The cost of direct air capture and storage: the impact of technological learning, regional diversity, and policy.

11 July 2022, Version 2
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

Direct air capture and storage is a technological solution to removing CO2 from our atmosphere that is deemed necessary to reach climate targets. However, huge question marks remain over the current and future costs. Here, we show the cost of DACS, for four example technologies, of plants built today before we project these costs into the future using technological learning theory. We exhibit that the costs of the first plants will be higher than many figures quoted today, but long-term, this can reduce to $80-600 t-CO2-1 at the Gt-CO2 year-1 technology scale. We also show that intelligent deployment via siting and energy source selection is critical and can save a few thousand dollars per t-CO2-1 for some technologies. Finally, we explore which policies can help create a market, accelerate scale-up, and reduce the long-term costs of direct air capture as a potentially vast future industry.

Keywords

direct air capture
carbon dioxide removal
negative emission technologies
techno-economics
cost
learning curves
regional analysis
policy

Supplementary materials

Title
Description
Actions
Title
Electronic supplementary information
Description
Supplementary tables and figures to the main text.
Actions

Comments

Comments are not moderated before they are posted, but they can be removed by the site moderators if they are found to be in contravention of our Commenting Policy [opens in a new tab] - please read this policy before you post. Comments should be used for scholarly discussion of the content in question. You can find more information about how to use the commenting feature here [opens in a new tab] .
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy [opens in a new tab] and Terms of Service [opens in a new tab] apply.