Experts estimate that the global production and disposal of plastics emits nearly 2 billion tons of greenhouse gases per year. The vast majority of these materials end up in landfills, but what if we could repurpose some of that waste to remove planet-warming emissions from the atmosphere?
A team of researchers in Denmark has discovered a way to do just that. In a new study, published September 5 in the journal Science Advances, they transformed decomposed #1 plastic—also known as PET (polyethylene-terephthalate) plastic—into an efficient carbon capture material.
“The beauty of this method is that we solve a problem without creating a new one,” lead author Margarita Poderyte, a chemistry PhD candidate at the University of Copenhagen, said in a release. “By turning waste into a raw material that can actively reduce greenhouse gases, we make an environmental issue part of the solution to the climate crisis.”
Two big problems, one innovative solution
As global temperatures rise, the need to mitigate planet-warming pollutants—such as carbon dioxide—is increasingly urgent. This has led scientists to develop ways to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere in addition to cutting emissions. At the same time, the growing amount of plastic waste in landfills, oceans, and pretty much everywhere else on Earth has led to a global microplastics crisis that threatens human and ecosystem health.
Poderyte and her colleagues hope their new approach to carbon capture can kill two birds with one stone. Through a chemical reaction known as aminolysis, they upcycled PET plastic—mainly used in plastic bottles and food packaging—into a CO2 sorbent called BAETA.
This material has a powdery structure that can be made into pellets that are very effective at grabbing CO2 molecules. One pound of BAETA can absorb up to 0.15 pounds of CO2, which is quite efficient compared to most current commercial systems.
BAETA is also more heat-resistant than other amine sorbents, remaining stable at temperatures up to 482 degrees Fahrenheit (250 degrees Celsius). However, it requires a greater thermal energy input to reach maximum CO2 absorption and to release the captured carbon for storage or conversion to other resources. This may lead to greater energy costs, but the researchers believe BAETA can provide a scalable, cost-effective carbon capture system.
Tapping a perniciously abundant resource
Humans produce immense amounts of PET plastic waste, much of which accumulates in oceans. Researchers recently discovered 27 million tons of plastic particles floating in the North Atlantic, the ecosystem impacts of which are still largely unknown.
“If we can get our hands on the highly decomposed PET plastic floating in the world’s oceans, it will be a valuable resource for us as it’s so well suited for upcycling with our method,” Poderyte said. She and her colleagues hope BAETA can help eliminate marine plastic pollution while also tackling the climate crisis.
“We’re not talking about stand-alone issues, nor will the solutions be,” co-author Jiwoong Lee, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, said in the release. “Our material can create a very concrete economic incentive to cleanse the oceans of plastic.”
Oslo —The world’s first commercial service offering carbon storage off Norway’s coast has carried out its inaugural CO2 injection into the North Sea seabed, the Northern Lights consortium operating the site said Monday.
The project by Northern Lights, which is led by oil giants Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, involves transporting and burying CO2 captured at smokestacks across Europe. The aim is to prevent the emissions from being released into the atmosphere, and thereby help halt climate change.
“We now injected and stored the very first CO2 safely in the reservoir,” Northern Lights’ managing director Tim Heijn said in a statement. “Our ships, facilities and wells are now in operation.”
In concrete terms, after the CO2 is captured, it is liquified and transported by ship to the Oygarden terminal near Bergen on Norway’s western coast.
The liquefied CO2 (LCO2) carrier Northern Pioneer of Northern Lights is pictured at Akershuskaia, Oslo, June 17, 2025 in connection with the international high-level conference on carbon management.
STIAN LYSBERG SOLUM/NTB/AFP/Getty
It is then transferred into large tanks before being injected through a 68-mile pipeline into the seabed, at a depth of around 1.6 miles, for permanent storage.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has been listed as a climate tool by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), especially for reducing the CO2 footprint of industries such as cement and steel that are difficult to decarbonize.
The first CO2 injection into the Northern Lights geological reservoir was from Germany’s Heidelberg Materials cement plant in Brevik in southeastern Norway.
But CCS technology is complex, controversial and costly.
Without financial assistance, it is currently more profitable for industries to purchase “pollution permits” on the European carbon market than to pay for capturing, transporting and storing their CO2.
The Northern Lights carbon storage site in Øygarden, Norway, is seen on May 28, 2025.
The Washington Post/Getty
Northern Lights has so far signed just three commercial contracts in Europe. One is with a Yara ammonia plant in the Netherlands, another with two of Orsted’s biofuel plants in Denmark, and the third with a Stockholm Exergi thermal power plant in Sweden.
Largely financed by the Norwegian state, Northern Lights has an annual CO2 storage capacity of 1.7 million tons, which is expected to increase to 5.5 million tons by the end of the decade.
While efforts such as Northern Lights are focused on capturing carbon directly from the most highly-polluting sources — industrial smoke stacks — there have also been efforts launched to capture the gas from the ambient air, an even more controversial methodology.
Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of environmental engineering, told CBS News earlier this year that he was dubious of the motivations for and the efficacy of both kinds of carbon capture, and he said bluntly that “direct air capture is not a real solution. We do not have time to waste with this useless technology.”
Jacobson thinks direct air capture, in particular, is a boondoggle, and more effort should be focused on switching to clean energy sources.
Currently, the U.S. gets about 60% of its electricity from fossil fuels.
“You have to think about who’s proposing this technology,” Jacobson said. “Who stands to benefit from carbon capture and direct air capture? It’s the fossil-fuel companies.”
“They’re just saying, ‘Well, we’re extracting as much CO2 as we’re emitting. Therefore, we should be allowed to keep polluting, keep mining,” Jacobson told CBS News, adding that his stance has not made him popular among many in the energy sector.
“Oh, yeah, diesel people hate me, gasoline people hate me, ethanol people hate me, nuclear people hate me, coal people hate me. They do, because I’m telling the truth,” he said. “We don’t need any of these technologies.”
HOUSTON, August 26, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– GeoMark Research, a leading geochemistry and PVT service provider, and Petricore, a global oil services company renowned for its expertise in rock and fluid analyses, are pleased to announce their collaboration to offer an integrated suite of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) services. This partnership combines the strengths and capabilities of both companies to deliver comprehensive solutions for the energy industry’s CCS needs.
GeoMark Research, with over 33 years of operation, has consistently remained dedicated to its mission of providing trusted geochemical & PVT services and data. Leveraging its extensive industry experience, a global presence with three offices, and a robust team of over 35 employees, the company continues to deliver unparalleled excellence in subsurface fluid characterization and monitoring.
Petricore, with more than 40 years of operational history, offers extensive services in rock and fluid analyses, wellsite, and digital rock analysis. With a global footprint of three offices and a team of over 250 dedicated professionals, Petricore has become a technical leader in the energy sector, committed to maximizing the value of laboratory and wellsite services for operating and service companies.
The combined expertise of GeoMark Research and Petricore spans every critical phase of CCS projects, including:
Location Assessment: Utilizing GeoMark’s RFDbase for global rock, fluid, pressure, and temperature data to inform CO2/brine/seal interaction models.
Reservoir Assessment: Comprehensive petrophysical evaluations to identify potential CO2 reservoir targets and assess caprock integrity and wellbore stability.
Seal Assessment: Detailed analysis of caprock integrity, including rock strength, stress, ductility, and mineral reaction risk.
Monitoring: Implementing advanced geochemistry workflows such as PlumeView™ to monitor CO2 plume movement and reservoir seal integrity.
This strategic collaboration brings together GeoMark Research’s extensive geochemical and PVT expertise with Petricore’s advanced rock and fluid analysis capabilities. Together, they offer a complete CCS solution that includes routine and special core analysis, digital rock analysis, and innovative monitoring techniques to ensure the safety and effectiveness of CCS projects.
“The combined GeoMark Research and Petricore offering for CCS projects, which brings together the expertise, knowledge and solutions of two of the most innovative and dynamic companies in the energy industry, is truly a one-stop shop for characterizing and monitor such projects throughout its life cycle – from location assessment to CO2 plume surveillance – using comprehensive databases, geochemistry analysis, fluid tests and laboratory and digital rock studies,” stated Carlos Palavicini, CEO at the Petricore Group.
Ethan Brown, President of GeoMark Research, added: “At GeoMark Research, our mission has always been to deliver trusted geochemical and PVT data that enhances subsurface understanding. Partnering with Petricore allows us to extend our expertise into the critical arena of Carbon Capture and Sequestration. Together, we offer a comprehensive suite of services that elevates the precision and innovation of the CCS field. This collaboration represents a powerful union of our strengths, providing the energy industry with the trusted solutions it needs for a sustainable future.”
Tomaž Vuk has the carbon. Now he just needs somewhere to send it.
Since 2020, Vuk, who sits on the board of the Salonit cement factory in Slovenia, has been plotting to get in on the ground floor of an industry poised to boom in the coming years: carbon capture.
It’s one of the ways carbon-spewing factories like the one Vuk helps run are supposed to keep operating in a greener future.
There’s just one problem: Vuk has nowhere to store any carbon he traps at the plant.
Salonit sits roughly 50 kilometers off the Gulf of Trieste, an Italian port nestled near the Adriatic Sea’s highest point. From there, Salonit can technically ship the carbon anywhere. But for now, it seems the only options are way up in the North Sea — a protracted (and, most notably, expensive) trip around the Continent.
Vuk said he’s willing to send the carbon wherever, but would of course prefer spots along the nearby Mediterranean and the Black Seas. For now, that’s not likely. So the North Sea it is.
“It might be acceptable to carry those costs for a short period of time until [closer] solutions are ready,” Vuk said.
The conundrum is a small example of a mounting problem for Europe as it races to establish the infrastructure needed to hit climate neutrality by 2050. The EU is heavily encouraging companies to invest in projects and technology that can either suck carbon from the air or prevent it from getting there in the first place. But that also means finding places to store all of that carbon.
So far, North Sea countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have dominated the industry — a fact the EU is aiming to change with new incentives and rules meant to create more storage across the bloc by 2030. But not everyone is convinced the plan will work, and some skeptics even wonder if carbon capture is really worth the sky-high investments required.
The stakes are high: Should the EU’s masterplan fail, landlocked, low-income European countries could be making investments now that never pay off, potentially taking down traditional manufacturing plants with them. That would leave the EU with an even greater economic divide — and another gap to fill in its green ambitions.
“There’s quite a risk, at least for industries in regions like Southern Central and Eastern Europe, where there are little project developments happening,” said Eadbhard Pernot, who leads the works on carbon capture for Clean Air Task Force, an NGO.“There’s a risk of deindustrialization in some parts of Europe and industrialization in other parts of Europe.”
Fragmented deployment
Over the past year, a flurry of carbon-sucking vacuums and vaults have been announced in the wealthy region bordering the North Sea. The area is home to some of Europe’s largest oil and gas sites, providing it with a plethora of places to both grab and store carbon.
In March, a project dubbed Greensand launched with the promise of first capturing carbon in Belgium before shipping it to a depleted oil field in the Danish North Sea — a project that could store 8 million tons of CO2 by 2030. And in May, the Danish Energy Agency awarded renewable utility Ørsted a 20-year contract for the Kalundborg Hub, which touts that it will remove up to half a million tons of carbon from nearby heat and power plants starting in 2026.
The Netherlands is also keeping pace. The Porthos project is slated to store no less than 2.5 million tons in depleted gas fields. And big emitters like Air Liquide, Air Products, ExxonMobil and Shell have secured storage on the site starting in 2026, when Porthos goes online.
The northern dominance is so vast that research has shown Denmark alone could develop enough storage capacity to meet the EU’s goal to erect 50 million tons of CO2 storage by 2030 — which Brussels proposed in its Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA), a legislative effort to bolster the bloc’s manufacturing of green projects like wind turbines and solar panels.
The other nearby options are EU neighbors like Norway, Iceland and the U.K. While these sites might make sense geographically, they would also leave the EU increasingly dependent on outside countries for carbon storage — a future that Brussels wants to avoid.
Prisoners of geography
The northern dominance is starting to freak out policymakers and industry leaders across the rest of Europe. They fear it will eventually erode their industrial competitiveness in a future marked by soaring carbon prices and fierce competition from outside Europe.
Currently, high-polluting manufacturers like steel and cement makers, which have to pay for their emissions under the bloc’s CO2 market, are getting a free pass for their carbon pollution — a decision made to keep EU-based industries from being overwhelmed by costs their competitors don’t always bear.
That won’t last forever, however. Last year, EU negotiators struck a deal to phase out the policy by 2034, hoping to drive up carbon prices and push industries to invest in lower-emission options, including carbon capture.
“Many are yet to grasp the consequences of the reform of the EU’s carbon market,” one EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO.
Once these manufacturers are confronted with the full cost of their pollution, the diplomat argued, they will have an existential need for relatively cheap ways to absorb and store their carbon.
And those storage options are only cheap if they’re nearby.
The EU claims its plan will create these options. A proposal is in the works to spread carbon storage sites more evenly across Europe. The plan will also map out the transport needs for carbon to effectively get from where it is vacuumed up to its final resting place. The idea is to ensure that plants like Salonit aren’t left behind.
“To keep the costs of decarbonizing hard-to-abate industries at bay, Europe needs CO2 storage projects across the Continent,” said Eve Tamme, who chairs the Zero Emissions Platform, an organization advising the EU on carbon capture technology. “This helps to limit the need for expensive long-distance CO2 transportation routes.”
Work in progress
The European Commission, the EU’s executive in Brussels, also wants to encourage plants to invest in carbon trapping by guaranteeing that storage will be available.
Brussels has already called for countries to adopt a binding, EU-wide storage target of 50 million tons of CO2 by 2030 as part of its net-zero act. But the proposal has run into controversy over a clause that would force oil and gas producers to contribute to that goal.
Carbon storage leaders like Denmark and the Netherlands argued the provision would simply pull cash away from existing CO2 storage projects — benefiting fossil fuel giants in the process. Yet others countered that these are the exact companies that should be forced to help pack away the carbon after they spent years putting it in the sky.
In the end, Denmark and the Netherlands won, getting a narrowly written opt-out for oil and gas firms — but only if these quotas have been met with other projects.
Lina Strandvåg Nagell, senior manager at industrial decarbonization NGO Bellona, argued the compromise wouldn’t derail the overall ambition.
“This decision shows that storage will have to be developed across the EU,” she said.
And Brussels says the early signs are promising. In late November, Ditte Juul-Jørgensen, who heads the Commission’s energy department, said there were a growing number of carbon capture and storage projects in Southern and Eastern Europe in line to receive speedy approval and EU funding.
“Previously … projects were really situated mainly around the North Sea region,” she told an industry event. “But now they stretch from the Baltic to the Western and Eastern Mediterranean.”
But the question is whether the pace will be quick enough for people like Vuk, in Slovenia, and his fellow cement and steel compatriots across Central and Eastern Europe.
“Any action that would encourage” more carbon storage, he said, “is welcome.”
Representatives from nearly every nation have met this week at an annual climate summit, searching for agreements on how to curb the rise of global temperatures. The summit is being held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, and that has dismayed activists who believe that the only way to really address the climate crisis is to walk away from fossil fuels.
For the moment at least, the world and the United States need both fossil fuels and renewable energy, and the best proof of that may be found in the state of Wyoming.
It is the country’s leading coal producing state, and very conservative politically, yet its Republican governor, Mark Gordon, is emerging as a leading voice promoting climate-friendly energy projects and action to address the climate crisis.
Essentially, Mark Gordon is trying to prove that it is possible to be both red and green.
Gov. Mark Gordon: We needed to be aggressive. And we needed to really address this issue.
Bill Whitaker: So you tell the people of Wyoming that climate change is real?
Gov. Mark Gordon: I do.
Bill Whitaker: And that it’s urgent, it’s an urgent crisis?
Gov. Mark Gordon: I have said that. And I’ve gotten– I’ve gotten some pushback from that as well.
Bill Whitaker: I bet you have. (laughter)
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon on the cattle ranch where he grew up
60 Minutes
In September, we met Mark Gordon, who’s in the middle of his second term as Wyoming’s governor, on the cattle ranch where he grew up.
Gov. Mark Gordon: This is my dad’s old saddle.
His family still owns this ranch, and he and his wife also operate another about 40 miles away.
Bill Whitaker: How did growing up here affect your worldview?
Gov. Mark Gordon: I think growing up here gave me a– an enormous appreciation for the world around us, and– and the ecological processes, and the weather. You just are exposed to it on a regular, on a regular basis.
Mark Gordon is also a mountain climber who has seen glaciers receding due to a warming climate. He says that helped convince him to set a goal of making Wyoming not just carbon neutral when it comes to CO2 emissions, but eventually, carbon negative.
Bill Whitaker: You first made this pledge of– net negative CO2 emissions at a 2021 State of the State speech. How did that go over?
Gov. Mark Gordon: I think some people probably resented it. I think generally it’s been well-respected. It was, to– to some degree, a bold move, and– and one that was intended to make a difference in that discussion about energy in the future.
After Gordon repeated his net-negative emissions goal at an appearance at Harvard in October, Wyoming’s Republican party passed a vote of “no confidence” in him. But he says heat from the right won’t deter him from pursuing what he calls an “all of the above” energy policy.
Gov. Mark Gordon: Whatever you’re going to do in energy, probably you’re going have something to do in Wyoming. We have tremendous wind resources. We have the largest reserves of uranium, important for nuclear energy, the largest coal producer, we’re number eight in oil, number nine in natural gas. 83% of our energy is exported.
That will soon include nuclear power from a next-generation reactor to be built in Wyoming with a $500 million investment from Bill Gates. Huge wind farms already dot Wyoming’s landscape, with the biggest one yet on the way.
Bill Miller: Because the wind blows basically 24/7, 365 days a year.
Huge wind farms dot Wyoming’s landscape
60 Minutes
Bill Miller is president of the Power Company of Wyoming, which is beginning to build what will be the largest wind farm in the continental United States, in the middle of a geographic break in the Continental Divide.
Bill Miller: All the winds which blow from west to east pretty much are funneled through this part of the country.
Miller drove to the top of a place called Chokecherry Knob to give us a taste of the wind.
Bill Whitaker: So when this is up and running, how many turbines will be out here?
Bill Miller: Current plan calls for 600 turbines.
Bill Whitaker: And how much energy will that generate?
Bill Miller: They’ll generate around 12 million megawatt hours of power a year.
Bill Whitaker: And that’s– and that’s enough to power how many homes?
Bill Miller: Million, a million-two.
Wyoming doesn’t have anything close to that many homes – it has the smallest population of any of the 50 states – so the plan is to build a new 800 mile-long transmission line to send that power to California, which needs and wants it.
Bill Whitaker: What’s this going to cost?
Bill Miller: The wind farm will be something north of $5 billion. Transmission line will be something north of $3 billion capital investment.
Bill Whitaker: That’s a big investment.
Bill Miller: Yes.
The project is bankrolled by billionaire Philip Anschutz, who owns the company Bill Miller runs, and who first made his fortune in oil.
Bill Miller: Society has spoken. That’s what this country is going to go to, is renewable energy. More importantly, it’s a project that contributes to the zero-carbon initiatives that– we strongly believe in. It’s going to happen. And this is the best place for it to happen.
bill Miller, president of the Power Company of Wyoming
60 Minutes
At this past summer’s windy groundbreaking ceremony for the transmission line, Bill Miller was joined not just by Republican Gov. Mark Gordon, but also by two members of President Biden’s Cabinet.
Gov. Mark Gordon: The way we’ve tried to navigate this is to find something for everyone. And– I think that’s the–
Bill Whitaker: Is that possible?
Gov. Mark Gordon: Yeah. I think it is. Honestly, I think if– if people are going to embrace how we get to a carbon neutral, carbon negative future, it has to be by saying, “We’re all going to be a little bit better by embracing innovation.”
If a single picture can capture Wyoming’s energy past, present andfuture, this may be it: a fully loaded coal train passing in front of a huge wind farm. Remember, this state still produces more coal than any other, by far.
Dr. Holly Krutka: The likelihood that we will truly as a world move away from fossil fuels is very low.
Holly Krutka runs the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming. Before shifting to academia, she worked for Peabody, the largest coal company in America.
Dr. Holly Krutka: 82% of– our global energy consumption is fossil fuels.
Bill Whitaker: 82%?
Dr. Holly Krutka: 82%. It has not changed.
Because of that stark fact, Krutka and her colleagues are focused on taking the CO2 out of fossil fuels like coal before it reaches the atmosphere, with a technology called carbon capture and storage.
Dr. Holly Krutka: There are carbon capture and storage projects in America working right now. There’s just not enough. The capture side, we’re there. Today.
Bill Whitaker: You can do it now?
Dr. Holly Krutka: Right now. Yes.
Dr. Holly Krutka
60 Minutes
Bill Whitaker: The technology is there, but is it economically feasible?
Dr. Holly Krutka: It will always be cheaper to do nothing than to add carbon capture and storage. If you want to reduce emissions, this is part of the solution. We have to decide, is it worth the cost.
At the huge dry fork coal-fired power plant near Gillette, the University of Wyoming is operating what it calls the Integrated Test Center. Some of the flue gas that would otherwise go up the smokestack is siphoned off into labs like this one, where the Japanese company Kawasaki is testing methods for making carbon capture more economical. Wells, 10 thousand feet deep, have also been drilled to show that captured CO2 can be stored underground, forever.
Bill Whitaker: How big a deal would it be to find– an affordable way to capture carbon at the point of emission– say, in power plants– around the world?
Gov. Mark Gordon: It would be a game changer, for certain.
Bill Whitaker: You know there are a lot of naysayers who say that this is a pipe dream.
Gov. Mark Gordon: Uh-huh (affirm).
Bill Whitaker: It’ll never happen. What do you say to them? How do you convince them?
Gov. Mark Gordon: Well, I say we’re trying it. And I know people will say, “Well, you’re just trying to extend the life of the coal mines.” I am. But I am also trying to do that in a way that is going to do more for climate solutions than simply standing up a whole bunch of wind farms or sending up a whole bunch of solars.
With his “all of the above” approach, Mark Gordon is trying to put every kind of energy project on a fast track, including Bill Miller’s huge wind farm.
Bill Whitaker: How long did you think it was going to take when you started?
Bill Miller: When I originally started, I thought we could probably get this entitled and under construction within five years.
Bill Whitaker: And it’s been 17?
Bill Miller: 17.
Bill Whitaker: Why so long?
Bill Miller: Primarily, the permitting process, the bureaucracy of the federal government.
Bill Whitaker: You told me, coming up here, that the– the process was kind of like a nightmare.
Bill Miller: It was difficult. (laugh) Maybe, “Nightmare,” is a little bit too strong. But– it was a very difficult process.
Bill Whitaker: So how important is it to reduce regulatory and permitting barriers?
Gov. Mark Gordon: I think it’s massive. Permitting reform I think is one of our biggest challenges at a federal level. It is something that’s being embraced– by both sides.
Both the Biden administration and congressional Republicans have endorsed the idea of streamlining permitting for energy projects. Actually doing it is another story. In Wyoming, Gov. Gordon has done what he can.
Cully Cavness: One thing I can share is that it’s a state that’s very welcoming to innovators in the energy space.
Cully Cavness is co-founder of a company called Crusoe Energy Systems. About five years ago, it decided to tackle the problem of “flaring,” when gas produced at oil wells is simply burned into the atmosphere.
Cully Cavness, co-founder of a company called Crusoe Energy Systems, speaks with Bill Whitaker
60 Minutes
Cully Cavness: If you could capture it all it would power about two-thirds of Europe’s electricity. It’s a very large amount of waste.
Bill Whitaker: And we’re just burning it off.
Cully Cavness: We’re burning it off because there’s no pipeline there.
Cavness and his colleagues came up with the unconventional idea of putting a small electricity-generating power plant right where that gas was being flared and wasted.
Cully Cavness: What we do is we tap into that gas line. We bring the gas over to a power generation system, and then that generates electricity, and we take that electricity directly into our onsite data center to power hundreds or thousands of computers, and then we network the computers to the outside world with fiber or satellite internet to get it offsite.
Bill Whitaker: So you take a– data center and just basically put it on top of the wellhead.
Cully Cavness: Exactly. It’s a modern data center in every way when you’re standing inside of it. And then you step out the door and you’re in an oil field.
Crusoe Energy first used those electricity-gobbling data centers to mine bitcoin; Now most of that computer power is being used by artificial intelligence companies. The first place to let them try this, in 2018, was Wyoming.
Cully Cavness: That’s not necessarily an idea that everyone’s going to embrace automatically right off the bat before it’s been done before. Wyoming was. They invited us to come do it for the first time here. We did it at a small scale. We proved that it could work. And that helped us attract the funding and the other projects that had helped us scale to where we are today.
Bill Whitaker: How many of these– centers do you have up and running currently?
Cully Cavness: We’re approaching 200. By the end of the year, we’ll have about 200 of our modular data centers deployed throughout the United States and now internationally.
Bill Whitaker: So how do you assess your environmental impact?
Cully Cavness So today we’re operating at a scale of more than 20 million cubic feet of gas per day that would have otherwise been flared and wasted. We’re preventing that flaring. It’s on the order of several hundred thousand cars per year being taken off the road in terms of the avoided emissions impact.
Bill Whitaker: Are you trying to send out a message to the rest of the country and even the rest of the world? “If you have a renewable or a climate-friendly idea, bring it here, bring it to Wyoming.”
Gov. Mark Gordon: Love to. We, we want to be part of the solution. There are some really remarkable things that if we– stop talking about what we shouldn’t do and start talking about what we can do and how we can embrace that future. And that’s what we’re dedicated to here in Wyoming.
Produced by Rome Hartman. Associate producer, Sara Kuzmarov. Broadcast associate, Mariah B. Campbell. Edited by Jorge J. García.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber’s controversial remarks that “no science” shows a fossil fuel phaseout is needed to hit climate goals may require “clarification,” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told POLITICO.
Kerry’s remarks — his first reaction since the Guardian published al-Jaber’s comments on Sunday — show the U.S. diplomat is not withdrawing his long-standing support for the COP28 chief, despite ongoing concerns about al-Jaber’s other role as CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s state-owned mega oil firm.
“Look, he’s gotta decide how he wants to phrase it, but the bottom line is this COP needs to be committed to phasing out all unabated fossil fuel,” Kerry told POLITICO’s Power Play podcast with Anne McElvoy.
Speaking during an online event in November, al-Jaber said there was no scientific basis to conclude that a fossil fuel phaseout is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius — the most ambitious target of the Paris Agreement. Kerry tried to contextualize the remarks.
“What I think he was saying, and maybe it came out the wrong way, I don’t know; I think he was saying that the science doesn’t dictate the methodology that you have to use,” he said. “You have to choose between many different ways of doing it. Maybe it happens through carbon capture, maybe it doesn’t” — a reference to the largely unproven technology that removes emissions before they enter the atmosphere.
In addition to al-Jaber’s dismissal of the science supporting a fossil fuel phaseout — a stance climate scientists quickly disputed — the COP28 president has also taken heat for leaked documents indicating the UAE planned to use the summit to push fossil fuel deals, allegations al-Jaber strenuously denied.
Kerry has tried to walk a fine line for months with al-Jaber. He has embraced the choice to put an oil executive atop the climate talks, arguing it may help bring the industry to the table to negotiate much-needed cuts to greenhouse gas pollution. But the support has stood out amid the flood of dissent from climate advocates and scores of lawmakers in the U.S. and EU.
In his remarks at the online event, al-Jaber also argued that phasing out fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
Kerry encouraged people to listen to al-Jaber’s words at COP28 itself, which began last Thursday in Dubai and runs through mid-December: “I heard him definitively say in his opening comments to the entire COP that he is committed to 1.5 degrees and that we need to do all the things necessary to implement that.”
When asked whether he would advise al-Jaber to clarify his remarks, Kerry said: “Maybe there’ll be a clarification. I don’t know, but I do know that the COP president’s position is that we have to achieve 1.5 degrees, and he has said that again and again.”
On Monday, al-Jaber did offer some clarification in his first public appearance since the report was published. He took shots at the media portrayal of his comments, which he said ignored his previous remarks that it is “inevitable” and “essential” for the world to move off of fossil fuels.
“One statement gets taken out of context with misrepresentation and misinterpretation — that gets maximum coverage,” he said during a press conference.
John Kerry and Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Al-Jaber said the world must shave global emissions 43 percent this decade to have a chance at hitting the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal. On that point, he said he thought he had been “crystal clear.”
“Let me just clarify where I stand on the science — I hope this time it gets picked up,” he stressed. “I am quite surprised at the constant attempt to undermine this message.”
Jim Skea, who chairs the authoritative climate science body the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also defended al-Jaber during the press conference. Seated to the COP president’s left, Skea said al-Jaber has been “attentive” through one-on-one meetings about the science.
Still, al-Jaber is facing ongoing criticism for failing to address the UAE’s own rise in oil production. ADNOC may drill 42 percent more by 2030, according to recent projections.
Speaking to POLITICO, Kerry agreed that the UAE must “cut [oil and gas production], and everybody needs to be reducing supply and demand.”
U.S. oil production, of course, also hit an all-time high this year.
Al-Jaber has staked his credibility on acting as a pragmatic broker between climate negotiators and the oil and gas industry, where he is a major player. Over the weekend he revealed the fruits of that work: an alliance of 50 companies pledging to reduce their emissions.
But on Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres pooh-poohed the effort. “The promises made clearly fall short of what is required,” he said, noting the failure to address emissions from later burning the industry’s oil and gas.
“Integrity really matters,” said Guterres. “So there must be no room for greenwashing. And this also applies to what has been announced yesterday.”
You can listen to the full interview with John Kerry on Power Play on Thursday.
Copenhagen, Denmark — Denmark’s Lego said on Monday that it remains committed to its quest to find sustainable materials to reduce carbon emissions, even after an experiment by the world’s largest toymaker to use recycled bottles did not work. Lego said it has “decided not to progress” with making its trademark colorful bricks from recycled plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET, and after more than two years of testing “found the material didn’t reduce carbon emissions.”
Lego enthusiastically announced in 2021 that the prototype PET blocks had become the first recycled alternative to pass its “strict” quality, safety and play requirements, following experimentation with several other iterations that proved not durable enough.
The company said scientists and engineers tested more than 250 variations of PET materials, as well as hundreds of other plastic formulations, before nailing down the prototype, which was made with plastic sourced from suppliers in the U.S. that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority. On average, a one-liter plastic PET bottle made enough raw material for ten 2 x 4 Lego bricks.
Despite the determination that the PET prototype failed to save on carbon emissions, Lego said it remained “fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032.”
The privately-held Lego Group, which makes its bricks out of oil-based plastic said it had invested “more than $1.2 billion in sustainability initiatives” as part of efforts to transition to more sustainable materials and reduce its carbon emissions by 37% by 2032, Lego said.
The company said it was “currently testing and developing Lego bricks made from a range of alternative sustainable materials, including other recycled plastics and plastics made from alternative sources such as e-methanol.”
Also known as green methanol, e-methanol is composed of waste carbon dioxide and hydrogen, created by using renewable energy to split water molecules.
Lego said it will continue to use bio-polypropylene, the sustainable and biological variant of polyethylene — a plastic used in everything from consumer and food packaging to tires — for parts in Lego sets such as leaves, trees and other accessories.
“We believe that in the long-term this will encourage increased production of more sustainable raw materials, such as recycled oils, and help support our transition to sustainable materials,” it said.
Lego was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. The name derived from the two Danish words, leg and godt, which together mean “play well.” The brand name was created unaware that lego in Latin means “I assemble.”
Newswise — Researchers at a field site in Victoria, Australia are among the first to use fiber optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) for high-precision tracking of induced seismicity from a small carbon dioxide (CO2) injection, according to a new study published in Seismological Research Letters.
The CO2CRC Otway Project in Victoria is a research test site for the subsurface storage of carbon dioxide, as one possible way to reduce the impacts of climate-warming carbon emissions. However, there is a risk of induced earthquakes after gigatons of carbon dioxide will be injected within the same geologic basin by multiple storage projects over decades of operations, and scientists would like to better understand how this seismicity is triggered and how it evolves over time.
Among the interesting details uncovered by the new DAS deployment at Otway: the tiny earthquakes that accompanied two injection phases at the site appear to follow the saturation front of the CO2 plume within the rock, rather than the pressure front from injection.
“As far as we know, the Otway Project remains the only CO2 storage project where induced seismicity was at the very least coincident with the saturation front movement, not the pressure front,” said study lead author Stanislav Glubokovskikh of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“We relied on the frequent snapshots of the storage formation to relate the CO2 plume evolution to induced seismicity,” he added. “It is hard to think of another practical monitoring system apart from the multi-well DAS vertical seismic profiling which could provide such temporal and spatial resolution for a small CO2 plume.”
The seismic monitoring system was designed by a group of geophysicists at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, led by Roman Pevzner and Boris Gurevich, to rely on five deep boreholes outfitted with sensitive fiber optic cable to monitor a 15,000 metric ton CO2 injection, called Stage 3, at the Otway site over 610 days. They detected 17 tiny seismic events during that period, with a maximum magnitude of 0.1.
An earlier “Stage 2C” CO2 injection at the site, of the same size, was monitored at the time using geophones buried below the surface that detected several microseismic events.
Part of the focus of the Stage 3 injection was to look more closely at potential cost-effective, long-term monitoring of geological carbon storage, said Glubokovskikh. “To enable the long-term monitoring, we had to use a permanent downhole installation of the seismic sensors. Otherwise, deployment and demobilization of the array for each active seismic survey would be prohibitively costly and cause too much interruption to the land owners. DAS is the optimal technology for such conditions.”
The DAS observations also revealed the seismogenic fault below the surface, which was not captured in earlier seismic images.
Glubokovskikh said it’s still unclear exactly what mechanisms are triggering the small earthquakes at the site, although the interesting observation that the seismicity coincides with CO2 saturation may offer some clues.
“Geochemical weakening of the reservoir faults by CO2 seems like a plausible explanation, given that some of the core samples from the injection interval broke down during CO2 core-flooding experiments,” in the lab, Glubokovskikh explained.
But the mineralogical composition of the fault gauge and the flow and pore fluid composition at the site are still unknown, making it hard to confirm geochemical weakening, he noted.
Apart from the seismic events triggered within the Stage 2C CO2 plume, a second group of events occurred outside of any CO2 accumulation areas. “These [second group] events occurred only during the injection operations, but showed no clear relationship to either the injection pressure or saturation plume movement,” said Glubokovskikh.
The Otway project is moving toward a Stage 4 injection, which will occur close to the previous two CO2 plumes, he said. “Thus, we will likely get another set of induced seismic events that will provide more insights into the triggering mechanism. Even if the new injection will produce no detectable events, this fact may be perceived as another evidence of the flow-related nature of the Otway seismicity.”
At a research lab in Alabama, scientists try to perfect what some see as a powerful tool in the fight against climate change. Others think carbon capture technology is a dangerous distraction and a waste of money. Senior national and environmental correspondent Ben Tracy reports from Wilsonville, Alabama.
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Carbon dioxide is captured from the air and buried underground as part of groundbreaking new technology to slow climate change. Bill Whitaker met with teams making it happen in Iceland.
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Last month the world’s top climate scientists delivered a sobering warning. Their mammoth report to the UN boiled down to one message: act now, before the climate breakdown becomes unstoppable. The report says extreme weather has forced millions of people from their homes and devastated food supplies. Oil and gas emissions are at a record high. The UN report calls for drastic cuts in fossil fuels. But if our old technologies got us into this mess, can new ones get us out? Among politicians, corporations and billionaires, one new technology is gaining traction. It’s called direct air capture that vacuums carbon dioxide out of thin air and locks it away underground. Sound like science fiction? We thought so too until we went to Iceland to see the world’s first commercial Direct Air Capture plant in operation.
Here on a frigid plain near the Arctic Circle, worries about an overheating planet seem far away. Yet tiny Iceland has put itself on the front line, with a new kind of machine that will fight climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. This is ORCA — the first commercial direct air capture plant on earth.
Bill Whitaker: What are these fans? How does this work?
Carlos Haertel: Here you see the back side of these collectors where the air is being pulled through the system by aid of these fans.
Carlos Haertel is chief technology officer for Climeworks, the Swiss company that built ORCA. He told us, as the fans draw air in, the carbon dioxide is trapped by a special filter inside these giant collectors—each the size of a shipping container. The captured CO2 is then siphoned off to storage tanks. We had to shout over the powerful fans as a bitter wind whipped around us.
Direct air capture vacuums carbon dioxide out of thin air and locks it away underground.
60 Minutes
Bill Whitaker: So you didn’t come for this wonderful weather?
Carlos Haertel: No, we did not. We knew that the winters were harsh, but it’s a good real-life test as well for the plant.
Bill Whitaker: What you’re describing almost sounds like science fiction, but what you’re saying is that we can actually do this?
Carolos Haertel: People never doubted the fundamental physics or chemistry of it. But realizing it under real-life conditions is a whole different matter. And that’s what this system shows. It can be done.
Climeworks is now building a new plant in Iceland 10 times the size of ORCA that will look like this—a modular design that Haertel told us can be easily assembled. But capturing the CO2 is only half of the story.
Sandra Osk: So this is where the magic happens.
The second half starts here in these metal igloos, where the CO2 is sent to be buried in the porous volcanic rock of iceland.
Sandra Osk: So this pipe is actually filled with water.
Sandra Osk is a geologist with Carbfix, an Icelandic company that pioneered the ground-breaking injection method.
Sandra Osk: Here we have the CO2 and the CO2 is actually dissolved in water. So, it’s actually just fizzy water.
Bill Whitaker: Just fizzy water?
Sandra Osk: Yeah and this fizzy water is being injected here into the injection well. This is–
Bill Whitaker: How far down does it go?
Sandra Osk: It actually reaches over a mile down.
Bill Whitaker: A mile down?
Sandra Osk: Yeah.
The fizzy water is shot like a soda stream into Iceland’s basaltic rock, where it reacts with the minerals and hardens to stone in less than two years.
Bill Whitaker: So the fizzy water turns into this?
Sandra Osk: Yes.
Bill Whitaker: In just a matter of years?
Sandra Osk and Bill Whitaker
60 Minutes
Sandra Osk: So you—so you take this gas that you can’t see, we turn it into fizzy water and then it turns to stone and you don’t have to worry about it.
Bill Whitaker: Turned into stone. That’s quite amazing.
Carbfix didn’t invent the process. Nature did. But nature takes millenia. After years of experimenting in Iceland’s grueling outdoor laboratory, Carbfix figured out how to speed things up. Aerospace engineer Carlos Haertel told us ORCA was a milestone. Now, the hard part starts: scaling up fast enough to slow climate change.
Carlos Haertel: Whether we are taking the right direction will depend as much on societal things than on technical matters. Am I optimistic as an engineer? I am, absolutely. Am I optimistic as a citizen? Maybe half-half. I haven’t made up my mind yet.
Bill Whitaker: This goal can be reached technically. It’s just whether we have the political and social will to do it.
Carlos Haertel: I think that’s the exact right way of looking at it.
There’s been a stampede of investment. Microsoft, Airbus, insurance giant Swiss Re, have poured in millions of dollars, but it’s a stupefying challenge. ORCA is built to take out the emissions of about 800 cars—or 4,000 tons of CO2 a year—a tiny fraction of the annual 1- billion tons scientists say we need to remove from the atmosphere.
Kari Helgason: It’s the problem of our generation. It’s like a moon shot.
Kari Helgason is an astrophysicist with Carbfix. He told us studying space helped him to think big. We met him on a barren stretch of rock that could have been Mars but Helgason told us he saw potential.
Kari Helgason: We need big solutions. We need to return the carbon back to where it came from, which is the Earth.
Bill Whitaker: Tell me what you’re doing here?
Kari Helgason: This will be a first of a kind carbon mineral storage terminal, which means that we are going to bring in CO2, transport it from industrial point sources in Europe, and ship it here, and inject it for full mineral storage.
It will be the world’s first industrial-scale underground disposal site for CO2, capable of handling 3 million tons a year. Helgason sketched out a new world where tankers—running on green methanol—would transport carbon dioxide from European businesses to Iceland.
Bill Whitaker: Is this going to happen fast enough to help us with climate change?
Kari Helgason of Carbfix speaks with Bill Whitaker
60 Minutes
Kari Helgason: I don’t know. To be perfectly honest um, we are demonstrating the first mineral storage hub here at the megaton scale. Whether that will happen in time, that is not entirely up to us. That is up to politicians, governance, financiers, societies and quite frankly, we are running out of time.
Direct air capture as it now exists is expensive and energy-intensive. In Iceland, that energy is geothermal—renewable and green. That’s not the case elsewhere. So, governments in Europe and the U.S. have dangled billions of dollars of tax breaks to encourage companies to take the plunge. But there’s a bigger question than just who writes the check.
Bill Whitaker: Do you fear that people will think “oh well, we can now clean the air. We can just take the CO2 out of the air, so we can carry on with business as usual?”
Kari Helgason: All the time, yeah. But that’s not how it works. We must stop the emissions and wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. That’s what we need to do right now. On top of that, we also must take down the carbon that we’ve already put up in the atmosphere. Only then will we reach our climate goals. So, can never be an excuse for continuing business as usual.
But it’s that “business as usual” that critics are warning against, as direct air capture expands to the U.S. That’s because here, oil companies are one of the technology’s biggest boosters. They have been capturing CO2 to inject into oil wells for decades. Not to bury it, but to flush out more oil. For Kari Helgason of Carbfix—and many others— that’s a non-starter.
Kari Helgason: We don’t see the need to work with the oil and gas sector.
Bill Whitaker: Well, if the oil and gas industry could help with the financing of the direct air capture, why not team up with them?
Kari Helgason: We don’t need them for direct air capture. And quite frankly, we don’t want there to be an oil and gas industry in 40, 50 years.
Vicki Hollub: There will still be an oil industry in 50 years. I have no doubt about that. I think our company though will be a different company by 2050.
That company is Occidental Petroleum and Vicki Hollub is CEO. She wants to turn Oxy into what she calls a carbon management company. It has set aside more than a billion dollars to build what will be the world’s largest direct air capture plant in Texas.
Bill Whitaker and Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub
60 Minutes
Vicki Hollub: So this would represent the CO2 that’s equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.
Hollub showed us the Texas version of how CO2 would be sucked out of the air.
Vicki Hollub: These are air contact towers…
Some of the captured CO2 will be locked away underground—just as we saw in Iceland. Some will still be used to extract more oil. But Hollub told us using carbon sucked out of the air, means the new oil produced is what she calls carbon neutral. That was hard to wrap our heads around.
Bill Whitaker: But you’ll be using carbon that you’re capturing and taking out of the air, to produce more oil that will then generate more carbon?
Vicki Hollub: But the, the oil will emit less carbon than the CO2 we’ve injected to get it. So we’ve put more—at least the equivalent—and sometimes more CO2 in the ground to get that oil than the oil will emit when used.
Hollub told us producing oil this way is essential in the transition to a green economy. Airlines and ships, for example, would need to run on fossil fuels until a sustainable alternative is found. That could take years. Until then, Hollub argues, using CO2 to get that oil helps keep a lid on emissions.
Bill Whitaker: Your critics will say “you can’t trust an oil company talking about reducing CO2,” that your mission here is tantamount to greenwashing.
Vicki Hollub: I would first say that we would never spend $1.2 billion for greenwashing. So we’ve got a monumental task ahead of us. The way that the CO2 enhanced oil recovery process works is that we can reduce more outta the atmosphere than what our products will emit when used. And so, if that’s not a concept that people can get, then we—we will no—we will not have a chance to achieve what we need to achieve.
Hollub told us she knows critics of big oil are suspicious and that many feel industry isn’t moving fast enough to avoid a climate catastrophe. On that point, Hollub doesn’t disagree. She told us, with the help of tax incentives, Occidental plans to build 130 more direct air capture plants by 2035.
Vicki Hollub: We know how to make it happen. We know how to drill the wells. We know how to safely sequester it.
Bill Whitaker: We were in Iceland and we were talking to some of the direct air capture companies. And to be blunt, they don’t quite believe you.
Vicki Hollub: We’re gonna walk the talk. That’s the only way that does it. Words will never convince anybody. We need to get the direct air capture up and working. We need to um make it better, make it more economical and start having it developed all around the world.
The next decade will be critical if the direct air capture industry is to grow big enough to make an impact. Both Carbfix and Climeworks told us they will be expanding to the U.S. Neither plans to work with the American oil industry.
Produced by Heather Abbott. Associate producer, LaCrai Mitchell. Edited by Patrick Lee.
United Nations — U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on wealthy countries Monday to move up their goals of achieving carbon neutrality as close as possible to 2040, mostly from 2050 now, in order to “defuse the climate time bomb.” Introducing a capstone report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the impacts and trajectory of global warming, Guterres delivered a blunt assessment of the challenge to prevent climate catastrophe.
“Humanity is on thin ice, and that ice is melting fast,” the United Nations chief said in a video message as the IPCC experts group issued its latest report, which he likened to “a survival guide for humanity.”
Guterres said the world still has time to limit average temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times but this requires “a quantum leap in climate action” by all countries in all sectors.
“It starts with parties immediately hitting the fast-forward button on their net zero deadlines,” Guterres said, but he acknowledged countries have different levels of responsibility and ability to change course.
Rich countries should commit to achieving carbon neutrality as close as possible to 2040, he said, “the limit they should all aim to respect.”
As things stand now most rich countries have set their goal at 2050 but some are more ambitious, like Finland (2035), or Germany and Sweden (2045).
Leaders in emerging economies must commit to reaching net zero as close as possible to 2050, he said without naming any specific nation. Major countries in this category have set more distant goals like China (2060) and India (2070).
Floodwaters surround homes and vehicles in Pajaro, Monterey County, Calif., March 13, 2023.
Noah Berger/AP
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said in a statement that the message of the latest report “is abundantly clear: we are making progress, but not enough. We have the tools to stave off and reduce the risks of the worst impacts of the climate crisis, but we must take advantage of this moment to act now.”
He noted a number of steps the U.S. is taking, including provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law in August, that Kerry says are projected to cut U.S. emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels in 2030. The act includes rebates and tax credits for homeowners to increase energy efficiency.
Guterres, who will hold a climate action summit in September, again stressed the role of the Group of 20 — the world’s largest economies and Europe ‚ which together are responsible for 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is the moment for all G20 members to come together in a joint effort, pooling their resources and scientific capacities as well as their proven and affordable technologies through the public and private sectors to make carbon neutrality a reality by 2050,” Guterres said.
In what could be a major milestone in the fight against climate change, a startup said Thursday it has started successfully pulling carbon dioxide from the air and burying it underground.
Climeworks announced that it has sequestered CO2 from the atmosphere using its facility in Iceland and stored the substance underground. The action was independently verified by risk management company DNV, and the resulting carbon credits were sold to Microsoft, Shopify and Stripe, the startup’s first corporate customers.
Companies purchase carbon credits to offset their own carbon emissions. Microsoft in 2020 made a bold promise to erase its entire carbon footprint since the company’s 1975 founding.
Founded in 2009, Climeworks has already successfully demonstrated that its direct-air capture technology works. However, Thursday’s milestone marks the first time a company has pulled a significant amount of carbon from the air using a third-party verification process, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“We hope we are growing from a teenager to a grown-up in this industry,” Christoph Gebald, co-chief executive of Climeworks, told the newspaper.
Climeworks’ direct-air capture (DAC) facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland, in 2021.
Climeworks
Climeworks declined to say how much carbon has been removed — a key metric in assessing how important carbon-capture will be in the fight to slow global warming.
Once its carbon-capture plant in Iceland is at full scale, which it has not yet reached, it will remove 4,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide, a company spokesperson said. That’s roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by 800 cars driving for a year.
There is a growing consensus among scientists and policymakers that to prevent the worst effects of global warming, people will need to not only reduce greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero but also remove carbon that has already been emitted.
In addition to low-tech ways of achieving this, such as planting trees and restoring wetlands, the high-tech promise of removing carbon directly from the atmosphere has captured the public imagination and billions of investor dollars.
Congress funneled $12 billion into carbon-capture efforts in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and expanded funding for carbon storage in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Private investors, too, are champing at the bit. Last year saw a surge in venture capital dedicated to post-emissions carbon capture, with deals in the second quarter of 2022 hitting a record, according to PitchBook.
Climeworks founders Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher pose in front of the company’s carbon-capture facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland in 2021.
Climeworks
Climeworks has also committed to creating a carbon-capture hub in the Gulf Coast of the U.S., a facility it says will remove 1 million tons of CO2 annually by the end of the decade.
“There is no solution to get to net-zero without carbon capture technology,” Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said last year, reflecting a common view among environmental scientists.
But despite the hype, some scientists harbor considerable doubt about whether direct-air capture technology can ever advance to the point of economic feasibility. Attempts to clean up U.S. coal plants using carbon capture have largely been an expensive failure, according to a government report, and direct-air capture projects often use tremendous amounts of power — negating their environmental benefits.
A recent study also found that carbon-capture technology would put added stress on the world’s water supply, an already scarce resource in many parts of the world.
Dimensional will supply Verijet with SAF synfuel made from carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from carbon emissions in the air.
Press Release –
Oct 25, 2022 15:00 EDT
NEW YORK, October 25, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– At a ceremony held in New York City during UN’s 77th General Assembly and Climate Week’s 14th year, Verijet CEO Richard announced the execution of a Letter of Intent (LOI) with Dimensional Energy Inc. to purchase a minimum of 750,000 gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by 2025.
Kane said, “We are excited to leverage Dimensional’s groundbreaking carbon dioxide (C02) to fuels technology in the creation of truly Sustainable Aviation Fuel made from captured atmospheric carbon dioxide (C02) and water cracked with clean energy sources. Dimensional’s technology is transformational. We are thrilled to participate alongside Dimensional in decarbonizing aviation.”
Jason Salfi, CEO of Dimensional Energy Inc., said, “Aviation as a form of transportation is forecast to grow by 50% over the next 20 years. I am excited to be working with Verijet to decarbonize aviation by offering the service of zero emissions air travel by pairing Dimensional’s sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) with Verijet’s high-performance jets.”
About Verijet
A Florida-based private jet charter company, Verijet, is disrupting the market by offering consumers a reduced carbon footprint option while flying private, and at a lower price point. Verijet’s mission is to transform aviation responsibly, be the best airline on and for the planet, and democratize private flight. Founded in late 2020, Verijet makes flying privately available to more people and places than ever before. Verijet is a technology company that has morphed into an air carrier – revolutionizing private aviation through the power of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and large-scale computing combined with the most innovative, advanced, and safest jets in the air today. Backed by an experienced team of aviation investors, professionals, and suppliers, Verijet has grown quickly and operates a fleet of 20 radically safe, quiet, and environmentally friendly Cirrus Aircraft SF50 Vision Jets in the U.S. Verijet recently completed the 5,000th revenue flight in just over 22 months of operation with a 100% perfect safety record. To learn more or to book a trip, call 833-Verijet or visit our website at www.verijet.com.
About Dimensional
Dimensional Energy envisions a world free from fossil fuel dependency. We use carbon dioxide emissions as a replacement for fossil carbon to make the fuels and products people use daily. Our team of subject matter experts comes from all over the world with a shared purpose of making the sustainable materials necessary for a truly circular economy and bringing about climate justice for all. Our technology can produce energy locally at a scale that can satisfy global demand without extracting resources or fomenting conflict. Learn more at www.dimensionalenergy.com.
On a hot D.C. Wednesday in the middle of July, an 11-foot statue honoring Mary McLeod Bethune—carved out of marble extracted from the same Tuscan quarry that Michelangelo used for his David—stood draped in a black cloak in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. A group of distinguished guests had gathered to honor Bethune, the prominent educator and civil-rights activist who founded a college for Black students in Daytona Beach, Florida, and later served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is now the first Black American to have a state statue in the hall.
The group, which included several members of Florida’s congressional delegation, smiled as cameras flashed. Two of those present, Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Val Demings, are opponents in the race for Rubio’s Senate seat—a race that could secure the Democrats’ control of the Senate. Together, they tugged at the sheet, revealing the white-marble figure clothed in academic regalia, holding a black rose—which, in life, Bethune viewed as a symbol of diversity.
One by one, speakers approached a lectern in front of the statue to offer remarks. “I remember as a little girl listening to my mother and my father talk about a Black woman, a woman who looked like us, who started a college,” Demings told those who had gathered in the amphitheater. “As I listened to my parents tell the story, it seemed impossible. But Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune made what seemed impossible possible.”
Demings hopes to conjure some of Bethune’s magic. The race has for some time been considered a long shot for the 65-year-old former Orlando police chief; to win she’ll need to make what seems impossible possible in a state where the voter rolls have flipped from a more-than-100,000-voter Democratic advantage in 2020 to a Republican lead of nearly the same size in less than two years. And for months the polls reflected that, showing Demings trailing Rubio; but in recent weeks, a new batch of polls has shown Demings pulling into an effective tie, or even a slight lead.
If the race does break her way, the Democrats will have the convergence of two separate story lines to thank. The first is the story of Val Demings herself: a centrist Black woman with a background in law enforcement—just the profile the party has placed its bets on in recent years. It’s no coincidence, after all, that Demings joined then-Senator Kamala Harris and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who both worked as prosecutors before seeking elected office, on Joe Biden’s shortlist for his running mate two years ago.
Political moderates could admire her centrism; people of color could identify with her race; women could identify with her gender. Demings has converted that appeal into a fundraising advantage, pulling in millions more in donations than Rubio so far this cycle, and spending more than twice as much as him on television ads.
And if the national Democratic Party’s unpopularity had been weighing on her fortunes, the events of recent weeks may have buoyed them. In early August, Democrats in Congress passed a mammoth bill on climate change, health care, and taxes. Though the Inflation Reduction Act is by nature full of compromises, as my colleague Robinson Meyer notes, it “will touch every sector of the economy, subsidizing massive new investments in renewable and geothermal energy, as well as nuclear power and carbon capture and removal, and encouraging new clean-energy manufacturing industries to develop in the United States.” Demings has contrasted her own legislative record with that of Rubio, who has one of the worst attendance records in the Senate. With Congress showing that it can actually function, voters might be more receptive to that argument.
Demings watches the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings in 2019. (Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux)
Demings likes to say she’s living the American dream. In 1957, when she was born, her family lived in a three-room shack in Mandarin, Florida—a rural part of Duval County, just south of Jacksonville. Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother was a housekeeper. A year later, they upgraded to a two-bedroom house, but the roof leaked and for several years it lacked working bathrooms.
In the sixth grade, Demings helped integrate Loretta Elementary School, which she used to ride past to get to the Black elementary school 15 miles away. Shortly after enrolling, Demings was chosen to serve on the school patrol. She loved it. “You had to have good citizenship and good grades—and I was selected. I had my little orange belt, and I just fell in love,” she told me in July. “It was such an honor to be selected, because it was a big deal.”
As soon as she was old enough to get a real job, she did: first washing dishes at a retirement home, and later working fast-food gigs. After high school, she went off to Florida State University to study criminology, with an eye toward becoming a lawyer. “My dad used to say, ‘You’re a pretty good talker. You need to make some money talking,’ and he thought being a lawyer was a pretty cool thing,” she said. But scraping her way through college meant she needed a job—not law school—after graduation. “I was broke broke,” she quipped. So she moved back to Jacksonville, where she became a social worker with the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. But she soon grew disillusioned, doubting how much good she’d ever be able to do with so little power.
“I had this 10-year-old boy on my caseload,” Demings said. “He started having some problems, exhibiting behavior that made him really a threat to himself.” She went to her supervisor to see if she could get a psychological evaluation for him, but was told it would be roughly three weeks before a referral could be made; the panel that made those decisions met only once a month.
Demings was shocked. “This kid would be dead by then,” she recalled telling her boss. So she went around her supervisor to the juvenile judge—waiting outside his chambers until she was able to plead his case. To Demings’s relief, the judge granted an emergency order. She saw it as a small victory in a tough system, until it backfired: Demings was reprimanded by her supervisor for subverting their structure. She felt deflated by the experience, and began to think about what she wanted to do next.
In 1983, Demings got word that the Orlando Police Department was recruiting at Edward Waters College, the historically Black college in Jacksonville, and she figured that she would go down to speak with someone. That ultimately led to a 27-year career at the department, where Demings worked her way through its ranks: patrol officer, juvenile-crime detective, community-relations officer, public-information officer, hostage negotiator, then supervisor of the patrol, investigations, and airport units. (Some aspects of her career were less deliberate: She always told herself that she’d never date a fellow officer—then she ended up marrying one.)
As a police captain, she developed a reputation as a tough-on-crime enforcer on everything from traffic violations to violent infractions. “The message has to be clear for the violators: There are no deals,” she said in 2005 after a string of dangerous-driving incidents.
But that approach, which continued after she was promoted to deputy chief, drew criticism from members of the Black community in the city. She was lambasted after an Orlando Sentinelstory examined the department’s overuse of tasers and aggressive traffic stops and she told the paper that her officers were “kicking butt” in the historically Black neighborhood of Parramore. “If that [vehicle or pedestrian] stop results in something greater and leads to drugs or drug paraphernalia, I call that good police work,” she said at the time.
Still, by late 2007, her policing record, and a succession of departures, led to her being selected as Orlando’s chief of police. She was the first woman and second Black person—after her husband, Jerry, who left that role in 2002 to become the county’s public-safety director—to lead the department.
From the start, she took an aggressive approach to the job. “We will be courteous to law-abiding citizens but relentless in our efforts to disrupt violent criminals who have no respect for the police, citizens or their property,” she wrote in a New Year’s Day Orlando Sentinel op-ed in 2008. Later that year, Jerry won his race for county sheriff, making the duo the first Black husband and wife to serve as sheriff and chief of police in the same county at the same time.
Demings often cites the fact that under her leadership, Orlando experienced a 40 percent drop in violent crime. But a string of excessive-force complaints—including a 2010 incident in which an officer broke an 84-year-old man’s neck by flipping him upside down—revealed some of the clear dangers of the aggressive policing tactics that were employed during her tenure. “Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to break old men’s necks for no reason,” John Kurtz, the founder of the blog Orlando CopWatch, said at the time. Demings initially defended the officer’s actions in the incident, but eventually modified the department’s use of the technique that led to the octogenarian’s fractured vertebrae. In 2011, after 27 years with the department, Demings stepped down and set her sights on a new challenge.
Elected office wasn’t something Demings had initially been interested in. But as she was about to retire, Mayor Buddy Dyer called her to let her know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thought she would be a good candidate to run for the House seat that represented Orlando. “I just burst out laughing,” she told me. “And the mayor’s like, ‘Chief, are you okay?’” She thought he must have been joking. “You know your police chief. I’m a little rough around the edges,” she recalls telling him. “And I don’t know if I’d make a good politician.” Still, she met with Representative Steve Israel, who was the committee chair at the time—and ultimately decided that running for Congress was a logical next step.
She lost her first campaign and suspended another run for mayor two years later. But her defeats only raised her public profile. By 2016, court-ordered redistricting meant that the Tenth District was significantly more Democratic than it had been when she first ran for office—which meant that her biggest hurdle would be her primary opponent. She won 57 percent of the vote in a four-person primary—and received 15,000 more votes than her nearest competitor. She then won in the general election by nearly 100,000 votes.
Thirty-three years after Demings had packed everything she owned in the trunk of her Oldsmobile Firenza and headed to Orlando for her new job with the police department, she would be taking her tough-on-crime bona fides to Washington.
Across two terms, Demings has sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of bills that have become law—though a divided Congress means she does not have a signature piece of legislation to hang her hat on. But her most significant moment came when, in January 2020, she served as an impeachment manager during the first Senate trial of then-President Donald Trump. Though the Senate ultimately acquitted Trump—voting along party lines except for the sole defection of Senator Mitt Romney—Demings’s prominence continued to grow. She was profiled by The Washington Post,NPR,and other national outlets. “Was it worth it? Every day it has been worth it,” she said of the trial after its conclusion. “Just like when I was a law enforcement officer, when I saw someone breaking the law, I did not stop and think about, well, my goodness, what will the judge do? … I did my job to stop that threat and then go to court and plead my case.”
After that, she landed on Biden’s shortlist for vice president—evidence of both her meteoric rise and the Democratic Party’s relentless search for its next phenom who can capture the national imagination the way Barack Obama did.
Demings makes phone calls to constituents from the Pinellas County Democratic headquarters in Florida. (Octavio Jones / Getty)
“Florida, vota por la jefa de la policía, no por el politiquero,” Demings’s first Spanish-language ad, aired in June, said. Vote for the chief of police, not the politician. Demings is trying to define herself for voters she hopes will form her coalition—particularly the Latino voters who have been tilting Republican in recent years She’s on the defensive: The Rubio campaign has tried to pin the Democratic Party’s most left-wing sensibilities on her.
In a campaign ad of his own, Rubio touts his endorsement from Florida’s Fraternal Order of Police and 55 sheriffs, and suggests that Demings supported the “Defund the Police” movement—or, at the very least, did not reject it fiercely enough. “Senator Rubio has not only tried not to defund the police; he’s defended the police,” Al Palacio, the Miami Dade public-schools Fraternal Order of Police president, says in the ad. “And we’re here to defend him.” Rubio’s campaign believes that this is a winning issue; an October 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 47 percent of Americans want to see more spending on police, compared with 15 percent who would like to see budgets reduced.
Demings dismissed the ad out of hand, responding with a brief statement: “I am the police. This is ridiculous.”
Though Florida has not seen the same jumps in crime rates as some other parts of the country over the past two years, the race has focused on policing and crime issues. The irony is, were she running as a Republican, Demings would be seen as emblematic of the tough-on-crime policies some voters say they want.
But because she’s running in a state that is turning redder and redder, Demings has to strike the right balance of being the police enforcer she’s always been while appearing open to reform, and being unrelentingly liberal on issues such as access to abortion while emphasizing her Christian faith so as not to isolate Catholic voters. And she has to highlight her identity—her family’s economic status growing up and, perhaps most important, her race—while not making it the central plank of her campaign. Over the past several years, Florida Republicans have passed laws that limit discussions of identity in classrooms and other public spaces—a bit of a contrast with the political campaign Demings has run, explaining to voters how being a Black woman has shaped her life and informed her policy preferences.
That’s been a difficult sell: How do you convince voters that you’ll be a senator who can get stuff done if the Democrats can manage to keep their Senate majority, when the Democrats had—at least in the public’s view—gotten so little done? But with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the party’s chances look different now, and maybe, just maybe, Demings will be the beneficiary. If Demings pulls off an upset, it will be not solely because she’s a Black woman, but because the Democrats finally figured out how to rack up some wins in D.C. And what could be a greater crowd-pleaser than that?
