RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
When President Obama laid out his ambitious plan to address climate change this week, he focused especially on reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the air. A few pioneering scientists are taking the idea of reducing carbon dioxide in a different direction. They're thinking about ways to remove what's already in the atmosphere, and possibly turn a profit in the process. NPR's Richard Harris caught up with one of the scientists who's exploring this new approach.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Lots of researchers are trying to tackle climate change by inventing better batteries, better solar cells, better windmills and more efficient vehicles. Peter Eisenberger has been looking at the problem from another perspective. He's not trying to invent anything. He's trying to take advantage of the vast wealth of knowledge that we already have at our fingertips.
PETER EISENBERGER: If you looked at knowledge as a commodity, we have generated this enormous amount of knowledge, and we hadn't even begun to think of the many ways we could apply it. So I felt that if we reversed the normal process of innovation - that is, somebody goes in the lab and says, eureka. I got this new material. Look what it can do. I got this new process. But rather said: This is what the world needs. You can go and find already existing knowledge that would enable you to do it.
HARRIS: He decided what the world needs is a way to suck carbon dioxide right out of the air. We're putting 30 billion tons of it into the air every year, and it's driving climate change. So he and another professor who works with him at Columbia University founded a company to do just that.
EISENBERGER: And it turned out that the best device already exists. It's called a monolith. That is the same type of instrument that's in your catalytic converter in your car that cleans up your exhaust.
HARRIS: He put together a bunch of these monoliths. They grab carbon dioxide from the air, and release it again when you heat them up. Their company, called Global Thermostat, was bankrolled with seed money from liquor and music magnate Edgar Bronfman. The company has built two pilot plants in Menlo Park, California. But, of course, there are big issues to solve: What do you do with the carbon dioxide once you've captured it, and how do you make money?
EISENBERGER: And so we then we looked for ways to monetize CO2, and found out lots of people wanted to use CO2 as an important feedstock for making a valuable product.
HARRIS: For example, people pipe it into greenhouses, or oil companies pump it underground to help them squeeze out more oil. Soda companies use it to put bubbles in their drinks. But these are mostly small-scale applications, so they'd never require all that much CO2. Maybe someday he could get paid to clean up the atmosphere by sucking out the CO2 and burying it underground, but there's no real support for that now. But using carbon dioxide to make fuel could someday be big. So Eisenberger's first project involves using CO2 to feed algae, which, in turn, churn out biofuel.
EISENBERGER: Our first demonstration plant is being erected right now down in Daphne, Alabama with an algae company called Algae Systems, which sits on Mobile Bay. They'll be floating their algae in plastic bags on the top of the water. We'll be piping in CO2 that we pull out of the air, and the sun will do the rest.
HARRIS: Now, this one project will have zero effect on how much carbon dioxide is in the earth's atmosphere. But Eisenberger does have much grander ambitions.
EISENBERGER: I believe we have something that's economically viable, so our company will be successful. But I'm really in this because I want to contribute to the long term solution that the world needs.
HARRIS: Eisenberger says if he can open the door to capturing carbon dioxide from the air and make the process cheap enough, someday we could actually slow down, or possibly even reverse the buildup of carbon dioxide in the air. Robert Socolow at Princeton University started hearing a buzz about this technology a few years back.
ROBERT SOCOLOW: It's catchy. It's attractive - conceptually - that one could basically pour CO2 into the atmosphere for the next several decades, and then take it out later and then everything would be fine.
HARRIS: But Socolow also found that worrisome. So he got his colleagues at the American Physical Society together a couple of years ago to produce a critique of this strategy.
SOCOLOW: It's seductive, and therefore we'd better understand its true promise before we get carried away.
HARRIS: It sounds like you were concerned that this would be an excuse for inaction.
SOCOLOW: Yes.
HARRIS: The physics panel concluded that the technology would be hopelessly expensive, costing $600 for every ton of carbon dioxide it drew out of the air. And the scale would also be huge. Consider what it would take to capture the carbon dioxide wafted into the air from a single coal-fired power plant.
SOCOLOW: The calculation that we have in our American Physical Society report is that it will be 20 miles long and 30 feet high. So it's like the Great Wall of China.
HARRIS: The committee concluded that it would make a lot more sense to cut down on emissions first - like make our cars, homes and factories more efficient. They also say it makes much more sense to capture carbon dioxide directly from smokestacks, where it's concentrated, instead of from the air. Socolow says maybe someday we'll have our emissions under control, and then we might need to remove some of the carbon dioxide that's already in the air with a capture technology. But that's a long way away, in his view.
SOCOLOW: I locate it in the 22nd century.
HARRIS: In other words, this might be a good project for Eisenberger's great-great-great grandchildren. No surprise, researchers working on carbon dioxide capture technologies today say that report made it much harder for them to raise money. And Eisenberger says the conclusions are just plain wrong, particularly the panel's cost estimate of $600 a ton.
EISENBERGER: We have had third-party reports - independent people - evaluating our technology, and it's under $50 a ton.
HARRIS: But Eisenberger says he hasn't actually demonstrated that yet, and he agrees nobody should take his word for it.
EISENBERGER: I'm just going to go do it. And doing it or not, that's the answer.
HARRIS: Eisenberger acknowledges that pursuing a big idea takes some hard-headedness and thick skin.
EISENBERGER: If they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile.
HARRIS: Do you really believe that?
EISENBERGER: Oh, without a doubt, and the history will show you that. Because what you do when you innovate, you disturb the existing order. Fortunately, that's the beauty of science, right? The people that take the time to come into the lab, right, and see it working and can do their own evaluation of the costs and all the performance, they know it's not crazy.
HARRIS: And if he and other researchers pursuing this technology can really make it inexpensive to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Eisenberger says it could be a game-changer. We could start producing fuels with the carbon dioxide that's already in the air, instead of unearthing more fossil fuels. This won't happen quickly, though.
EISENBERGER: The energy infrastructure of the world is $55 trillion. You know, it's not like a new Google app. The world has made these transitions before, and they just don't happen in a day, but they happen.
HARRIS: There's certainly no guarantee that capturing carbon dioxide from the air will ever become big enough to make a difference to our climate. But it certainly won't if people like Eisenberger don't at least give it a try. Richard Harris, NPR News.
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MONTAGNE: Tomorrow, we'll hear about another scientist who has found a way to make a low-carbon diesel fuel from yeast.
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