June 2023: Geothermal Beyond Power Generation: Direct Air Capture and Geothermal Energy
Channel: Texas CSEE
Date: 2023-06-15

Abstract
Direct air capture (DAC) technologies extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere. There are currently 18 DAC plants operating worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year, but they have the potential of scaling up to 60 Mt CO2/year by 2030 (IEA 2023). Two technological approaches are currently being used to capture CO2 from the air. One of them, solid sorbent DAC (S-DAC), operates at ambient to low pressure and 80-120°C, while the other, liquid solvent DAC (L-DAC), requires much higher temperatures of 300°C to 900°C. Despite being used for many decades, geothermal energy has gained significant interest since 2020 because it is clean, renewable, baseload, and available anywhere. While most of the current discussions about the geothermal energy potential are related to the drilling and completion of geothermal systems for power generation (GeoVision 2019), direct use applications using geothermal energy have great potential to decrease existing and future CO2 emissions. This lecture will discuss using geothermal energy for S-DAC and provide a techno-economic analysis for four specific locations in Texas, California, Alaska, and the Netherlands. 
Bio
Dr. Silviu Livescu has extensive experience in innovation, multi-disciplinary technology development and deployment, intellectual property, strategy, and management applied to several hydrocarbon and geoenergy engineering (geothermal energy, direct air capture, carbon sequestration, underground thermal storage) technical disciplines, with focus on well engineering and operations (monitoring and telemetry systems, well intervention, stimulation, construction, production, and data science and engineering analytics), authoring 39 US patent and patent applications and more than 100 papers and articles. Silviu is the 2020–2023 data science and engineering analytics technical director on the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) International board of directors and the Geoenergy Science and Engineering editor-in-chief.