Understanding environmental trade-offs and resource demand of direct air capture technologies through comparative life-cycle assessment

Kavya Madhu (), Stefan Pauliuk, Sumukha Dhathri and Felix Creutzig
Additional contact information
Kavya Madhu: University of Freiburg
Stefan Pauliuk: University of Freiburg
Sumukha Dhathri: University of Freiburg
Felix Creutzig: Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change

Nature Energy, 2021, vol. 6, issue 11, 1035-1044

Abstract: Abstract Direct air capture (DAC) technologies remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air through chemical sorbents. Their scale-up is a backstop in many climate policy scenarios, but their environmental implications are debated. Here we present a comparative life-cycle assessment of two main DAC technologies coupled with carbon storage: temperature swing adsorption (TSA) and high-temperature aqueous solution (HT-Aq) DAC. Our results show that TSA DAC outperforms HT-Aq DAC by a factor of 1.3–10 in all environmental impact categories studied. With a low-carbon energy supply, HT-Aq and TSA DAC have a net carbon removal of up to 73% and 86% per ton of CO2 captured and stored. For the same climate change mitigation effect, TSA DAC needs about as much renewable energy and land occupation as a switch from gasoline to electric vehicles, but with approximately five times higher material consumption. Input requirements for chemical absorbents do not limit DAC scale-up.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00922-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natene:v:6:y:2021:i:11:d:10.1038_s41560-021-00922-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nenergy/

DOI: 10.1038/s41560-021-00922-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Energy is currently edited by Fouad Khan

More articles in Nature Energy from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().