Environment

World’s biggest carbon capture plant set for Wyoming

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Project Bison is expected to remove five million tons of CO2 each year by 2030
BusinessWire
Diagram depicting operation of Project Bison's carbon capture process
BusinessWire
Project Bison will feature carbon capture modules that can be stacked into tiers
BusinessWire
Carbon capture activity is expected to kick off at Project Bison in 2023
BusinessWire
Project Bison is expected to remove five million tons of CO2 each year by 2030
BusinessWire
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The US state of Wyoming is set to welcome the world’s largest direct air capture plant for the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Called Project Bison, the facility is slated to swing into action next year and, all going to plan, will scale up its operations by the end of the decade to suck up five million tons of CO2 each year, and safely lock it away underground.

Project Bison enters the fray as the first massively scalable direct air capture plant in the US, according to the company behind the technology, CarbonCapture. The LA-based outfit has teamed up with Dallas-based company Frontier Carbon Solutions on the venture, which will lock the captured carbon away underground to prevent it from re-entering the atmosphere.

The direct air capture machines will draw in atmospheric CO2 and absorb it with solid sorbents, then subject it to heat in order to turn it into concentrated CO2. This concentrated CO2 can then be mineralized in deep rock formations or permanently sequestered by other means. Alternatively, it can be palmed off to manufacturers of products that use clean CO2, such as fuels and next-generation concrete.

Project Bison follows in the footsteps of another ambitious startup in this space, Switzerland’s Climeworks. The company last year began operations at its first proper direct air capture plant, the largest in the world at the time, a facility called Orca that's capable of soaking up 4,000 tons of CO2 each year. Earlier this year, Climeworks broke ground on second, even larger plant called Mammoth, which is designed to soak up 36,000 tons of CO2 annually once operations begin in a couple of years.

Climeworks plans to ramp up its operations to reach megaton-scale CO2 removal, or millions of tons, in order to take more of a bite out of the some 30 billion tons generated by human activity each year. Key to these ambitions is a modular architecture that allows its direct air capture units to be stacked atop one another, and CarbonCapture is taking a similar approach with Project Bison.

Carbon capture activity is expected to kick off at Project Bison in 2023
BusinessWire

For its part, CarbonCapture describes its system as “deeply modular.” The reactors slot into shipping-container-sized modules that can be stacked into tiers. This enables upgrades to individual reactors, for example, or for different types of plug-and-play sorbent cartridges to be slotted in to suit different climates or seasons. These modules can be grouped together in clusters to share resources like power and heat, with those clusters then able to be scaled up to form gigantic arrays.

Wyoming was chosen as the site for Project Bison owing to its ready access to renewable energy sources and friendly regulatory conditions for carbon storage. Pending approvals, it will be the first direct air capture plant to use Class IV wells for carbon sequestration, injecting it into deep saline aquifers. Phase 1 carbon capture operations are expected to begin next year, removing around 10,000 tons annually.

CarbonCapture says there are no practical limits when it comes to scaling up the project, however, and plans to do just that to remove 200,000 tons a year by 2026, one megaton a year by 2028 and then five megatons a year by 2030. At this point, it expects Project Bison to be the largest single atmospheric carbon removal project in the world.

Project Bison will feature carbon capture modules that can be stacked into tiers
BusinessWire

When that time comes, it may have some competition, however. Aside from Climeworks’ efforts in this area, we’ve seen London startup Brilliant Planet outline plans to offer gigaton-scale carbon capture using algae, and Australian startup Southern Green Gas’s vision of capturing billions of tons each year. The US government is also investing billions of dollars into carbon capture, with the aim of developing regional hubs that can help drive down the considerable cost of the technology.

This is no small sticking point when it comes to making carbon capture a viable weapon in the fight against climate change, considering the size of the problem. Climeworks’ first plant captured carbon at around US$600 a ton, but it aims to do so at around $100 a ton as it scales up, while others are aiming even lower.

CarbonCapture will be betting big on the effects of the Biden government’s recently passed Inflation Reduction Act to make its carbon capture commercially viable. The act sees tax credits for carbon capture plants increase from $50 per ton to as much as $180 if the carbon is stored underground, and is designed to accelerate innovations in the carbon removal sector.

“With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the proliferation of companies seeking high-quality carbon removal credits, and a disruptive low-cost technology, we now have the ingredients needed to scale DAC (direct air capture) to megaton levels by the end of this decade,” said Adrian Corless, CEO and CTO, CarbonCapture Inc. “We plan to have our first DAC modules fielded by the end of next year and to continue installing capacity as quickly as modules come off our production line. Our goal is to leverage economies of scale to offer the lowest priced DAC-based carbon removal credits in the market.”

Source: Frontier Carbon Solutions, CarbonCapture via BusinessWire

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9 comments
Robert
This is your reminder that carbon capture plants idea is around for decades now, and no project managed to capture anything remotely close to what was projected. At this point it seem to be used mostly as industry's fig leaf allowing pretending doing something about problem they are creating.
WONKY KLERKY
I concur with Robert on that point raised - ie. The things have not been proved to work to stated efficiencies.
Wot not said yet to this publicity 'puff' particular, but said on numerous occasions previously on these things,
Just wot's the plants total life CO2 audit?
ie.
How much CO2 created in the build of it + the running of it in its lifetime + the removal and recycling of the plant materials at the end of life
v/v
How much it will absorb over its life + where is the product to be put (?)
-
Amount of product put to displacing other materials in existing CO2 generating manufacturing streams.

NB. All calc's should be @ FULL considerations of inputs
eg. A small eg. of a total audit consideration:
If bods have to travel to site to do ye doings;
How much CO2 does that create?
(And so on, and so on. If only some b*gger would invent trees . . ......)
Fritz
Projects like this lead to a total disaster!
The only way C should be captured is by increasing the humus content of today dessert(ed) land to rise it´s fertility
That´s what we, HELIOFLOAT - Austria are doing.
michael_dowling
5 million tons is like bailing out an ocean liner with a shot glass. There are 3210 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere at present,or 3.2 Trillion tonnes.
Christian Lassen
To sequester CO2 you've got to power fans and condensers and filters, right? as well as manufacture this stuff with all sorts of raw materials, which are dependent on fossil fuels to do. What's the net CO2 loss on something like this? To come up with a net negative seems to go against laws of physics. "Lets use energy to get rid of the byproduct of using energy!"
jerryd
Unless they came up with a 100x better breakthrough, not going to work their process is so bad. Note they have no mention of how much power this will use that as fungible, will cause FFs to get burned to replace it.
The only viable CC is burning biomass in O2 for on demand power with a CO2 output.
This doesn't take huge amounts of energy, it makes the best energy, on demand power that displaces the most polluting power.
Another is growing hemp, bamboo and using it structurally in buildings, etc or burning in O2.
Taking the whole hemp plant in deep sea water will gather barnacles, etc until it gets too heavy with even more CO2 from the air and sinks to the bottom storing it cheaply.
Noah Tall
That's why we are in the state we are in. Someone wants to make a lot of money.
Likely the oil companies own this absurd gizmo. A pig in a poke.
Oil Spills? They'll sell you tanker loads of chemicals to fix it up.
TpPa
Please no pumping of CO2 gas into the ground if it is to stay in it's current form. It will come back out somehow, sometime & we will be paying for it in more ways that one.
Expanded Viewpoint
WHERE is the financial profit in this boondoggle? WHO is supplying the money to get it started? Do all of the components involved grow on trees or vines? Will the people who operate and maintain these machines work for free?
The CO2 in the atmosphere is NOT really such a curse upon the planet, because plants take it in as a food source and release Oxygen! So grow lots of trees and other plants, if you've got a desire to remove CO2 from the air. About 70% of the Oxygen in our atmosphere comes from the algae growing in the ocean.