Klaus Lackner didn't set out to save the world, but he thinks his machine could help

The machine that could save the planet first killed Seymour the philodendron, turning its leaves shaggy and brown after three years in a tiny greenhouse.

So the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions replaced it with a geranium, and the new plant grew lush and green, fed by the constant stream of captured carbon dioxide.

The geranium, unnamed so far, sat in a tiny greenhouse in the center's fourth-floor lab, its $15.98 price tag still attached to the pot. Plastic tubes slithered across the table, connecting the greenhouse to a metal machine and computer screens that monitored the CO² in the air.

“This guy is running, right, Allen?” the center's director, Klaus Lackner, said on a hazy Monday in the lab at Arizona State University. He leaned over to inspect the tiny prototype.

“Should be, yeah," replied his longtime research partner, Allen Wright. He pulled on a blue lab coat and shuffled over to watch.

Lackner, 65, reached a long arm across the table and picked up a black plastic box. Inside were stacked 19 sheets of rough white resin. He ran a finger along the edge, making sure the resin was dry. When it was, he had discovered, it was covered in carbon dioxide.

“This thing has been sitting in the open lab air,” Lackner said in his soft German accent. “So it’s loaded with CO².”

The machine’s metal lid lifted with the press of a button. Another black box rose into the air, filling the lab with the scent of fish. Its sheets were moist and empty. A bath of cool tap water had washed off their haul of carbon dioxide, sending it through the rubber tubes and into the greenhouse.

There, the geranium absorbed its fill, sucking away another chunk of civilization-threatening gas. Just a few hundred billion tons to go.

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The world has a carbon-dioxide problem. An unprecedented amount of the invisible gas fills the atmosphere, threatening the planet with twin attacks: global warming and a collapse of the world's energy cycle.

Lackner thinks he can solve it.

For two decades — including the last four years at ASU — Lackner has pioneered and promoted a process called direct air capture, which would allow humankind to take back what it has already spewed into the atmosphere. He envisions 100 million air-capture devices spread around the world, working like shipping container-sized artificial trees.

His concept has finally taken root. A full-size prototype sits at ASU’s Polytechnic campus in Mesa. Activist organizations and private companies have formed to build on Lackner’s idea. The latest federal budget included a tax credit for capturing and storing carbon dioxide, and a United Nations report said direct air capture had “large potential” to help reach international climate goals.

That future would require a drastic drop in the use of fossil fuels, billions of dollars to build the machines and the cooperation of an American government whose president once called climate change a “hoax.”

But first, Lackner needed to perfect his prototypes.

“It’s not very cooperative, Allen,” Lackner said, fumbling to pull out the still-wet box. He pried open a metal latch and tugged until the box came free. Then he inserted the dry box and closed the lid again.

On the monitor, the CO² concentration inside dropped to 0.4 percent, matching the air outside.

Lackner pulled off his glasses and pressed a green button on the base of the machine. Clear water flowed into the tank, bubbling over the box and its sheets of resin. Then he let go, and the water drained away, leaving the resin dripping inside.

Immediately the monitor started a slow climb as the resins shook off their carbon dioxide. “Point-seven percent,” Lackner read out. “One-point-two percent … We are now at 1.6.”

He stepped back, eyes locked on the monitor. How many times had he watched that number climb? It was impossible to keep count, but every time it thrilled him. A few minutes later, the number hit 1.8 percent. 1.9 percent. Two percent. Lackner smiled.

"The challenge now," he said, "is to go from the small things to the really big things."

CO² removal is the only way out

Four floors below the lab, in the lobby of an ASU Science and Technology Building, spins a 6-foot globe called “Magic Planet.” Field trips of middle-schoolers come to tap a touch screen, watching the globe light up with real-time displays of the Earth’s vital signs.

One of the options shows carbon-dioxide concentrations around the Earth. When a student presses that button, a deep yellow swallows most of the globe. Some spots swirl an angry red. Almost no place remains untouched.

Carbon dioxide has always figured in the blender that is the world’s atmosphere. The invisible, odorless gas plays an important role in photosynthesis, and a layer of the gas wraps around the planet, trapping the sun’s warmth like a giant blanket.

But there’s never been this much of it. The past 200 years of global industry have extracted seemingly endless amounts of carbon from the ground, burning it and leaving almost a trillion tons of CO² in the air.

That blanket of CO² is now overheating the planet.

The invisible gas makes itself seen in turbulent, world-altering climate change. Violent hurricanes slammed into the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast last summer, leaving meteorologists unable to explain their strength. Arizona’s drought has now stretched into its second decade. Europe is unseasonably cold, while parts of the Arctic warmed 45 degrees above their usual temperatures.

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And still the world can’t stop burning fossil fuels. The average American is responsible for about 16 tons of CO² emissions each year. Every day, another 98 million tons of carbon dioxide clog the atmosphere, and every year the global CO² level sets a new record.

Today it hovers around 408 parts per million, the highest mark in human history.

Almost every nation — the United States excluded — now agrees that global warming is a looming crisis. The 2015 Paris Agreement pledged to slash carbon emissions and hold the Earth's temperature within 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels.

But that runs counter to global development goals. As poor countries grow, their fossil-fuel consumption skyrockets. An expanding world population requires more energy than ever.

And there’s already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that simply cutting emissions would not solve the problem. Some of it has to come out.

“If the goal is to restore climate, then that involves carbon removal,” said Julio Friedmann, who spent three years in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and now works to promote carbon removal. “You’ve got to figure out how to pull it out and keep it out.”

The United Nations agrees. In 2014, its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pitched thousands of ideas to meet the international climate goals.

It found only 116 scenarios that could work.

Of those, 101 required carbon removal.

'Hey, this is not bananas'

The planet tries to clean up its own CO². It just can't do it fast enough.

Trees and oceans can’t keep up with global emissions, so scientists and engineers have tried to figure out how to do it themselves. They have promoted low-till farming techniques, experimented with injecting carbon dioxide deep into the ocean and tried a process in which crushed minerals bind to the gas.

But those processes are limited in scale and speed. A growing minority of climate experts have turned to direct-air-capture technology, which can suck up seemingly unlimited amounts of CO², as the planet’s best chance. Friedmann calls it “the vanguard of the climate counterstrike.”

Lackner believes that once deployed, each of his devices will pull in a ton of carbon dioxide a day. With 100 million of them running constantly, he’s calculated, it would be possible to lower the world’s CO² concentration by 100 ppm.

“It’s quite attractive,” said Pete Smith, chair in Plant and Soil Science at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and one of the world’s leading climate experts. “But at the moment, it’s too expensive and requires too much energy.”

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And it may be too late.The IPCC noted in a report that the current technology is “uncertain” and “associated with challenges and risks." Even if they are perfected, the devices would then need to be mass-produced and spread across the world. Lackner estimated the first of his full-size machines could cost $300,000.

But in the past year, three private companies have produced working models. All follow the same basic concept, sending air over a carbon-friendly material that traps it to be deposited somewhere else. All bear Lackner’s scientific fingerprints.

The founder of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company attempting to turn carbon dioxide into diesel fuel, is an old friend whom Lackner helped convince of the possibilities. He did the same with a co-founder of Global Thermostat, which has begun selling captured CO² for a variety of uses. And Climeworks, a Swiss company that pipes its gas into a local greenhouse, was founded by men Lackner saw in the audience at a speech about his long-shot idea.

“He was the first person to basically say, ‘Hey, this is not bananas,’ ” Friedmann said. “Klaus really is the intellectual godfather of this technology.”

This idea needs adventure capital

But he is not a climate geek. A confessed “emitter,” Lackner doesn’t drive an electric car, lecture on the benefits of recycling or avoid air travel. A constant stream of airplanes outside his office window doesn’t seem to bother him, though he knows every passing jet leaves a trail of CO² behind it.

He began his career with only a vague sense of the impending crisis. Few people worried about climate change in 1979, and that group did not include a young German physicist looking for postdoctoral work.

But Lackner was always drawn to the greatest challenges science had to offer. After a few years of particle physics, he moved to work on fusion at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he soon noticed the world’s energy cycle was creating havoc.

“I realized we’d be in serious danger of not having enough energy,” Lackner said. “What struck me is, we are not limited by the available carbon in the ground. We’re limited by the carbon we dump into the atmosphere.”

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As the world's population skyrocketed in the early 1990s, Lackner thought only of how much energy those people would soon consume. He wasn’t tempted by the cold-fusion experiments that thrilled the scientific world, promising unlimited free energy. In the meantime, the world would continue burning massive amounts of fossil fuels and ignoring the waste. Atmospheric CO² levels would climb ever higher. The system would soon collapse.

It was a waste-management problem, he realized. The bathtub was already full, and people kept trying to add more water. Somebody had to release the drain.

“We need to clean up after ourselves,” he said. “By now, we don’t have a choice anymore.”

The thought of pulling carbon straight from the air, of not only stopping carbon emissions but actually reversing them, rooted itself in his mind. In 1999, Lackner co-wrote the world’s first paper on negative emissions. “We conclude there are no fundamental obstacles to this approach,” the paper’s abstract read, “and that it deserves further investigation.”

He just had to work out how to do it. He moved to Columbia University two years later, determined to make air capture real. He heard of a fisheries biologist-turned-mechanical engineer who had little background in climate science, but an unnatural ability to turn complex ideas into simple equipment.

Lackner needed just that. So he invited Allen Wright to New York, where they met with Lands' End founder and climate philanthropist Gary Comer. Lackner assured Comer that carbon capture could help him save the Arctic.

Comer turned to one of his advisers. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t think this is venture capital,” the adviser replied. “I think this is adventure capital.”

Somehow, Wright returned to Tucson with a $5 million budget and directions to make it work.

Capturing carbon in a jar

So they tried. Wright rented a wide-open warehouse space and hired a woman to sit at the front desk. He named his new company Global Research Technologies, choosing something intentionally vague because he still wasn’t sure what they were supposed to be doing.

“Nobody’s done any of this before,” Wright said. “This is the crudest kind of science.”

Lackner flew to Arizona in the summers, and for three years they fumbled their way forward. They raided junkyards and surplus auctions and built what they needed: makeshift wind tunnels to watch the air flow through screens, liquid distributors to study how water and air interacted, and valve systems to learn how gas moved.

They sketched wild machines and thought a strong chemical compound would be the key. That brought a brief moment of success, when they soaked a block of foam in sodium hydroxide and watched it suck in CO².

To build on that, they experimented with using electricity to split chemical solutions. They bought stacks of an anionic exchange resin, which looked like oversized sheets of scratchy paper, and hung them in a contraption they nicknamed “Big Bird II.”

Like pouring vinegar onto baking soda, the machine was designed to spray the sheets with sodium carbonate and capture the CO² that the reaction created.

They weren't sure what would happen when they switched on Big Bird II. But it whirred to life. Everything fired properly. The solution crashed against the resin, and the machine filled with carbon dioxide.

Wright found a pile of glass bottles and held them against an opening in the machine. Gas flowed inside, swirling against the clear glass. Then he sealed, signed and dated each one, trapping the carbon dioxide inside.

The world wasn't ready

Back to the experiments. Lackner wanted to know more about the resin, so on a Friday evening in 2006 he washed a piece in water and dropped it in a glass jar. He and Wright left for the night.

They returned the next morning, armed with a schedule full of tests. When they checked the jar's CO² monitor, it showed a concentration over 2,000 ppm, five times the air outside. Something unexplainable had happened.

Intrigued, they took out the now-dry resin and waved it in the air. Then they put it back into the jar and screwed on the lid, expecting the CO² level to climb again.

They stared at the monitor. For a moment, it froze.

Then it plummeted.

They pushed aside the day’s planned experiments, suddenly obsessed with figuring out what had happened inside that jar. They were missing some variable, some secret of CO². Maybe it was the temperature. Maybe it was the dry Arizona air. Maybe there was some sodium hydroxide left on the resin.

By that evening, only one possibility remained.

"It's water," Lackner said.

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The resin had been in use for decades, and nobody had noticed its hidden talent: When dry, it absorbed CO². But when it was wet, it pushed it off.

"That was sort of serendipity," Lackner said later. "You are lucky, but you also had to see it and take advantage of it. So we did."

Overnight, the company’s entire future changed course. They shifted their efforts onto finding the best design for their new machines. An artist drew plans for a version that could produce a ton of CO² every day. Wright and Lackner held their first successful demonstration in 2007, prompting a breathless press release from Columbia.

“The GRT demonstration could have far-reaching consequences for the battle to reduce greenhouse gas levels,” the release read. “Going forward, GRT plans to begin demonstrating its air capture system on a larger scale.”

It never had the chance. Gary Comer died in 2006, and his estate lost interest in the project. Then the Great Recession hit, and the entire world tightened its budgets. A planned investment from Lehman Brothers collapsed when the bank itself collapsed.

GRT ran out of money. The company folded.

“The world wasn’t ready,” Wright said, throwing up his hands.

Is it too easy a way out?

A decade later, Lackner’s ideas remain trapped inside the labs, held back by the same set of questions he started with: Would it work? Can the world afford to build 100 million machines? Can it afford not to?

Private companies pulled ahead of him, motivated by profit and promises of cheap renewable energy. In their labs, slowing climate change became a pleasant side effect of what some claim could become a trillion-dollar industry. There’s no money in merely saving the planet.

“Environmental cleanup tied with an economic position that makes sense, why wouldn’t anybody support that?” Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham said. “Environmental cleanup which has no economic product other than environmental cleanup is a much harder sell.”

Lackner had already bought in. He moved to ASU in 2014, bringing Wright with him to chase their utopian ideal. The full-scale prototype in Mesa went up. It had faulty wiring and mismatched parts, but it worked. Lackner started searching for production deals and spare funding. He sketched out upcoming hurdles and how to clear them, and published a string of papers urging action.

Lackner was convinced he had found the correct action.

Not all of his colleagues agreed.

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The most public blowback came in 2016, in a paper titled “The Trouble with Negative Emissions.” Published in Science Magazine, one of the world’s most widely read journals, energy scientists Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters called the promises of carbon removal a “moral hazard.” Fancy technology, they wrote, threatened to distract people from the true dangers of climate change.

If people believed they could clean up their mess later, Anderson and Peters wrote, they might be discouraged from cutting carbon emissions. They argued the world should focus on renewable energy, eliminating fossil fuels and adapting to the changing climate instead of pinning their hopes to millions of unfinished machines.

“Negative-emissions technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather an unjust and high-stakes gamble,” the paper’s final paragraph began. “There is real risk they will be unable to deliver on the scale of their promise.”

Lackner’s name never appeared in the paper. But his idea was under attack.

As the “moral hazard” argument spread, Lackner responded with a letter of his own. Co-signed by 45 colleagues, Lackner’s letter repeated what he had spent years preaching: The atmosphere contained too much carbon dioxide, and direct air capture was the only way to get it out.

“Throwing a life-preserver to a drowning victim may not assure a successful rescue, but it is not a high-stakes gamble,” he wrote. “Even though it might reduce the victim’s incentive for learning how to swim.”

Can the world change?

He always talks too much. He can’t help it. The problem looms too large, the possibilities too great, and nobody seems to understand. So he starts talking about his device, which leads into carbon removal and large-scale economics and the history of innovation, and before he realizes it the class is over.

It happened again last week, so Lackner reminded himself to keep it brief as he walked back into his graduate lecture in carbon management. He pulled up a PowerPoint he wouldn’t need, stowed a wide-brimmed hat beneath the lectern and watched as the next generation took their seats.

“I understand we are almost at the midpoint,” he said. Already half the semester had passed. Lackner had lectured on climate change, CO² buildup and the immediate need to pull it back. He had told them about renewable energy and the potential to close the carbon cycle. The world was close to solving most of those problems.

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But still so much remained. Lackner wanted to talk about carbon storage, he told the class, and the all-important questions that it raised. Lowering the carbon concentration by 100 ppm would require a storage space almost as large as Lake Michigan. Where could they put it all? Would there be enough room? Could a world addicted to burning carbon be convinced to leave it there?

“We are right now at the beginning of this,” he told the class. “There are no standards.”

One day, he expects, rules and regulations will shackle carbon removal. But for now he led a brand-new industry, with a miniscule market and little proof it works.

The next lecture, he told the class, was canceled. By then he would be in San Diego, holding yet another meeting to convince yet another group that it would be possible to clean up the world’s mess. That it was important. That it was their only chance.

Tucking the hat under an arm, he walked outside and into the hazy evening air. Two students flanked him, peppering him with questions he’d already heard and solutions he'd already considered. He looked straight ahead and headed for another late night in his empty office, where the window had a wide-screen view of the passing planes.