Herzog highlighted three other affordability concerns. But to obtain those carbon-free energy sources, DAC will have to compete with growing ranks of consumers as the clean energy transition escalates. Unless that energy comes from zero-carbon sources rather than those that produce emissions that must also be extracted from the air, the operational costs of multiple DAC units could become untenable. Herzog observed that it takes a lot of energy (about 1200 kilowatt hours/ton of CO 2) to separate CO 2 from the large amount of air that a DAC unit must process. DAC could serve as a NET as well as a carbon source for drop-in fuel production in aviation and other hard-to-decarbonize transportation modes. To frame the discussion, Barrett noted that the latest IPCC Assessment Report indicates that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius will likely require the deployment of negative emissions technologies (NETs) that remove and sequester CO 2 from the air. Harvard University Professor of Applied Physics David Keith, founder of Carbon Engineering, a company developing technology to capture CO 2 from ambient air, offered his perspective on those challenges as well as opportunities for DAC to play a substantial role in advancing net-zero economies. MIT Energy Initiative Senior Engineer Howard Herzog, a pioneer in carbon capture research and author of the book Carbon Capture, evaluated the technical, logistical and financial challenges of deploying DAC at scale. Moderated by MIT Joint Program Founding Co-Director and Sloan School of Management Professor Emeritus Henry Jacoby, and introduced by LAE Director and MIT Aero/Astro Professor Steven Barrett, the seminar featured presentations by two trailblazers in carbon-removal technology. To explore the economic feasibility of large-scale DAC, the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment (LAE) convened a seminar entitled “Affordable Direct Air Capture: Myth or Reality?" on the MIT Campus and online on May 26. Capture cost estimates are wide-ranging, from USD $50/ton to $1,000/ton of CO 2. As the technology has not yet been demonstrated at large scales, the future cost of DAC and its potential to support an affordable path to a net-zero economy is uncertain. Carbon removed from the atmosphere in hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as aviation and heavy industry could be utilized to produce synthetic fuels or stored underground. DAC and other carbon-removal technologies may play a key role in global and national efforts to achieve net-zero emissions economies in which the amount of CO 2 released into the atmosphere is equivalent to that being removed. Direct air capture ( DAC) technologies extract carbon dioxide (CO 2) directly from the atmosphere.
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