- Climate change is already a problem,
including the southwest US
where we've already observed warming
of one and a half degrees Fahrenheit or more.
That's starting to affect ecosystems,
we've got extreme heat waves, sea level rise,
and then looking forward,
we could see really devastating impacts,
loss of major ecosystems, disappearance of arctic ice.
At warming of two degrees,
we'd lose all the tropical coral reefs.
Tucson would start having a climate
like Death Valley in the summer,
which would be over 110 degrees
and of course, very serious threats
to food security, as well.
What can we compare the climate change risk to?
Major epidemics, things like the Great Plague
that killed millions, the First World War
in terms of lives lost.
I don't think it's as severe as meteorite impacts
that destroyed the dinosaurs,
but it certainly could have
very devastating effects on the economy.
- I'll ask people,
"What kinda car do you drive?"
and they'll say,
"Oh, well, you know, I drive something."
and I'll say,
"Well what kinda mileage does it get?"
and they'll say, "
Oh, I don't know, I get 25 miles to the gallon."
and I'll say okay.
And I hold this plastic bag up.
And this bag has almost a pound of sand in it and I say,
"That is the weight of the carbon dioxide gas
"that you put into the air from your car
"every single mile that you drive."
- If that were sand forming out of the back of your car,
people would be complaining.
If it were smelly, people would have been complaining.
Unfortunately, CO2 is colorless, odorless,
and it just vanishes into the big atmosphere around us.
It just has large consequences if you start doubling the CO2
which was in the atmosphere to begin with.
- If we want to limit warming,
we have to half greenhouse gas emissions by 2030
and we need to have what's called
net-neutral emissions by 2050,
which is that any greenhouse gases we emit
would have to be compensated by capturing carbon.
- The CO2 problem is a waste management problem.
We keep dumping it in the atmosphere
and the bulk of it keeps piling up.
This is a cumulative problem
and we need to figure out how to stop.
- I was the Research Engineer at the BioSphere
and Klaus was a professor at Columbia at that point
and he would come through town periodically
and breeze into my office and we would talk for a half hour
and then he would take off and continue on his way
and I would take a nap (laughing).
You've talked to Klaus, you know what that's like.
And at the time that Columbia University
pulled out of the BioSphere,
Klaus and I decided to start a company in Tucson
devoted towards understanding the possibilities
of doing direct air capture of carbon dioxide.
That's the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
- We started to ask where in the environment
can you collect the CO2?
- Whether air capture was technologically possible
at a scale of where it would
make a difference to the climate,
whether energetically it made sense,
economically, would it possibly have a future,
and just in general, what did it look like.
- I gotta turn it on first.
- First of all, we don't wanna blow the air around
and fan the air because that costs money
we didn't need to pay.
The wind is perfectly capable of delivering the CO2.
Then, we'd need surfaces on which the CO2 binds.
This is a polypropylene sheet
embedded into these polystyrene particles of the--
- There were a couple of a-has along the way.
One of them was, I'm sure Klaus has mentioned,
the moisture swing phenomenon
with this material we're working with.
We have a filter, the resin material.
- When it's dry, it really loves CO2
and if it's wet, it gives it back.
So, this is the resin material.
I can open this and give the plant access to this material
which has a lot of CO2 in it
and inside it is moist.
- The beauty is that it's simple in conceptual operation.
Put it outside, let it dry, pick up CO2.
Bring it in a box, make it wet, it gives it back off.
- We stumbled into this, at some level, by dumb luck.
But we worked on it and we found
that this material can concentrate the CO2 hundred-fold,
or put another way, remove 99% of all the air molecules,
which were in the way.
You can put out about half a gram.
- That was a game-changer.
That was where all the directions we had
on this technology stopped and we turned left
and we went that way.
- One unit of ER-08S-3
- Those were very exciting and very heady times
and that's when we sort of said wow,
this could be real, this is important stuff.
- What do you mean?
(laughing)
- I was excited when I heard they were moving to Arizona
because I think that the technologies they're working on,
the air capture and the other research
is a really important area of research.
- [Spokesman] Our solution is to pull CO2
directly out of the air using our artificial trees,
which pull CO2 1,000 times faster than natural trees.
So we recover the carbon, dispose of it,
or recycle it into carbon-based raw materials and fuels.
- We have reached a point where we understand how it works
and now we have to engineer a real system.
And that costs money.
- [Man] Close to saturation, 22 part plan.
- I think, in two years, you have a machine,
which you look at and you say you could actually work.
Then, I think there's a five-year stretch
where you actually have to now move
from having a technology which sort of works
to actually mass-producing it.
That means you have to build up supply chains,
put it all together,
find out who can build that stuff,
where's the factory which can do it
because in the end, you have to make a lot of them.
- That's the one I couldn't read,
whether it was minutes or seconds
makes a big difference.
- [Allen] This entire industry, this entire technology
is just infantile in its maturity,
so yeah, there are huge hurdles to overcome.
- We are hindered on both sides.
On the one side, you have people to tell you
that climate change is a hoax.
On the other side, you are also getting hit head on
by the moral hazard argument, which says,
Well, if you do that,
then people won't change their lifestyle
because they think they have this way out.
If you say,
"I wanna solve the problem with lifestyle changes,"
and since 1980 we tried to convince people to do that
and we still have failed to do that,
maybe we should consider the possibility
that we should throw other solutions at the problem as well.
- [Woman] We need the full portfolio of effort
to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.
Energy efficiency moving to renewable energy,
dietary changes, but then the longer term solutions,
one would be carbon capture and storage,
are the ones that are much more innovative and challenging.
- [Allen] The more I think about the scale of the problem,
the more impressed I get with the scope of the work
that we're attempting to do here.
- [Woman] What I want to say to them is,
"Please develop this technology fast and cheaply
because if we've only got 12 years
to reduce emissions by half,
then we really have to get our act together.