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What’s the real deal with carbon capture? Sucking carbon out of the air may sound like an enticing solution, but climate advocate and investor James Mwangi warns that the technology is too often used to justify polluting behaviour rather than prevent it. As he puts it, it’s the difference between endlessly cleaning up a messy room versus simply not making the mess in the first place. Furthermore, the technology is very energy intensive; but Kenya, with 96% renewable energy, is uniquely positioned to provide this technology, says Mwangi. Recorded live in conversation with Climate Curious co-host Ben Hurst at TED Countdown 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya.
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Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Curated by Deesha Chandra
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston
00:00 Introduction
00:38 Understanding carbon capture
01:21 Types of carbon capture
02:04 Challenges and realities of carbon capture
02:54 Innovative carbon capture techniques
05:18 Kenya’s role in carbon capture
06:37 Conclusion
[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:00] Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite-sized nuggets of Climate Goodness. From our TEDx London experts in under 10 minutes in this week’s climate, curious, we are cutting through the noise about carbon capture, [00:00:15] asking and answering what is it and in what situations is it a good solution, and when is it more likely to be a gimmick?
[00:00:24] On how Kenya is perfectly positioned to provide the carbon capture we need. Here’s Climate [00:00:30] Action Advocate and investor James Mwangi. Stay curious.
[00:00:38] Understanding carbon capture
[00:00:38] While there’s a big debate about how people use their claims on how they’re going to do [00:00:45] carbon capture. Mm-hmm. And, and here I agree with Al Gore. There’s lots of people saying, I don’t have to change my behavior today. We’re gonna fix this with carbon capture in the future. Right. Um, that is, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it on, on, on this podcast.
[00:00:57] It’s, it’s, it’s bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re allowed to say [00:01:00] bullshit. Um, I would’ve added a modifier before that, but my mother might hear it and then she will. What do you that f No, it’s, yeah, leave that one out. So don’t anyone who’s promising to do carbon capture in the future to allow [00:01:15] them to do something today.
[00:01:16] That’s nonsense. Okay. Right. And I think a lot of people who worry about carbon capture, right?
[00:01:21] Types of carbon capture
[00:01:21] And there’s two flavors of carbon capture, right? Mm-hmm. There’s the CCS, which is basically, I’m catching the emissions I’m making from my industrial process and I’m putting them away. So I’m like basically tidying up my room after I make a mess.
[00:01:33] Okay? And the, or like I’m rather picking it up before it even goes out right into the wider atmosphere. Uh, is one flavor. Um, and then the other one is direct to air carbon capture, where I’m saying it’s already up there [00:01:45] where, and it could be other forms of CDR, it could be out there anywhere. It’s ambient and we’re just dry it, drawing down carbon as fast as we can and putting it away permanently.
[00:01:53] Mm-hmm. Across both of them. I think there have been bad actors who’ve used the [00:02:00] promise of doing it one day to argue why they shouldn’t do stuff today. Okay.
[00:02:04] Challenges and realities of carbon capture
[00:02:04] The problem is fighting them has gotten us to ignore a very, a very simple mathematical reality, which is we cannot read any of the IPCC reports. We cannot stay within planetary bounds this century.
[00:02:18] Mm-hmm. Without a vast program between five and 15 billion tons a year of carbon removal. Mm-hmm. Now some of that is gonna come from hopefully restoring some natural systems. Mangroves, tree, you [00:02:30] know, forests, et cetera, et cetera. Great. They die. But if you’re just kind of, you keep replanting, that’s fine.
[00:02:35] Mm-hmm. Great. But there’s a limit to how much land we have for that. Some of it is gonna come from stuff like biochar, which is really just a way of using the same land many times. Mm-hmm. Because you, [00:02:45] you make the biomass, then you turn it into bio, try stick it in the ground. Mm-hmm. That probably taps out at about between half a billion and, and a billion tons of potential per year.
[00:02:54] Mm-hmm.
[00:02:54] Innovative carbon capture techniques
[00:02:54] Then there’s other techniques like, you know, now we’re starting to play with chemistry, and one of the things we know is if you crush certain kinds of rock and expose them to air, they do absorb carbon dioxide for accommodate carbonates, usually with air and water, so, okay. Um, that’s enhanced rock weathering where you take, it’s a natural process.
[00:03:11] It’s been happening all, you know, it’s why we have chalk, uh, and [00:03:15] stuff. Right, right, right. But now you’re accelerating it. You’re taking, you’re digging up, you’re quarrying, rock, crushing it, spreading it over land. It’s good for the soil in some places. Mm-hmm. And it also takes carbon out. Mm-hmm. And then there’s a last version, which is direct air carbon capture, where you’re [00:03:30] actually running a big old energy intensive, vacuum cleaner that’s sucking air in, it’s, capturing it in some sort of process, gives you a concentrated stream of carbon dioxide that’s coming out of that.
[00:03:40] Mm-hmm. And then you put that carbon dioxide somewhere where it won’t come back. Mm-hmm. [00:03:45] Now, if I am a nasty, naughty, uh, fossil fuel loving, uh, petroleum company, maybe. I’m sticking it in an oil field to increase my, my oil returns. Okay. Which kind of defeats the point. Right. Right, right, [00:04:00] right. I’m, I’m using it to force out more of, I’m squeezing the bottom of that juice box to get more of the um, and that’s also a problem.
[00:04:06] Okay. But if I, it turns out, if you inject it in particular kinds of volcanic rock, they do that in Iceland. They’re also now starting to do it here in Kenya. It turns [00:04:15] into the, it’s the same Baal that we crush for enhanced rock weathering, but now it’s underground. Mm. And so you’re basically injecting massive amounts of carbon dioxide in a concentrated soda water.
[00:04:25] And when that seltzer hits the right rocks, it forms a perm, a solid [00:04:30] mm-hmm. That stays down there for 10,000 years. Okay. Now it’s a very energy intensive process. It takes about, I think, two megawatt hours to to do one ton of carbon dioxide from them. Okay. You could bring that down a little bit, but not by much.
[00:04:43] So you need an obscene [00:04:45] amount of energy to make a big difference. But the reason director carbon capture is important is it’s the only one of the, the pathways for carbon removal that doesn’t have a ceiling, right? As long as we can find the energy, we can do as much of it as we need. Right. [00:05:00] And people say, well, but we have other uses for energy.
[00:05:02] And I’m like, yes. And we have massive amounts of renewable energy that we’re not using. Okay. So in some places in the world, don’t do this. In the us if you have renewable energy in the US, for goodness sake, use it to displace fossil [00:05:15] fuel energy. Mm-hmm. In your grid or in Europe or whatever.
[00:05:18] Kenya’s Role in carbon capture
[00:05:18] But Kenya’s grid is 96% renewable already.
[00:05:22] We’ve got all this energy sitting here. There’s this big pile of homework that the world has of drawing down carbon. Mm-hmm. We need this technology to get cheap, [00:05:30] which means we need to build it again and again, again, and learn how to get from $600 a ton to less than a hundred dollars a ton. There’s no other place in the world to responsibly learn than here.
[00:05:39] Mm-hmm. I would argue. Mm-hmm. So that’s, that’s the point, is we don’t disagree with any of the [00:05:45] skepticism about certain aspects of carbon removal. Okay. It’s not about making excuses. Right. But I, I said it in my, in the TED Talk I did a few years ago mm-hmm. Is, you know, some people say, don’t do this because if we do it, it’ll encourage us to [00:06:00] keep on emitting.
[00:06:00] Right. That’s like saying, okay, I’m driving my car. I’m not gonna put on my seatbelt or install airbags. ’cause otherwise I will, I’ll deliberately drive into a wall. Right, right, right, right. No, just don’t drive into the wall. But yo, you, you may need that seatbelt and those airbags. [00:06:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you are kenya’s like a.
[00:06:18] The smart kid in the class that’s doing everybody else’s homework in that specific regard. Well, we expect to be paid through the nose for it. Exactly right. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The rich kid in the class’s doing everybody [00:06:30] else’s, hopefully they eventually very rich kid in the class that’s saying, yeah, you know, we are the, we are the reverse Saudi Arabia.
[00:06:35] I love that. I love that.
[00:06:37] Conclusion
[00:06:37] Thanks for listening to this quickie. This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDx London. Until next time, stay curious.
