Redesigning Direct Air Capture using Renewable Energy

Abstract

With the increasing global threat of climate change, the world is very seriously looking into rapid solutions to the problem. Among the major identified solutions—increase in energy efficiency, development of renewables and the development of carbon capture and storage/utilization technologies, the case of Direct Air Capture, is relatively new and needs much research. Being a technology that’s still in its early stage, the cost of this technology is still very high but given the urgency of climate change, this needs to be corrected and brought down to easily deployable levels. Thus, this research looks to explore simple solutions to decrease the running cost of Direct Air Capture by using renewable energy. Using the reference as the Direct Air Capture plant of Carbon Engineering, this research proposes the replacement of the contactor fans and the calciner (the most energy intensive parts of the process) with a solar updraft tower and a solar power tower respectively, to show that ideally, 0.219 GJ energy could be saved in the air contactors, and a maximum value of 4.05 GJ energy could be saved in the calciner, thus leading to an economically much viable process for Direct Air Capture.