Largest plant capturing carbon from air starts in Iceland | Hacker News Reader

Largest plant capturing carbon from air starts in Iceland

reuters.com

30 pointskristianpaul19 comments

There's this thing that works more or less the same way, except it's free, works 24 hours a day, needs only light and water to function and looks beautiful while doing so... What's that called again? Oh right, a tree.

To give some numbers to that idea:

"Around 0.9 billion hectares of land worldwide would be suitable for reforestation, which could ultimately capture two thirds of human-made carbon emissions."

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/07/how...

Only if we stop producing more.

Carboniferous ended 350M years ago. Today lignin is biodegradable and thus does not capture carbon past tree living mass.

No. Some of the carbon can end up being stored in the soil:

https://extension.psu.edu/how-forests-store-carbon

Or alternatively, wood can be used for increasingly complex construction, for example this wooden skyscraper:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/berlins-woho-wooden-skysc...

Lastly, just increasing the carbon stored in living mass may be vastly beneficial.

Especially, it has to be said, in places like Iceland - which were significantly forested until historically-recent human intervention.

Apparently it had 40% tree cover as recently as 1000 years ago.

The currently largest "forest" in Iceland is... a wee thing.

trees burn, if you pump carbon into some rock formation 2km underground its not coming back for a long long long time, if ever.

> U.S. oil firm Occidental is currently developing the largest direct-air-capture facility, to pull 1 million tonnes per year

This prompted me to look up more details, and I found another article about that company[0] which said:

> If governments around the world take climate targets seriously, models estimate that the world will need to bury as much as 10 billion tons of CO2 underground annually by 2050.

So the world needs to build about 10,000 of those facilities over the next 30 years? That seems logistically manageable, so it's probably just a question of what the running costs are for such facilities. If the main cost is the electricity, then the falling costs of renewables could be doubly important in the coming decades.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-13/occidenta...

The great thing about applications like this is that they really only need to run when the sun shines and the batteries are already fully charged, or anyway when your customer energy demand falls below present renewable generating capacity. Any extra capacity at minimum price does not need to be wasted, because there are infinite uses for the product.

Other similar processes include producing and liquifying hydrogen and ammonia for industrial and agricultural processes.

There is not much economy of scale for these uses, so you can add them to any installation, big or small.

The Afghanistan war cost an estimated $2 trillion. Let’s double the 10,000 and say it takes 20,000 facilities to ‘solve’ the climate crisis. That gives us $100 million to spend per facility to equal the cost of the war.

If someone from Climeworks sees this thread, do you have a real time dashboard of energy consumption and total CO2 sequestered? Thank you!

>4,000 tons of CO2 per year

That is not impressive, just building that thing wasted probably 10 times more than that.

It is a pilot project. You have to start small and scale up. 4000 tons is small compared to the problem, but it is enough to prove the process. Imagine carrying 4000 tons up a hill.

There is way, way more energy available under Iceland than they could ever use otherwise. Scaling up CO2 capture could consume any amount.

They already had a Pilot-project in Switzerland in 2017

https://www.nzz.ch/wissenschaft/kohlendioxid-rueckgewinnung-...

>Imagine carrying 4000 tons up a hill

It's like 750 Cars/year now imagine how many of those you have to Build just to equal even Icelands Volcano-emissions.

It has a Hyperloop smell to me to be honest.

I.e., you do not understand what "pilot project" means.

>>A pilot study, pilot project, pilot test, or pilot experiment is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment

That description is far more limited than the real-world role of pilot projects.

To those downvoting the parent comment I give an example for intuition.

The IEA provides an example estimate that the average annual household electricity consumption outputs about 5.5 Tonnes of CO2.[0]

This plant (After it has ofset the emissions needed to get created) will remove the equivalent CO2 emissions of coal/gas electricity generation for about 727 households annually.

That is basically the emissions of a small village excluding cars/freight/logistics.

I am not disagreeing that Carbon removal should be pursued, but this really drives home the point that emissions must be first and foremost widly cut.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com