Making fuel out of thin air

A British Columbia-based company working in collaboration with multiple coastal businesses, a First Nation in the province’s interior, and the B.C. government is hoping to develop a plant to produce a new type of vehicle fuel that could reduce CO2 emissions.

Huron Clean Energy is a Canadian clean energy company that has designs on a plant that would “produce transportation fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” It has been working with two other companies — Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Carbon Engineering — plus the Upper Nicola Band near Merritt, B.C., where it plans to build the facility.

Hydroelectricity will power the plant’s “direct air capture,” a process of combining carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with hydrogen to create renewable hydrocarbons to replace petroleumbased fuels in existing gas, diesel, and even jet engines — all while creating up to 90 per cent fewer emissions than today’s fuels.

The B.C. government will kick in $2 million from the provincial Innovative Clean Energy fund to help with project development, which will bring thousands of temporary construction jobs and hundreds of long-term jobs to the area.

At full capacity, the facility should produce 100 million litres of fuel per year, and up to 650 million litres per year by 2030.

What do those numbers mean? Not much in the grand scale of things, considering that according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers , Canadians consume some 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (for all purposes, not just transportation). With each barrel containing 159 litres, that puts Canada at 238.5 million litres each day.

Project partners hope the facility will be up and running by 2025, and that others like it will follow.

Huron Clean Energy in British Columbia is proposing to build a facility that could make vehicle fuel virtually out of thin air.