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Note on the technical content of the Discovery Channel program

The Discovery Channel team did an extraordinarily good job of turning a complex set of experiments into an hour of entertaining and informative television. The University of Calgary team had a great deal of fun participating in the program. Nevertheless, it's important to understand, as is routine for such things, that all editorial decisions were made by Discovery and that there are important technical differences between the work done at the University of Calgary and that shown on the Discovery program.

The following are the most important differences:

• In editing the interviews, the Discovery program juxtaposes Keith's statement that the climate problem is solvable with today's technologies with statements about air capture. This is potentially misleading. Keith said that we can act now on the climate problem using technologies at hand like wind power, coal with CO₂ capture and storage and nuclear power. Air capture is an exciting and potentially important technology, but it is not ready for large-scale deployment. While this program highlights exciting research and development, it is crucial to begin attacking the climate problem with tools available today and to avoid the temptation to delay action while we wait for R&D to deliver solutions.


• Capturing CO₂ from air using hydroxide requires two major steps, first a "contactor" in which CO₂ is extracted from the air into the hydroxide solution, and second a "caustic recovery” system in which the CO₂ rich hydroxide solution is regenerated and pure pipeline quality CO₂ is extracted. A major part of our work has been on novel methods of energy efficient caustic recovery. The Discovery Channel program focused on the contactor and made no mention of the recovery step.


• We have now demonstrated a contactor design that requires an energy input of less than 100 kWhr/ton-CO₂ captured. This value was achieved by operating the caustic fluid pumping system intermittently so that the average fluid pumping energy could be reduced by approximately an order of magnitude. The energy efficiency estimates mentioned on the discovery program do not take these effects into account, so they understate the actual contactor performance substantially.

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