An Australian prototype carbon capture and storage machine has secured a US$700,000 contract and this deal is thought to be the first time an Australian company has obtained a deal to remove CO2 using direct air capture (DAC) technology.
The Australian company, AspiraDAC, will use about 180 of the machines to capture and store 500 tonnes of CO2 by 2027 at an agreed US$1,000 a tonne.
In April, several major companies, including the owners of Facebook and Google, announced a new venture called Frontier that would commit US$925m to projects that pull CO2 from the air and then store it. The contract with AspiraDAC is a part of the projects.
Payment giants Stripe, one of Frontier’s members, announced its spending of US$2.4 million for purchase of six direct air capture projects. AspiraDAC is one of the six projects in the first round of spending.
Julian Turecek, executive director of AspiraDAC, said up to 180 modules would be needed to fulfil the contract and these would cover an area of less than half a hectare. Each module can capture two tonnes of CO2 a year.
The company had not confirmed the location or the geological storage for the site, however, the depleted oil and gas reservoirs at Moomba, in South Australia, were being considered, Julian Turecek added.
The machine was originally developed by Southern Green Gas in partnership with the University of Sydney. The business development manager and co-founder at Southern Green Gas, Brett Cooper, believes that the deal is a major step for the industry, which has big growth potential in Australia.
The world’s biggest direct air capture plant so far is in Iceland. The company behind the plant, Climeworks, declared in late June that it was expanding capacity to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
