all of human activities at the moment collectively each year put about fifty billion tons of carbon

dioxide up into the atmosphere carbon removal now has to be thought of as part of plan a for
responding to climate change here in British Columbia we collect co2 directly out of the atmosphere
so some people it seems like something that's way down the road but the technology is ready for us
to use now climate change is a nasty thing and it's going to take all of human ingenuity to get us
through this moment what we need to look at is if direct air capture is going to live up to its promise
it's much easier to keep a unit of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and it is to try and retrieve it
once it's already there so when it comes to climate change the best way to respond is to stop putting
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in addition scientists are suggesting the need to remove
about 10 billion tons per year that does have the ring of science fiction to them broadly speaking
there are two different categories of carbon removal strategies one is a biological category planting
trees changing farm practices or you can at the other end of the spectrum and imagine more
technological or chemical based strategies something like direct air capture which would have been
off the table a few decades ago as kind of a wacky scheme by mad scientists now needs real
consideration but the economics and storage questions about where the carbon dioxide can actually
be held over the long term these are open questions

[Music]

so we're carbon-capture company we have a pilot facility which captures a ton of

co2 per day

we think we're different because we

focus on very large scale there's

different ways of attacking carbon

capture what we do is direct air capture

so we're targeting the low concentration

co2 that's in the atmosphere

[Music]
fundamentally our process has four steps

each step concentrates the co2 more first step is a big fan it pulls air through it reacts with chemical
and captures 80 percent of the co2 out of the air we take that co2 rich solution repressive potato
solid calcium carbonate pellets we heat those very small pellets up and out comes the co2 you can
then do two things with it you can choose to permanently bury it somewhere safely now you've
reduced the overall level of co2 and that's carbon negative or you can make products out of it and
one of the things we do here in Squamish is we combine our co2 with hydrogen and we make a fuel
that's essentially carbon neutral you put it in your car you drive your car the car burns the co2 and it
goes back into the atmosphere again and

that's what carbon neutral means you're

not adding overall to the quantity of

co2 in the atmosphere if you think about

a closed-loop system around and around

we go in time though there won't be

enough to address climate change because

the carbon dioxide has to be put into

storage to actually remove the carbon

dioxide from the atmospheric system

directly capture at the moment is a

reasonably expensive proposition

industries feel that it's scale costs

come down all the time that's why as a

company we focused on large scale and

why we're all so happy to license our

technology to anybody in the world who

wants to build these plants we just

announced our first large-scale plant in

Texas we're actually expecting that will be a one Megaton atmospheric co2 implant that's the
equivalent of 40 million trees in one plant our cost point is a little bit less than $200 per ton for that
first plant but we expect the cost to come down a lot if carbon dioxide can be captured for 150
dollars or less per ton then it becomes almost a commercially viable enterprise because that carbon
dioxide could be put to a use that would enable the facility to pay for itself but to scale it up would
mean building lots and lots of these facilities and spreading them around the world you could
eliminate the world's emissions with 40,000 of our plants sounds like a big number but it's actually
less than there are power

plants for example in the world

lots of grand promises have been made

about carbon removal and one of the jobs

that has to be done now is to sort

through the reality from the promise

the goal is to use large-scale carbon

removal as a piece of humanities

response but if society kind of gets the

notion that does it get out of jail free

card then that might have perverse

impacts on climate response today so the

trick now is to work out what forms of

carbon removal at what scales are going

to make the best contribution and the

most socially just contribution

we think of ourselves as a really

important tool that we have to have in

the fight against climate change

I don't think it should be the only

solution but we need everything we can

bring to the table

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Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban
Transformation was launched by Prime
Minister of India Narendra Modi in June
2015 with the focus to establish
infrastructure that could ensure adequate
robust sewage networks and water supply
for urban transformation by implementing
urban revival projects.