The Potential

The ability to remove CO2 emissions from the atmosphere is the exciting promise of air-capture technology. In April of 2007, GRT announced that it had made a critical step forward in realizing this promise:

A pre-prototype model of the GRT ACCESS™ air-capture system removed carbon dioxide from the ambient air and delivered it as a gas stream for subsequent processing or delivery to the marketplace.

Major international efforts are already underway to store the CO2 that will be captured from power plants and other large industrial sources. Collectively this technology is referred to as carbon capture and storage (CCS) or simply carbon sequestration. GRT’s air-capture technology will play an important role in CCS. Demand for CO2 credits will increase markedly as cap-and-trade systems designed to offset GHG emissions are implemented more and more widely. In typical field installations, the ACCESS™ unit could be located at the point of geological sequestration or CO2 end-use significantly reducing handling and transportation costs. CCS promises to be a multi-billion dollar market opportunity driven by regulatory regimes both in the U.S. and worldwide.

Air-capture will also open or expand new markets for CO2. One example is controlled environment agriculture (CEA) where increasing the level of CO2 in a greenhouse enhances plant growth and improves both product quality and yield – critical to feeding an ever-expanding world population and satisfying an increasingly sophisticated high-end consumer. Tying a GRT air-capture system to a greenhouse complex would ensure that CO2 was always available to the grower at the desired concentration and at an affordable and predictable price. A related market is urban agriculture, also called BIA or building-integrated agriculture. In BIA, greenhouses or greenhouse-like structures are installed on the roofs or built into the walls of schools, public buildings and residential apartment units. CO2 enrichment is also critical to ensuring optimum yields of algae and other crops being cultivated worldwide as feedstocks for bioethanol and biodiesel production.

CO2 is already an important industrial chemical with a myriad of end-uses ranging from food processing and food transportation to water treatment, plastic and rubber foaming, dry ice for metal cleaning/blasting, beverage carbonation, fumigants in grain storage and fire extinguisher fluid.

Currently worldwide demand for CO2 is estimated to exceed 80 million tons annually. The global CO2 market will grow strongly to meet the physical supply engendered by a robust CO2 regulatory framework.

Not all CO2 in the atmosphere is the result of power generation, industrial production or the growing transport sector. Forest fires and agricultural burning, volcanic eruptions, loss of natural vegetation through land clearing and even methane hydrate release from melting permafrost, all impact the level of greenhouse gases in the environment. These other sources of CO2 are also a worthy target for air-capture.

Reducing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, regardless of the source, is critical. Air- capture can achieve what traditional stationary capture can not: it can reduce existing CO2 concentrations as opposed to simply preventing additional CO2 emissions. This is what makes the further development of air-capture so critical to future climate change mitigation success.