TECHNOLOGY that “sucks” carbon dioxide out of the air could be up and running in Aberdeenshire around the middle of the decade.
Banchory-based Pale Blue Dot Energy (PBDE) is working with Canadian firm Carbon Engineering (CE) to develop the UK’s first commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) plant.
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They are considering building it close to PBD’s planned Acorn carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at St Fergus gas terminal, near Peterhead.
If it goes ahead, the project could deliver huge environmental and economic advantages to Scotland and the UK.
Steve Oldham, CE’S chief executive, said a large-scale DAC plant would create around 1,500 jobs during construction and 100-200 for the operational phase.
It would also require the investment of hundreds of millions of pounds.
Full-scale DAC facilities can be built to capture one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year each, equivalent to the annual emissions of 250,000 cars or the workload of 40m trees.
PBDE and CE have not decided which location would be best for the UK plant.
But said “one of the locations being considered by the partnership for their first UK DAC plant is in North East Scotland, close to the Acorn CCS project.”
PBDE hopes Acorn will be operational by late 2024, while the first DAC project could be operational about two years later.
Alan James, PBDE managing director, said: “Whilst most businesses here have growing aspirations to decarbonise to make their contribution to meeting the UK’s Net Zero target, some face huge challenges due to the nature of their emissions, or the uncertain business environment for their operations during the energy transition.
“For some, installing decarbonisation technology may simply never be commercially or logistically practical. DAC will provide a mechanism for those businesses to reduce their climate impact effectively and allow others to remove from the atmosphere the emissions that they were responsible for in the past.
“A DAC industry will create jobs and export opportunities for business around the UK and is an ideal transition for some of the oil and gas supply chain.”
From a pilot facility in British Columbia, Canada, CE has been capturing CO2 from the atmosphere since 2015 and is now engineering its first large-scale commercial plant in the United States that will capture one million tonnes of atmospheric CO2 annually – equivalent to the work of 40 million trees.
Mr Oldham said: “We’ve been developing and optimizing our Direct Air Capture technology for more than a decade and are thrilled to now be working with Pale Blue Dot to bring this solution to the United Kingdom.
“This partnership with Pale Blue Dot enables the deployment of DAC projects in the UK and will help establish a UK DAC industry that will deliver significant emission reductions and help address the climate challenge.”
