Process design and costing of an air-contactor for air-capture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carbon Engineering (CE) has developed an air-contactor design, specifically optimized to the challenge of efficiently removing CO 2 from atmospheric air. CE’s air-contactor design is based on the wet-scrubbing method, where air is brought into contact with an alkali hydroxide CO 2 -absorbing liquid solution. This is a similar process to that carried out in absorption or reactor towers commonly used in the chemical processing industry, but unique constraints posed by the challenge of removing CO 2 from atmospheric air have led CE to a number of original, innovative, and proprietary design modifications to these existing technologies. These key differences have led CE to depart from traditional chemical industry practice involving packed reactor towers, and to develop an intermittently- wetted air-contactor with cross-flow slab geometry. This design has as much in common with induced draft cooling towers as with chemical reactor towers. Design has been tested in a 5 m tall packed tower prototype and detailed tests of packing performance have been performed in a laboratory system that enables us to control CO 2 , air velocity, relative humidity while accurately measuring packing performance. In addition to CE’s on-going in-house engineering and experimental evaluations, the structural design and cost estimation of the air-contactor system was performed by an independent Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) firm (SolTech Projects Inc., Calgary, Alberta). The cost estimate produced by this EPC firm forms a conservative upper bound on the cost of the air-contactor because it is based on 2008/09 Alberta, Canada construction and labour costs, which were among the highest in the world. The EPC firm collected quotes from vendors for major equipment and components, and the total system cost was estimated using standard engineering cost-evaluation procedures. The total estimated cost of the air-contacting system, evaluated using conservative labour and energy rates as mention equates to $80/tonne- CO 2 and CE has identified specific areas of research to decrease this cost to $49/tonne- CO 2 .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".