Host: David Banmiller
Guest: Claude Letourneau | CEO | Svante
Category: 🌳 Carbon Capture
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[1:56] “Svante is a Vancouver based company […] with a vision to build what we call a carbon marketplace in order to lower the human impact on climate change. So what we have is a unique technology to capture CO2 from very diluted streams, such as what you would find in the air called direct air capture, or from industrial emission, avoiding the CO2 going up in the atmosphere. So we take the very diluted stream of CO2, and we concentrate the CO2 to 95% purity, so it allows somebody to either use the CO2 or compress the CO2 and pipe it to safely store the CO2.”
[2:42] “The technology is a nano material that we've engineered, and we call this a sorbent. And that sorbent is then laid on a very thin film. And then we stack all these sheets together to create a filter. And that filter is then used to catch and release the CO2. So we've also designed a machine, we call it a contactor that we put the filter in, and then it rotates and within a cycle of less than 60 seconds, the filter will be able to catch the CO2 from the diluted stream of mixture of CO2. It will then interrupt the CO2 inside the filters. And then the second zone is we regenerate the filter by putting steam and then we extract the CO2 from that filter, and then we make 95% CO2 purity that can be compressed. And then the last step of the contactor is to dry […] the filters so that we can restart the cycle. So it's a continuous process of catch and release, and cooling all in a very small piece of equipment.”
[4:05] “Our technology is well suited for hard to [tackle] industry. We're focusing primarily on decarbonisation of the hydrogen process […]. Unfortunately, you generate 10 tons of CO2 per ton of hydrogen you generate. So you need to catch that CO2, which is about 20% concentration in a nitrogen mixture. So we capture that CO2 as an end of the pipe, non-intrusive process. So you can go in and equip all the existing SMR plants or hydrogen plants with our technology. Cement is another case where when you take the rock and you break it, you make CO2 and in the process of making cement. So we catch that CO2 from that flue gas as well. And we've also adapted our technology to be able to be applicable for direct air capture, which is much more diluted, we're looking at 0.04% CO2. And in this case, we're doing it in partnership with a leading company in that space called Climeworks in Switzerland.”
[5:21] “The value proposition is that we lower the cost of the contactor and the filtering system to capture the CO2 compared to existing technology that has been out there for 85 years. It's called a gas to liquid system. So you're using a solvent to catch the CO2 and then you need to boil off that solvent to regenerate the solvent and release the CO2. So it's quite energy intensive, because you need a higher pressure steam to do so. So in our case, we're using very low pressure steam. And the conductor itself, it combines all three operations of catch and release and cooling into a single piece of equipment, we call this process intensification. So the capital costs of the plant will be much lower than a liquid system where you need a tall tower to capture, another tower to regenerate, and a reboiler or heat exchanger to boil off the solvent.”
[23:15] “We need to stop this [...] it's one or the other. We need electric vehicles on steroids. We need renewable on steroids. We need hydrogen on steroids. And we need carbon management. The sum of all this to have an impact on the climate to get to net zero by 2050 is about $100 trillion of capital investment. Carbon management is about $2 trillion, 2% for 20% of your CO2 emission. This is the more bang for your buck.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
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🕰️ 56 min | 🗓️ 02/18/2022
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