having me. it's a great honor to be here. and it's particularly nice to be able to speak a little longer than normally, and actually i hope i can explain things in the time allotted. i'm sure we will have time for questions at the end. but i would very much encourage you to interrupt me. i don't mind quite the contrary, i think, discussions get more lively if you have an issue and we can settle it right here and now. and i do realize that the topic i'm talking about, air capture, is at some level controversial and, therefore, if you have issues, if you have questions, feel free to interrupt me and ask it right here and then, and i will do my best to answer it and sort things out as best as we can. so to begin with, i would like to just introduce the basic concepts and put air capture into a larger context because i

think just talking about air capture doesn't really explain why one would want to do it and how it fits into the bigger picture. to begin with, i think i'm talking here to the converted. i would like to point out that we really do need energy and we cannot solve our climate issues and other pollution issues which come from having energy by not having energy. we do need it for a variety of reasons. i would say we have planned it if we need food, we need fertilize for that, we need energy. we couldn't sustain the population we have without the process which affects nitrogen. if you want water there are unlimited supplies in the ocean if we could figure out how to desalinate and that takes energy and if you extract minerals from the ground, you again need energy. you came today mine coupled with a fraction of a unit because you have the energy to do so.

in 1980 they were running out but they have 20% cup. so we can do better by throwing more energy at the problem pb. if you want to clean up after yourself and the environmental issues you again will need energy to do that. because nearly every problem you had has created an entropy that you didn't want and you have to do that and that again will take energy. the challenges that in some ways the atmospheric level of co-2 and it has to be stabilized. it's not the emissions that need to be stabilized but the level. and fossil carbon is not running out. i don't want to get into a lengthy discussion about that now, but i'd be happy to engage you if i have questions on that. but start from the observation that we have been thinking about running out of petroleum and coal and gas since the early 1900s and we seem to find always more when things start to look a

little short. and so i would argue we have certainly enough coal in the ground to wreak havoc on the planet, so we're not limited by the availability of fossil carbon. in my view, if you want 10 million people get to a decent standard of living we need very, very large scale sources of energy. the three that come to mind is solar energy and maybe its derivatives can be thought of as well, wind is derived from solar energy in some ways, there's nuclear energy and there's fossil carbon and all three still have to get to the point where they really can support you. nuclear energy has its own problems, which is not the topic of today. solar energy still is trying to get competitive and it has a big intermittency issue which needs to be resolved. and fossil carbon while not immediately running out, it probably could last a couple hundred years, has a very severe problem with climate change and

that will need to be addressed. so you have to figure out how to make it carbon neutral. as i said, i think the fundamental limit is the environmental limit not the resource in the ground. and you see in this chart what might happen if you follow various trajectories. if follow the first one continued expo then shall growth, we would get off the chart and exceed before the century is out. we started at 280 parts per million at the beginning of the industrial revolution. and have now reached 400 parts per million. i took 2010 here as sort of a starting date to change things. hypothetically i hope emissions constant at 2010. you notice we still run up, not quite linearly but running it up

in the atmosphere. holding emissions constant doesn't solve the problem if 450 parts per million is your critical value, then you just delayed a little bit. you didn't solve the problem, you just pushed it out a little. if you go down to zero, then, of course, the co-2 very, very gradually goes away, but i would point out that even after 200 years, you are still at about half of what you started with ultimately if you were to two to 10% of current emissions, would actually at about 2200 start going up again. co-2 will never go below 360 parts per million in this model and then gradually work its way up because the ocean slows down in its uptake. i sort of marked in green the one-third of current emissions level as the one which doesn't solve the problem but kicks the problem down the road. all i would like to point out, though, is the per capita allowance in a world of 10 billion people wa that rate of

emission is roughly 4% of the actual per capita emission in the u.s. today. so from a harmless engineer's perspective that means we have to go to zero, right? sure, we will overlook a few things here and there and there are some emissions we didn't counter in and reaching 4% of where we are today we may as well set on our banner how to figure out, how to be carbon neutral, have no carbon dioxide emissions. that's what this tells me. and i think we have to have a different look at the carbon cycle and i think this skug has started at the ipcc lately. i think the concept of saying there's a lifetime for co-2 and it gradually goes away is actually highly misleading. there is not a single lifetime for co-2. the longer you wait the slower it is to get out of the system. so in the end it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the last 20, 25% to actually go away. so in a way there is no single lifetime, that co-2 is extremely

persiste persistent. thermal effects of having had it linger even longer because there's a delay in warming up. so roughly speaking, the impact of a giga ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the year is with us for another thousand year. you should think of the emissions of co-2 to the atmosphere as permanent. not all stays in the atmosphere but roughly half of it will be with us for hundreds and hundreds of years. so therefore, it's not about stabilizing emissions. it's about eliminating emission s and that's a rather different thing. people have brought up this bathtub analogy which is somewhat sort of ironic because the original version of this analogy was it's a bathtub. you keep filling it and the level will rise. but people are so trained to think in flow-through models that they immediately said but there's a drain in the bathtub and you can't match the drain. the message i want to point out

here is yes, there is such a drain but the drain clogs up over time. the more you put in, the smaller the drain will get and we will not -- we will not drain out what we put in in a short time. eventually even a small trickle will keep raising the co-2 level and we just have to come to grips with the fact that we should think of this as a stop versus a flow problem, but then that makes the calculus incredibly simple. you just need a conversion factor. since roughly half stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years you have this calculus that shows 1 in the atmosphere regards 4 giga tons of co-2. if you have that, you go up by 1 ppm. that will be with you for a very long time. you wanted to start at 500 ppm at the start you had 900 gigatons to play with, we put that first part out in the next century, the last slice in the last decade we're now working our way through the next few

decades. if you hit the end of that, we are at 500 ppm. if you think that it's too much, how about the personal carbon allowance to stop at 450 ppm? if you take 8 billion people as a rough number for the next 30 years on the planet, everybody gets 30 tons of carbon which translates into roughly the content of this big fuel tanker at some airport which has about 30 tons of fuel in the back. so next time you sit in an airport and see the plane you're on being filled, once you personally consumed one of these tankers, you have done to get to 450 ppm, from now on out you probably shouldn't consume any more co-2. produce any more co-2. that's your forever allotment, for you and your children. once it's spent we're at 450

ppm. i think you had a question about that? this is 30 ton of carbon, therefore this diesel truck which is roughly 30 tons has roughly 30 tons of carbon in it. that literally sets the scale. and by the way, it will take the average person in the u.s. about six years to go through that. so that sets the scale if you take what i just said at face value, the conclusion is without capture and storage fossil fuels will have to be phased out. similarly you can argue that for every ton of fossil carbon coming out of the ground another ton of carbon will have to go back in in some form of another. you will have to return it again. and i would add to that one more step because ultimately the atmosphere does not relinquish the co-2 you put into it.

so if you put it in, no matter where it came from, you have to get it back out. now if you run on bio fuels you did it automatically, if you didn't run on biofuels it doesn't really matter if it was fossil or not. if you put it in the atmosphere you are responsible for taking it back out because otherwise it will accumulate or at least half of it will accumulate in the atmosphere. and there's an emergency in all of this if you want to stop at 450 ppm, that truck sort of made it clear. but let me do here a simple calculation. i'm assuming 3% growth plus 1% population growth. so you have roughly 4% rise in the world energy consumption or the world gdp, and now we have to get better every year in not emitting carbon. and you can simply ask if i get better by x percent every year then you'll calculate that we'll never spend more than a certain amount of carbon. you can ask how much do i have

to improve every year to not go over 450? so this was done several years ago. it assumed that as the starting point. if you wanted to stop at 450 ppm you would have to stop in about five years you are done. that is now history. but the point i really want to raise, if you stop at 750 ppm, you still would have to reduce carbon intensity every year by 4 1/2%. and that's a lot. so in a way, it's urgent if we want to stop at 450 ppm, by now we're talking like 8% or so because we didn't do anything for five years and i didn't account for that in this graph. so we need about an 8% annual reduction, which is far, far from what we really do. and but even if you talked about 800 ppm, 4% annual reduction is a big challenge. let's put up our sleeves right now. so the debate where we need to

stop, in my view, is misguided. we need to figure out how to stop. and the faster we can stop, the lower the level we will end up at. so this is where the discussion was fairly recently, and now the ipcc has said in its latest report no scenario -- any scenario -- let me put it this way. any scenario that actually stays out of harm seems to involve large periods of time with negative emissions. times where we managed to pull more carbon dioxide back than we emit. and that is basically an admission that this is a nearly permanent thing. and that if you want to balance the budget you have and you cannot stop fast enough, which seems to be challenging, you need to in the future have times where you are at negative emissions. otherwise, you will overshoot the 450. and presumably we are likely to do that, right? negative emissions require, in

my view, first and foremost carbon storage, or to put it more bluntly, carbon disposal. if we cannot figure out how to do that, we cannot solve this problem. the second part it will need is someway of getting the co-2 back now that it has been emitted, we have to pull it back. so either we have bio mass or chemical ways of pulling co-2 either out of the atmosphere or maybe out of the ocean, but we have to get that carbon back somehow or another. that technology needs to be solved. and i will argue that you cannot quite do this with biomass because the scope to which you have to go is simply going to be too large. it does work beautifully with by o mass but not on the scale we need. and the storage capacity you need is potentially very large. and i would argue that if you pull back co-2, the ocean will also give it back because the equilibrium will come back. it may be a little bit of an

exaggeration, but if you put 4 giga trons out of carbon and you get a 1% rise of ppm, you will roughly get four giga tons back, not 2 because the ocean is now out of equilibrium the other way and the co-2 will come back at you as you put it out. roughly speaking if you want to pull back 100 ppm, you are talking about 1500 gigatons of co-2. this is more than we emitted in the 20th century. for that reason alone i'm convinced that in all likelihood we'll carbon storage and we have no choice, because we're solving problems that we are about to create and cannot help ourselves creating because we have enough momentum that we'll overshoot. i can give you several scenarios. a simple one is we go to 450 and we find it simply unbearable. jim hanson is saying that and he said we should go back to 350,

that's a 100 ppm drop. another option is we overshot to 550, which is not all that implausible and we decided we need to come back to 450. of course there's the possibility that we come from 550 pack to 350 in which case it's 200 ppm. i would argue if you tell me you want to pull back 10 ppm, i say why bother? if you are talking if it gets serious, we are talking about many tens or hundred or maybe several hundred ppm. but if we do that, we are having a carbon sequestration problem as big as if we had sequestered all of last century if not bigger. that's the challenge we have. therefore i think it's very likely that we'll end up with this technology whether we like it or not. but you also in my view, it's not an if, it's a when. about ccs. but that would allow you to come back. so you could imagine a scenario

like this hand drawn red line i overlaid on that computer model i put in before. and that, by the way, would be about -- it would be about 100 ppm. we withdraw. in my view you end up needing technologies to solve the problem. you need to advance carbon management. you clearly need to close the carbon cycle. you may not close it by shrinking it. you may say carbon comes out of the ground, carbon goes back or carbon cycles very fast between fuel and co-2 or you may decide that you abandon carbon and have other forms of energy. that's certainly an option. but i think we're nevertheless committed to 1500 giga tons of carbon storage because we delayed and we dawdled and we waited too long and now it's hitting us. i think you need to go beyond conventional solutions. i think doing the retrofits will

not solve the problem. you need more than one storage option. we find a mistake in that one, we're really in trouble. we need more than energy alternatives. we need more energy alternatives and we also need more than just energy efficiency. energy efficiency will help, but it will not get us to zero. it certainly will not get us negative. and we need to operate at a formidable scale. 100 ppm reduction is more than 20th century emission as i pointed out and 1500 giga tons is one thn oird of the mass of water in lake michigan. that sets the scale of what we are talking about and you end up having to build a large industry in a 30-year time window. that's sort of the challenge ahead of you. as i started to think about this over the years and some of you, i'm sure, have seen this graph before, you really need three technologist. you need the ability to store the carbon dioxide in some form,

somewhere. you need to deal with the big concentrated sources which are roughly half of the problem. and you will need, particularly for the negative emissions, the ability to pull co-2 back out of the air by some means or another. and i will talk about one of those in a minute. power plant capture i would really stress is not enough. power plants produce roughly 30% of the emissions and successful scrubbing will reduce the emissions by 70%, but we reducing 30% by 70% does not give you 100% reduction no matter how you do it. point sources even if i take all point sources only cover roughly half of all emissions and negative emissions clearly require a new approach. all the co-2 i can capture in a power plant is the co-2 that would otherwise have gone in the air. i cannot reduce it in the air by scrubbing the power plant unless it's burning biomass.

so i also argued by o mass capture is not enough. i gave you a very simple argument which convinced me early on that that likely was right. agriculture feeds us. we consume hundred watt of metabolic energy which we get from food. as an energy supplier, the agriculture feeds us hundred watts. the energy systems we have to give us industrial industry feed us 10,000 watts. so you are now asking the 1% player to step in and pinch hit for the 99% player. and i think in the end, you have a horrible collision between food supply, energy demand and environmental footprint because, let me tell you, if you more than double the agricultural land which this would imply, you end up really having to do this with a heavy environmental footprint. because and you are still competing with more meat for

people in china and that will be very, very difficult. and if you wanted to get the co-2 back, you clearly have to operate at the human energy scale because we are putting out 30 giga tons of co-2 a year and you want 1500 giga tns back in less than a century so you're talking about very comparable number. growing the bio side that large is highly unlikely. so we need to look for other options. and that brings me to the concept of air capture. what intrigued me about it early on after i convinced myself that it seems feasible is they literally separate the sources from the six. and the air mixes so fast and so well across the planet that you can collect anywhere. you could imagine having in australia a collector and take credit for co-2 emissions right here in washington. that's just a matter of paying for it. and the reason for that is

within the latitude the air mixes around the globe in about a few weeks. in a hemisphere within six months, between the hemispheres in about two years. that's pretty easily seen because at the south pole, the co-2 concentration lags the northern hemisphere by about two years and most of that co-2 that shows up came from the northern hemisphere. so the typical mixing times are that long. since we're not worried about co-2 e kurgss on a yearly basis you can collect it anywhere are and make things work out. in particular, you don't even have to match the times all that accurately. so you could say we can go after emissions which happened 30 years ago, right? nothing prevents you from doing that. and that then is at the esebs of negative emissions. it provides you options. one option air capture provides and therefore the

environmentalists are unhappy with me, is it maintains access to fossil fuels. if you have the ability to pull co-2 out of the atmosphere and found a place to store that co-2, you can keep using fossil fuels. so they say this is an excuse and you shouldn't do that. in that sense, though, air capture is part of ccs. it is one of the capture options in that it was unusual in that it went after a low concentration source. white to focus on mobile and dispersed sources. you can't scrub your car, it's not that i couldn't figure out how to scrub the exhaust air pipe of the car i end up with 20 pounds of co-2 in the car for every gallon of gas i used. i have six or seven big gas bottles in the trunk of my car by the time i get back to a gas station to get rid of it. so it's impractical to hold that co-2 on a vehicle. it is impossible on a ship and it's absolutely impossible on an airplane.

it cannot carry that weight even if you figured out how to scrub it out, which in a jet engine is impossible. so the bottom line is the transportation sector would need it. so it's complementing the power source capture it's not displacing it. you could use air capture with nonfossil energy. there's nothing wrong about having liquid fuels in the transportation sector in making them from co-2 and water with electric energy as the input. in that case you close the carbon cycle with synthetic fuel and that requires very cheap nonfossil energy. i doubt we have it right now but we might get it particularly in europe if people push very hard. there will be days where electricity from vent is extremely cheap and you can turn that back into fuel. so air capture could become a storage option for intermittent electricity by holding that energy in liquid fuel when you have too much.

ultimately you can draw down the co-2 in the atmosphere. if you are really big enough to deal with the entire transportation sector, and you now scale up by another order of magnitude you actually draw the co-2 down from the atmosphere and you can get there, but you can't really get there until you stopped emitting. otherwise you are not really negative. you are just book by bookkeeping you can say one particular player is negative but you are really only negative after you stopped everything else. and i do want to stress -- because this is the other part where people -- environmentalists are upset with air capture. this is not an excuse to procrastinate. it may be taken as such, but i would argue we are too late for that. and i think that's what the ipcc said, we have procrastinated and we're now stuck with the consequences and part of that consequence is we will have to do air capture. so in the end i'm talking about a technological fix and there's

a paper by dan serovitz about three rules for technological fixes apply to air capture. i thought that was a very nice paper in "nature" a few years back and makes my point more eloquently than i can make it. they said there's three rules. the first rule of any technological fix it must embody the cost relationship. that's obvious, right? you emit co-2, you take it back. so clearly you have the right relationship and you can cut through all the complications. you don't need to know what precisely happened and why it happened and what the co-2 would do if you left it alone. all you do is put out a ton, you got back a ton. similarly, you can assess whether you did what you were supposed to do. you can measure how many tons you collected and you can actually see the effect on the atmosphere. so if somebody's cheating and pretending, then the co-2 goes up and it shouldn't have.

and if you pay attention how many tons have actually been collected it's all very straightforward. and he says ultimately it has to be feasible. and they say we don't understand why nobody spends even the little money it takes to demonstrate it because it does look to them like it is feasible. but that, of course, isn't the eye of the beholder. there have been plenty of critics who say it's utterly impossible and therefore i should spend some of the time i have allotted here to argue why i think it's possible and why the critics have overstated their point. so the concern of the critics is this is all fine and good, but if you can't do it or it costs a thousand dollars a ton of co-2, why bother? you can't make it work any how. so as i look at it, there are two fundamental problems with getting co-2 from the air. the first one everybody hit meese over the head with is it's

dilute. it's only 400 parts per million. so it's hard to get out. one part in 2500. sort of struggled with far more than the first problem, is the air is full of water. and before you know it, you are having a great water collector which collects water to the tune of $30 a ton or $30 a cubic meter had in mind. that's a very expensive proposition. 10 to 100!nç times more water t co-2 in the air. mosts things that bind co-2 wil also bind water. this is actually an important issue to address and come to grips with. the other point is -- and i probably started this when i got early on excited about it. a little bit like flue gas scrubbing. you have to be careful on these technologies and let me be on the other side of the fence and say it's very different than flue gas scrubbing and just

extrapolates flue gas scrubbing to this point is not a good idea. there was an aps study, if i summarize it, too difficult, too costly, not practical and their cost estimate is $600 per ton. is was asked what i think about it, hence the picture, and whether i have a rebuttal to their too expensive argument. very hard to rebut because when i analyze the same process, i came to the conclusion it's a thousand dollars per ton. a little bit like some fluid dine am ma cysts getting together and carefully discussing the aerodynamics of a penguin and concluding it cannot fly. what am i about to say about it, it can fly? no, it cannot. but the logical jump is from going to a process that doesn't work all that well which was designed to see whether we can collaborate together with the simple extrapolation of current technology is too expensive. well the answer is yes, it is. right? and that doesn't rule out that

there are other processes which are not too expensive. so you cannot conclude from the fact that penguins cannot fly that flying is impossible or that birds cannot fly. some birds apparently cannot. right? the dilution is too extreme, separation technology cannot be extrapolated and they say and by the way, the law of efficiency deteriorates. this is due to a famous chemical that the cost of separation is linear and the concentration are co i'll come back to this point in a moment. just don't try to extrapolate. it doesn't work all that well. you have to really áfrethink th need çnonconventional solution from the start. we're sort of as a matter of analogy say airplanes got invented by people who built bicycles. and that's not an accident. because if you had let the locomotive engineers on it they

would say we can never lightweight it enough and landing on a track is incredibly hard. right? so you need to start from first principles if you want to do things. and going from standard separation technologies to air capture does not work. you have to rethink it. all right? and the inspiration ultimately comes from nature. and i can't resist this airplane analogy. back then people were very happy to tell you that heavier than air flight isn't feasible but all they needed to do was look out of the woind and see a bird. now they tell me capturing co-2 from the atmosphere is impossible, but i think that's what that tree outside is actually doing. right? so you have to do it differently. there's no question about it. but there is an example out there in nature which managed to solve this problem. and so we need to figure out how because they are not -- nature is not impervious to the loss of nature and it will abide by it.

the argument that we cannot make it within the laws of nature is probably wrong. but let me summarize up the challenges before i give you the solution. we have to move huge pamts of air cheaper. we need to see a lot of air before we've seen enough co-2. make good contact at low pressure drops. we cannot pay for driving the air through a filter, a packed bed as you would do in standard separation. it would ruin our economy. avoid water capture as i mentioned before. if we capture water rather than co-2, we're in trouble. and we need to avoid all emissions of something being trained. we can't mess up the air flow coming out. after all we tried to clean it up, not make it dirty. we need to avoid expensive energy. you can easily spend too much on energy if you're not careful. in the longer term you need to bootstrap this from small applications to get to full scale and take advantage of it. these are the challenges.

what got me intrigued very early on was these oaks. there's an artist's rendering how a big air capture device as big as a big windmill might look. i was interested in what does the windmill actually do. it collects kinetic energy from air and every cubic meter delivers about 20 joules of energy. the co-2 combustion equivalent in air is 10,000 joules. if you had to take all the co-2 out of a cubic meter o air and you have to put it back because i burned a thimble of gasoline, how much energy did i get from doing that? 10,000 joules. the wind mill avoids 20 million co-2 emissions. and the air capture device allows some diesel engine to put out 10,000 joules of primary energy. so in a way, the air capture device goes after something

which is 500 times as concentrated in the air as kinetic energy. yet we have no trouble building wind mills. so the fact that it is doable came out of this observation. because the collector of co-2 is equivalent to its carbon footprint or its negative carbon footprint to the carbon avoidance of a wind mill which is several hundred times as big. right? that was what got me started. the observation from this is the first step in the process, just contacting the air may not be easy, but it's not so hard that we don't do it. we do it in a wind mill. and we do it there with much less value coming out. by the way, if they too would cost the same per square meter of frontal area and they would be equally efficient and the wind mill costs 5 cents per kilowatt, mine would cost 50 cents per ton. my conclusion is not that it

would cost 50 cents per on the but my conclusion is this first step isn't going to kill me. what's going to get me is the second step now that i've absorbed the co-2 on some material i have to get it back off. and that will cost me money. i know that from a power plant scrubber. there it costs me money. so -- but the problem now is the same. i have some sorbent. my absorbent had to be a little bit more stronger and it turns the out that scale's rhythmically in the dilution for every factor two in dilution i need to pay an extra amount of energy. if you work it out, we pay about 1 1/2 to 2 times depending on how i do the accounting in energy than the flue gas scrubber must pay in the ideal solution. we cost a little more but not 100 times. we are a little more expensive by not linearly more expensive. here you can see the energies.

so this is how much energy we need for air, this is how much we would need for co-2 from a power plant and what you see here, if the eveningeers can see this, this is rp log t. let me put this out with a fancy formula so you know)zca we act do math on occasion. what thisn basically says, the dynamics works. and by now nobody disagrees with this any more. the thermodynamics of capturing co-2 from the air is pretty benign. the criticism is that that's all good and theoretical but you can't get there. that's what the critics say. and they say, sherwood said, the cost of getting things is linear in the dilution. and here is a national research council study from 1987 in which this is said. he said, look, the cost of metals is proportional linearly proportional to the dilution. and the fact ser that it costs

that's sherwood's rule.5n if we apply sherwood's rule, $10 per ton of air to our problem, we are dead. we're $25,000 a ton of co-2. so we can't do that, right? here's our aspiration where we want to be way below this long curve. i put it here at 20 drl a ton because these are 1985 numbers. so how come we could get there? my first observation is this linearity makes perfect sense jiì% a ton of ore, i can dig it up, i can crush it, i can grind it, i can run one flotation and i can dispose of the tailings, i just spent $10 in 1985 dollars. i'm done. basically what that says is the cost of ore metal extraction is dominated bycáb/ that first co.

that first ñrstep. everything7úprñ else is small potatoes. if that's the case, obviously, if you have to look at twice as much ore, you will spend twice as much money. therefore, sherwood's rule nearly always applies and i would point out that bromine from sea water is not on the curve and the reason it's not we're not crushing and grinding sea water. it follows its own curve. lastly, there's uranium from sea water and that is even better than what we would ever need to get to in order to succeed. and that's because uranium in sea water is 3 parts per billion. and according to mr. sherwood, this$ should cost you $3 millio per kilogram and recent work in japan said well between 200 and 1200 kilograms because it's not done industrialle so there's a fairly big window there. but the thing that was important we make the first step passive. we make braids of resin which

absorbs uranium out of sea we anchor it to the ocean floor sherwood's rule shrwood's rule is rule of thumb.

and we just gave you an example. so nearly as a disclosure, i got involved in this in 2003 when allen wright who you see here in the picture formed a company in tucson. i owned a little piece of it. it turned into kilimanjaro. i still own a little piece. kilimanjaro is now moving into a new area, so i'm actually getting further and further removed from having a direct stake, economic stake in private start-ups on this. i think that's just fine because, in a way, i need to push this in a public arena because that's actually more important that it's visible and can be done. so our goal was to provide a proof of principle. and we honestly stumbled into an anionic exchange resin which had a very remarkable feature. if it's dry it loves co-2 and binds it very tightly. when it's wet it gives it back.

and we could show that if we equilibrated it with co-2 with some pressure and made it wet, the pressure equilibrium would be 500 times larger than when it was struck. we are taking advantage of the fact that the water chemistry with these carbonates in these resins changes the i wa it behaves. what we believe happens and we are trying to prove this in detail, that when it is wet, you have -- and it's empty, it's a carbonate and these big carbonator ions sit between those two positive ammonium ions. as you dry it out, the hydration clouds shrink and carbonate becomes less and less comfortable. at some point it pays energetically to split one of the remaining waters into an h-plus and an oh-minus making a carbonate and a hydroxide. that hydroxide really wants

co-2. this will load up on co-2 but the moment i make it wet the old bicarbonate/carbonate chemistry comes back and you'll have co-2 over that mixture. that you can now move up, pull off, as you pull it off, you drop back to the carbonate and the cycle repeats itself. what drives it is the drying of the system in the open air. if it didn't dry, it couldn't do it. so we are bound to consume water in our process. here are some materials you see in a photograph here. we purchased this actually, this is actually an electro chemical membrane where the resin itself is embedded into a polypropylene sheet in various shapes and forms. after we put it in the sheet we have 1.7 mole and we can hold on the absorption and desorpgs in the maximum swing. in practice we would sing only 30, 40% of that.

so the basic idea is we stand out in the wind, the system dries, its absorbs co-2. as it now has it i put it in a box and i now have several options. one is i can suck out the air before i do anything and make it wet and have an atmosphere of co-2 and nothing much else in the box. i can also absorb that co-2 into an aqueous brine and sodium carbonate to bisodium carbonate or i can just make co-2 enriched air which i might sell to a greenhouse. so in the original version, we actually pulled the vacuum, then compress the co-2 after liquid and that's where we spend all of our energy and that's why we spend 50 kill ojoules or more of power to evacuate system. that is to say if i ran this against the coal plant,

one-third of the co-2 i collected would be emitted. if i plugged into an average u.s. power plug i would have 20% of my co-2 reemitted at some distant power plant if it ran it against wind mills, of course, that wouldn't happen. here is a small demonstration unit. we actually demonstrated this technology in london some years ago where we have the filters and the edges is push pd around by this dyson fence inside the front and you can watch the co-2 box go away and you can put wet ones in and refill it with co-2. and with you can look it up on the internet, we have plants in there and they grow happily with the co-2 we can get off those things when they're wet and we put them outside and they lock up again. the trick in what we did is we made the air carry our work. the air carries kinetic energy. has plenty to run through the filters. we cannot run fast but we can

run steady. the air carries thermal energy. as a matter of fact if you measure very carefully you notice that the energy coming out of the back of our filters is a little cooler than the air coming in. that's where we paid our energy payment. it is technically a very large energy penalty. somebody pointed this out to me. but i'm not paying it. if you hang a towel on the clothesline you're not paying the heat of evaporation although somehow, somewhere the air has paid for it. we see all the air moving through dropped in temperature by about a degree. that's how we end up paying for it. it also carries chemical potential in that it wants to evaporate that water which is on there because the air is not saturate in water. so as a result we are extremely rare in the desert and that's where i would like to do the demonstration but we're not working so well in the tropics because the air is very humid there and we cannot really load. the next question, the next problem is how can we get from these little things we just did

in the laboratory over to the full scale where you actually deal with 30 giga tons of co-2. so we decide -- and this is an artist's concept of an underlying design, a one ton a day unit. think of these as 30 panels up in the air, meter wide, 2 1/2 meters tall and they're exposed to the wind and they will load up in a matter of an hour. so this thing rotates every minute, every two minutes one of them is being removed as full and pushed into one of those boxes downstairs, so there's some robotic system going on which is going to do all of that. and so this is the typical size of a one ton a day unit. by the way, we didn't start with one ton a day. we started with a shipping container and see what we can stuff into it. it turns out it turned out to be almost a ton. that's the size. and if you have 100 million of those, you would collect 36 giga tns of co-2.

if they last ten years you have to build 10 million units. you would ask is that a large number o or a small number? well, we're producing 80 million light trucks and cars, so that sets the scale. right? i would argue we can argue whether it's a car or 1 1/2 or 2 coarse half a car, it's bigger in volume but pretty hollow. i would argue it's comparable. but another point i would make shanghai harbor processes 30 million containers a year and they're full. so there's an industrial capacity behind shanghai which fills 30 million such containers and they're probably on average more full than ours are. so the industrial capacity to do this clearly exists. the question is whether you can figure out the policy which will give us that. but this is the scale we would need to operate on if you wanted to do it all by ourselves.

we decided to stay small because i have been struggling with this observation that this power plant in the front of this car significantly cheaper than this power plant on the other suicide of the picture. typical coal plant is today 1500 dollars a kilowatt. a car engine, not this one but a typical car engine is $10 a kilowatt. they don't last all that long, but mass production really has driven prices down and we feel that if you really want to push cost, you have to go to mass production and drive prices down this way. so rather than thinking of making these things bigger and bigger, we prefer to think of it as making more and more of them. and that gets you into this mass production idea. what we found when we recently wrote a paper on this topic, not in then context of air capture but in general that the reason itse historically you wouldn't have done that is the personal cost

of running that is unaffordable. so the only way you can massi massively poweralize power plants is to have a high degree of automation. until recently this was not available but this is the existence proof that this is doable. this is a google car driving without a driver. so the technology for automating is right now coming online. so therefore, i wouldn't scale up to large sizes. i would instead go massively parallel. that's what drove us to this one ton a day image where you can actually drive the unit to where you want it and if it's not need there any more, you pack it up and drive it somewhere else. and if you need a lot of co-2 in one place then 10,000 of them have to be in one place and you can put that many on a square kilometer without the interference to be too high. so cost issues and economic viability.

i'm going to punt. i'm telling you this right up front because i don't know the answer and you don't know it either and the critic don't know it either. absolutely unpredictable. i paid $20 for my first one. i now pay about 10 cents. i can show you how this can be done for 10 cents, why don't you do it? so the answer is you cannot predict until it happens. so having a long discussion, hence that $20. by that i mean if i did everything just perfectly where would i be in the ice trope. i can tell you so many things.

so there's no underlying thing that's sticking out saying it has to be very expensive. but on the over hand i can prove to you i can get to the we can get to. but that's an ultimate cost, not today's cost. and learning can give you large differences. but i can tell you something else. not in the long run. so we better figure out whether we can get below $100 a ton. if we can, this is a big player in the game. then for about 85 cents a gln of gasoline, i can get my pack. it's changed much more than that over the last few years. and i keep driving my car. so that level could be absorbed. but if it's much more than $100 a ton, other technologies will see substitute. >> can you explain why that is?

>> when i start ed to think abot all of this, i asked myself, what's my budget. and i said, there are coal plants and there are nuclear plants. if i take the difference, i have about $60 per ton. in other words if i spend more than $60 a ton that nuclear plant is cheaper. so over $100 a ton and looking at biofuels f you look at all those other options you have on the table, it becomes more and more interesting to do that and less and less interesting to do this. maybe it's $150 a ton, but somewhere around that level, the alternatives simply look too good and we will phase out completely. there's one exception.

it if climate change really hurts, we'll pay any price to get that back. but we will not keep running on a technology -- it may prove to be the cheapest option. for me it's roughly the tipping point. i can't guarantee that 25 cents, pu i'm confident by that number. here's the technology at $600 a ton. they thought it was $250 but both of them are first of a kind. if you talk to peter eisenbu eisenburger's company, they all say they are bee low $100. i'll be the pessimist and say

they are near $100. if you just reach there and you didn't do anything but make the stuff and let it dry again, you can do this well below $50 a ton, probably at $30 right now. the raw materials are even less than that. i do want to point out the example there, light coming out of your fixtures that are 7,000 times cheaper in the 20a&/açwt century. pv dropped 100 fold. if we went from $600 to $6, we're actually there. so. my view is the $600 number is actually not all that bad. if you try something the first time and actually said i'm trying to corroborate and do nothing fancy and you came out at $600, getting that ten times cheaper doesn't strike me as all that hard. you can see the development in

the company. you can't prove it because they won't let you look at the details. they are pushing towards $100 and there are outside investors who seem to be convince d by these numbers. so i would argue we're on that track. how far on that track, nobody knows. but it couldn't go to $30 or less. i cannot see any obstacle which would say can't possibly do that. that's just saying we don't usually do it that well. ultimately you want to start doing something and co-2 is everywhere available. and then you see the price varies with location. it can be as cheap as $50.

it's ultimately the distance that sets the cost. typically the local demand is quite small. we looked at it at like 50 tons a day. so it's not all that big, but it is doable. so you have these merchant markets. you ship co2 by trucks. also welding supplies turns out same car engines are done with dry ice. so there are huge numbers of tiny applications. you saw chemical commodities. those are probably of limit because nearly always they have a big plant right next to it which makes a lot of co-2 and you can't tie into that. there's biomass production. a lot of people that want algae reactors and need co-2.

and they ask can we get it from the mechanism and since we like things dry and wet cycle, it actually fits very nicely with what we do. greenhouse gets co-2 and people pay that. probably not where you have pipelines, but where you do exploratory work where you managed to pay for the pipeline with a little premium you could take the co-2 from the air. synthetic renewable fuels is another big market and here it can play a big role because some of the co-2 has to come from the air, but the other is you can do it in places you could never get to. it's a lot easier to convince people in the muld of australia or desert to put co-2 right here than in manhattan or washington.

the co-2 is made where people are and therefore both sides are near people. it can do it anywhere and thereby simplify a lot of those issues. i mean the market for greenhouses is not all that large. the market for fizzy drinks is not all that large. the recovery starts to get big and ultimately you have the co-2 omission reductions. so we think glass houses could be 200 million a year. it's not something venture capitalists are salivating over, but it gave you a starting point. a company who wants to do just that. and has negotiated that.

synthetic fuels is a big thing. so we ran on hydrogen. we take water out of the environment, we have renewable energy, we split the high water into hydrogen and oxygen, get the oxygen back into the air maybe and when you need power in the car you consume the hydrogen and make the water again. nice cycle. i'd pay more for the transformation. it's ease rier to have a liquid on board than the hydrogen. so technology with hydrogen and co-2 to make any hydrocarbon exist. it was hard about it is to get the price of the energy lower that this actually works. as a matter of fact, if you have $30 per on to of co-2, if you spend 50% efficiency, you added

for the electricity to the price of gas. so it's the electricity price which will tell you how this game will go. you can think of a biomass substitu substitute. you run pv, which is 30, 40 times as efficient as biophoto synthesis. and an elect liezer to make hydrogen and combine with the co-2 from the air. as you come bust it and put co-2 into the environment, the psych sl closed. my vision of this is you have two complimentary energy carriers. for the stationary application electricity is perfect. it's clean. it's responsive. i turn on that switch and things work. no admission at the point of

consumption. it's very difficult to store it directly, but you can make the electricity at a large plant and that involves co-2 you can easily capture it there. probably much more cheaply than air capture. you have liquid fuel from the other side. they are easily stored. they can store e enormous amounts of energy. you might want to work out how much power you have pouring into your car while you're at a gas station and filling it. it's horrendous power plant as you're spilling the co-2 into the tank. you can use it for on board transportation, but you could also do it for electricity storage and you lose a lot of it. but on the other happened, your capital investment in the storage device is very small sitting on a battery for a day is a quarter per kilowatt hour and that's before i paid for the battery going away because after the cycle it doesn't work anymore. it's just for the interest i

paid to own the battery. it has extremely high energy density. it's 50 mega jewel in a battery. so it's easily stored. but it does produce co-2, and therefore, would need air capture to close the cycle. but with air capture, i can have it. and i just make the point that the crummy can full of gasoline has 100 times the energy density than the nice lithium ion battery in the background. carbon energy systems, you start with all sorts of energy sources. i quoted them from nuclear and renewable, which are carbon free to dirty carbon and petroleum, which goes to the transportation sectors and runs all on natural gas would make electricity as we do right now, but it also would make gas converted to liquid fuel. that goes into the mobile energy

demand. air capture would have to get the co-2 back and into storage. similarly, the co-2 from the electricity production would go into the storage. if on the other hand you went entirely on nonfossil energy, the electricity has no carbon impact, but you would use some of it to make fuels, which are on the food chain. and the liquid fuels would be used in the mobile demand that would lead to emotion missions to the air which you mop back up and feed back into making nor synthesis. and of course, the real world would be some overlap over many of these various options. so let me conclude on a few observations on the policy issues. the fundamental changes you get

is it makes e megss reversible. that's good and bad. and you emit and i don't like it, i can absorb it and later on present it with a bill. i can tell you what it cost me to counter this unfriendly act on your part. i can assign that cost to you. it's not a good reason to delay action. in a way people say it's a moral hazard because you have the ability to make it reversible, but it cuts two ways. the one moral hazard was i don't need to deal with it, i can deal with it later. the other one is oops, i just did it, what are you going to do about it? that you now can fix. that's a fundamental change. if you listen to some of the power you tillties, they basically say we feel for you, we understand the problem, but you wouldn't want to pay what it cost to deal with the problem.

if you say you don't want to deal with the problem, we'll just charge you the air capture, you'd be surprised how fast. because suddenly they have an incentive to deal with the problem which only comes in once they have a competitor that sets the price. if the air capture is not there, it's size to say, trust me, it costs too much and we went through this discussion in the 1980s. we actually had to do it. prices dropped by an order of magnitude in a hurry u. i suspect the same thing will happen here once you force it. one way to force it, you don't want to deal with it, there's somebody that can do it on your behalf. that means you have to make the emission reversible. nevertheless, i would say air capture is the capture of last resort. it's not something you do because it's the easiest. in a way, it's the hardest and it's by definition the hardest because if you had another technology that costs you more, clearly you would do air capture

instead. the beauty is it can handle emissions from all sources. how did you manage to make this co-2. i can say how much did you make? i can get it back. that's the first advantage. you can deal with anything you know. it can't get worse than that. that would be incredibly valuable to know and there's a real value in finding the actual price of air capture. that's the only way to find that out. it also issues feasibility of carbon scenarios. you can't avoid car bob. here you can mop up what you did in the past because it did make emissions reversible. it provides solution to the risk of leaky storage. we have been talking about what happens if you put it on the ground and it comes back. one answer is right now it comes

back right away because we never put it underground in the first place. the other part is there are hazards and damages, but the oil companies have accepted that or they won't do enhanced oil recovery. it gradually leaks back and you didn't get anything for your money. now that we have air capture, this is a risk. it's not i don't know what to do with fellowship can tell you the price is $100 a ton for every ton you have to pay to get the co-2 back and put it back where it belongs. ultimately it encouraged points of capture.

years ago i wrote a paper on this where we argued you really want -- rather than figuring out who made it where and what, we go all the way to the source and say if you extract a ton of carbon from the ground, you need to show a certificate that you or somebody else put another ton of carbon. those two things will balance. you want to dig up a ton, you need a certificate. in the meantime, we need some transitional phase because overnight we cannot create that many certificates. air capture can play u and everybody else can. air capture will set the price. that's the method of last resort. i would argue you back permits with air capture base and

suddenly you are in business and air capture sets the carbon price worldwide. >> a backed permit, you back it up. the way we originally said since we have a cfgggév'ut of sequestration, we do the equivalent of a gold coin. somebody did something to put carbon away. then we said you can get a permit, that's a temporary thing, a bridge to bring between where we are today and where we want to be. and the permit is like a dollar bill. so it can print as many as it needs to keep the price at a reasonable level. the carbon board can turn around and say we start backing them up by putting co-2 away. so you go back on the gold

standard. it actually turned out if you start thinking, the carbon board looks more and more like a federal reserve. in a way it is a funny currency u. if you put air capture behind, you know where the price will end up. it will end up at the price of air capture and anybody who is cheaper gets the rent of being cheaper. so the goal guys will do that. by the way, they only got 80% in the last 20% they still got through air capture buzz it got too expensive. you can balance all this out and say if now a government decides that it wants to have negative e emissions, all it has to do is rip up certificates and you are there.

right now in this picture if some government decided they buy them up and retire them without having any carbon coming out of the ground, you have created a negative emission. you have carbon out of the ground because somebody comes in and purchased them and doesn't use them. for example, a government.

as you tear them up you basically shorten the availability of permits by retiring them you create negative emissions, which have nothing else to go against so you could get into a world where we say we have a goal of getting back half an ppm a year. >> yes, it would. it's very similar. half of the people will tell me what you just told me. the other half say this is a tax. in a way, we are right in the middle. being the truly extreme and in the early days that carbon board has the ability to print perms

chrks are not covered and thereby can set where you want to be. the european trading showed the problem. it's like saying through the federal reserve we're going to set the interest in perpetuity. we set the carbon cap z way in advance and the economy did a somersault and nobody needed it and the price collapsed. if you have somebody who can actually maintain that availability, you get a much smoother ride. that was our idea. now a colleague of mine in oxford had suggested that in the beginning, you should just have to buy one carbon certificate per hundred coming out and gradually that ramps up.

that's disadvantage renewable energy because they don't get that benefit. that's a detail worth thinking through. i think we'll find alternatives to air capture and that's a good thing. you can go to renewable so you didn't need it. and you can't have closed cycle liquid fuels with air capture and all of that would get you out of the ccs. air capture acts as a competitor and the ultimate all emissions. so the competitors occupy sectors. what's left over and i would argue the left over is what's left to air capture. in conclusion it's worth pursuing air capture. it's a powerful tool. it outperforms biomass air

capture. it could be an important policy tool in creating carbon reductions. there's no physical reason why it could not work. it's not an, which do not work. it's carbon negative. technical feasibility has been d demonstrated and very similar processes are routinely in other industries. you think about it, any plant removes the co-2 from the air before it goes in. they are feasible. the aps process is six times too expensive, but it is a first of a kind and it's a boot force technology. i think mass production can drive cost reductions. learning curves in other fields

have reduced hundred fold. the frictional cost is actually very low. i think the risk is mitigated by limiting unit scale of operation ps. i think for $30 million you can build functional prototypes. you don't have to go to power plant scale before you know works. and the return is amply by fied by applicability. you don't just do it in one place, you can do it anywhere. and it's amplified by motivating other option. i think small markets allow you to boot strap, but they are small and they are difficult and a policy intervention. when i u think actually be a long-term thing. i think what i want in the long-term and that's what i'm working on now is to get to

build i building an air capture center that demonstrates the technology and integrates brand new ideas into academia. you want demonstrations, you want deployed prototypes, work all the time and establish rapid prototyping capabilities to build up and improve and learn by doing. because i think that's what it takes. there's a lot of basic science, which we don't yet fully understand. this is a new technology. this is a new separation technology. it's very different from others. we're still beginners. and this is new to systems engineering. the scaling story alone is a whole big story in its own right. and ultimately it's about sustainable signs and how humans interface to all of that. and you need the policy outreach. and i snuck in there. there's an ip pool that needs to

be managed and if we're not careful it will fragment so finely into small companies that nobody can do anything. so all of that needs to be sorted out and worked out. but i do think that new ideas can change the words and they are often unpredicted, unmodelled and they change d th course of future development in very unexpected ways. this one has similar disruptive nature. at this point i think i've gotten through my main section. if you have questions and debate points, i'm more than happy to entertain them. i think i already have a first one there. thank you. >> first question is, what inventions are needed to make this a possibility.

the second is not related in one sense, but it is in the oh sense. could this be tried in a state in the united states where an experimental nation? >> the second answer is yes. i just said $30 million will get you a prototype u. you can take that as a guess. that is certainly within the range. and it wants to be a desert and drive because my particular technology works in such an environment. so that's a good start. so i could see that. so ask what inventions are necessary, let me sort of give you a first ra-ra answer. the first answer is we have made the invention. it works. and i think there's some truth to that. on the other hand, if we want to

stay as small as we are, we better have a large degree of automation. we will only work in certain climates with our technology and you want to get much broader than that. you would like to get much more efficient than we are. i think to come back to this picture, we look about like this. . if that. we're not yet a car. we're still a horse-drawn wagon. so to get from where we are to something which is really well done is a very long way, but if you asked what inventions it takes to get to you, they probably couldn't have answered you either. so there will be a lot of inventions, but i think the stick figure version of it is

working. but from there to having a true breakthrough and having it happen on large scale, i can give you an analogy. if you have five people saying jet engines in airplanes cannot work because they are so horribly inefficient they can't even carry their own weight. in 1938, it happened. in 1950 the first commercial plane was built. so time counts for that in my view in the order of a decade or so. and once it's running, it takes two or three decades to really get big. and i can give you plenty of examples of that. >> part of the difficulty i see is the economic feasibility. you point out the lightbulb and how technology has improved, but most cases there's a pretty obvious economic drivers.

and i think that's missing here. i got an e-mail from my brother, i'm an earth scientist, he's a mechanical engineer. he sends me a graph of carbon in the atmosphere over geologic time. it averaged 3,000 parts per million, 1,500 in the mez sewic. so what's the big deal? europe is tolerating 5,000 in the past. these are the people we have to convince. >> it's hard. to start with, you've got to move. because there was no ice on the planet back then. so the ocean was 70 meters higher. so that's the first thing. the second thing is we evolved.

and my daughter asked me recently what would be my scariest thought about climate change. i said we are designed -- we have a body temperature around 37 degrees. our skin temperature better be 35. if it's not, we overheat. we can get rid of thermoheat by evaporative cooling. it turns out nobody on the planet is the dew point temperature above 31 degrees. warming models suggest that with heavy degree warming, you get a three quarter degree warming in temperature. it makes sense that you will. i would have thought it's 1 to 1, but the model says it's only 3/ 3/4. but surely we could e evolve. if you give it enough time.

but we won't. so the scenario that scares me the most is that you actually have to -- you cannot go outside and you rely on air-conditioning for dear life. it's not a convenience. otherwise, you cannot make it. we know that from mining. miners going into very deep mines have to wear ice vests in order to manage their body temperature. and that's because the humidity is hig]p8á a and the temperatur high. in arizona you can sweat and you cool. and in 36 degree dew point temperature or wet bar temperature, you actually cannot survive. so life u could get rough. and we are making changes on a scale evolution really didn't have to deal with. and i would argue at some level

it's an insurance issue. i would go one step further. where's your pain threshold? you actually have health problems. but lower numbers we will have a pain threshold at some point the coral reeves will dissolve around 1,200 ppm because the ocean got acidic enough that coral reeves cannot dissolve. it turns out calcium carbonate is not solvable because it's super saturated. so we all have some pain threshold. it's way too early to tell about climate change how reliable all these details are that was in 1993 or so. i took the point of view maybe 400 is fine, maybe 500 is fine. maybe 800 is fine. one of those numbers is your limit.

the problem i cannot tell you what it is, if you really get upset about the polar bears being gone, we need to stop a lot earlier. if that's something the world doesn't care about, we can go a little further. but we will have to stop somewhere because the pain got large enough. so what convinced my back then if we have to get to a carbon economy, the only question is, when? the worst mistake i can make is i'm 50 years too early. >> i get all that. i made those arguments with my brother. but it doesn't convince him in the least. and i don't think he's untypical. >> let me try another thing out. let me say it for the sake of argument for 50 cents a ton, the problem is solved. would he invest into that? because i have the impression,

and this is part of the political debate, i have the impression that this is typical human nature if i tell you you really have to change your ways in order to avoid some damage, you're going to tell me i'm lying because you really don't want to change your ways. so i'm arguing a lot of that denial is literally that. it's denial. i don't want to hear it because it really changes my life. so the reason i'm working on technological fixings in a way is i want to get out of that debate. i don't want to tell you you have to change your life. we can have that debate offline for other reasons. we can argue whether you should live this way or not, but i don't want to tie it to climate change. you pay a little bit of money and the problem is gone. bad things can happen because we don't know what the planet will do. and you won't like to live in an ice age nor would you like to live at 3,000 ppm.

>> your one-ton unit, how much energy does it use, number one, and second ly, if you did a lif cycle analysis of the energy that went into building of the unit, which sometimes you can see charts where windmills made in china with electricity from coal power might, have you done this analysis? how energy intensive is the unit? where would you the get the energy in your desert environment? just a little bit more on that. >> okay. a ton a day is a quarter more. i just told you it's 50 kill

jewels per mold. so divide by four. the net total is that i would emit some co2 elsewhere in this process. but this is just comparing the operational process. i cannot really do a life cycle until we have a real unit, but i can give you a rule of thumb. most equipment has a few times its own weight. and if you look at this thing, it's tons of stuff. as a matter of fact, i know exactly how much carbon is in the resin because it's effectively oil. so there's the fact of three. so give or take, take that weight a few times, we are collecting one ton a day in

weeks or months, i have collected more co-2 that is embedded into the machine. i can't tell you this within accuracy because the equal machine habit been decided. but i'm reasonable confident pst the same argument for a car. i can guarantee over a lifetime it puts out a lot co-2 than into making it. this is an inverse car. as a matter of fact, it's like 15 cars running all the time. it collects far more co-2 than it's own weight and something ought to be horribly bad in its own carbon footprint for it to not make good on this in a short amount of time. >> second question, elaborate, you mentioned the tree, you e showed a picture of the tree. it looks like an artificial tree and alluded to a thousand. could you elaborate the benefits

of this machine versus just planting more trees. which is probably a question you get all the time. >> the analogy it would make, can you draw a plow with a horse? of course, you can. would you rather pull it with a tractor? yes. the tractor is not good at horse racing and doesn't look all that good, but the bottom line is we're specialists in collecting co-2. we absorb per unit area of surface area over which we make contact significantly more. but we also don't worry about shading. so we therefore can pack them a lot more tightly. so as a consequence, if you gave me an object which is the size of a tree, has a cross section and the wind blows through, in

our case you can tell that the co-2 on the other side is noticeably lower. in the tree's case, you cannot. but the bottom line is we are over the lifetime of the tree, if you divide that by the number of days, you come about a thousand apart. >> two questions. at least one of which may be really premature. the first question is just could you clarify again. i'm not an engineer. could you explain what the status of this technology is maybe in terms of how much years away is this from either a unit or commercial viability? and the other question i have is is there any regulator around in the u.s. or elsewhere that's

actually talking about giving any kind of regulatory credit for somebody who comes up with a widget that does air capture? or is that discussion premature? >> the first question, let me tell you where we are. you saw in one of the pictures, i think you alluded to it, a prototype that worked slightly differently, which was about the size of a doorway. what we have right now in our system is laboratory scale things. but they do work the entire loop. so we can actually have air in the lab tests moved by the fans in the air and the air handling system in the room is good enough to do this. the material will give it back up and we can get it back up to 5%. my goal for the next year is to have a small e device outside,

which runs continuously and you can watch on the web. it will tell you how much co-2 it collected today and all of that. so at that level, we are at right now. how long it will take from that to industrial scale depends a lot on how much impetus is there. the companies that are in had this space have splurged money for years and then they are looking for more money and that all takes time. it's a tedious and slow process. if they have a large program to make this happen n a matter of a few years, you could see whether we are making progress and you could have this thing operating at a reasonable scale, which for me would be kilograms to hundreds of kilograms a day in a practical manner. my goal is to have something like that at the university in a matter of four years.

if i have the budget for that, i certainly can do that. if i have to scrounge for the budget, i will get delayed. the scale moving forward from there is very difficult. it depends on what environment you're in. the startups all started from the presumption that there is nobody to help them. and that they have to find an economic market that is driven by its own dynamics. and that's not all that easy, particularly looking for venture capital. if i come to you, most venture guys say this can never grow to a multibillion-dollar affair, so forget it. nobody says how about there's no regulation which makes that happen, so forget it. so you're caught in that no man's land and it's hard to get out. right now a new company started, it's a little premature to talk

about it in detail, but they want to feed co-2 to greenhouses but they want to be done in a few years. so i think we are at the verge of something, but we are not there. if you compared me, i would say we are like windmills in the 1950s and '60s. we are like solar panels in the '60s. yes, it works, but we're far from really being there. and that's why it takes solace that it's cheaper over time. we have to learn that too, but you could argue that that version of that social panel actually already exists because the space station has to scrub out its co-2. but their price is no object. by the way, that was exactly what happened to the first solar

panel. it was out and price was no object so nobody pushed the cost no down. so what's different for us is he has to drive the cost down. if you don't succeed with that, my view is you can only find it out by doing. so you can think of this as a bet you have to place and you may lose it. chances of losing are very small. if you're not directly involved, you may say he's not right about it. he has a 30% chance of losing. but i think it's worth trying because the potential benefit is enormous. and the only way to find out is you can't learn by doing without doing. >> so is kilimanjaro still

operating and are they pursuing this technology? that's the first question. the second is do you have a point of view about the alternati alternative technologies that the others are starting up? do you see a path to get to $100 a ton or lower threshold. >> kilimanjaro is still operating entity. they are right now pushing other things than direct air capture. so i'm fairly far removed in san francisco. but they exist -- they are planning to do things. the other players, i would argue, it varies. first, i would say keep in mind if we hadn't stumbled into the humidity swing and decided this is so much better than anything

else we saw we would be doing something that's similar to global thermostat because we're also looking at all sorts of things and expecting to have a thermal fling. i think using sodium or potassium hydroxide to carbonate is really an uphill battle. and if you go back to 1999 when said this demonstrates that it can be done, but we got to get off that hydroxide. so i have the least belief in technologies like david keith, which used that. we started there. we made it work. we had a machine, which was fairly big and worked extremely well. we decided we don't want to play this game any longer. we need to have find better ways of doing it.

but we learned a lot from that exercise, and so i think all of the competitors learn a lot from their exercises and gradually they will get better in their various natures. . if you ask me to operate in the tropics, it's very miserable. we wrote a paper where we tried out some islands because a colleague of mine said this is the place to be. for us it's miserable and cold and rainy. it was a good exercise to see whether i could make it work or not. cost was a factor too, but we made it work. we did it in the lab, of course, but we created conditions. high wind speeds, very cold, slightly above freezing temperatures. it's like iceland. and we found we can make it work, but even in the paper, i

said, this is something for somebody with a thermal swing. it's not designed for us. this is an uphill battle for our technology. so i suspect there will be multiple technologies for different applications. we haven't really begun to explore the space of different reservoi reservoirs. we haven't really begun to look at all of that. so i think there's an enormous amount of room. so you're asking a question sticking with your analogy but going a little earlier and saying should the car have a steam engine, electric engine. sometimes you revisit this 50 years later so there are lots of various technologies. i think these thermal swings can get there too. if you insist on pushing over the fan, you have very limited power to do that because

otherwise you run out of budget, but it is doable. so i think among all the players, there are a lot of good ideas and how this will play out, only time will tell. if you can do this in an academic setting, i can try out all sorts of technologies not necessarily tied to a particular player. that's what i really want to do is build a group which can talk to different industrial partners and make different things work. that's how we have to make it happen. >> talking about the economics of this. the cost of it are born by individual or maybe even the national government, but the benefits are for everyone. how would you figure that

economics of the thing across the world? >> well, right now we are trying to put individual countries and convince them to have a cap. and its successes haven't really been all that successful. but you come in from the trade side and you say, you know, you are putting out far more co-2 than we do and exporting goods into this country and we have rules about it because ultimately this is the tragedy of the comments. you have to find a way of dealing with it. if you don't have one big guy that can control it, tough figure it out in interactions. so you say, okay, if you do that, we'll import these goods, but we will adjust your carbon balance accordingly. and we will charge that as a

condition of bringing it in. and you might even get it through the wto because you performed a service. so it is not impossible, but it's a very big uphill battle. and that is the fundamental challenge. this goes back to your question in a round about way, how do we convince everybody to play? and one of the things air capture does change is it says if you don't play, i can do it on your behalf and, a, i'm mad because i had to pay for it, and b, i was trying to stick it back to you. and that's new. everybody says now that it's out, there's nothing we can do anymore. so that does change the debate. >> can you describe the ideal

climatic conditions or hydraulic conditions? >> ours specifically? >> yeah, because the -- >> there are different systems with different features. ours likes dry air. . my sort of qualitative test is how long does it take a towel to dry? and the longer it takes you to dry that towel, the harder it is for us to run. for us the perfect place is a desert because it's warm and things dry incredibly fast. then it is ready to pick up co-2 very, very rapidly. now the next part is i do need water to get it back. so i don't want to be in a place where access to water is impossible. we have several methods of doing it. some of them can actually use

sea water. one way of doing this is to coat material with a poor surface. co-2 will go through, water vapor will go through, but salt water will not. we demonstrated that -- we actually took a construction material. you can wrap our stuff and dip it in water and will release co-2 and it will not pick up the salt. >> does wind affect it? >> that's a complicated quest n question. the way i would answer is wind is necessary if -- think of this as a box. i put it up and the air can go through. if no air goes through, i will take whatever air is in it and strip all of the co-2 out and it stops. if you tell me the flow is very, very slow, then what i will do

is i will saw my box into thinner boxes and put them side by side. right now our cost is the box, not the frame which holds it. as long as that is true, we can let the wind speed go down and out. basically you tell me what is your minimum wind speed at which you want to run, and i tell you how thick your boxes are and the lower your wind speed, the smaller i have to make it. it's like a sale. the lower the wind speeds, the thinner it has to be. the we can operate down to half a meter a second, which is really, really low. if you get below that, things really mess up. >> how much water would you need? >> we right now -- we have run outside. we can wash the dust off.

yes, it collects dust, no question about it. but if you hose it off, it's just fine. we found that we're in need of a power plant for awhile. we could actually see a gradual deterioration because of this. you can wash it in sodium carbonate and it recovers completely. so most things are fine, but we use about our water consumption is 10 to 1. so i have a colleague at oxford who argues that we should do this to grow crops indoors in places that don't have enough rainfall and we could operate at 1% of the natural rainfall if you harvest at that we would still be operating because we don't need that much water. so he says you kwould grow crops

indoors in the entire sahara because the rainfall is everywhere, at least 1% of what you need to actually grow crops outside. so he sees this as a water conserving mechanism by putting a lid on the plant growth. and that's a possibility. but we are consuming water. we could be consuming sea water. it's easier if you give me fresh water, but it doesn't have to be ultrapure. >> could you go over how the resin works again to capture the co-2? >> the resin we purchased is fairly common.

they have a number of companies who have similar ones. they are typically toly sty reens and have ammonium ion as the positive charge positive clark embedded into that resin. so think of having a nitrogen atom with a positive charge and four connections to the polymer resin behind it. and that, these positive clarks have a counter ion, which when you buy this stuff it's a chloride. so there are positive charges and negative charges. and you can wash this in hydroxide and the sodium ion, the chloride ions get washed out. and the hydroxide ions will replace them. so when we started, we said that stuff has to pick up co2, because it's a hydroxide. and we liked it because up to this moment we had worked with materials dipped into sodium hydroxide solutions. so we wanted to know whether

this is faster or slower, and i made a prediction it will be significantly quicker. because the surfaces are rough, so it should go faster. and true enough, when we took it in the hydroxide form, it absorbed co2 roughly 15 times faster than the parallel sheet, which was soaked in sodium hydroxide, one more or two more sodium hydroxide solution. then what we noticed, is the sodium hydroxide exposed to air, it cannot go to bicarbonate. we noticed early on that we pick the up way too much co2. as we started to measure it, it became very clear our stuff was going straight to the buy carbona carbonate. so every single one converted it self into a bicarbonate ion.

we had some irregularities in the data we couldn't understand until we timely realized we couldn't control for the moisture level. thouf that we controlled for the moisture level we suddenly saw that the loading state we entered up was extremely sensitive to the water loading of the material. and so what we then found is that the water controls the affinity to co2. if it's dry, it has a 500 times higher equilibrium than when it's wet. so therefore, you can load it all the way to the bicarbonate at 400 ppm. and if you then dip it in water or expose it to 100% relative humidity, it will go in a small, confined volume all the way to 20% co2. we found we can hold roughly 5% in a system with a little bit of

counter streaming at the exit. we can hold the stream with 5% co2 in the exit, or if we did it in a vacuum, we could hold 5% of an atmosphere of co2 in that unit and then extract that from the system. and that's what we did. one way of doing it by the way, is we used liquid nitrogen to freeze it up. and we instantly created two atmospheres of co2 by letting it warm up again. but the basic concept as far as as we can tell is that the hydration clouds of these carbonate ions, in these tiny pockets of polymer, right, actually act differently than in free water, fully wet, and as the ions, the hydration clouds shrink, the relative eke lib yum between carbonate, bicarbonate and hydroxide shifts in favor of

getting rid of the bicarbonate. and the hydroxide has a high affinity to co2. so that's how it seems to happen. we are now building molecular dynamics models, and i can't really talk about it yet because we're not finished. but the preliminary answers look like we can recreate the phenomenon in silicone. it actually works in the computer.÷$óe you actually see a humidity effect there as well, if you take, for example, two graph fain sheets. put some granules and put water molecules and carbonate ions, you see the same shift of eke lib yum we see in the real polymers. so you see it quantitative. so we brief it all makes sense. we now have to do a lot of speck tros copy and work out all the

details. but we also found nobody has the instrumentation to do this. people haven't really studied systems where you have absorbant with two strongly-acting sore baits, because both water and co2 get absorbed on the system, but they strongly interact with each other. and ha happens is, when you put the system in eke lib yum, and you're now einlated with co2 and i now feed it a little bit extra co2, we can observe that that co2 comes off and waters come on. if on the other hand you push on some water by raising the p -- the water pressure a little, it then spits out some co2. as a consequence, while it's absorbing co2 on the outside it

cools, because it's pushing water out, right? and the energy which makes this work, and that's why people say that can't work because he gets something for nothing. no, we don't. we're evaporating water. and that's how we pay for it. and the energy for that we can account for, and it comes out just right. so that was a more technical -- >> thank you so much for coming. >> you ran me ragged. i'm not sure. [ applause ] >> thank you. this weekend on the c-span networks, american history tv is live from baltimore's ft. mchenry for the 200th anniversary of the star-spangled banner. and later at 6:00 eastern on american history tv we'll tour ft. mchenry and learn how war

came to baltimore in 1814, about the british barrage on the fort and how francis scott key was there to witness the fight. saturday, bill clinton and george w. bush. and sunday evening at 8:00, q&a with author rick pearlstein. and on c-span 2, on book tv, ken silverstein on the secret world of oil. and at 6:45. kirsten gillibrand on her life in politics and her call for women to rise up and make a difference in the world. find our television schedule at c-span.org. call us at 202-626-3400. e-mail us at comments @c-span.org.

join the c-span conversation. follow us on facebook and twitter. at an event in washington, hosted by the national u.s. arab chamber of commerce diplomats discussed the business climate in north africa. they're joined by the u.s. assistant the secretary of state. this is two and a half hours. >> if i may invite our chairman to the stage. thank you. on behalf of the national u.s. arab chamber of commerce, i'm delighted to welcome you this morning to this north africa business forum. it's taking place in the backdrop of the first ever

africa summit, to be held in the united states. we have an outstanding roster today, both from the arab and the american side. i particularly want to thank the assistant secretary of state, the honorable charles rifkin for being here today and for leading a delegation of several of our american ambassadors. mr.rifkin is no stranger to africa. he has diplomacy in his blood, be being the son of a distinguished ambassador, william rifkin. charles brings many years of experience in both business and diplomacy to his position as assistant secretary of state in the bureau of economic and business affairs. it's a very key post at the center of america's commercial relations with the world.

american business is very fortunate to have him there. had mr. rifkin will speak to us at 9:45 and introduce the american ambassadors with him. but at this time, i have pleasure to introduce from the floor, our assistant secretary of state of state ann patterson of the near east bureau. she has a crammed schedule during this summit, as you can imagine. but she is kindly dropping by to underscore the importance of north africa to the united states and to encourage fwrart commercial cooperation between us. ann is the senior state official for the neares esast. she's a career ambassador who has served in four countries, most recently egypt. thank you, ann, for being here this morning and for your long service to the country.