A new carbon capture plant will pull 36k tons of CO2 from the air each year
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
For other GHG and pollutants there are uv-powered systems like TiO2, olivine etc, though there are also limits to how much they can do.
Basically we have to "mash our hand on the keyboard", i.e. try to do them all, but I can't see machines like these making any meaningful contribution.
Note: I'm working on methane destruction straight in the atmosphere, so I'm putting my money (and my time) where my commenting is.
At just $15/tonne of Carbon Tax, we halve CO2 output, mainly by destroying the economics of coal:
https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/what-is-a-carbon-tax-how-...
All the effort and funding currently spent on carbon capture should instead go towards lobbying for carbon taxes. The impact will be significantly greater.
The best use of Carbon Capture technology would be in building ventilation systems. If we can capture and exhaust CO2 from inside air, we can reduce ventilation requirements, and potentially reach lower-than-atmospheric CO2 levels (which could have extraordinary benefits for cognition and sleep quality).
Here is page 122 of NextEra’s investor deck. They are closing all coal plants by 2028 as they are no longer profitable to run. Even without a carbon adder per MWh, coal is dead (“near firm” solar and wind are renewables with battery backing to make them dispatchable when called on by the grid operator). Even existing combined cycle natural gas is under pressure! And their note: “We expect further technology improvements and cost declines will extend the competitiveness of onshore renewables and storage.”
https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/06/lcoe-small.jpg?mrf-s...
Japan is opting out of financing coal plants further in Indonesia and Bangladesh, cancelling ~3GW worth of coal plant projects.
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/planned-coal-plants-fizzle...
So we’re seeing some progress in avoiding electrical thermal emissions, which is the cheapest emissions offset.
(Oahu, Hawaii’s last coal fired plant turns down in September after the Tesla Megapacks replacing their frequency response capability are installed, another 200MW of coal taken offline)
Also, despite the coal subsidies from congress, even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners. They just want some other way to make a living.
But that doesn't seem to be the case, as those same families voted heavily for the politicians who claimed they could bring back coal jobs and the industry. So they obviously want someone to be digging coal, and who else but the next generation?
We also need laws to require plugging abandoned, venting wells, and stiff fines for venting to help pay for that.
A $1/gallon tax on gasoline is rounding error compared to all the other disasters hitting these days.
And it seems only Northern Europe and China even give a shit about the climate. Yes, China is expanding coal plants but they are also worrying more about the climate than others.
OTOH I'm not that convinced northern Europe gives a shit about it, given how much oil/gas Norway is drilling and how reluctant Germany has been to reduce its fossil fuel dependence (and now geo-politics has forced its hand on oil, it's ramping up coal usage again!).
The evidence is pretty hard to ignore though - nobody who can really do anything about it is going to give a shit until it's all too late.
Yes, one of our founders is an anthropologist and she has been doing field work in underrepresented communities. Rich countries (think they) can afford to pretend there's no such thing as climate change but nobody outside these wealthy enclaves has any doubt.
The reason we spend effort on this is that the atmosphere touches everyone, so we should try to figure out the interests and concerns of as many people as possible to make sure we do our best to do things that help everyone.
It's interesting that the biggest opponents of climate repair seem to come from Germany, USA, UK, and Canada.
> OTOH I'm not that convinced northern Europe gives a shit about it, given how much oil/gas Norway is drilling and how reluctant Germany has been to reduce its fossil fuel dependence (and now geo-politics has forced its hand on oil, it's ramping up coal usage again!).
Yes, it's frustrating that in the face of a war the convo switches immediately back to "drill" rather than "windmill". A big part of that is that corporations speak in terms of benefits, and tailor their messages to specific customer groups (this topic is probably 15% of HN posts and comments) while the conversations of governments and NGOs focus on features and risks.
But I do think it's a top of mind issue in europe, and the continued expansion of the scope of the ETS is a good example. See a long reply I wrote to "tito" to see why there's a complex combination of repairs and continued damage that is unavoidable (point 1 in my comment)
But one way or another it's the OECD who'll have to pay for the cleanup.
China has the advantage that they do not need to continue operating expensive equipment just because it was expensive.
Yes, but then you see, existing business will become unprofitable. And these business are currently profitable, and using those profits to pay bribes.
This is the fundamental issues behind all proposed solutions to climate change -- fossil fuel based companies are here now to pay the required corruption fees to keep themselves going. Renewable energy companies might be able to pay the same bribes in the future, but... not now. In the future. Now is now, and politicians want to retire to a cushy consulting job when they lose reelection election, which could be any year now, not decades in the future.
If you want to understand why corruption is inherently bad and can never be tolerated, just think back to this scenario and thousands like this. Our very future -- our survival as a species -- is being undermined by a handful of people in exchange for bribes as low as a few thousand dollars.
Call it the "American Carbon Dividend" or the "Advancing America Dividend".
The price of the beef burgers would go up by 7% according to Beef Magazine, 150% according to vegnews.com, and 40% according to NY Times.
However on a full cycle basis the difference is biochar is typically made from local material (mostly the leftover waste from the prior year's harvest) which is right there (zero transport) and would otherwise rot and release methane and CO2 on its own, even if plowed into the field.
Charcoal is made from trees, typically cut down and transported to a factory and then transported to the customer.
In general I am not in favor of burning trees, enjoyable as it is on a cold night out in the forest.
"The biggest food price hikes are in meats, with pork and beef up 14% to 20% compared with a year ago."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meat-prices-pandemic-inflation-...
"The bill for magical thinking arrives with unpredictable timing but thunderous force." -pmarca
Not constitutionally. I demand that people stop advocating for general solutions and instead focus their action on my petty personal grievances for a marginal return.
After that, the My Climate Journey [2] and Work on Climate [3] communities are excellent entry points.
Climate is a big buffet full of all sorts of cool problems to help solve. I'm focused on carbon removal as an example, but we need millions of people working across all aspects of the planetary system.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Drawdown-Comprehensive-Proposed-Rever...
Massive algal blooms in the ocean gives me nightmares.
Why? How you you think much of the carbon at the bottom of the sea got there? Biological activity, most of small species that died and sank.
The pelagic ocean is pretty nutrient-poor, so anything you grow there is going to need to be farmed. I've been reading that used to be far more fertile before the ecosystem crashed as we decimated the whale population (there are experiments under way for basically adding "artificial whale poo" (as it was jokingly described to me by one of the participants) to try to form little regions of more fertile surface waters.
IMHO you do want to stay away from coastal waters which are a witch's brew of all sorts of things, from runoff to various organic processes. Some algal blooms in coastal regions have been of toxic species (e.g. "red tide" -- those algaes also show up in snow BTW) but most are not that kind at all, and as I note above, in the pelagic (open) ocean you'll have to be seeding it anyway.
You want it to die and sink, but of course it will be attractive to other species some of which will eat it, grow, eventually die and sink, but will probably breath some of that carbon out again. But in the end, you'd want most of it to sink.
Just like my code, I want to make sure I'm able to undo some change before making even seemingly small changes. I don't know how you "undo" a huge cloud of algae.
If its all in some tank and can't escape, then fine, I'm on board.
Once we are electrolysing lots of water for the hydrogen, dissolving the waste oxygen in river outflows could start to save the current dead zones. But restricting over-fertilization would have a bigger effect.
Regarding the main part of your comment, what is it you think people should be working on instead?
Well, that's a broad topic! Here's how I look at it:
0 - people are going to continue peopling. Otherwise what's the point? So any argument based on privation ("you need to stop doing everything you like to do because it's sinful") won't work. Some stuff will drop at the margins (I expect meat will become increasingly expensive and other high protein alternatives will displace some of it), but all of that will continue to change gradually, though I hope the derivative will increasing in a non-linear fashion.
1 - concommitent with that: there's an enormous infrastructure of depreciating cap ex. So a power plant built today will be depreciated over the next 40 years. Yes, some economic changes can shorten that but people will try to eke out what they can from them. In fact as renewables increase, the cost of fossil fuels will fall (because of reduced demand) which will make old, polluting plants more viable.
2 - Governments have shown they cannot tackle this problem. I gave a talk at Asilomar a couple of months ago in which I showed a temperature graph and pointed out it's impossible to see the Paris conference on it. This year will be COP 27 and what has changed? Governments have a huge role to play in terms of incentives, but in actual action? Pretty much zip. I think this is an inherent property of some of the good properties of good government so I'm not claiming governments are mendacious, pathetic, controlled by some conspiracy or anything like that. I don't drive a motorcycle underwater, but I would drive one to the beach. Likewise I don't depend on governments to be able to do much directly to improve the global climate, but they can sure help.
3 - We need multiple kinds of improvement:
A - yes, we need emissions reductions and replacements for emitting activity (e.g. "alternative energy"). Though there are many sources of GHG emissons, and I don't see a way to replace most of them (e.g. we can't simply stop growing rice -- see point 0). This is "stop making things worse"
B - Because of point 1, some people need to work on adaptation. The climate isn't going to go back to the status quo ante right away (actually never -- see point 4) so the next 50-100 years will have to presume that the weather is going to get worse (hotter/colder, wetter/dryer depending on where you are). I am uninterested in this problem BTW.
C - Climate repair (sometimes called restoration) is the longest term and most important. We do need ways to change the chemistry of the air and oceans back to 1775.* Reducing insolation, removing GHGs, etc. Like I said, I really only believe in a variety of solar-powered chemistry, both biological and not. Look at some natural processes that can be sped up, like synthetic limestone which has been discussed on HN. (Maybe let's not consider the gold standard of setting off 50 massive volcanic eruptions.) Most of these are only feasible at certain concentrations of a GHG, which is one reason I'm more in favour of biologics which are more adaptable and generally easier to power. I talk with a variety of people about these topics every week, but all my efforts right now are on methane, because there's a small amount of it and it's been responsible for about 1/3 of the temperature rise to date.
There's a subgoal here, which is zapping emissions at the point of generation (so called "point source remediation"). Catalytic converters on cars work for some GHGs (though you can't stick one on a swamp); some efforts to zap methane in barns or mines are under way, etc. We could paint the insides of building ventilation with TiO2 and install UV lamps; if they could be cleaned would they work? Who knows. But stopping the emission when the concentration is highest is generally the easiest place to do it.
4 - in terms of climate repair, we aren't really going to ever "go back". We have no idea what the critical points are (where the path of the hysteresis curve changes) and will be curating the climate indefinitely. That's not terrible; we have been curating the forests of Europe for a thousand years or more (is there any original forest on that continent) and there's little "wild" forest in new england either. So it's quite doable from a social standpoint. We'll just find a point were we find the climate on earth adequate.
5 - Carbon credit can be used to cover a lot of sins (see point 1) and offset credits (don't cut down a tree) are tough to justify. But can be a pretty good way to fund repair and remediation, and could be a good way to shift the cost onto the people who create majority of the problem.
* I used to think that "1775" automatically made everybody think of James Watt's first significant patent, but it seems in the US it makes people think of political events around that time. Apparently not everybody is a steam nerd -- who knew?
There is a serious worry that in the next big Cal earthquake, dikes will collapse, pulling sea water into the delta. It has happened before.
Generally, restoring wetland that had been converted to farmland can be done in many places to similar effect. Floating solar is a big win, producing much more power than the same panel in the desert, and lasting much longer, without interfering with anything else.
search for another comment that mentions bluedotchange
We are not ruining the earth in any way. We are merely making it inhospitable to vertebrates and some other life forms.
There are billions of people living almost primitive lives just waiting to consume as much as we do driving everywhere and buying new iphones every year. We are about to make things cheaper and more efficient and give them access to this consumption.
Despite all of this advancement, resource usage and emissions has never once gone backwards or even slowed down its increase.
https://twitter.com/birdhillcap/status/1541812452760776705
https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1541768533004148738
https://twitter.com/luisbaram/status/1523671791062843393
https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1529809797582815244
There is a bigger problem. Those who scrutinize climate change are punished by the society even though we need legit scientists and people that debunk overarching claims. You could accept CC arguments but still be a critic of some of the insane claims going on today.
It's like the early COVID days. Can't criticize. Can't speak against the mob. Can't do science without scrutiny.
Right, so your sources for this is a few Twitter posts. Let's take a look.
The first one is a supposed quote from Al Gore, but he never said that. Even if he did, Al Gore getting something wrong would hardly disprove anything about climate science.
> Those who scrutinize climate change are punished by the society
You're parroting untrue claims. How about some self-awareness?
The main general point still stands. All I’m asking for is some scrutiny. By the time information reaches from scientists to reporters and policy makers, there is a lot of malaise and omission of inconvenient truths.
We need more checks and balances. Climate alarmicism is getting out of control. It's become a religion. Scientists that want to report inconvenient results are terrified.
Edit: I found some more: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-e...
You just want to throw out accusations without evidence and you're complaining about "climate alarmicism" not getting enough scrutiny?
> Scientists that want to report inconvenient results are terrified.
This is an oft-repeated claim by people engaged in climate denialism, but it's a lie. A conspiracy theory without evidence. Where are all these terrified scientists? Who has been sanctioned for presenting contrary views?
A friend of mine was a climate sceptic. He started a PhD looking at glaciers and ice cores. He was expecting to experience some friction pushing back against the climate orthodoxy, but after looking through the data he changed his mind. He realised our models of the climate were consistent with the evidence.
Consider: if your "terrified scientists" theory was incorrect, and actually scientists did believe that the standard models are correct, wouldn't that state of affairs look identical to what is actually occurring today?
I am also not a climate skeptic. I just think that we need more scrutiny. The push back I get from people is insane like the strawman you've conjured up.
The inconvenient truth is that far too little is happening, and doing enough would be overwhelmingly cheaper. Quibbling has outsize impact interfering with action.
I've heard from friends who believe that we should depopulate the planet by 100x. Anti-human arguments all over the media.
Sure, it could be a bubble, just big enough of a bubble to envelope the entire West.
so try your best and if it doesn't play out: memento mori!
Trees whose wood is used as a building material, animal feed where the manure is then used as fertilizer, are 2 very accessible examples.
No need to make this more complicated than it has to be.
In order to what and at what rate? Break even? Each year?
It's not as simple as I state above, but that gives you an idea of the size of the problem.
So, this is just a step on the path....but, those numbers do seem pretty aspirational at this stage.
* when you hate on the fossil fuel industry, don't forget that it saved the whales.
Even if emissions went magically to zero today we have the accumulated emissions CO2 since 1775 lingering around and trapping all the heat we want to radiate away. We have to get rid of that as well
If you go to our crappy web site (www.bluedotchange.com) and click on the science you can read some refereed papers on the subject.
We are looking for some MEs and ChemEs and a couple of EEs and software people if you're interested.
Water on the high atmosphere looks like a good choice. But it needs some simulation to know if the water won't stay there long enough to create a greenhouse problem of the same size.
We're working in the lower troposphere (like 0-50 m). The stratosphere frightens me (and the folks who want to spray sulphur compounds up there are terrifying.
Water in the upper troposphere (AKA Marine Cloud Brightening) like Silver Lining is trying to do feels like a pretty good cooling approach. I wrote a jokey paper in the 80s about giant volcano-powered teakettles spewing steam into the upper atmosphere but the much simpler approach of simply spraying seawater into the air is clever.
Congratulations on the project.
Now Climeworks is building another facility that makes Orca seem tiny by comparison. The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With a CO₂ capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca."
A lot of negativity in this thread, oddly. This is a 10X improvement over a previous version. Another magnitude or two and this becomes incredible for the environment. Other solutions should also happen, but a problem as big as climate change should have many parallel solutions. We don't have time to put all our eggs in one basket.
It's better to reduce emissions than to try and capture a couple of 0.0X% of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's obvious to everyone and so everyone agrees and that gets upvoted.
In reality, good luck having cows and steel (=iron+carbon) and cement on this planet without GHG emissions. Even plane fuel (long-distance flights) is basically going to have to do carbon capture to make 'electrofuels' (or biofuels) that they then burn and put back into the atmosphere, at least with how it's currently looking.
It saddens me to see that people are rambling, and others are voting it to be the current top comment, about teratons (a unit even I hadn't heard being thrown around before) which is of course a ridiculous notion. The point of this technology is to neutralize unavoidable emissions in thirty-odd years. We can't, in thirty years, start to develop this tech and hope it works the next week.
It also allows us to put a direct price point on CO2. You pick: remove CO2 or don't emit it. A smart company will choose the cheaper option. Only a few years ago, planting trees or "preventing emissions" magic accounting was considered offsetting. This sets a new standard.
So long as it's within proportion, I really see no downsides to funding the development of this tech. The roll-out to megaton or gigaton scales, yeah we should see about that when we actually have renewable energy to spare, not when the gas, nay, coal plants are still in full operation. But for now, we're struggling to reach a few dozen kilotons economically, and that's why this is necessary work and good news.
The problem is that the price on this will be severely underestimated. Every year we hear our estimates of climate damage are underestimated.
Then the wildfires around the world and in the arctic started becoming to frequent to ignore.
The real problem is that the extraction industries will fight tooth & nail to not have subsidies much less additional cost - and they have won and continue to win to this day.
I guess you mean the underestimated impact, i.e. "cost" to society (insofar as human lives have a € value), if we don't do anything? Because that's a different discussion. I presume that lawmakers would be in agreement that we need to curb emissions, otherwise it's an entirely different conversation to be having (and flashbacks from 10-20 years ago).
I asked them if there would be any sort of tour available, given that the neighboring power plant has an exhibition (which is superb by the way! Easily worth the money, and I spent quite a bit of time geeking out there on.is/en/geothermal-exhibition/). Initially Climeworks responded, we exchanged a few emails, and one of their marketing guys wanted to give me a call, so I sent my number and... got ghosted. No replies to reminder/follow-up emails or anything. Bit bummed but oh well, didn't expect there would be anything available in the first place so I can't complain.
As for the other climate-related part of my bio, reducing emissions, there's a whole host of things but mostly things everyone already knows is an option: I chose to live in a place where I can commute by public transport, I buy and sell second hand instead of new when possible, reduce meat consumption (prioritized by a CO2/kg chart, which unfortunately includes cheese above chicken iirc) and buy veggie/vegan food to vote with my wallet, vote green in elections since imo basically everything else (short of war-like situations) can wait a few years, etc.
And if you do get curious about working on carbon removal, check out the AirMiners Boot Up: https://bootup.airminers.org/
I also love how this picture on your website about sums up this discussion about how to solve the climate problem: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602c4ede5fdbd7...
¹ edit: I had not realized the irony here while writing this :-)
Billions of tons of carbon will need to be extracted from the atmosphere. But removing it will do no good as long as even more is released. 100kt/y is like breathing on somebody who is thirsty. Yes, there is moisture in your breath. No, it didn't help.
Creating a carbon tax such that emitting carbon costs as much as they spend extracting it, and then handing that over to extractors, could enable scaling up to the point where it could do some good.
The tech is supposed to be used (at scale) once we exhausted the low-hanging fruit of closing (replacing) gas plants and the like. Once we have days with excess sunlight and wind, for example, this can be used anywhere. And I like that they're using renewable energy during this R&D phase, because indeed it doesn't matter if you remove the CO2 next to a USA freeway or in remote Iceland place that sounds like hell (hellisheiði, "ð" as "th") but has excess electricity and heat and suitable rock.
> And I have serious doubts about CO2 emissions of this thing!
For the previous plant, some third party (iirc KPMG, obviously paid by Climeworks so there's a conflict of interest) says it's 90% efficient, meaning that the associated emissions are about 10% of what it captures.
But since Climeworks only published the claim and not the report, I don't know if that includes construction, or if they picked a nice number that only considers plant operation. And construction might have included a lot of R&D, so then it wouldn't really be a fair comparison because building more of the same would not require those R&D-related emissions.
For what it's worth, I'm optimistic given this 90% claim. Even if you apply the marketing department discount and reality might be 75%, it's still a whole lot better than nothing.
It uses A LOT of water! Bitcoin mining is propably more ecological than this.
For everyone who likes podcasts as a medium, here is an in-depth interview with Peter Psarras who's researching DAC:
omega tau science & engineering podcast: 387 - Direct Air Capture
Episode webpage: http://omegataupodcast.net/387-direct-air-capture/
Media file: http://omegataupodcast.net/podlove/file/394/s/feed/c/mp3/ome...
One thing I do like about this is that we get an actual, concrete, and correct "cost of carbon" from it. Sure, there are caveats (i.e. you can't just build 5MM of these in Iceland), but having a real number that doesn't include hand-waving around whether the Brazilian farmer would have cut down those trees or not is a good thing for offsets, future planning, markets, etc.
edit: I've also seen a similar argument made for developing geoengineering solutions. Being willing to dump chemicals into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight makes a lot of people think "oh shit they're really serious about this climate change stuff arent' they", and then the outcome of "we should take this more seriously".
Thanks for running these numbers. I have a few more calculations to add which support what you're saying.
Let's consider a fairly standard industrial air compressor[0] which has a rating of "CFM at 90 PSI: 18.1". This means 18.1 cubic feet of air per minute. A cubic foot of air "weighs approximately 0.0807 lbs" according to an expert answer on PhysLink[1]. Using `units`, then:
You have: 18.1 * 0.0807 lbs / minute
You want: tonnes / year
* 348.46671
[0] https://ingersollrandcompressedair.com/ss5l5-single-stage-ai...
Your typical tiny PC fan can move 70 CFM, so about 3.5 times the amount of your industrial air compressor. A typical 30 inch fan can easily move 10000 CFM.
Here's what I could find on how the technology works:
> While a few different techniques have been developed, the most common involves industrial-scale fans that transmit ambient air through a filter. This latter component then uses a chemical adsorbent (which holds molecules in the form of a thin film on its surface) to produce a pure, storable stream of carbon dioxide.
https://singularityhub.com/2019/08/23/the-promise-of-direct-...
Assuming, though, that the process could keep up with the air flow that 100 of those 30 inch fans could produce (if we imagine a shipping container being about 10 feet wide by 10 feet tall) then that's 1 million CFM, which is 50,000 times my original comparison, so only 400,000 units would be needed.
To pick some more arbitrary numbers, if 100 factories were built, each producing one unit per week, that would take 4000 weeks or roughly 80 years. Feel free to consider more realistic numbers, which may lead to different conclusions.
We also know that there's roughly 0.75g of CO2 in a m^3 of air.
So we do some math, converting to a proper system of measurement and back to lalaland units using 907.2 kg in a US ton and 35.315 cubic feet in a m^3:
36000 [tons of CO2/year/80 containers] / 80 [containers] * 907.2 [kg/ton] * 1000 [grams/kg] / 0.75 [g/m^3] / 90% [efficiency] / (365 * 24 * 60) [minutes/year] * 35.315 [cubic feet/m^3] = 40636.4383562 [cubic feet / minute / container]
So one of their containers filters about 40000 CFM at 90% efficiency.
Was any of this helpful? Not at all. Just looking at tons of CO2 produced vs. captured would have given us the same picture, and that's the numbers we started with.
> if 100 factories were built, each producing one unit per week
That's a tiny amount at planet scale and also incredibly slow. Humanity builds around 150,000 cars every single day. Some factories crank out a thousand a day. And I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that a car is probably a more complex product.
One could have said the same thing for PV panels 20 years ago.
There is recent research on this that indicates we could achieve a 10 gigaton annual sequestration rate with only a 5% impact on the total terrestrial tree production and at a cost of $30/ton.[1]
"The quantity of this wood utilization can be controlled carefully to maintain a desired amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to keep the Earth’s climate from diving into the next ice age, acting as a climate thermostat."
[1] https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021...
The inputs for petri plate growth have a demanding level of refinement. Pure sugar, yeast extracts, salts, gelling agent, all dissolved in D.I. H2O. Sterility requires autoclaves which are energetic monstrosities. Without these conditions the culture will become contaminated and overgrown with stuff you don't want.
Innovation could solves these problems, but it's going to be hard.
citation?
The analogy isn't perfect, but the point is clear. Refining and developing imperfect Co2 extraction technology today can pay massive dividends in the future.
I mean you could be right, it could go right and they could figure out the thermodynamics and somehow built insane number of huge plants without adding significant additional CO2 emissions.
Or it could suck up billions in resources to produce 2M$ in revenue and give polluters a license to pollute some more
I offer that anyone looking at a DAC machine today could see the equivalent of the first transistor sitting on a bench in Bell Labs [0]. Gooey, weird, and packed with potential.
[0] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10261887...
Climeworks currently estimates 2.5MWhr / tonnes of carbon (1000kg) (heat energy). That's an hours worth of energy for 2500 homes, PER 1000 kg.
Mammoth sounds like it'll capture (36000 ton per year / 365 days / 24 hr) ~4 tonnes an hour = 10MWhr.
Most solar farms in the US are currently less than 5MW and thus ALL of their energy couldn't support a single one of these capture facilities.
Two Comments:
1) All that energy for 36000 tonnes / year just doesn't seem like it is viable.
2) I don't really think we should be prioritizing using clean energy to recapture carbon over replacing other sources.
Where I encourage you to explore is what an equivalent unit of energy spent on developing new carbon removal systems is right now vs the equivalent unit of energy spent to make another solar panel. There's a trillion tons of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so even if we stopped every carbon dioxide emission tomorrow, the planet would still continue to warm for the next century.
My conclusion is that ultimately we need both, and that short term the energy spent on carbon removal solutions needs to be framed as an investment for it to make sense.
What are the actual downsides of energy usage here given that the enterprise is strongly carbon negative? Given that it is consuming geothermal energy in Iceland, 1) wouldn't the energy become waste heat in the environment regardless, 2) Is there a consumer of the energy that would be "better"?
You can read that "downside" more generally as DAC (and carbon sequestration in general) is expensive, and no one really knows how efficiently we can do it, especially at the scales we'd probably want.
It's also an expression that current low/no carbon energy sources are globally sufficiently constrained that we're in no real position for large scale (aka meaningful) DAC (and many other forms of carbon sequestration - perhaps not all) deployment.
Climeworks is clearly out to iterate and gain experience to be well positioned for a presumed DAC (and sequestration) market that may form as all of the easy to decarbonize sources and processes are converted. We're... a ways off here.
This is addressed in the article: "Or would the geothermally-generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars?"
There's no such thing as waste heat really. In the short term you can argue that limited units of energy are better used towards carbon neutrality, things like powering electric cars. Ultimately, we need removal tech, and we need to make it energy efficient, fast. Putting money and energy into carbon removal systems needs to be looked at as an investment for it to make sense. Powering an electric car gets you to go a mile, powering a DAC system lets you remove a little carbon and is an investment in developing more efficient systems too.
If you have anyone in mind to reach out to, climate scientists I know love to answer curious questions like this. AirMiners has IPCC co-author Bill Collins speaking a few weeks, you could see about posing the question to him: https://lu.ma/airminers
> To meet its future goals, though, the company will have its work cut out for it; they’re aiming to remove millions of tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by 2050.
It's a startup and growth is the name of the game
And 36kt CO2 captured /year means over 2 million euros in tradable emissions each year, at current ETS prices of 60+ euros per metric ton CO2 emissions.
Economics looks a lot like entropy. We know of no way to do economically valuable work by burying carbon.
I see economic processes like physical ones. Water flows downhill, never up. Sure, there are huge spectacular waterfalls like your most hated billionaire. But that's essentially still the same downhill flow process as a meandering wide river.
We can discuss the best route from top to bottom. Fine. Perhaps I too would prefer to avoid such precipitous drops. But the issue here is that we have the need for uphill flow.
Climeworks (and others) are just a couple orders of magnitude away from having real impact, with a clear roadmap lying ahead. Let's support them, along with all other potential solutions? We're going to need more than one.
Our problem is that this is a technological solution for a problem that needs a policy solution.
In fact, in a certain way the policy part is already there - the latest IPCC reports project that carbon removal will have to be part of our strategies for staying below the 1.5C target (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-removal-un...).
every economic/political actor sees only long-term benefits from fixing the climate, and those benefits are the average of each actor's carbon contributions. everyone has an incentive to cut corners (spin up those coal plants to keep energy cheap) unless doing the right thing just so happens to be the easiest thing (solar costs less now.)
infinite economics and peace Nobels for whoever solves that. or physics Nobels for whoever makes fusion practical. it's basically the same thing, after all.
> While Orca has 8 collector containers each about the size and shape of a standard shipping container, Mammoth will have 80.
This doesn't seems practical to scale. To capture 36,000,000 tons (1/1000 of the current global output) they'd need 80,000 shipping containers?
> Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year.
> “We started with milligrams of carbon dioxide captured from the air,” he said. “Then we went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms to tons to 1,000 tons.” That sort of leveling up over the course of 13 years is no small feat.
If it took 13 years to reach the current scale, how many more orders of magnitude are left to squeeze out?
It will have to happen, but it will be hard to keep people from thinking it is a substitute for doing what else will really be needed for it to end up making any difference.
How many orders of magnitude do you expect them to need?
I wrote an article specifically on this balance of impossibility and necessity here: https://tito.co/posts/necessary---impossible.html
We are removing trees to build giant factories ?
Then hopefully, with a little wishful thinking, future generations appreciate our environment a little more.
Hopefully nobody will go to war, or starve, or go bankrupt in the process.
Why not just plant more trees?
Is it more likely that when this plant switches on, other people will just make do with that much less electricity, or that when this plant switches on, electricity production will go up?
All the way down to the minerals being extracted from the earth. Nobody thinks about this... which is why we have all these smug EV drivers everywhere thinking they are net zero emissions.
Mining is dirty. Transporting raw material, smelting, transporting, forging, transporting, forming/shaping/fabricating/transporting again, etc... finally moving the finished products to the destination for final installation.
Nothing is "carbon neutral". It's a made up term to make people feel good about themselves.
That's pretty false on it's face. Some building products, like cellulose insulation and cork are actually carbon negative.
Even among carbon positive products, some are much less CO2 intensive over their lifetimes than others. EVs have far lower lifetime emissions than ICEs even if they have slightly higher embodied CO2 of production [1], and EVs can be dispatched to only charge using renewables, thereby reducing lifetime emissions even more.
1. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...
Hint, it's not carbon neutral.
We are going to build no matter what, just like we are going to eat. It's pointless to argue that nothing is carbon neutral when some ways of living have significantly lower carbon intensity than others.
Therefore it makes sense (assuming one takes climate change seriously) to go about our lives in the least carbon intensive ways that are possible for us economically.
So for someone who it works for practically, an EV can result in much lower lifetime CO2 emissions than an ICE, and using cork or similarly low CO2 insulation can result in lower lifetime CO2 than using fiberglass.
How do you think they calculate the CO2eq's that went into producing this stuff? What did you think I was talking about? It uses heat from the earth, it'll be CO2-neutral pretty soon and after that it'll be CO2-positive!
- Food you ate to power your brain - CO2+
- Computer, Electricity, and the internet you used to research your idea further - CO2+
- Any phone calls, emails, chats with people that can help you implement your idea, fund your business, etc. - CO2+
- Opening business, paying all of the fees, opening bank accounts - CO2+
- Hiring people, renting offices, furnishing these offices with desks, computers, coffee makers, water coolers - CO2+
Now, after quite a lot of CO2+ work, you're ready to... start designing your CO2 sequestration plant.
- All CAD work, servers, electricity for light, internet, travel for you and your employees from home to work and back - all of that is still generating CO2 - CO2+
- All of the components you need to build that plant need to be first mined and shipped to your vendors - CO2+
- All of your vendors will have to build these widgets you need for your plant - CO2+
- All of that will have to be shipped to you, most likely be ship or air, and of course by cars. - C02+
- All tools like wrenches, soldering irons, and screwdrivers also need to be made and shipped to you - it all generates CO2 before your employees can start using it.
Now you're ready. You can start building your plant.
- You will need a lot of concrete - CO+
- You will need a lot of steel - CO+
-You will need a lot of copper, aluminum, and many more .. all of it is still CO+
In the meantime, your employees need to get to work every day, and they need their coffee. They need their lunches, internet, and electricity. You and your employees will travel a lot to do a lot of "businessy" things.. all of that requires energy, which generates CO2, and only a tiny fraction of it can use "clean" energy.
After a few months or most likely years, you have your CO2 removal plant ready. Yay... In that time, your idea generated tons and tons of CO2 and paper, organic(food, coffee, etc.), and electronic waste.
Now you have a grand opening, the plant begins operations, and you can start removing all of that CO2, your "simple and eco-friendly idea," from the atmosphere. Is it all good, right? You will remove all of that CO2 in no time, and soon after, start removing CO2 other people generate.
But wait. You need to operate this plant.
- maintain it by ordering new parts and replacing whatever breaks - CO2+
- employ people to run the plant. They need to travel to that plant, and they need to communicate, use computers, the internet, etc. - CO2+
- They need to get paid, so you need to start making money or beg for money from nonprofits or governments. All of that begging is best-done face to face, so you will have to fly all over the world - CO2
- roads to your "not so new anymore" plant needs maintaining - CO2+
- these computers your employees use get old, and your employees demand better company phones and new espresso machines. - CO+
- that free, safe, and CO2-negative geothermal energy your plant uses also needs to be maintained, and since your plant uses a lot of that energy, part of that CO2 this maintenance requires is added to your balance.
So that was my original question - when you consider all of the CO2 that these CO2 removal plants generate before they are even operational and all of the CO2 they generate during operation, how long before they are CO2 negative? My guess is never. All these "environmental" projects do is transfer billions of dollars from taxpayers to business owners. That's not how you fix the environment. That's how you destroy it.
I'm really worried we have no idea what we're doing, and will find out down the road things like this only made things worse, or caused other unforeseen problems.
I do not subscribe to the philosophy that "doing something is better than nothing", particularly when we likely don't fully understand what it is we're doing or actually trying to achieve. Doing the wrong thing can be, and often is, worse than doing nothing.
> Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, that’s equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars).
That's some hand-wavy numbers there. 790 of what type of car? 1970 muscle car without a catalytic converter and modern fuel injection system? Or a 2022 Prius? One outputs a huge amount of CO2 and other gases, and the other hardly any at all.
Car emissions are really good on average. As technology progresses, it might be fathomable that 7,900 cars, or eventually 79,000 cars produce the same amount of emissions as today. This "metric" sounds impressive, but it's useless.
> DAC’s energy usage, particularly when it’s considered in conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 it’s capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from renewable sources helps, but it’s still not unlimited nor free.
So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering this thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes?
> Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year. 36,000 tons (the quantity of CO2 that will be captured by the Mammoth facility) is a negligible fraction of that total. Is it even worth the energy usage, construction and maintenance costs, and frankly, the effort? Or would the geothermally-generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars?
Ah, they even mention this in the article. Of course the CEO hand waves this away...
I'm not convinced this is the future - seems more like a get rich quick scheme if anything. Sort of like those companies you can pay to "offload" your emission burden and supposedly they plant trees or something and you get to claim your carbon neutral. Scams... all of them.
Thankfully that's why the article first gave the metric in tons of carbon, which has no such ambiguity.
> So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering this thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes?
My understanding is that there is generally an over supply of renewable energy in Iceland. Historically it attracted location agnostic consumers like aluminum smelting and bitcoin mining as consumers of this energy, because there wasn't any other demand for the renewable energy in Iceland.
Not so quick. Does a layman have any reference point to what is considered "a lot" of carbon? Is there a way to readily measure my vehicle and see what it produces? No... and the article even attempts to provide some sort of "scale" metric, and only succeeds in making this DAC seem underwhelmingly useless, less than a drop in the bucket.
> My understanding is that there is generally an over supply of renewable energy in Iceland.
That may be so, but this still doesn't make this a good use of that surplus.
I don't think a comparison to another producer of carbon would actually help a layman. Whether that is a lot or not would depend on the cost and energy used by the plant itself, which isn't really given in this article.
> That may be so, but this still doesn't make this a good use of that surplus.
Why? Suppose there is no other demand for that energy. What is actually wasted in that case? How do you measure what is "good"?
Or work on ways to "package" the produced energy and export it to other nations efficiently.
Regardless, this DAC is consuming lots of energy and producing very little (if any, likely no) benefit at all, and in the process of merely being brought into existence releases a lot of emissions. It would quite literally be better to not even build it in the first place it seems... given the lofty-but-insignificant numbers the article provides.
You have to quantify these things in some way, otherwise you are making purely subjective claims. I don't think this project does a good job of using data to quantify that it is useful, but it is even less legitimate to dismiss it in the same way. How do you measure that a Data Center would be a better use of this power? How would a prototype of a project that "packages" energy for transport also not just be perceived as a total waste of effort?
Because the technology there doesn't rely on literally sucking all of the atmosphere through a machine to achieve some sort of positive effect.
We can do napkin math and conclude already this machine achieves nearly no results - and worse, it took over a decade to achieve nearly no results - and even worse, to scale this thing to a level where it does actually register some sort of impact is unachievable.
Again... doing the wrong thing is often worse than doing nothing at all. This machine, and all DAC's like it are a complete waste of time and resources.
The only atmosphere being cleaned is that which passes through the machine. It's like a hepa filter for your house. Place the filter in a clean room, and it'll still work, but it'll take an exceedingly long period of time to circulate all the air in your home. The real-world atmosphere isn't stagnant like that in your home either... with currents and what-not, meaning this machine needs to be all over the globe to make meaningful impact.
> I challenge you to actually do the napkin math here, rather than continue to state your claim that it achieves "nearly no results" without anything quantifying what that means.
Others in this thread have already done so. But here it goes again:
Total estimated global CO2 emissions (according to the article) are 36,000,000,000 tons per year. This machine is advertised to extract 36,000 tons per year (which likely means less since this is clearly a puff piece, but we'll use this number anyway).
This is 1/1,000,000th of global CO2 emissions - meaning we'd need 1,000,000 more identical machines to achieve CO2 neutrality - which assumes zero net increase in emissions over whatever period of time it takes to manufacture and install all of these machines (which isn't reality).
We don't know the emission cost of producing these machines - but it certainly isn't zero. We also don't know the emission cost of the energy being produced to power these things (which even with geo-thermal, is not zero either).
We also don't know how large the footprint of these machines are - but given the rendering they do look to be huge.
Lastly, we still don't know if it's a good idea to just deposit possibly billions of tons of carbon into the earth every year anyway, making this contraption more of a fantasy than something productive.
This is like saying that the only gasoline that is consumed is that which is burned up in a car. 1) A car can still be useful without consuming all gasoline in the world. This machine could be economically viable given carbon credit structures as well, it doesn't have to scale to solve the problem on its own, it just has to be efficient enough to be worth building (I'm not claiming that it meets this criteria). 2) Clearly we could actually use up the majority of gasoline on earth, there is no reason why scaling something that much is impossible.
> with currents and what-not, meaning this machine needs to be all over the globe to make meaningful impact.
Are you really saying this is an obstacle-- that if we wanted to make 1 million of these machines we would be unable to distribute them, and that furthermore we would completely clean the co2 from the atmosphere over a single country before the currents and what-not would bring in more co2 for the machines to consume? If this is true, then why do we care about co2 emissions in other countries currently?
> We don't know the emission cost of producing these machines - but it certainly isn't zero. We also don't know the emission cost of the energy being produced to power these things (which even with geo-thermal, is not zero either).
I agree that we need to know this and the other factors and that they are larger than zero, but it is critically important to know the actual values, or at least a rough estimate. How are you so confident whether it would work or not without knowing them, or even giving an estimate and doing the napkin math?
Cars burning gasoline is a side effect. This machine cleaning the atmosphere is its entire purpose.
What we have here is a "Carbon Rush" and everyone who gets in early will get rich but likely end up accomplishing nothing (or make things worse in unforeseeable ways).
Sorry to be so blunt, but the numbers and schemes that come out of these things are woefully unrealistic.
In addition, none of these schemes make any difference so long as developing nations (and some developed nations) continue to produce emissions at staggering rates. All the efforts here are wasted if, say China, builds even one new coal plant.
So, a best guess at a solution is to stop wasting time trying to extract and hide emissions, and instead work to further pursue technology that produces less emissions from the start. Manufacturing would be a great place to start, because even this DAC machine is going to produce a massive amount of emissions during production... all the way down to the trucks mining the raw materials for the forge.
But those are hard, difficult problems to solve... and aren't "sexy", which denies quick VC money and grants.
These solutions require deep industry knowledge and buy-in, deep understanding of the problem space, and deep pockets to front unproven technology that nobody will adopt until it solves their problems better than the current solutions.
ie. you are not going to revolutionize mining just because you want it to be more green. It doesn't matter how much money have, and how many domain-novices you employ. The mining/farming/manufacturing/whatever industry will not even entertain your product unless it's objectively better.
No industry actually cares about being more environmentally friendly at the trade off of reduced production and efficiency, or increased costs - all things that come along with unproven technology developed by people that had little-to-zero understanding of that industry's problems in the first place.