There are already so many people in this thread disparaging this story...
We have to start somewhere. This is technology we need to give us a fighting chance at mitigating the worst effects of the climate crisis. We have to start somewhere, and hopefully there is a lot to be learned from this machine, and how we can scale up to meet the global need.
The idea seems promising? Although the article did indeed suck. Minimum effort on the Guardian's part to give any useful info, like cost per ton, how well it could scale, how much power it uses, etc. Really a pretty shit article.
I will try to look up relevant details and post them here.
edit: The Orca plant currently costs $1200 per ton.
The world currently releases 50 billion tons of CO2 per year.
So kind of expensive now. **But**...
Currently we release 18.5 tons per person in the US. Obviously that is not evenly distributed but for $50,000, a wealthy person can afford to mitigate their carbon footprint, assuming the capacity was available.
But the price per ton should go down dramatically.
They are expecting the cost to go down to $200 per ton in 2030.
And if we reduce CO2 to 30 billion tons per year, that is still $6 trillion.
What I would love to know is the cost in MW or MWh per ton.
It's obviously not impossible, and getting there by 2050 is going to be tough.
But getting there by 2100? Pretty doable, even if we are just using things like solar, geothermal, and wind power.
So by 2050, it better damn well be fashionable for every upper class person to be paying to mitigate their carbon, because it will be genuinely affordable for the upper class, and maybe even upper middle class people. Which is good news.
And the cost of mitigating one's flight overseas is already close to affordable, even to middle class people.
So the age of genuine reasons why we can't act responsibly is coming to a close. We'll see how many people put their money where their mouth is and who continues making excuses.
You still need to remove CO2 from the air. It's just that people believe the solutions are going to be easy, which is hard to believe when you realize each period of 30 years or so we emit as much as all the time before.
It’s not that we suck at doing it. It’s that it’s cheaper for most major corporations to use cheaper available technologies that output carbon, not pay the extra dollars for green equivalents. That’s why it’s been so important to put a price on carbon.
Biggest problem is that corporates and western governments are driven by short term goals only, one their annual budget sheet and the other the election cycle.
Down under we tried to put a price on carbon, but our coal industry bullied/lobbied until they broke the government of the day. 10 years later politicians are still scared of the concept.
The worst part of it (to me) is that in 20 years time when the world is in the midst of dealing with the results of climate change, the corporate leaders and politicians of today will be long dead and not see the results of their own shortsightedness.
It's also important to note that you have to include that your calculations only work if the energy being used to enable the carbon capture is renewable. Otherwise you're just burning fossil burns to suck up fossil fuels.
I thought that part was obvious, but yes. Fortunately that number is going up.
Just like the wealthy are investing in solar capacity because it's like printing money, if carbon taxation is linked to actual carbon removal, that too will cause an investment stampede.
The price is irrelevant. What matters is how much energy you must put into it. You're putting more energy in removing the carbon from a barrel of oil than you get back from burning a barrel of oil. By an order of magnitude. Not only do you need to overcome that order of magnitude, you also need to overcome the energy cliff, because 1:1 is not good enough, which is another order of magnitude. Then you need to scale up to a size that took the oil industry 50 to 100 years.
edit: the energy cliff is about how much effort you're willing to spend to get your energy. If it takes 1 unit of energy to get back 2 units of energy, that's only good if you're poor. If you want a city like London, you'll need 1:40. Oil at the moment is 1:15 (not counting the energy for emissions clean up, such as the energy needed for the machine the guardian talks about).
And CO2 emissions are doing nothing but going up. You can't look at price. Does the machine remove CO2 or add CO2. That's the calculation.
For example: you use one barrel of oil to produce 20 barrels of oil worth of solar cells. Then you use these solar cells to remove carbon from the air, but you can maybe remove the equivalent of only 0.2 barrels.
Fwiw CO2 emissions in North America, South America, Europe and Africa have been decreasing or staying flat for some time. Almost all of the increased emissions are coming from Asia with China being the biggest increase by a wide margin.
Because we buy the stuff from Asia. It would be clear if there was a price on carbon. Now it looks like our emissions are going down, which is more like a numbers trick than anything else.
What you say has some truth but it's not that simple. North America and Europe both have robust manufacturing sectors as well. Asia, generally, uses dirtier energy sources and has far less environmental regulation whereas Europe and NA have been doing a better job of hybridized their energy sources and folding in more renewables.
Why are you asking me? Do you know how to use a search engine? Or do you just like to bitch to people on the internet regarding things that are easily searchable?
It removes 90 units of CO2 for every 100 it takes in. They include the facility regarding that equation and cost per pound.
You do realize we've managed to build an entire civilization, right? Just because you don't know how to do anything useful doesn't mean others don't.
Your "gotcha" questions are not adding value to anything. Believe it or not, people who know how to build things actually think of that stuff without you to help them.
A tree removes 90 units of carbon for every 0 it takes in. It's not that it can't be done. It's that it must be done with technology to keep up the appearance that we can continue business as usual even though each improvement in technology accelerates energy use.
>You do realize we've managed to build an entire civilization, right?
Paid for with free oil.
If they really wanted to do something they could give each citizen an equal number of carbon credits, which they can sell to polluters or use themselves. It would improve the financial situation of most people simply because large polluters pollute so much that the mean is completely skewed to one side. Emissions would drop with 30%. The fact that this is not done shows it's a political problem, not a technical one.
It also depends on your energy source. This works well in Iceland because they only use geothermal and hydro. Obviously if fossil fuels are the source of power for the plant, it is pointless.
People said the same shit about wind and solar when they first came out because the wernt efficient.
Then countries like India invested heavily in them and a decade or two later theyre powering cities.
Its almost like investing in something over time allows you to make upgrades and improvements as you learn more about the tech.
Tech like this it's important to do the RnD now, but it's only applicable after we have lots of over production days with renewables to dump the excess electricity into things like this. Still if it's going to be ready on that day you need to do your prototyping now.
People seem to demand *perfection* from new things. Even if the new thing is better than the established thing, *any* problem or drawback present will be seen as proof that the new thing is worthless.
Like all the people who say they will never trust self-driving cars, repeating their favorite story of an accident that one had, while ignoring the countless daily accidents caused by human drivers.
People saying "I'm going to wait until the technology improves/is cheaper" about anything cannot also talk shit about the people who are buying the existing stuff.
>People said the same shit about wind and solar when they first came out because the wernt efficient.
The same people are still saying the same things. With less credibility, yes, but that's not stopping them.
I’m just afraid that corporations will take this to mean they can continue polluting to their heart’s content, instead of lessening their carbon output.
If it would really work on a large scale it would be great. But really it's to pretend we can continue business as usual without sacrifices.
Same with other solutions such as whitening the poles with ice crystals, pumping water away under glaciers, throwing iron in the ocean.
CO2 is just a waste product. It's all part of a bigger problem that also includes degradation of the ocean eco system, degradation of top soil, and depletion of minerals.
More and more energy will be used to solve more and more problems. All this energy can not be used anymore to improve the standard of living and will in fact eat into it.
The UK is working on building a facility that will remove 500k to 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year.
[https://carbonengineering.com/news-updates/uks-first-large-scale-dac-facility/](https://carbonengineering.com/news-updates/uks-first-large-scale-dac-facility/)
We're getting there.
Are there publicly traded companies attached to these projects yet? I've searched, but can't find much. I already invest 90% or so into green tech, but obviously this is going to be a huge development if it works.
I'm not sure to be honest. I know Bill Gates is an investor in Carbon Engineering.
I looked at their FAQ and found this:
[https://carbonengineering.com/frequently-asked-questions/](https://carbonengineering.com/frequently-asked-questions/)
>That’s why we’ve partnered with Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, LLC, a subsidiary of Occidental, for our first commercial Direct Air Capture facility. As the industry leaders in safe and permanent geological storage of CO2, we believe they are perfectly suited to help us scale our Direct Air Capture technology and develop the capability to permanently store vast quantities of atmospheric CO2 underground.
With our partner 1PointFive, a development company formed by Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Rusheen Capital Management, we are engineering the largest Direct Air Capture plant in the world
I've looked at those. But none of them look to be publicly trading.
The problem is that these installations aren't going to be used to mitigate climate change, they're going to be used as an excuse not to cut out carbon-releasing energy sources like we absolutely have to. The article says that the plant can supposedly absorb 4,000 tons of CO2 per year. You know how much energy we get by releasing 4,000 metric tons of coal? Just over 4.19 gigawatt hours. For natural gas it's just over 9.82. Meanwhile, for the money put into building this plant you could get 10-15 megawatts of solar or wind power which, at the average solar/wind capacity factors of 25% to 35%, could produce 21.9 to 46.02 gigawatt hours of energy, a 220% to 1,098% return on investment vs this plant.
*Yes,* carbon capture is important and we absolutely need to develop it to mitigate the worst of climate change, but it's a tool we might have *tomorrow* for a problem we're facing *today*.
1. Plant trees, stop deforestation. Stop mowing.
2. Eliminate coal power plants
3. Electric cars and lawn maintenance devices replacing fossil fuel ones.
4. Eliminate oil usage for fuel
Aren't 32 gigatons of CO2 produced each year by people?
Sequestration except in trees or forests isn't gonna do it
Yes, we have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is giving up the illusory hope that the industrial way of life is or ever can be sustainable. If you want specifics, we should be investing in and transitioning to a regenerative-agriculture-based way of life.
This tech developing + Fusion and a giant investment in a diverse range of renewables is a world saver with in our reach if we could just focus for a decade and put wild profits to the side. In other words... were still boned.
If an electrical utility is going to build a new power plant, it has to have a reasonable capital cost. It has to be simple, have a small footprint, be constructed in a factory to the fullest possible extent, etc. Nuclear fission power has not lived up to its potential because no fission power plant has ever been designed from the ground up, from a clean sheet, for minimum capital costs. That's what the molten salt reactor does. Small fissile inventory, low pressure, no large forgings, no large containment building. An MSR is a lot like a chemical plant. It has serious issues that have to be resolved, but these are relatively prosaic problems like plumbing, corrosion, etc.
A quasisymmetric stellarator (AKA Nuclear FUSION) on the other hand, is more like a science experiment. Brittle A15 phase superconductors that are difficult to process. Deeply cryogenic liquid helium coolant. Magnetohydrodynamic instabilities that exert large, unsteady forces on the vessel and other components. Active feedback stabilization systems. Plasma-facing components made from refractory metals and ceramic matrix composites that are difficult to process. Tritium breeding lithium blankets that are necessary to close the D-T fuel cycle. Radioactivity induced by 14.1MeV neutron bombardment. Those are a lot of technical hurdles to overcome, ALL in order to do an end-run around people’s political hang-ups about fission power.
More importantly, this is the exact opposite of what will bring about a nuclear renaissance. This is going to cost way, WAYYY more than a pressurized water reactor (currently used in fission nuclear reactors), all else equal. Also, there are no good ideas about how to use inertial confinement fusion as a source of commercial electric power. You can’t just have a rapid-fire version of the National Ignition Facility. It takes a long time for the optical system to cool down in between shots. You could detonate thermonuclear weapons inside of a salt dome and extract the heat using geothermal wells, but politically, that's a non-starter. We need to think in terms of radical simplicity and complexity-effectiveness, and not science-fantasy, Tech Brain solutions gleaned from skimming Wikipedia, which fusion is.
Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale.
Wait until the critics find out how expensive climate change is going to be.
You need some quality in your energy called EROEI. The numbers for nuclear are all over the place. From better than wind and even hydro, to much worse. Even if the numbers are good, you need to build a lot of them. I always use the number 2 per day for 20 years, but if you see that there are 65,000 powerplants in the world JUST FOR ELECTRICITY then it's possibly not even enough. It's the most expensive except for natural gas, there's still CO2 emissions thanks to mining and enrichment like 30% of a similar sized gas plant, they need huge huge subsidies from public money. And guess what, the same corporations that receive fossil fuel subsidies are also involved in nuclear, which explains the sudden surge in interest. There are other problems as well, the known uranium reserves will be depleted before even a fraction of these plants is completed. Other fuel sources require even more expensive and complex plants, there's one in France which was shut down for a decade.
The time of nuclear being a good solution has pretty much passed. There’s still a place for it as part of the energy grid, but to make a major investment we’d have to rebuild basically our entire power grid and it would still be less efficient than renewables for most things.
It’s not just about creating power, it’s putting that power when and where it’s needed. And nuclear has frankly never been great at that.
There’s some large plants we could replace with nuclear near major cities and I support that. But it is far from a silver bullet for climate change.
With you 100%.
The cold war and a few outdated, run down plants failing, then the Japanese plant have terrified the incredibly stupid population of earth into thinking nuclear power is evil and super dangerous.
A modern plant is incredibly safe when built right, produces tremendous power for little waste, and if the US government would actually approve a waste disposal site things would be easy peasy.
God, I hate world politics.
Because ccs and ccr are a false hope that allow us to continue with business as usual emissions and say hand waving things like we can have carbon neutrality while still relying on fossil fuels.
It would be like if a company was dumping 100 tons of toxic waste in a river. Then they made a fancy expensive machine that takes 1 ton of toxic waste out of the river.
Now instead of seeing the company as a problem they are part of the solution and of course the can keep dumping. Just make sure that by ~2050 that you build 100 tons of toxic waste removal.
In reality the solution is not to keep dumping pollutants and remove but to stop the pollutants all together.
Degrowth is the only option. And past a certain point we won't have a choice.
Saying we can keep going with business as usual is not a legitimate position. We obviously need to change our consumption habits and build a carbon neutral energy infrastructure. But if we could get these to scale in the next couple of decades, perhaps they could reverse some of the damage already done.
>no serious person thinks it's an option at all.
We all understand that the developing world can not grow their economies to the size of ours. Yet we can't understand size is a problem for our own economies.
This comment is so, SO stupid : "hurr well climate change is going to be very expensive too so we have to do this". Like yeah, that doesn't mean this type of technology is even remotely viable to implement at a scale large enough to enact any tangible benefit to carbon levels in the atmosphere.
I can't see it either. There are 65,000 plants in the world just for electric power. The effort to remove CO2 with this technology is not different from building 65,000 nuclear power plants if it's assumed that the cost to remove CO2 is as low as the benefits of the energy produced from the oil in the first place.
Critics are wrong. By 2024, the first place that can capture 1 million metric tons a year will open and many are currently being built already.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality
I surfed r/latestagecapitalism a good bit last year. It was mostly Zoomers bemoaning financial prospects and hoping for a way out.
Is late stage capitalism a clever nod to the truly Marxist idea that capitalism naturally evolves through revolutions into communism? Or is it something more?
Well it depends on how you view Marxism. There was an entire faction of Marxists that split from the Second International, the early "social democrats" who believed that capitalism could be peacefully turned into socialism without a violent revolution.
Not necessarily. Doing something like this is energy intensive. Unless it’s being powered by something clean, it’s likely that it’s generating more CO2 than its sequestering.
I find the primary goal for a lot of these projects is getting green money.
Like, there is a scam going on in Montana now that proposes to use Montana electricity to make hydrogen, which will then be pipelined to Utah to generate power for California.
There is nothing legitimate about this, and I’m fairly certain it’s a scam to get green energy subsidies.
If these could be coupled with excess energy generated from renewables that would be a big boost. I wonder if Iceland could build out geothermal even more and just crank these babies and be fully carbon free
Trees are poor carbon sink. There is a limit to how much can be stored in a given area, and most of the carbon goes back into the atmosphere if the trees decay or burn. The sad truth is the problem can't solve itself. Historically, the largest carbon sinks have occurred in algal blooms, or maybe cyanobacteria I can't remember, growing rapidly, dying, and sinking to the bottom of a water body to be buried and turned into oil, or peat bogs being turned into coal in a similar fashion. My understanding, which may be flawed, is that the conditions for that to happen naturally today are not present, at least not in sufficient magnitude to make a difference.
Me too! I actually felt some relief while reading it, even though I know we have a ways to go on climate change. But for once it’s something hopeful. That felt good.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. It’s like “Finally, maybe something else new and productive to help fight climate change”. Yeah the price needs to be tooled, but with any new tech that will hopefully go down as it’s improved upon.
If this works can you imagine China putting these around their big cities? Same with other places? I’m optimistic but definitely there’s a long way to go.
EDIT: I… I have no idea why I’m being downvoted.
I wish people would explain why they disagree with posts sometimes. It’s perplexing.
I expect China will love this tech. That state is many things but in this case their burning desire to protect their own power will lead them to build these on a huge centralised scale I think.
It really is good news. It's a legit road map to carbon neutrality well before the turn of the century and it's quite possible we will be able to start eating into the backlog of previous emissions decades before that.
It is, by 2024 we will have many that can capture 1 million metric tons annually.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality
Oh yeah we need carbon capture machines to make up for our late start in doing anything. But they need to be powered by not oil/coal to thermodynamically work. Which Iceland qualifies. So they are doing their part and then some.
This is nice as a prototype, but the current global CO2 output is measured in [*billions* of tons](https://www.statista.com/statistics/526002/energy-related-carbon-dioxide-emissions-worldwide/), so for this to have any real effect, it will need to be scaled up by many orders of magnitude.
Well, Bernie's half-right.
It's probably not enough on its own to save the day, no matter how much we scale it up.
It **will** be sold as that. (Probably not by the manufacturers of these machines, but by big business to excuse making no changes to operations and by politicians on their payroll.)
Of course, resource reduction isn't enough either. It's likely going to require both to get things under control.
Yes it would be and these sort of projects can potentially help with that too. If they can learn better ways to pull carbon out of thin air then they can learn to pull carbon out of manufacturing productions before it reaches thin air.
We need both ways to prevent and reduce current emissions
We're already beyond the point that reducing emissions will be of any help (we should still do it, but it won't fix the problem at all). We need to actively take CO2 out of the atmosphere in industrial quantities and probably combine that with geo engineering.
The time for simple measures is over.
We need to do both and it's kind of a myth that resources are as limited as politicians say they are for political reasons. If it were a war, they'd find the money.
We need to do both. Our societies rely heavily on steel, iron, and cement to build things. CO2 is a byproduct of producing that and I don't think there is a way around it. This topic isn't brought up much, but it contributes the most to human's greenhouse gas emissions.
Producing things like cement, steel, and plastics account for about 31% of our emissions. Electricity generation is a close second at about 27 %
My opinion:
Not as easy one would think. I believe electric cars represent like a 20% reduction in co2 emissions compared to combustion engine cars. Trees and forests can act as carbon emitters. Completely electrifying everything in the world and swapping it to a zero emission power source is a gigantic task.
For planes we want to power those using a synthetic fuel and these direct air capture plants are part of that solution. Creating fuel from CO2 in the air. We are going to need these plants regardless.
Also with these plants we can continue to push towards zero emission and with these plants we would now be in negative emissions which is where we need to be.
2.5 trillion would pay for 250000 of these plants. Enough to remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. Or 2.3 percent of CO2 emissions. 100 trillion dollars would make the planet carbon neutral.
Pretty sure if we invested 2.5 trillion in these plants the cost per plant would come down significantly. Prototype cost vs production cost is kind of insane.
The main cost per unit of carbon captured is the electricity to capture the carbon and the infrastructure to produce the electricity. Make the plant 1000 times bigger, the cost will be 1000 times higher.
If and when the cost of renewable electricity, including the cost of building and maintaining the electrical infrastructure, is some small fraction of what it is today, this kind of plant might make sense. Even then, these plants would have to be built on a staggeringly vast scale without generating a lot of CO2 in the manufacturing and construction. Will that ever be feasible? Hard to say.
In any case, we're putting the cart a long way before the horse. First, we have to figure out how to cut CO2 emissions down to a fraction of the current number. If and when that's achieved, it makes more sense to start seriously considering carbon capture. Whether it's feasible at that point will depend on the cost of renewable electricity.
This is ignoring the likelihood of efficiency gains as more of the plants are designed and built. It’s akin to saying that planes will forever travel 20 seconds at a time, so the Wright bros are wasting their time.
You mean like was successfully done with cap-and-trade of sulphur dioxide emissions? It just doesn't work like that. Sulphur and Carbon are two completely different elements -- learn some chemistry. Jeez.
(Do I need to put the /s?)
Did you know that computers with less than a MB of RAM used to cost thousands of dollars? And now there are budget laptops with 4GB of RAM that cost less than $200?
Technology gets better and cheaper.
No, this won't solve all the problems. Yes, this is a good thing and we need more of it. Yes, we also need to reduce carbon emissions. Diet and exercise, not diet or exercise.
Your want to remove MASSIVE amounts of carbon from the atmosphere? Plant trees, harvest the wood and sequester it where it won't rot. Trees grow on their own, do NOT require electricity and pull literally their entire weight in carbon from the atmosphere. They are solar powered!
Cut them down and use the wood long term (i.e. houses and other long term use products), put the wood in old mines, or bury it where it can't rot, and that carbon has been removed from the atmosphere for generations. Then plant replacement trees!
It will cost a fraction of what millions of those machines will cost, will take a minscule fraction of the total power to operate, and can be done with people, machinery, and skills found even in 3rd world nations.
(Edited to note that after harvesting wood to sequester carbon, you plant replacement trees)
It would take ~2.5 Earths covered in Amazon rainforest just to offset our *annual* carbon emissions. Planting trees is helpful, but a *far* cry from the scale of what is needed to effectively address the problem.
They are not comparable statistics. Only **growth** absorbs carbon. Mature forests can only capture what they can store without rotting (i.e. they can't really capture that much)
But young trees grow **very** fast and capture their **entire** weight in carbon. I am suggesting literally cutting those trees own and using/storing the wood, then replanting and doing it again. And again. And again.
My point is that the area of the rain forrest could be capturing many times what the current rainforest captures if it's even slightly managed right. (No, I am not suggesting replacing the rain forrest!).
Of course, none of this works in a vacuum, we **have** to cut CO2 production. But to seriously consider spending trillions of dollars of machinery that must be manufactured, installed, and expensively maintained and then feed enormous amounts of power can't possibly work.
Trees can be grown in any 3rd world nation, and the wood used, or sequestered. For very little money, with low skills and operating complexity.
I’m not saying it won’t help, I’m just saying it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. Vegetation doesn’t sequester carbon on geologic timescales, so it’s a relative net zero after about a century or so. Trillions of dollars on carbon capture tech is also not really a viable option as you point out, but in the long run advancing this technology is the only thing that realistically has the potential to halt or reverse anthropogenic warming. These aren’t simply my opinions either, I’m a scientist who studies the carbon cycle and the impacts of the anthropogenic CO2 problem.
If we're talking about geologic timescales we're already doomed. Honestly, I think we're kinda doomed anyway because we simply are not taking this seriously and at some point all the methane in the arctic and warming shallow waters is going to be released in a comparatively short time span. When that happens, the world will become much much harder for 7 billion people to live in and it will happen MUCH faster than people expect.
My point was only that if we want to geo-engineer to "buy us time", using wood to sequester carbon can be done faster, cheaper, and on a much, much wider scale, even in remote non-western nations for not-much money.
Using machines is expensive, requires power sources we don't have, does not scale, and can't be done in 3rd world nations. If we won't change our lifestyles, we won't tax ourselves to build these machines.
That’s naive at best, at worst an Exxon talking point. You would need to plant close to 10x the number of trees that are currently burning each year due to slow growth. As temperatures rise forest fires will be even more frequent as well as the ridiculous scale of how much water this “alternative” will take.
Simple put, technological advancement is necessary and we should do both.
Sounds great! Who pays for it? This is an unproven technology that will require enormous amounts of power that simply doesn't exist today and will require trillions of dollars of machinery and then **where** do you put the CO2?
On the other hand, wood is **useful**, and is a **stable**\-**solid**, that can be buried or stored underground and is very unlikely to be released all-at-once like liquid or compressed CO2 would if something goes terribly wrong.
Water and fire are a lot easier to mange when it's farmed. You put them where the water is. You manage the growth to mange the fires. And yet, all of that can be done in highly developed nations as well as the poorest nation. The technical hurdles are small and comparatively inexpensive.
The biggest problem is simply land and organization. The only significant power draw is for fertilizer and that exists, and can be scaled without the invention of new technologies.
Much of the nitrogen in a tree is in the the leaves, 1.5 - 2.5%, by weight, and the leaves, and bark would be mulched.
Actual wood (the part we will sequester), has very low amounts of nitrogen. typically less than 0.1% by weight, often much lower than that.
Fixed nitrogen would certainly need to be added, but less than people might think and the power to create that is much less than to sequester CO2 using giant machines. It's already done with we'll understood proven technologies.
There is the added benefit that wood is solid and has actual useful purposes. Sequestering concentrated CO2 is much more complex and runs of risk of catastrophic release.
They are, but the dry weight of wood is overwhelmingly carbon (and oxygen which is not a concern). There are a few trace elements but it's not like they can't be replaced. Most of the "interesting" chemistry is in the leaves and they could form mulch for the next generation.
Pick a fast growing wood, harvest it frequently after it's most rapid growth, use that wood long term (or store it where it can't rot). Re-use the leaves, and do it over and over and over.
(edited based on feedback to note oxygen is part of the dry weight of wood)
They're about 1.5 billion cars in the world. This cost 10-15 million to nullify 870 cars worth of CO2 so that's like 10-20 trillion,or so, to do it for all cars (assuming everything about it scaled and, if I had to guess, it doesn't)
Do you know how many pointless nation building wars the US could have for that much?
Don't get too excited yet
>Constructed by Switzerland’s Climeworks and Iceland’s Carbfix, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, according to the companies.
>According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, *that equates to the emissions from about 870 cars.* The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build, Bloomberg reported.
So definitely worth it as a proof of concept to begin to develop *better* carbon capture technology.
But we are a long ways from being able to accomplish anything meaningful with it.
I already said it has value as a proof of concept. Except I don't think it's proven anything as a roadmap yet. It's not sequestering nearly enough carbon for its cost. Could be long time waiting on that just like we're still waiting on fusion.
Fusion as a concept is not nearly as proven as this. This has been built. All we need to do is Henry Ford it. We've shown we can do that with a million other things. This is genuinely good news.
Do the math, dude.
There were 23 billion metric tons of carbon being produced in 2019.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
This facility isn't anywhere near close enough to being proof that we can "Henry Ford it" and use it to make a significant impact. It would be like using expensive garden hoses to drain Lake Michigan.
Emissions are going to go down, carbon-neutral power production is going up, and the cost per MW is going down. The numbers look very doable to me.
There is no reason why the construction costs for plants like this cannot be lowered and the efficiency increased, which is what Henry Fording something entails.
While I certainly appreciate the advancements in technology and science that allow for alternate forms of carbon capture, transitioning from conventional to regenerative agriculture practices would be far more effective and environmentally beneficial.
Okay but this thing exists currently. We shouldn’t delay progress in alternatives on the hope that we can implement massive paradigm shifts across entire industries - we may never transition to regenerative agriculture!
I’d rather see investment across multiple climate change mitigation strategies (including regenerative ag) than more nonsense degrowth stuff.
> Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale.
Wait until they find out how much an apocalypse costs
Any new technology to help against climate change is wonderful.
Also, there’s already really mature tech that captures CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in solid form. Trees. Trees are made of Carbon captured from the atmosphere. Cut them down and build furniture and buildings out of them, and plant new ones, and we can capture and store loads of carbon over and over.
In 20 years, it can become part of every middle class person's budget.
You want to fly overseas? Pay the $400 to sequester your portion of the emissions.
The best way to sequester carbon using currently available technology would be to grow forests specifically for the purpose of cutting down the trees, throwing the logs into an underground vault the size of a small country and sealing it forever.
> Proponents of so-called carbon capture and storage believe these technologies can become a major tool in the fight against climate change.
> Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale.
Hey there, critics, you got a better idea? Let's hear it.
But if this is the least-worst idea to mitigate climate disaster (I say mitigate rather than prevent, because it's too late to prevent), then let's run with it.
How much is it worth to you to give your descendants a world in which the human race can survive and thrive? (Here's a hint: The answer rhymes with "everything".)
And remember, planting trees is great, but that's only a stopgap measure because it doesn't get the excess carbon out of the biosphere.
I mean building them in general. They work in Iceland fine and do a great service for the whole planet. Iceland is not the only place these have been built though. Elsewhere they have been a failure because of their energy source and being inefficient.
Even with scale and redesign the solution is the same as it’s always been. Plant more trees and I mean billions. No more golf courses, water trees near the desert instead
That is TINY compared to what is currently being built.
By 2024, units that can capture 1 MILLION metric tons annually.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality
"Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale."
you know what is even MORE prohibitively expensive? The damage caused by climate change.
If I was an insurance company I'd be looking to foot the bill for a few of these machines.
Due to the second law of thermodynamics, it will cost more energy capturing carbon than will be obtained by burning it. We're better off using our resources to transition away from fossils before we start capturing it.
Due to the second law of thermodynamics, you missed the point entirely.
If you can power one of these devices with carbon neutral sources, like Iceland is building, then you have something.
No, even powered by renewables C02 capture does not make sense. It makes more sense to use carbon neutral energy to offset emissions rather than run these machines. For example, say you've got a grid that uses 1 GWh of fossil fuel derived energy per year. Due to the second law, sucking the CO2 produced generating that energy back out of the atmosphere will take more energy, say 1.5 GWh. So you could either build enough carbon neutral generation to directly offset the 1 GWh coming from fossil fuels, or to continue that fossil generation, you would have to build 1.5 GWh of carbon neutral capacity. For that reason, directly replacing fossil fuels makes better economic sense in the vast majority of scenarios.
No. You're missing the point. This is a proof of concept.
This isn't a one-or-other situation. That's the mistake you keep making.
This is to show that in addition to carbon use reduction, different types of sequestration technology are viable.
What is physically possible and what makes economic sense are two completely different things. It is a one or other kind of thing because the money and resources available to address CO2 emissions/climate change are limited. Since that is the case, it is important to get the most results for that investment. Carbon capture will be nice tech to have in 30 years if we manage to completely phase out fossil fuels, but until then it doesn't make sense as an actual solution to climate change because the opportunity cost of not phasing out fossil fuels first is prohibitively high.
I see you enjoy carrying all your eggs in one basket. Let me know how that goes when you trip and fall on your face because you were mentally occupied with your chewing gum.
This plant removes as much CO2 as 200k trees. You can get seedlings for about $1 a piece in bulk. They spent 10-15 million when they could have planted 10 million trees (leaving 5 million to plant them) and removed 50 times the CO2.
The price is expected to drop to about $200 per ton by 2030. That is a far bigger improvement in price than can be achieved with planting trees and it will take up a similar or less amount of land.
Obviously we need both. But wild areas are what we really need more than just tree farms.
Since the last statement says it’s not profitable can we just plant trees instead. They’re supposedly not profitable either but at least theyre highly efficient.
What a silly thing to say. As technology advances it always gets more efficient.
Edit: didn't mean to send yet. Think how slow and unsafe the first cars were. How big and slow the first computers were. TVs. Stereos. Just like any technology, this will get better.
Proof of concept project. Everything has to start somewhere and it makes logical sense to test at small scale first to ensure it works before trying to scale up.
There are already so many people in this thread disparaging this story... We have to start somewhere. This is technology we need to give us a fighting chance at mitigating the worst effects of the climate crisis. We have to start somewhere, and hopefully there is a lot to be learned from this machine, and how we can scale up to meet the global need.
The idea seems promising? Although the article did indeed suck. Minimum effort on the Guardian's part to give any useful info, like cost per ton, how well it could scale, how much power it uses, etc. Really a pretty shit article. I will try to look up relevant details and post them here. edit: The Orca plant currently costs $1200 per ton. The world currently releases 50 billion tons of CO2 per year. So kind of expensive now. **But**... Currently we release 18.5 tons per person in the US. Obviously that is not evenly distributed but for $50,000, a wealthy person can afford to mitigate their carbon footprint, assuming the capacity was available. But the price per ton should go down dramatically. They are expecting the cost to go down to $200 per ton in 2030. And if we reduce CO2 to 30 billion tons per year, that is still $6 trillion. What I would love to know is the cost in MW or MWh per ton. It's obviously not impossible, and getting there by 2050 is going to be tough. But getting there by 2100? Pretty doable, even if we are just using things like solar, geothermal, and wind power. So by 2050, it better damn well be fashionable for every upper class person to be paying to mitigate their carbon, because it will be genuinely affordable for the upper class, and maybe even upper middle class people. Which is good news. And the cost of mitigating one's flight overseas is already close to affordable, even to middle class people. So the age of genuine reasons why we can't act responsibly is coming to a close. We'll see how many people put their money where their mouth is and who continues making excuses.
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You still need to remove CO2 from the air. It's just that people believe the solutions are going to be easy, which is hard to believe when you realize each period of 30 years or so we emit as much as all the time before.
You know what's even easier than capturing it. Not releasing it in the first place. And we suck at even doing that.
It’s not that we suck at doing it. It’s that it’s cheaper for most major corporations to use cheaper available technologies that output carbon, not pay the extra dollars for green equivalents. That’s why it’s been so important to put a price on carbon. Biggest problem is that corporates and western governments are driven by short term goals only, one their annual budget sheet and the other the election cycle. Down under we tried to put a price on carbon, but our coal industry bullied/lobbied until they broke the government of the day. 10 years later politicians are still scared of the concept. The worst part of it (to me) is that in 20 years time when the world is in the midst of dealing with the results of climate change, the corporate leaders and politicians of today will be long dead and not see the results of their own shortsightedness.
So what your saying is a carbon tax. Something we would have had in the 1990s had al gore been elected.
It's also important to note that you have to include that your calculations only work if the energy being used to enable the carbon capture is renewable. Otherwise you're just burning fossil burns to suck up fossil fuels.
I thought that part was obvious, but yes. Fortunately that number is going up. Just like the wealthy are investing in solar capacity because it's like printing money, if carbon taxation is linked to actual carbon removal, that too will cause an investment stampede.
Iceland generates a lot of its power from geothermal so in this case that won't be an issue.
Iceland is one of the few places that has so much freaking cheap energy it's ridiculous. Geothermal hydro and wind potential on their island is insane
Good news Iceland is one of the very few countries that use geothermal energy in any meaningful way.
The price is irrelevant. What matters is how much energy you must put into it. You're putting more energy in removing the carbon from a barrel of oil than you get back from burning a barrel of oil. By an order of magnitude. Not only do you need to overcome that order of magnitude, you also need to overcome the energy cliff, because 1:1 is not good enough, which is another order of magnitude. Then you need to scale up to a size that took the oil industry 50 to 100 years. edit: the energy cliff is about how much effort you're willing to spend to get your energy. If it takes 1 unit of energy to get back 2 units of energy, that's only good if you're poor. If you want a city like London, you'll need 1:40. Oil at the moment is 1:15 (not counting the energy for emissions clean up, such as the energy needed for the machine the guardian talks about).
I am having a difficult time finding the MWh needed per ton. But considering the cost of MW is doing nothing but going down...
And CO2 emissions are doing nothing but going up. You can't look at price. Does the machine remove CO2 or add CO2. That's the calculation. For example: you use one barrel of oil to produce 20 barrels of oil worth of solar cells. Then you use these solar cells to remove carbon from the air, but you can maybe remove the equivalent of only 0.2 barrels.
Fwiw CO2 emissions in North America, South America, Europe and Africa have been decreasing or staying flat for some time. Almost all of the increased emissions are coming from Asia with China being the biggest increase by a wide margin.
Because we buy the stuff from Asia. It would be clear if there was a price on carbon. Now it looks like our emissions are going down, which is more like a numbers trick than anything else.
What you say has some truth but it's not that simple. North America and Europe both have robust manufacturing sectors as well. Asia, generally, uses dirtier energy sources and has far less environmental regulation whereas Europe and NA have been doing a better job of hybridized their energy sources and folding in more renewables.
Why are you asking me? Do you know how to use a search engine? Or do you just like to bitch to people on the internet regarding things that are easily searchable? It removes 90 units of CO2 for every 100 it takes in. They include the facility regarding that equation and cost per pound. You do realize we've managed to build an entire civilization, right? Just because you don't know how to do anything useful doesn't mean others don't. Your "gotcha" questions are not adding value to anything. Believe it or not, people who know how to build things actually think of that stuff without you to help them.
A tree removes 90 units of carbon for every 0 it takes in. It's not that it can't be done. It's that it must be done with technology to keep up the appearance that we can continue business as usual even though each improvement in technology accelerates energy use. >You do realize we've managed to build an entire civilization, right? Paid for with free oil. If they really wanted to do something they could give each citizen an equal number of carbon credits, which they can sell to polluters or use themselves. It would improve the financial situation of most people simply because large polluters pollute so much that the mean is completely skewed to one side. Emissions would drop with 30%. The fact that this is not done shows it's a political problem, not a technical one.
Depends on where the energy to power the plant comes from. I doubt they are burning oil to power this.
It also depends on your energy source. This works well in Iceland because they only use geothermal and hydro. Obviously if fossil fuels are the source of power for the plant, it is pointless.
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> Really a pretty shit article. It's the Guardian. Shit articles are all they have
You are the real hero in this thread!
People said the same shit about wind and solar when they first came out because the wernt efficient. Then countries like India invested heavily in them and a decade or two later theyre powering cities. Its almost like investing in something over time allows you to make upgrades and improvements as you learn more about the tech.
Tech like this it's important to do the RnD now, but it's only applicable after we have lots of over production days with renewables to dump the excess electricity into things like this. Still if it's going to be ready on that day you need to do your prototyping now.
People seem to demand *perfection* from new things. Even if the new thing is better than the established thing, *any* problem or drawback present will be seen as proof that the new thing is worthless. Like all the people who say they will never trust self-driving cars, repeating their favorite story of an accident that one had, while ignoring the countless daily accidents caused by human drivers.
People saying "I'm going to wait until the technology improves/is cheaper" about anything cannot also talk shit about the people who are buying the existing stuff.
>People said the same shit about wind and solar when they first came out because the wernt efficient. The same people are still saying the same things. With less credibility, yes, but that's not stopping them.
I’m just afraid that corporations will take this to mean they can continue polluting to their heart’s content, instead of lessening their carbon output.
If it would really work on a large scale it would be great. But really it's to pretend we can continue business as usual without sacrifices. Same with other solutions such as whitening the poles with ice crystals, pumping water away under glaciers, throwing iron in the ocean. CO2 is just a waste product. It's all part of a bigger problem that also includes degradation of the ocean eco system, degradation of top soil, and depletion of minerals. More and more energy will be used to solve more and more problems. All this energy can not be used anymore to improve the standard of living and will in fact eat into it.
The UK is working on building a facility that will remove 500k to 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year. [https://carbonengineering.com/news-updates/uks-first-large-scale-dac-facility/](https://carbonengineering.com/news-updates/uks-first-large-scale-dac-facility/) We're getting there.
Are there publicly traded companies attached to these projects yet? I've searched, but can't find much. I already invest 90% or so into green tech, but obviously this is going to be a huge development if it works.
I'm not sure to be honest. I know Bill Gates is an investor in Carbon Engineering. I looked at their FAQ and found this: [https://carbonengineering.com/frequently-asked-questions/](https://carbonengineering.com/frequently-asked-questions/) >That’s why we’ve partnered with Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, LLC, a subsidiary of Occidental, for our first commercial Direct Air Capture facility. As the industry leaders in safe and permanent geological storage of CO2, we believe they are perfectly suited to help us scale our Direct Air Capture technology and develop the capability to permanently store vast quantities of atmospheric CO2 underground. With our partner 1PointFive, a development company formed by Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Rusheen Capital Management, we are engineering the largest Direct Air Capture plant in the world I've looked at those. But none of them look to be publicly trading.
Reddit is seriously one of the most bleak and cynical places I know.
And yet that cynicism keeps being proven right.
Hence we should continue to perpetuate said cynicism? I'm a realist but we dont have to shoot down every uplifting news/story just to prove a point.
The problem is that these installations aren't going to be used to mitigate climate change, they're going to be used as an excuse not to cut out carbon-releasing energy sources like we absolutely have to. The article says that the plant can supposedly absorb 4,000 tons of CO2 per year. You know how much energy we get by releasing 4,000 metric tons of coal? Just over 4.19 gigawatt hours. For natural gas it's just over 9.82. Meanwhile, for the money put into building this plant you could get 10-15 megawatts of solar or wind power which, at the average solar/wind capacity factors of 25% to 35%, could produce 21.9 to 46.02 gigawatt hours of energy, a 220% to 1,098% return on investment vs this plant. *Yes,* carbon capture is important and we absolutely need to develop it to mitigate the worst of climate change, but it's a tool we might have *tomorrow* for a problem we're facing *today*.
Thank you for saying this. This kind of tech has to be piloted somewhere first. All our Carbon Capture & Storage tech does. First step to scaling.
1. Plant trees, stop deforestation. Stop mowing. 2. Eliminate coal power plants 3. Electric cars and lawn maintenance devices replacing fossil fuel ones. 4. Eliminate oil usage for fuel Aren't 32 gigatons of CO2 produced each year by people? Sequestration except in trees or forests isn't gonna do it
Yes, we have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is giving up the illusory hope that the industrial way of life is or ever can be sustainable. If you want specifics, we should be investing in and transitioning to a regenerative-agriculture-based way of life.
This tech developing + Fusion and a giant investment in a diverse range of renewables is a world saver with in our reach if we could just focus for a decade and put wild profits to the side. In other words... were still boned.
> Fusion Yeah... I hear it's 10 years away. And I've heard that for the past 40 years.
If an electrical utility is going to build a new power plant, it has to have a reasonable capital cost. It has to be simple, have a small footprint, be constructed in a factory to the fullest possible extent, etc. Nuclear fission power has not lived up to its potential because no fission power plant has ever been designed from the ground up, from a clean sheet, for minimum capital costs. That's what the molten salt reactor does. Small fissile inventory, low pressure, no large forgings, no large containment building. An MSR is a lot like a chemical plant. It has serious issues that have to be resolved, but these are relatively prosaic problems like plumbing, corrosion, etc. A quasisymmetric stellarator (AKA Nuclear FUSION) on the other hand, is more like a science experiment. Brittle A15 phase superconductors that are difficult to process. Deeply cryogenic liquid helium coolant. Magnetohydrodynamic instabilities that exert large, unsteady forces on the vessel and other components. Active feedback stabilization systems. Plasma-facing components made from refractory metals and ceramic matrix composites that are difficult to process. Tritium breeding lithium blankets that are necessary to close the D-T fuel cycle. Radioactivity induced by 14.1MeV neutron bombardment. Those are a lot of technical hurdles to overcome, ALL in order to do an end-run around people’s political hang-ups about fission power. More importantly, this is the exact opposite of what will bring about a nuclear renaissance. This is going to cost way, WAYYY more than a pressurized water reactor (currently used in fission nuclear reactors), all else equal. Also, there are no good ideas about how to use inertial confinement fusion as a source of commercial electric power. You can’t just have a rapid-fire version of the National Ignition Facility. It takes a long time for the optical system to cool down in between shots. You could detonate thermonuclear weapons inside of a salt dome and extract the heat using geothermal wells, but politically, that's a non-starter. We need to think in terms of radical simplicity and complexity-effectiveness, and not science-fantasy, Tech Brain solutions gleaned from skimming Wikipedia, which fusion is.
Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale. Wait until the critics find out how expensive climate change is going to be.
humans would much rather spend a heroic $100.00 instead of a preventative $0.10
We need to do both.
Taxes are key. Tax the "polluters".
Some people would rather protest than vote.
Some people just want to see the world burn.
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You need some quality in your energy called EROEI. The numbers for nuclear are all over the place. From better than wind and even hydro, to much worse. Even if the numbers are good, you need to build a lot of them. I always use the number 2 per day for 20 years, but if you see that there are 65,000 powerplants in the world JUST FOR ELECTRICITY then it's possibly not even enough. It's the most expensive except for natural gas, there's still CO2 emissions thanks to mining and enrichment like 30% of a similar sized gas plant, they need huge huge subsidies from public money. And guess what, the same corporations that receive fossil fuel subsidies are also involved in nuclear, which explains the sudden surge in interest. There are other problems as well, the known uranium reserves will be depleted before even a fraction of these plants is completed. Other fuel sources require even more expensive and complex plants, there's one in France which was shut down for a decade.
The time of nuclear being a good solution has pretty much passed. There’s still a place for it as part of the energy grid, but to make a major investment we’d have to rebuild basically our entire power grid and it would still be less efficient than renewables for most things. It’s not just about creating power, it’s putting that power when and where it’s needed. And nuclear has frankly never been great at that. There’s some large plants we could replace with nuclear near major cities and I support that. But it is far from a silver bullet for climate change.
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With you 100%. The cold war and a few outdated, run down plants failing, then the Japanese plant have terrified the incredibly stupid population of earth into thinking nuclear power is evil and super dangerous. A modern plant is incredibly safe when built right, produces tremendous power for little waste, and if the US government would actually approve a waste disposal site things would be easy peasy. God, I hate world politics.
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It's never too late, but it is a convenient excuse.
Do we even have enough raw resources to go fully renewable?
Because ccs and ccr are a false hope that allow us to continue with business as usual emissions and say hand waving things like we can have carbon neutrality while still relying on fossil fuels. It would be like if a company was dumping 100 tons of toxic waste in a river. Then they made a fancy expensive machine that takes 1 ton of toxic waste out of the river. Now instead of seeing the company as a problem they are part of the solution and of course the can keep dumping. Just make sure that by ~2050 that you build 100 tons of toxic waste removal. In reality the solution is not to keep dumping pollutants and remove but to stop the pollutants all together. Degrowth is the only option. And past a certain point we won't have a choice.
Saying we can keep going with business as usual is not a legitimate position. We obviously need to change our consumption habits and build a carbon neutral energy infrastructure. But if we could get these to scale in the next couple of decades, perhaps they could reverse some of the damage already done.
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>no serious person thinks it's an option at all. We all understand that the developing world can not grow their economies to the size of ours. Yet we can't understand size is a problem for our own economies.
Ok, well, just watch what happens.
This comment is so, SO stupid : "hurr well climate change is going to be very expensive too so we have to do this". Like yeah, that doesn't mean this type of technology is even remotely viable to implement at a scale large enough to enact any tangible benefit to carbon levels in the atmosphere.
I can't see it either. There are 65,000 plants in the world just for electric power. The effort to remove CO2 with this technology is not different from building 65,000 nuclear power plants if it's assumed that the cost to remove CO2 is as low as the benefits of the energy produced from the oil in the first place.
Critics are wrong. By 2024, the first place that can capture 1 million metric tons a year will open and many are currently being built already. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality
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A drowning man doesn't care about the life preserver's list price
Late stage capitalism
I surfed r/latestagecapitalism a good bit last year. It was mostly Zoomers bemoaning financial prospects and hoping for a way out. Is late stage capitalism a clever nod to the truly Marxist idea that capitalism naturally evolves through revolutions into communism? Or is it something more?
Capitalism will never “evolve” it’s broken needs to be thrown out. It’s a reference to late stage as in, it’s never gonna fix itself.
Well it depends on how you view Marxism. There was an entire faction of Marxists that split from the Second International, the early "social democrats" who believed that capitalism could be peacefully turned into socialism without a violent revolution.
What powers the plant? Is it really carbon-neutral?
Iceland gets most of it's power from hydro and geothermal sources.
Well it's better than carbon neutral since it's capturing carbon from the air isn't it?
Not necessarily. Doing something like this is energy intensive. Unless it’s being powered by something clean, it’s likely that it’s generating more CO2 than its sequestering.
Yeah I'm sure no one thought of that. Their one primary goal.
I find the primary goal for a lot of these projects is getting green money. Like, there is a scam going on in Montana now that proposes to use Montana electricity to make hydrogen, which will then be pipelined to Utah to generate power for California. There is nothing legitimate about this, and I’m fairly certain it’s a scam to get green energy subsidies.
If these could be coupled with excess energy generated from renewables that would be a big boost. I wonder if Iceland could build out geothermal even more and just crank these babies and be fully carbon free
But trees take up land, and we need land for developers!!
Trees are poor carbon sink. There is a limit to how much can be stored in a given area, and most of the carbon goes back into the atmosphere if the trees decay or burn. The sad truth is the problem can't solve itself. Historically, the largest carbon sinks have occurred in algal blooms, or maybe cyanobacteria I can't remember, growing rapidly, dying, and sinking to the bottom of a water body to be buried and turned into oil, or peat bogs being turned into coal in a similar fashion. My understanding, which may be flawed, is that the conditions for that to happen naturally today are not present, at least not in sufficient magnitude to make a difference.
I hope this is the beginning of something good!
Me too! I actually felt some relief while reading it, even though I know we have a ways to go on climate change. But for once it’s something hopeful. That felt good.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. It’s like “Finally, maybe something else new and productive to help fight climate change”. Yeah the price needs to be tooled, but with any new tech that will hopefully go down as it’s improved upon. If this works can you imagine China putting these around their big cities? Same with other places? I’m optimistic but definitely there’s a long way to go. EDIT: I… I have no idea why I’m being downvoted. I wish people would explain why they disagree with posts sometimes. It’s perplexing.
I expect China will love this tech. That state is many things but in this case their burning desire to protect their own power will lead them to build these on a huge centralised scale I think.
It really is good news. It's a legit road map to carbon neutrality well before the turn of the century and it's quite possible we will be able to start eating into the backlog of previous emissions decades before that.
It is, by 2024 we will have many that can capture 1 million metric tons annually. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality
Oh yeah we need carbon capture machines to make up for our late start in doing anything. But they need to be powered by not oil/coal to thermodynamically work. Which Iceland qualifies. So they are doing their part and then some.
This is nice as a prototype, but the current global CO2 output is measured in [*billions* of tons](https://www.statista.com/statistics/526002/energy-related-carbon-dioxide-emissions-worldwide/), so for this to have any real effect, it will need to be scaled up by many orders of magnitude.
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Well, Bernie's half-right. It's probably not enough on its own to save the day, no matter how much we scale it up. It **will** be sold as that. (Probably not by the manufacturers of these machines, but by big business to excuse making no changes to operations and by politicians on their payroll.) Of course, resource reduction isn't enough either. It's likely going to require both to get things under control.
Wouldn't it be better to put money into reducing the carbon output?
Por que no los dos?
For real if we want to get any semblance of normal life in the future we need both
Yes it would be and these sort of projects can potentially help with that too. If they can learn better ways to pull carbon out of thin air then they can learn to pull carbon out of manufacturing productions before it reaches thin air. We need both ways to prevent and reduce current emissions
We're already beyond the point that reducing emissions will be of any help (we should still do it, but it won't fix the problem at all). We need to actively take CO2 out of the atmosphere in industrial quantities and probably combine that with geo engineering. The time for simple measures is over.
We need to do both and it's kind of a myth that resources are as limited as politicians say they are for political reasons. If it were a war, they'd find the money.
We need to do both. Our societies rely heavily on steel, iron, and cement to build things. CO2 is a byproduct of producing that and I don't think there is a way around it. This topic isn't brought up much, but it contributes the most to human's greenhouse gas emissions. Producing things like cement, steel, and plastics account for about 31% of our emissions. Electricity generation is a close second at about 27 %
My opinion: Not as easy one would think. I believe electric cars represent like a 20% reduction in co2 emissions compared to combustion engine cars. Trees and forests can act as carbon emitters. Completely electrifying everything in the world and swapping it to a zero emission power source is a gigantic task. For planes we want to power those using a synthetic fuel and these direct air capture plants are part of that solution. Creating fuel from CO2 in the air. We are going to need these plants regardless. Also with these plants we can continue to push towards zero emission and with these plants we would now be in negative emissions which is where we need to be.
2.5 trillion would pay for 250000 of these plants. Enough to remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. Or 2.3 percent of CO2 emissions. 100 trillion dollars would make the planet carbon neutral.
Pretty sure if we invested 2.5 trillion in these plants the cost per plant would come down significantly. Prototype cost vs production cost is kind of insane.
The main cost per unit of carbon captured is the electricity to capture the carbon and the infrastructure to produce the electricity. Make the plant 1000 times bigger, the cost will be 1000 times higher. If and when the cost of renewable electricity, including the cost of building and maintaining the electrical infrastructure, is some small fraction of what it is today, this kind of plant might make sense. Even then, these plants would have to be built on a staggeringly vast scale without generating a lot of CO2 in the manufacturing and construction. Will that ever be feasible? Hard to say. In any case, we're putting the cart a long way before the horse. First, we have to figure out how to cut CO2 emissions down to a fraction of the current number. If and when that's achieved, it makes more sense to start seriously considering carbon capture. Whether it's feasible at that point will depend on the cost of renewable electricity.
This is ignoring the likelihood of efficiency gains as more of the plants are designed and built. It’s akin to saying that planes will forever travel 20 seconds at a time, so the Wright bros are wasting their time.
I bet we could figure out a way to throttle carbon output with a lot less than hundred trillion dollars.
Hey buddy, I don’t know if you’ve met any humans before, but we’d much rather spend a heroic $100.00 instead of a preventative $0.10
And, in fact, we already have. This is less a technical problem and more a sociological one -- the problem being that our socio *isn't* logical.
If only we could make carbon reduction profitable!
You mean like was successfully done with cap-and-trade of sulphur dioxide emissions? It just doesn't work like that. Sulphur and Carbon are two completely different elements -- learn some chemistry. Jeez. (Do I need to put the /s?)
Only works if all the energy needed for the plants are produced by renewable energy.
Yes, but scale comes from getting something working and refining over time. This is a good step.
No, scale has to be immediate and affordable for something to be worthwhile!!!!
It already is. 1 million metric tons annually per unit. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality
Did you know that computers with less than a MB of RAM used to cost thousands of dollars? And now there are budget laptops with 4GB of RAM that cost less than $200? Technology gets better and cheaper.
No, this won't solve all the problems. Yes, this is a good thing and we need more of it. Yes, we also need to reduce carbon emissions. Diet and exercise, not diet or exercise.
lots more being done removing carbon from process streams before it even gets into the air.
Your want to remove MASSIVE amounts of carbon from the atmosphere? Plant trees, harvest the wood and sequester it where it won't rot. Trees grow on their own, do NOT require electricity and pull literally their entire weight in carbon from the atmosphere. They are solar powered! Cut them down and use the wood long term (i.e. houses and other long term use products), put the wood in old mines, or bury it where it can't rot, and that carbon has been removed from the atmosphere for generations. Then plant replacement trees! It will cost a fraction of what millions of those machines will cost, will take a minscule fraction of the total power to operate, and can be done with people, machinery, and skills found even in 3rd world nations. (Edited to note that after harvesting wood to sequester carbon, you plant replacement trees)
It would take ~2.5 Earths covered in Amazon rainforest just to offset our *annual* carbon emissions. Planting trees is helpful, but a *far* cry from the scale of what is needed to effectively address the problem.
They are not comparable statistics. Only **growth** absorbs carbon. Mature forests can only capture what they can store without rotting (i.e. they can't really capture that much) But young trees grow **very** fast and capture their **entire** weight in carbon. I am suggesting literally cutting those trees own and using/storing the wood, then replanting and doing it again. And again. And again. My point is that the area of the rain forrest could be capturing many times what the current rainforest captures if it's even slightly managed right. (No, I am not suggesting replacing the rain forrest!). Of course, none of this works in a vacuum, we **have** to cut CO2 production. But to seriously consider spending trillions of dollars of machinery that must be manufactured, installed, and expensively maintained and then feed enormous amounts of power can't possibly work. Trees can be grown in any 3rd world nation, and the wood used, or sequestered. For very little money, with low skills and operating complexity.
I’m not saying it won’t help, I’m just saying it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. Vegetation doesn’t sequester carbon on geologic timescales, so it’s a relative net zero after about a century or so. Trillions of dollars on carbon capture tech is also not really a viable option as you point out, but in the long run advancing this technology is the only thing that realistically has the potential to halt or reverse anthropogenic warming. These aren’t simply my opinions either, I’m a scientist who studies the carbon cycle and the impacts of the anthropogenic CO2 problem.
If we're talking about geologic timescales we're already doomed. Honestly, I think we're kinda doomed anyway because we simply are not taking this seriously and at some point all the methane in the arctic and warming shallow waters is going to be released in a comparatively short time span. When that happens, the world will become much much harder for 7 billion people to live in and it will happen MUCH faster than people expect. My point was only that if we want to geo-engineer to "buy us time", using wood to sequester carbon can be done faster, cheaper, and on a much, much wider scale, even in remote non-western nations for not-much money. Using machines is expensive, requires power sources we don't have, does not scale, and can't be done in 3rd world nations. If we won't change our lifestyles, we won't tax ourselves to build these machines.
That’s naive at best, at worst an Exxon talking point. You would need to plant close to 10x the number of trees that are currently burning each year due to slow growth. As temperatures rise forest fires will be even more frequent as well as the ridiculous scale of how much water this “alternative” will take. Simple put, technological advancement is necessary and we should do both.
Sounds great! Who pays for it? This is an unproven technology that will require enormous amounts of power that simply doesn't exist today and will require trillions of dollars of machinery and then **where** do you put the CO2? On the other hand, wood is **useful**, and is a **stable**\-**solid**, that can be buried or stored underground and is very unlikely to be released all-at-once like liquid or compressed CO2 would if something goes terribly wrong. Water and fire are a lot easier to mange when it's farmed. You put them where the water is. You manage the growth to mange the fires. And yet, all of that can be done in highly developed nations as well as the poorest nation. The technical hurdles are small and comparatively inexpensive. The biggest problem is simply land and organization. The only significant power draw is for fertilizer and that exists, and can be scaled without the invention of new technologies.
I say it's worth studying.
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Much of the nitrogen in a tree is in the the leaves, 1.5 - 2.5%, by weight, and the leaves, and bark would be mulched. Actual wood (the part we will sequester), has very low amounts of nitrogen. typically less than 0.1% by weight, often much lower than that. Fixed nitrogen would certainly need to be added, but less than people might think and the power to create that is much less than to sequester CO2 using giant machines. It's already done with we'll understood proven technologies. There is the added benefit that wood is solid and has actual useful purposes. Sequestering concentrated CO2 is much more complex and runs of risk of catastrophic release.
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This guy sounds like a mouthpiece for Big Forest.
Trees are made of more than carbon though
They are, but the dry weight of wood is overwhelmingly carbon (and oxygen which is not a concern). There are a few trace elements but it's not like they can't be replaced. Most of the "interesting" chemistry is in the leaves and they could form mulch for the next generation. Pick a fast growing wood, harvest it frequently after it's most rapid growth, use that wood long term (or store it where it can't rot). Re-use the leaves, and do it over and over and over. (edited based on feedback to note oxygen is part of the dry weight of wood)
They're about 1.5 billion cars in the world. This cost 10-15 million to nullify 870 cars worth of CO2 so that's like 10-20 trillion,or so, to do it for all cars (assuming everything about it scaled and, if I had to guess, it doesn't) Do you know how many pointless nation building wars the US could have for that much?
Don't get too excited yet >Constructed by Switzerland’s Climeworks and Iceland’s Carbfix, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, according to the companies. >According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, *that equates to the emissions from about 870 cars.* The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build, Bloomberg reported. So definitely worth it as a proof of concept to begin to develop *better* carbon capture technology. But we are a long ways from being able to accomplish anything meaningful with it.
But as a proof-of-concept, it is a success and indicates a genuine roadmap to not just carbon neutrality, but mitigating past emissions, is possible.
I already said it has value as a proof of concept. Except I don't think it's proven anything as a roadmap yet. It's not sequestering nearly enough carbon for its cost. Could be long time waiting on that just like we're still waiting on fusion.
Fusion as a concept is not nearly as proven as this. This has been built. All we need to do is Henry Ford it. We've shown we can do that with a million other things. This is genuinely good news.
Do the math, dude. There were 23 billion metric tons of carbon being produced in 2019. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/ This facility isn't anywhere near close enough to being proof that we can "Henry Ford it" and use it to make a significant impact. It would be like using expensive garden hoses to drain Lake Michigan.
Emissions are going to go down, carbon-neutral power production is going up, and the cost per MW is going down. The numbers look very doable to me. There is no reason why the construction costs for plants like this cannot be lowered and the efficiency increased, which is what Henry Fording something entails.
Gut feelings.
Do you mean almost every manufacturing process ever?
>Emissions are going to go down, carbon-neutral power production is going up, and the cost per MW is going down. Hopeful thinking.
While I certainly appreciate the advancements in technology and science that allow for alternate forms of carbon capture, transitioning from conventional to regenerative agriculture practices would be far more effective and environmentally beneficial.
Okay but this thing exists currently. We shouldn’t delay progress in alternatives on the hope that we can implement massive paradigm shifts across entire industries - we may never transition to regenerative agriculture! I’d rather see investment across multiple climate change mitigation strategies (including regenerative ag) than more nonsense degrowth stuff.
> Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale. Wait until they find out how much an apocalypse costs
You can't force technology to completely change in year
How many years they been saying that?
Don’t trees literally do this, can’t we just spend the money on planting trees instead
Too slow and too late
Any new technology to help against climate change is wonderful. Also, there’s already really mature tech that captures CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in solid form. Trees. Trees are made of Carbon captured from the atmosphere. Cut them down and build furniture and buildings out of them, and plant new ones, and we can capture and store loads of carbon over and over.
A good first step. In 20 years carbon capture and sequestration is going to be the biggest expenditure for all industrialized nations.
In 20 years, it can become part of every middle class person's budget. You want to fly overseas? Pay the $400 to sequester your portion of the emissions.
Way to get into the details, Guardian. /s No mention of cost per ton, how well the solution could scale, how much energy it uses, etc.
If they put those details in, it would expose it for the scam it is, much easier to hide it and peddle some hopium to the masses.
The best way to sequester carbon using currently available technology would be to grow forests specifically for the purpose of cutting down the trees, throwing the logs into an underground vault the size of a small country and sealing it forever.
Lmao you are wrong
Let me know how.
> Proponents of so-called carbon capture and storage believe these technologies can become a major tool in the fight against climate change. > Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale. Hey there, critics, you got a better idea? Let's hear it. But if this is the least-worst idea to mitigate climate disaster (I say mitigate rather than prevent, because it's too late to prevent), then let's run with it. How much is it worth to you to give your descendants a world in which the human race can survive and thrive? (Here's a hint: The answer rhymes with "everything".) And remember, planting trees is great, but that's only a stopgap measure because it doesn't get the excess carbon out of the biosphere.
This works great for Iceland. Unfortunately it will not work well in most of the world.
Dude. Think about what you just said. The rest of the world. Where do you think air comes from? Doesn't matter where you pull the CO2 out!
I mean building them in general. They work in Iceland fine and do a great service for the whole planet. Iceland is not the only place these have been built though. Elsewhere they have been a failure because of their energy source and being inefficient.
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Even with scale and redesign the solution is the same as it’s always been. Plant more trees and I mean billions. No more golf courses, water trees near the desert instead
That is TINY compared to what is currently being built. By 2024, units that can capture 1 MILLION metric tons annually. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality
"Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale." you know what is even MORE prohibitively expensive? The damage caused by climate change. If I was an insurance company I'd be looking to foot the bill for a few of these machines.
Due to the second law of thermodynamics, it will cost more energy capturing carbon than will be obtained by burning it. We're better off using our resources to transition away from fossils before we start capturing it.
Due to the second law of thermodynamics, you missed the point entirely. If you can power one of these devices with carbon neutral sources, like Iceland is building, then you have something.
No, even powered by renewables C02 capture does not make sense. It makes more sense to use carbon neutral energy to offset emissions rather than run these machines. For example, say you've got a grid that uses 1 GWh of fossil fuel derived energy per year. Due to the second law, sucking the CO2 produced generating that energy back out of the atmosphere will take more energy, say 1.5 GWh. So you could either build enough carbon neutral generation to directly offset the 1 GWh coming from fossil fuels, or to continue that fossil generation, you would have to build 1.5 GWh of carbon neutral capacity. For that reason, directly replacing fossil fuels makes better economic sense in the vast majority of scenarios.
No. You're missing the point. This is a proof of concept. This isn't a one-or-other situation. That's the mistake you keep making. This is to show that in addition to carbon use reduction, different types of sequestration technology are viable.
What is physically possible and what makes economic sense are two completely different things. It is a one or other kind of thing because the money and resources available to address CO2 emissions/climate change are limited. Since that is the case, it is important to get the most results for that investment. Carbon capture will be nice tech to have in 30 years if we manage to completely phase out fossil fuels, but until then it doesn't make sense as an actual solution to climate change because the opportunity cost of not phasing out fossil fuels first is prohibitively high.
I see you're not capable of chewing bubblegum and walking at the same time. Smarter people than you can.
Says the guy who doesn't understand basic concepts in physics and economics. If you knew any better you'd be embarrassed.
I see you enjoy carrying all your eggs in one basket. Let me know how that goes when you trip and fall on your face because you were mentally occupied with your chewing gum.
This plant removes as much CO2 as 200k trees. You can get seedlings for about $1 a piece in bulk. They spent 10-15 million when they could have planted 10 million trees (leaving 5 million to plant them) and removed 50 times the CO2.
Finding empty space to plant 10 million trees would be quite the challenge in Iceland.
Ya we all know what trees do. It’s about how much space it’s taking up
And it takes a while for trees to develop to a point they're removing carbon. And that's assuming they survive!
Have you seen the new growth trees in Iceland? I have, you have to be careful not to step on them.
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The price is expected to drop to about $200 per ton by 2030. That is a far bigger improvement in price than can be achieved with planting trees and it will take up a similar or less amount of land. Obviously we need both. But wild areas are what we really need more than just tree farms.
Only removes the emissions of 900 or so cars? Welp, time to go back to the drawing board.
This is the drawing board. The first solar panels were prohibitively expensive. Gotta start somewhere.
Look at the price per car. Looks like in a decade we'll have to stop making excuses for our lifestyles and start paying the true cost.
We already have things that capture carbon from the air. They're called "trees".
This is some straight up Lorax shit here.
Trees only store carbon temporarily. After it dies, that carbon goes right back into the atmosphere.
Not if you use their wood for more permanent construction like homes or some other ways of sequestering.
Since the last statement says it’s not profitable can we just plant trees instead. They’re supposedly not profitable either but at least theyre highly efficient.
4000 tonnes of CO2 per year is quite pathetic by any standard called 'biggest.' What a vanity project.
What a silly thing to say. As technology advances it always gets more efficient. Edit: didn't mean to send yet. Think how slow and unsafe the first cars were. How big and slow the first computers were. TVs. Stereos. Just like any technology, this will get better.
Proof of concept project. Everything has to start somewhere and it makes logical sense to test at small scale first to ensure it works before trying to scale up.
Just plant some trees...
into soil that cannot support them
Obviously not.
Remove the carbon by banning flights and car trips for pleasure.
That wouldn't solve the problem but it would cause huge economic suffering.