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MOSCOW (MRC) -- United Airlines said it
had committed to a multimillion-dollar investment in a project to remove carbon
dioxide from the air through air direct-capture technology as part of a plan to
be 100% "green" by 2050, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
The
project, 1PointFive, is a partnership between Occidental Petroleum Corp
subsidiary Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Rusheen Capital Management that plans to
build the first U.S. industrial-sized direct air capture plant that would
permanently sequester 1 million tons of CO2 each year.
That is the
equivalent of what 40 million trees can do, but covering a land area about 3,000
times smaller, United said, adding that direct-capture technology is one of the
few proven ways to correct for aircraft emissions. United declined to provide
details on the investment amount.
Speaking to reporters about the
project, United CEO Scott Kirby said carbon capture and sequestration is the
only scalable technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere and buries it
in the ground. "Sequestration is a real and permanent solution," Kirby
said.
Until now, the airline industry has focused primarily on the
purchase of carbon offsets to reduce the environmental impact of flying. Before
the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global air travel earlier this year, carbon
reduction was expected to be a top priority for airlines, particularly in
Europe, where a flight-shaming movement has gained momentum.
Although the
pandemic has forced airlines to focus heavily on daily survival rather than
longer-term environmental goals, Kirby said climate change could alter behaviors
in even more dramatic ways than the pandemic. Aside from the carbon-capture
program, United is also investing in sustainable aviation fuel, which has up to
80% less carbon emissions than conventional jet fuel.
Most of an
airline's contribution to climate change comes from the fuel it takes to fly.
Kirby said that with fewer planes in the skies during the pandemic, emissions
were likely down about 55%. The carbon-capture project will offset nearly 10% of
United's annual emissions, he said.
As MRC informed earlier,
Perstorp says it plans to build a large-scale commercial carbon capture and
utilization (CCU) unit at Stenungsund, Sweden, dubbed Project AIR, that will use
a production concept the company has developed to produce sustainable methanol
from a variety of recovered end-of-life streams and hydrogen from
electrolysis. The company plans to utilize its own CO2 and residue streams,
and use the methanol to substitute all the fossil-based methanol used in its
production in Europe. Project AIR aims to substitute all the 200,000 metric
tons/year of fossil methanol that Perstorp uses in Europe as a raw material for
downstream chemical products, the company says.
As MRC reported earlier,
in December 2017, Perstorp announced world’s first portfolio of renewable
alternatives to the essential polyols Pentaerythritol (Penta),
Trimethylolpropane (TMP), and Neopentyl glycol (Neo).
As per MRC's ScanPlast report,
November total production of unmixed PVC was about 86,100 tonnes versus 86,600
tonnes a month earlier, SayanskKhimPlast and RusVinyl decreased their capacity
utilisation last month. Overall output of polymer were 892,100 tonnes in the
eleven months of 2020 from 893,600 tonnes a year earlier. Two producers
increased their production, whereas two other manufacturers reduced their
output. |
