TY - JOUR
T1 - Buying down the Cost of Direct Air Capture
AU - Lackner, Klaus S.
AU - Azarabadi, Habib
N1 - Funding Information:
$50 million is well within the reasonable range of current annual research and development investments in sustainable energy technologies. Single projects on point source capture received larger funding from the Department of Energy (DOE). According to a congressional report, in the fiscal year 2018, the US DOE spent over $4.5 billion (2016 dollar) on research and development with more than $1.5 billion on fossil and renewable energy technologies alone. $50 million is less than 3% of the R&D budget that DOE annually spends on nuclear and renewable energies. Moreover, a report by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) states that in the fiscal year 2016, the total energy subsidies and support from the US government came to about $15 billion (2016 dollar).
Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the support by Shell’s New Energy Research and Technology (NERT) Program. We thank the initial support by the NERT’s Long Range Research Platform to conceive of these concepts. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the research that led to this publication, from The Global KAITEKI Center at ASU, a university-industry partnership between ASU and The KAITEKI Institute of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation. We especially thank Robert Page, Michael Hanemann, Maureen Lackner, and Stephanie Arcusa for reading the manuscript and providing valuable comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Chemical Society.
PY - 2021/6/9
Y1 - 2021/6/9
N2 - Direct air capture (DAC) shows exceptional promise for carbon dioxide removal on the scale required to fulfill the Paris Agreement. Even though planetary limitations do not constrain the scale of DAC, the currently high cost puts its feasibility in question. By observing cost reduction pathways of similar technologies, this paper explores the cost reduction opportunities that result from learning-by-doing. We developed an analytical buy-down model to investigate what it would take to lower the cost of DAC to $100/ton CO2. Our goal is not to accurately predict future costs, but our analysis demonstrates that if DAC follows a path similar to that of comparable, successful technologies, a capital investment of several hundred million dollars could buy down the cost of DAC. This buy-down effort at a relatively low cost will quantify the learning potential of DAC and show whether its costs can be reduced (like solar photovoltaic modules) or whether despite the investment it remains expensive (like nuclear power generation).
AB - Direct air capture (DAC) shows exceptional promise for carbon dioxide removal on the scale required to fulfill the Paris Agreement. Even though planetary limitations do not constrain the scale of DAC, the currently high cost puts its feasibility in question. By observing cost reduction pathways of similar technologies, this paper explores the cost reduction opportunities that result from learning-by-doing. We developed an analytical buy-down model to investigate what it would take to lower the cost of DAC to $100/ton CO2. Our goal is not to accurately predict future costs, but our analysis demonstrates that if DAC follows a path similar to that of comparable, successful technologies, a capital investment of several hundred million dollars could buy down the cost of DAC. This buy-down effort at a relatively low cost will quantify the learning potential of DAC and show whether its costs can be reduced (like solar photovoltaic modules) or whether despite the investment it remains expensive (like nuclear power generation).
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U2 - 10.1021/acs.iecr.0c04839
DO - 10.1021/acs.iecr.0c04839
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85108410705
SN - 0888-5885
VL - 60
SP - 8196
EP - 8208
JO - Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research
JF - Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research
IS - 22
ER -