needed
and that you can have enough storage and enough materials
to build machines like direct air capture machines
in order to get to a scale of, let’s say -
looking at the current climate models - 6 to 20 gigatons per year.
That’s what will likely be necessary.
To put it into perspective,
we’re currently emitting about 40 gigatons per year,
so we might have to take out almost half of that every year.
And again, here we have developed a great solution with our partners,
Carbfix in Iceland.
So we take CO2 out of the air,
then pump it underground,
and because of the special geological conditions that we have down there,
the CO2 mineralizes within two years, so it basically turns into stone.
So we put it back to where it came from before the industrial revolution,
and this is what we call, or can call, an atmospheric cleanup.
So I guess, you know, in summary,
we should try to wean ourselves off, you know, carbon as much as possible,
but we will still need it,
and we will also still need to clean up the carbon
that we have put into the atmosphere.
And I think this is where, you know, businesses are especially good at.
And, you know, there’s a flip side to it that I also want to highlight.
It is very important that now, you know -
we have maybe 30 years to achieve this -
we as a society start growing this rapidly.
And this is also, then, a chance
for not only society and politicians and politics
but also businesses
to strategically help us develop carbon removal markets
in order to make sure
that we have the scales needed to make the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Thank you so much.