The Great Decarbonization

In the last installment of our special report on sustainability, we look a how greenhouse gas reduction takes center stage with manufacturers—along with national, state, and local governments.

As the localized impacts of climate change become more existential, it’s clear that we must break our addiction to fossil fuels. It’s time to think about decarbonization—the full-scale elimination of all greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2021, many hopeful data trends emerged. Cities have taken real action to phase out natural gas, for example, in favor of electrification. Electricity, goes the thinking, can be created from sunlight. But there’s still a long way to go, as only 1 percent of homes today are net zero. The Climate Change tipping point is upon us.

Powering Up Decarbonization

Orca is the world’s largest direct air capture plant, capable of eliminating 4,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. It’s also aptly named: “Orca” is the Swiss word for “energy.” Courtesy Climeworks

There are actually two types of decarbonization—engine and energy. Although they achieve the same ends, they are different processes.

According to carbon offset service provider Terrapass, engine decarbonization involves removing built-up carbon residue that accumulates in internal combustion engines from fossil fuels that release carbon when they are burned. 

The residue is physically scraped off by a professional technician, or a chemical solvent can be poured into the gas tank. It’s not meant to be done on a regular basis, and most vehicles manufactured within the past 15-plus years comply with emissions standards that also reduce the amount of accumulated carbon.

Electricity decarbonization has the same basic principle as engine decarbonization: removing carbon from the system. However, the main difference is that removing CO2 from the electrical grid means stopping it from occurring in the first place. 

“This means more than simply switching off fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy, such as solar power and geothermal energy,” Terrapass notes. “It involves increasing energy efficiency and looking for clean energy resources that are not typical renewables.”

Electrification: All or Nothing

Electrification technologies—those that promote the all-electric status of homes, transportation, and businesses—are rapidly becoming more cost-effective and more reliable than fossil fuel systems in a variety of planning scenarios and climatic conditions, according to COGNITION data.

For example, the electrification of homes is expected to increase substantially in the next decade, with market growth from $2.4 billion in 2020 to $12.9 billion in 2029 for electrified home technologies. These include air-source heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and induction cooking products. 

Use of these technologies will “improve cost and performance metrics across climate zones and markets, and lead to high job creation associated with new construction and retrofit projects,” COGNITION notes.

Electrification is not a new concept: More than 37 percent of all homes nationwide are all-electric, most in the South, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Jurisdictions across the country are requiring new homes and commercial buildings to be all-electric. 

More than 50 cities in California thus far have taken this route since 2019. This includes San Jose and San Francisco, the nation’s 10th and 17th most-populated cities, according to the Sierra Club. Cities in other states, including Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, New Mexico, Washington, and Louisiana have plans under consideration or taking effect in 2022.

“We can’t ignore that we are seeing the consequences of the climate crisis every day,” San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani noted in a report in the San Francisco Examiner. “Whether it is the impact of sea-level rise on our sea wall or the wildfires that are devastating communities locally and around the globe, we will be paying for the consequences of climate decisions for a very long time.”

The Last Defense: Carbon Tech

Decarbonization has two green processes. The first is Earth’s forests and oceans, which regularly filter pollution from the atmosphere. For thousands of years, this method was sufficient to keep things in check. But over the past 50 years, increasing emission levels and destruction of natural purifiers such as rainforests and algae have caused carbon levels to rise by 90 percent, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

That brings the other cleaning effort into play: technology. A slew of tech products and processes are on hand to help slow the rate of emissions and speed up how fast we dispose of them. They include:

Direct-air capture. In this process, an industrial plant uses massive fans to pull in air and sends it through a liquid or solid filter to remove the CO2. The carbon is eventually injected deep into the ground, where additional natural processes turn it into solid rock within a couple of years. Swiss clean air technology manufacturer Climeworks recently went online in Iceland with Orca, the world’s largest direct air capture plant. It’s capable of drawing down 4,000 tons of CO2 annually—about the amount that 790 passenger vehicles pump out in a year.

Carbon utilization. This process of taking carbon particles out of the air and infusing them into products is necessary for highly intensive industries like concrete, asphalt, and steel. One method, mineralization, transforms CO2 into mineral carbonates, which can be used to make concrete and cement. 

Because these building construction materials are used at an enormous scale and have product lifetimes that span decades, mineralization “represents a significant opportunity for long-term carbon storage as well as utilization,” according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. A variety of processes that use carbon dioxide in the production of concrete and cement are already operating at limited commercial scales.

Other technologies use chemical and biological processes to transform CO2 and methane into fuels, polymers, and chemicals. Some of these processes are already producing high-value chemicals, National Academies notes.

But being able to use technology to reduce GHGs is only part of its environmental benefit. The process also assigns a value to CO2 and changes the way people think of the gas, according to COGNITION. 

Government incentives. More than $20 million has already been allocated to companies that have sequestered or reused carbon in products. Another $6 billion has been earmarked for companies developing carbon capture, storage, and utilization technologies.

Congress is also considering the Storing CO2 and Lowering Emissions Act (SCALE) Act, a $5 billion plan calling for an infrastructure to transport carbon dioxide from the sites of capture to locations where it can be utilized in manufacturing or sequestered safely and securely underground. 

Related Stories In This Series:

The State of Sustainable Building 2022 

Alternative Building Systems Rising

People Develop New Priorities for Living Spaces