Understanding the ethics and scalibility of emerging Direct Air Capture approaches

With growing discourse surrounding climate repair and geoengineering in general, scientists must ask critical questions regarding the morality of such research whilst also recognising its potential importance. From a social perspective, there is a careful balance to be struck between the need for Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) to limit global temperature rise and ensuring that this research does not detract from efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This poster will examine these ethical considerations whilst highlighting the physical constraints of cutting-edge CDR through a process-modelling analysis.

Specific focus will be placed on the fundamental physics underpinning emerging Direct Air Capture (DAC) processes, and hence on evaluating the scalability of such technologies from a scientific perspective. In particular, a physics based transport–reaction model of Supercapacitive Swing Adsorption (SSA), which currently operates at the millimetre scale, will be presented. Analysis of this model provides insight into whether SSA can be realistically scaled to industrial levels, identifying the physical and operational factors that may limit such upscaling and thus the implications for feasible CDR deployment. This work builds upon recent research published by the Forse group within the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.