This is a free public event. Free parking available.
Capturing CO 2 from the air at a concentration of 0.04% seems absurd, when after decades of talk we are only now close to financing capture from power plants where CO 2 concentrations are greater than 10%; but thermodynamics tells us that air capture should be feasible. We are working to turn theory into engineering reality using a conservative design built on a titanate-based technology for caustic recovery derived from the pulp and paper industry.
Air capture could play an important enabling role in solving the climate problem by breaking the link between emission source and capture technology, by enabling carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels, and in the long-run by, enabling negative global emissions as a tool manage future climate risk.
Speaker Bio
David Keith is the Director of ISEEE Energy and Environmental Systems Group. He is also the Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment and he is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and Department of Economics, University of Calgary. He is also the Adjunct Professor Department of EPP, Carnegie Mellon. Professor Keith works near the interface between climate science, energy technology and public policy. His technical and policy work addresses the capture and storage of CO2, the economics and climatic impacts of large-scale wind power, the use of hydrogen as a transportation fuel, and the technology and implications of geoengineering. Extensively published, he is also very active in national and international advisory committees. Most recently he was a member of Canada’s ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force, of the InterAcademy Council (IAC) study on Transitions to Sustainable Energy, and of Canada’s National Advisory Panel on Sustainable Energy Technology.