A factory in the United Arab Emirates will begin capturing carbon from the air and binding it in rock. This provides the foundation for the oil country’s call to combat global warming without abandoning fossil fuels.
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Located in the remote mountains of the Emirate of Fujeirah, the project is based on a new technology from the Omani start-up 44.01 that allows carbon dioxide (CO2), the main associated greenhouse gas, to be removed from the atmosphere. exposed to human activity before being dissolved in seawater and injected into the subsurface where it mineralizes.
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It is financed by the Emirati oil giant ADNOC, whose CEO is none other than Sultan Al-Jaber, the president of the World Climate Conference (COP28), which begins on Thursday in the neighboring emirate of Dubai.
The first CO2 injections will take place in the context of debates that will focus in particular on the status of these controversial technologies.
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“We believe the amount of rock here in the UAE has the potential to store gigatons of CO2,” Sophie Hildebrand, head of technology at ADNOC, told AFP during a site visit this week.
“ADNOC has allocated $15 billion for decarbonization projects,” she added, refusing to specify the amount allocated to the Fujairah project.
The United Arab Emirates, already the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, plans to invest $150 billion by 2027 to increase its hydrocarbon production capacity.
Like other oil and gas powers, they are relying on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to limit emissions responsible for global warming, despite criticism from climate experts who say they are inadequate to address the crisis.
These techniques, poorly developed on a large scale and very expensive, are still far from making a difference on a global scale.
“Not proven”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that existing fossil fuel infrastructure – without the use of carbon capture – will push world temperatures above 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
At the solar-powered Fujeirah site, giant fans extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere.
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The liquefied gas is then stored in tanks, then converted back into gas and dissolved in seawater before being injected into a kilometer-deep well.
“According to our calculations, it will take about eight months for the CO2 underground to be fully mineralized,” explained Talal Hasan, CEO of 44.01.
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The company, winner of the 2022 Earthshot Prize, conducted a pilot project in Oman that enabled the sequestration of around 1.2 tonnes of CO2.
The Emirati project is “10 to 15 times” larger, with the aim of achieving “one tonne of CO2 per day over an initial period of 10 days”, Talal Hasan added.
To be competitive with more conventional storage technologies, “costs of around US$15 per ton of sequestered CO2 are targeted, excluding the costs of capture.”
Since being chosen by the host country to lead global climate negotiations, Sultan Al-Jaber has called on the hydrocarbon industry to reduce its emissions and not necessarily its production, which has raised concerns among environmentalists.
“When negotiating parties talk about a full phase-out of fossil fuels, they are excluding fuels whose emissions have been reduced through carbon capture and storage,” explains Karim Elgendy of the British think tank Chatham House.
The problem, however, is that these technologies “have not yet been tested on a large scale,” he emphasizes.