The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has published the final version of its paper focused on scaling direct air capture (DAC) technologies in a sustainable way.
The authors have based their work on publicly available scientific and business data, as well as first-of-a-kind plant cost values obtained by them. Crunching the numbers they have focused on several different aspects of the emerging industry.
The first one is something that might appear simple at first glance but doesn’t seem to – a classification of the types of direct air capture technologies.
The RMI has come up with no more than 11 and described the critical nuances that distringuis them from each other. An important factor with this (perhaps) granular approach is that it allows for incorporating new technologies, simplifying forecasting and cost estimations and providing a way to harmonize technologies both present and future.
Another interesting part of the roadmap deals with the obstacles faced by DAC. Ranging from its cost to, materials, process designs, infrastructure and the simple energy requirements most of the approaches have, the paper describes them in detail.
With all possible angles considered, the authors finally delve into the roadmap itself. Here we find a priority list for every components of the DAC industry:
- R&D
- Demonstration
- Deployment
The RMI tries to pinpoint the bottlenecks on all of these plains, as well as formulate and prioritize the actions that can generate the fastest speed of development in a way that future proofs the industry.
The roadmap comes at an important time for the industry, as the first DAC hubs are starting to take shape and investment, both public and private, is seeing a significant increase across the world, not just the U.S.
You can read the full paper here.
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