In the scrublands of central Kenya, technicians are working around four large metal tanks that use heat from the Earth’s crust to pull carbon dioxide from the air.
It’s part of an effort to slow down global warming, Reuters reported. Kenya sits on the Great Rift Valley, a deep tectonic crack stretching about 7,000 kilometers through Eastern Africa.
The country produces nearly half of its power from geothermal energy, which gives off a lot of excess heat.
That makes it a good place to develop Direct Air Carbon Capture, or DACC, said Hannah Wanjau, an engineer at Octavia Carbon, the company behind the machines.
DACC is an energy-heavy process. It works by moving air across a chemical filter.
When the filter fills up with CO₂, it’s heated in a vacuum to release the gas, which can then be stored underground or bottled.
Kenya also has many trained scientists and engineers, as the government focuses on education.
That’s another reason why a project like this can work there. Octavia uses Kenya’s extra geothermal steam to run its machines in a cost-effective way.
The area’s basalt rock is also suitable for storing CO₂ safely underground, said Wanjau.
“We’ve already seen the effects of climate change, so we want something that’s going to work very fast, and remove huge amounts of CO₂,” she said.
Each of Octavia’s machines can capture about 10 tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s equal to what about 1,000 trees can absorb.
The company plans to sell these captured emissions as carbon credits to businesses and governments looking to offset their own pollution. But the bigger picture is still challenging.
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According to a report co-written by University of Oxford researchers, the world will need to remove 7 to 9 billion tons of CO₂ from the air every year by the middle of this century to avoid going above 1.5°C of warming from pre-industrial times.
That goal was set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Last year was the first year global warming passed that level.
“Critics would be right to point out that what we currently do is a drop in the ocean,” said Martin Freimüller, Octavia Carbon’s co-founder.
He plans to launch a plant that can capture 1,000 tons of CO₂ per year by next year.
“But the point is that scaling from 1,000 tons (of carbon dioxide) to a billion tons, still starts with 1,000 tons.”
Groups like Greenpeace say the carbon capture industry is used by oil and gas companies to “greenwash” and slow the shift away from fossil fuels.
But the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says carbon capture will still be needed to lower emissions in hard-to-clean sectors like steel and cement.
Octavia has signed a deal with Cella Mineral Storage, a New York-registered start-up.
If things go as planned, Kenya could become the second country after Iceland to inject air-captured CO₂ underground by early next year.
The company has already signed contracts worth about $3 million in carbon credits, with about half paid in advance.
That covers around 40% of the planned plant’s total output, Freimüller said.
“The world often thinks about Africa still as a hapless victim of climate change,” he said, pointing to stronger floods and droughts hitting the continent.
But Octavia Carbon wants to prove that Africa can also be part of the solution.
“Technology made in Kenya and developed in Kenya, for the use of the world,” he said.
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Image Credit: Reuters
