Japanese heavy-industry giant Kawasaki has carried out one of the country’s largest direct air capture (DAC) pilots to date, successfully demonstrating a system with lower energy consumption than conventional DAC mechanisms.
Deployed at Kawasaki’s Kobe plant, the system showed it can capture 100 to 200 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 emissions a year, powered by a proprietary sorbent that separates the gas at about 60°C, marking a substantial reduction from the 100–120°C typically required by liquid absorption systems.
This lower-heat advancement enabled the system to utilize waste heat from the Kobe plant, lowering the technology’s energy requirements and environmental impact.
Standing at ∼42 ft (13 m) in height, the Kawasaki pilot DAC system was built using blueprints and insights from solutions developed for submarines and space stations.
While Asia is home to a number of pilot-scale DAC developments, the country of Japan already has a few commercial-scale ones. Kawasaki’s pilot removal volumes of 100 to 200 tonnes per year are small by global standards, but they are significant on a national scale.
Moving forward, the heavy-industry titan has the ambition to scale this DAC system to one of Asia’s largest announced DAC deployments. To that end, it will work on advancing this technology to a commercial unit that will be able to capture 500,000 to 1 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030.
This DAC demonstration comes at a time when Japan’s heavy industry sectors, including the steel, chemicals, and shipping industries, face pressure to decarbonize and phase out reliance on fossil fuels.
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These industries are the ones that could benefit from Kawasaki’s DAC solution, and the company also expects to see demand for this technology from fossil-fuel-dependent emerging economies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.
Kawasaki’s successful DAC pilot aligns with Japan’s sustainability strategy that entails the usage of different decarbonization technologies to reduce emissions and capturing and storing CO2 with the goal of reaching net-zero by 2050.
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