Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
climeworks.com
climeworks.com
It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of #carbon #dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ #removal (CDR) like a #time #machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example:
Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million #trees take us?
A: If one mature tree takes up an average of 25 kg of CO₂ per year, then 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back 33 minutes and 6 seconds in a year. It's not a lot.
The bottom line being: 99.999% of today's efforts need to focus on cutting emissions. This is like if you want to lose weight: It won't help you if you keep eating 5k kcalories a day and work out for 2 hours a day. Cut the intake, and then do some workout for the rest.
Like top comment suggests, it doesn't make sense to just capture, you have to get off carbon positive processes entirely.
This company aims to do both, effectively.
https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-tre...
There are less densely populated places where more trees could be planted.
I hope one day industry will be required to match their carbon capture with devices like this to their carbon output.
Perhaps someone will make a solar farm in tandem with these co2 capture devices with the fans from these devices cooling the solar panels as solar panels work more efficiently at cooler times (1).
1: https://www.solar.com/learn/do-solar-panels-work-less-effici...
Think of it this way. It’s more energy intensive to capture carbon than it was to generate the electricity from that carbon. The amount of energy required to make this work requires you to generate roughly the same order of magnitude of energy as has been emitted through the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning.
I’m a big fission supporter but I doubt even fission could get to the cost scaling needed to generate all this energy effectively. Even fusion might struggle since we don’t actually yet know what the unit economics of it will be.
We might get lucky and figure out a way where recapturing carbon is net cheaper energy than it generated but I doubt it as that feels like it would be very close to a perpetual motion machine scenario.
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Net Zero is not enough. We must do Net Negative, a much bigger project than Net Zero.
The goal is CO2 350ppm, or lower.
Today is 417ppm. It will be >600ppm in 2050, our current global Net Zero deadline.
There is no either-or. We need all the solutions. To stop and then reverse emissions: solar, wind, geothermal, nukes (old and much more new), storage, transmission, carbon direct capture, solar reflection, etc, etc.
Renewables and electrification buy us a little bit of time.
Meanwhile, we need to over invest in CDR. Birth of Flight type thinking. Moonshot type efforts. Dump money onto every semi-plausible idea.
Any viable CDR solutions will take decades to scale up. So we must start today.
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PS- Ditto methane and other GHGs. Ditto fusion and solar reflection (mirrors). And maybe even, god forbid, geoengineering.
The one thing that might change that is very ambitious geo engineering. Which actually is the solution that makes most sense to me. But the very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support that.
Dr Tao's MEER project is so audacious and crazy, it just might work.
"Volts podcast: Dr. Ye Tao on a grand scheme to cool the Earth" [2022/06/08] https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand
"MEER | Mirrors For earth’s Energy Rebalancing with Dr Ye Tao at Harvard University" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZAIIe4X2MU
TLDR: We need to shade a lot of agriculture. So make those shades mirrors too. Practical and scalable with today's tech and supply chain. Adding mirror shades to 15% of arable land cools enough to stay under 1.5C warming.
> ...very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support [geoengineering].
Ya. Boomers. Whaddya gonna do? Fortunately, or hopefully, the cohort of anti-development environmentalists are finally being displaced.
Meanwhile, at least someone is finally doing the prerequisite basic science on the problem:
"How to think about solar radiation management" [2023/02/24] https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-think-about-solar-radiation
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Please share any other climate crisis mitigation ideas you may stumble upon. My inner geek appreciates these kinds of hacks.
We need to think of actual countermeasures and mitigations.
It's like if a patient has dangerously high blood pressure. It's all well and good to tell them about diet and exercise but if the situation is really bad you need to give them medicine too.
The other one that seemed quite viable is using reflective aerosols like sulfur dioxide over the Antarctic. It would circle around in the polar vortex and not have massive effects outside of the South Pole. But cooling Antarctica would add more ice, slow sea level rise, and the ice itself would reflect heat away from the planet.
Could be problematic for Argentina/Chile, but probably not so much anywhere else. The potential benefits seem huge.
Carbon sequestration is unfortunately more of a scam than a practical process. Without actual discouraging the burning of fossil fuels people aren’t going to simply stop on their own and if we can’t even get that far nobody is willing to pay for any kind of meaningful rather than token carbon sequestration.
Elites and grifters always co-opt and subvert any and all reform, revolution, rebellion. That hardly absolves us of our collective moral obligation. We must protect and provide for (present and) future humans. Despite the obstacles.
> people aren’t going to simply stop on their own
On the other hand, CDR determines the floor price of removing that pollution. Less arm-wavy than current proposals for determining carbon taxes amounts.
Anywho, I'd rather try than not try. YMMV.
Debatable: not only have human activities taken over huge swathes of land which previously sequestered carbon (aka forests), we have been releasing huge amounts of carbon which had been sequestered through processes which basically can not work anymore, at least not naturally.
There is no millions of years of trees being buried wholesale because fungi haven’t evolved peroxisade yet, because they did, a while ago, and so dead trees rot and release their carbon.
The misconception around the lack of fungi resulting in massive sequestration is that carbon would have been sequestered either way. It was similarly limited by the amount of carbon available per year from volcanic activity, what changed was the location of carbon storage not the net rate it was stored.
Volcanic activity releases nearly 2 orders of magnitude less carbon than humanity does. That’s a much easier amount to cycle.
> The misconception around the lack of fungi resulting in massive sequestration is that carbon would have been sequestered either way.
By the process of magic? Because if that’s your hypothesis you need to explain why that magic was overwhelmingly more active during the Carboniferous than at any other epoch.
No, by other carbon sinks like dead ocean algae.
> Volcanic activity releases nearly 2 orders of magnitude less carbon than humanity does
But they have been around far more than just 2 orders of magnitude as long.
Between the great oxygen event and the emergence of woody plants volcanic processes releasing ~100,000x as much all of humanity across all of human history yet levels didn’t hit 90% CO2. Further woody plants didn’t increase the rate of carbon release by volcanoes so across such long timescales they had zero net effect on total carbon sequestration.
So, across long timescales it was on average 100% of all new carbon before they showed up and it remained 100% of all new carbon afterwards. What changed was where the carbon ended up, the ocean floor sees subduction into the mantle, woody plants stuck around on the surface.
Now, yes on human timescales these things seem slow but net zero + 1,000 years really will have a noticeable impact.
What they said is spot on: the problem would go away in short order if we ceased all emissions today.
That’s obviously not going to happen though, and the original argument is spot on too: the technology is just socialised greenwashing. It’s basically only there to postpone legislature and offload the cost to tax payers while keeping private profits high.
Not just taxpayers, every living thing has to endure the increasing effect of failed climate preservation. As we have seen there's not really enough taxpayers to make a difference, what's more effective would be voters but there's even far less of them since voting is prohibited most places and proven ineffective for this purpose almost everywhere else.
The after-effect is spread so far & wide that's one more reason why it's been so lucrative not to do the most effective emission reduction immediately, since the outset of gassifying as much carbon as industrialists could possibly do, far in excess of what the earth has been able to naturally capture for eons.
In natural science, renewable energy is still far more effectively employed for reducing the need for emissions, secondarily for near-complete source capture.
The only viable energy that can be sensibly devoted to air capture appears to be pure waste energy for the forseeable future. Most probably still better recovered and used for conservation instead.
You realistically can't fool mother nature.
Where are all the CO2-trapping chemicals going to come from without prohibitive amounts of additional emissions unless that chemical process is driven by only pure waste energy as well? Using even renewable energy for any part of direct air capture simply reduces the benefit of that valuable low-cost energy to that of pure waste energy instead.
Thermodynamics is supposed to be top-of-mind here, not mumbo-jumbo. When you read the article one of the first things you see is:
>1. Air is drawn in through a fan located inside the collector. Once sucked in, it passes through a filter located inside the collector which traps the carbon dioxide particles.
Umm, no. Atmospheric CO2 does not exist in particle form at temperatures much above minus 78 degrees C. Who writes this stuff?
>2. When the filter is completely full of CO₂, the collector closes, and the temperature rises to about 100°C — about the same temperature it takes to boil water for a cup of tea!
That's supposed to be exciting? One can safely assume the temperature of significant sized filters will not rise all by itself, boiling water for a cup of tea that big may very likely take enough energy to more than offset what could be accomplished if the energy could be diverted to conservation or emission reduction instead. Not exactly my cup of tea as a chemist experienced with material balance on a large scale.
>3. This causes the filter to release the CO₂ so we can finally collect it.
Now once the "captured" CO2 is released (re-gassified) again in more concentrated form like this, you can expect an additional collection/capture mechanism to be orders of magnitude more physically effective. All signs point to increased effectiveness of capture in proportion to the ppm content of the CO2 present. More or less the same technology needed for direct source capture, so why not just capture at the source instead? Duh.
In the research lab you can purchase trapping chemicals easily within the reach of most budgets whether grants or "investments", and as you scale up you will definitely reach more attractive but false economies of scale until eventually the diminishing returns fall far short of what is needed to make a significant difference to the planet as a whole.
Who's willing to settle for putting research dollars, or worse large amounts of renewable energy into not making much of a difference anyway?
Ha, I think I've found it. That was easy.
Elsewhere on the website, preceded by their partnership with JPMorgan announced a week ago:
>Climeworks published a statement calling for a clear distinction between emissions reductions and carbon dioxide removal
>Reductions and removals have different roles to play
Correct, one conserves resources and the other wastes resources better put to use in further conservation until after massive conservation efforts have fully halted rising atmospheric concentrations.
>1. Limiting the moral hazard It presents a simple way to mitigate the moral hazard coming with carbon dioxide removals, as it makes for greater clarity over the role, foreseen share, and timing of removals alongside accelerated emissions reduction.
Obviously the most pressing hazard they will be addressing together is the moral threat to JPMorgan more so than the climate threat to the rest of the planet. They might not have even invested enough for that limited an approach yet. Looks like there's more to come, maybe whatever it takes, this could be a bigger threat than people realize and might need to be overcome at all costs.
>2. Adding integrity to carbon markets It adds further integrity to carbon markets and climate policy, as it allows for clarity and aligns with best practice concerning "net-zero", where carbon removal credits need to be singled out to counterbalance residual emissions.
The highest integrity will not be achieved as long as there remains a market for carbon in excess of that which can be captured naturally and through waste energy combined. This means reduction in market size for high-energy carbon forms much more so than CO2 whose energy has been fully depleted.
As long as JPMorgan continues to earn more from fossil fuels than they invest in reduction or capture, they can afford for the capture investment to be largely ineffective, maybe even some financial writeoffs could be possible allowing for indefinite maintenance of status-quo. $200 Million sounds like a lot of money because it is, lots of people will prosper financially as the funds are dispersed, but the continued CO2 dispersal will always be much wider than having the same money focused on conservation instead. Also to some large firms, especially in aggregate, $200 Million is just a drop in the bucket.
>3. Responsible deployment It provides a framework wherein carbon removals can be deployed in a responsible and just manner, in addition and complementary to vast and rapid emission reductions and avoidances.
How much have they put into the these rapid emission reductions and avoidances that are the only thing within anyone's reach to make much of a difference in the short term?
>4. A question of scale CDR urgently needs a dedicated framework with opportunities to scale the entire sector, as well as guardrails against a deployment that is incompatible with global sustainability objectives. A dedicated CDR framework allows to tackle these aspects in the most effective way.
Effective for who, the climate itself needs much more scale on emission reduction before capture makes sense.
>In summary, it presents a scientifically sound framework to deliver on the temperature targets set within the Paris Climate Accord.
Not as scientifically sound as it could be.
Just because you can actually capture kilos of CO2 doesn't mean that is the best use of your time, resources, and energy when it comes to climate action overall.
Regulatory capture just may not be enough, how about hedging your bets with a bit of scientist capture too? Who's any good at large-scale hedging around here anyway?
I disagree with none of your points. The only reason I can imagine for your comment is that you've misunderstood there term green washing perhaps? This is it's official definition:
> Greenwashing, also called "green sheen", is a form of advertising or marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly.
The socialized cost I was speaking about wasn't the resulting environmental degradation but the literal cost of both researching the technology and building sites which do it. That's why carbon capture is so beloved by the industry: they can offload the literal costs to society while virtue signaling by giving token support for this pointless effort.
To add another point to the carbon capture fiasco: the energy spent capturing the CO2 is quite significant, so it's not even certain that their CO2 contribution is subtractive at the end.
I see the $200 Million as token support for a misguided effort that is being given a spin as something more effective than it really is.
The climate cost to society has always been offloaded primarily because it was not accounted for financially.
What better PR than to put (a little bit of) their money where their mouth is by supporting Climeworks, no deceptive advertising campaign necessary, just that level of spin at this point.
Climeworks seems to be saying foremost exactly what JPMorgan wants them to say, more convincingly than JPMorgan could say for itself.
>the energy spent capturing the CO2 is quite significant, so it's not even certain that their CO2 contribution is subtractive at the end.
You seemed to have grasped this more so than others.
> "Given current rates of warming, an estimated 130-160 billion tons of permafrost carbon, could be released in the form of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide but with an important warming contribution from methane—during this century. Thus, emissions from thawing permafrost, in total equivalent to 61-75 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide, could be similar to other Jluxes from other environmental changes, such as deforestation, but far less than fossil fuel emissions. New plant growth is expected to offset only ~20% of this carbon release, but this offset could help to delay impacts on climate."
- "Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback", Schur et al. (2015) Nature
Humans will have to adapt to a new climate regime, by necessity. It's not going to be very pretty.
Somehow, I get a sense that the governing bodies are going to cause far more harm to people than the climate change. Similar to how Mao ordered the mass killing of Sparrows in a misguided belief that since sparrows eat crops, killing sparrows will increase yields. Unfortunately, killing the sparrows meant a predator of bugs (which eat crops in a more destructive manner) was drastically reduced. The crop yields plummeted largely from the policy to kill sparrows, resulting in millions people dying of starvation.
Human institutions with their "brilliant" ideas of intervening with nature often make matters worse, especially when chasing a single metric & ignoring other aspects of a system.
That sense is called "your priors." This is a very simple, mostly linear switch on top of very very very complex systems, ie CO2 concentration. Your argument is basically "we broke it, but if we fix it it will be more broken" and there's just no evidence for that, just speculation.
As long as other bad policy decisions aren't made because of the existence of CO2 sequestration there is absolutely no reason not to use it, but it's one out of perhaps 100 major initiatives that will be required to get us back to a good level.
And by the way, if you're living in a man-made climate crisis and governments start doing bad shit (like Syria?) it's still the fault of the man-made climate crisis, at least in part.
I have my priors & you have yours. "Your priors" seems to be that funneling money to large institutions fixes our problems. My prior is that funneling money to large institutions creates corruption & misaligned incentives. History has shown that large institutions which have utopian ideals make dreadful mistakes often based on a silver bullet mentality. If only we kill all of the sparrows there will be more food. If only we remove CO2 from the air, we will achieve some sort of balance...which has yet to be defined.
> This is a very simple, mostly linear switch on top of very very very complex systems, ie CO2 concentration.
Given how little we know about the Sun's cyclic behavior & the inaccuracies the climate models have been in their predictions...I am skeptical of your "silver bullet" assertion.
> Your argument is basically "we broke it, but if we fix it it will be more broken" and there's just no evidence for that, just speculation.
Actually, my argument is that the climate always changes throughout Earth's history. We broke nothing except polluting local areas, which btw is not measured with CO2. In Earth's geological history, there's more evidence that CO2 lags increases in temperature...indicating that CO2 is a side effect of increased temperature. The anthropocene is different as there are emissions from humans, yet there have been periods of mass burning from cosmic sources, volcanic activity, etc. During these times the "runaway greenhouse effect" failed to materialize.
The temperature records have shown an increase after we left an ice age a little more than 200 years ago. I'm not surprised that temperatures increase at the end of an ice age.
> As long as other bad policy decisions aren't made because of the existence of CO2 sequestration there is absolutely no reason not to use it, but it's one out of perhaps 100 major initiatives that will be required to get us back to a good level.
Mao & his scientists also had "absolutely no reason" not to kill all of the Sparrows. Within their contextual worldview, it was logical...yet in reality it was dreadfully wrong. Bad things happen when people & institutions become arrogant in their assertions & approach broader systems with dogma instead of curiosity.
The Earth has gone through periods of significantly higher CO2 & yet life flourished. Plant growth benefits from CO2.
> get us back to a good level
What indicates what a good level is? CO2 on Earth has gone through large fluctuations.
> you're living in a man-made climate crisis
Earth has gone through some far greater climatic variability than we are seeing today. The climate models models are speculative & horrible at predicting what will occur within a few years span, let alone decades. If we are so concerned about man-made impacts on the environment, why not concentrate on pollution that damages ecosystems & people instead? If we are concerned about climate change which has always occurred in Earth's history & will continue to occur, why not focus on helping people adjust to the impacts. Spending vast amounts of money based on speculative & inaccurate models is a terrible idea & will probably have "unforseen impacts".
Luckily this is probably dead on arrival. People are more interested in their own well being than appeasing some sort of doomsday scenario based on models that have so far been useless in their predictive abilities.
Energy released by burning one barrel of oil: ~6 GJ. Total number of barrels consumed per year: ~100M
Total energy per year: 6 * 10^17 J
Solar flux on 10^17 J/s or 3 * 10^24
if we had a machine that could convert CO2 -> Carbon in some stable form, we would need to use 10^-7 of the earth's solar flux.
At a very high level such a machine would have two principle "knobs" (1) the efficiency and (2) percent of earth that would need to be covered. The product of the 2 must equal (or be less than) 10^7.
Some example parameters:
Efficiency : 10^-2 Area: 10^-5
This seems wildly plausible for some microbe that we design in the near future that lives in the ocean. This efficiency parameter is lower than current plants.
For those wild eyed technologists that think we can beat nature by a good amount:
Efficiency : 10^-1 Area: 10^-6
That's a couple of hundred square miles. That seems paltry for an "existential threat". Even a couple of orders of magnitude more area seem like they would be fine to sequester for this purpose.
This type of technology seems well within our grasp (or within the next 20 years). I never understand the hysteria over this topic.
It seems to be a gross mix of a few things:
-Most people are simply incapable of doing this type of analysis. They hear that "the sky is falling, and the only way out is to perpetually give up our comforts and live shittier lives", and they believe it.
-People get really hung up on forcing their personal "correct" way of doing things on everyone else. Whatever their personally acceptable use of energy miraculously happens to be "acceptable", and anyone else who uses more is a "bad selfish person".
-A lot of people seem to just enjoy the "us-vs-them" mentality, and shitting on others for their differing energy use seems to be a way to scratch that itch.
Our entire civilization is fundamentally based on energy use, and we have so much energy available to us in the form of sunlight. We can unwind all our carbon issues, and enable everyone to consume as much energy as a typical American, and more. But people seem to be more interested in shaming and shrieking at each other over bullshit.
There are correct ways that are correct because they're effective and incorrect ways that aren't. Those ways should be imposed on people in tragedy of the commons type market failures. It follows from the social contract.
We're talking about converting hydrocarbons -> CO2 + water (or whatever if you care) and reversing that reaction (or similar, since we may want something more stable than hydrocarbons).
There are already machines which do this (anything that does photosynthesis). We're just going to play around the edges of making the reaction more efficient and/or the results more stable.
If it were so simple, we’d be doing it. Over here in reality, carbon capture remains a difficult and unsolved problem in practice, requiring enormous amounts of energy that is—at present—generally far better put to use replacing carbon-based forms of energy than trying to put the carbon genie back into the oil barrel.
You started with a complex macro object and said it's difficult to reassemble. I noted that the reaction is actually simple, this isn't an information problem.
This is a technology problem, and one we are actively working on. And with the correct technology it is a not a large problem.
Trivial, really.
I believe their reasoning is that for the amount of money invested, it remains one of the most efficient investment to decarbonize.
I don't know what to do with that information.
Which is why world leaders flying jets to Climate Change Conferences makes no sense!
How much land, in solar panels for example, is required to power this?
Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it?
I've wondered the same about these carbon capture plants. Is this literally just elemental carbon in some kind of dust/sand at the end of the day? Could this be a raw material input for carbon fiber production?
Nah, separating carbon from oxygen in CO2 and CO is too expensive and energetically demanding.
To simplify things a little bit, what they do here is inject CO2 into water at high pressure, which results in highly acidic H2CO3. They then pump H2CO3 into basalt rock, which chemically reacts with the acid -- in fact, it is partially dissolved. Then there's a second stage reaction between the partially-dissolved basalt and the remnant HCO3-, and it recrystallizes as carbonate minerals, e.g. FeCO3 or CaCO3.
So they're turning CO2 into a liquid acid, and then injecting it into rock where it reacts with basalt and crystallizes as carbonates.
It says "The CO₂ can then be safely and permanently stored underground by our storage partners — Carbfix in Iceland."
So my assumption was that the collectors are located there as well and using Iceland's abundant geothermal electricity.
So, yes, it would make sense to use local geothermal electricity or even to produce it at the same time as the CO2 injection process if that's possible.
Having a business saying their product is carbon negative when the actual end to end process isn't seems par for the course, especially one with VC backing...
It’s about 850 US tons per full leg * 4 legs to make up the two round trips
(388 pax in a -300ER)
Combustion of dodecane (a C12 straight-chain alkane) makes 12 CO2 molecules. A 747 jet consumes about 4 L of jet fuel per second when in flight. Based on the density and molecular weight of dodecane and the stoichiometry of its combustion reaction, you'd arrive at something like 0.01 ton of CO2 emitted per second of flight time.
4000 tons is a good estimate.
Back of the envelope...
Is that right?
Firstly, based off two full fuel tanks for a 777. Apparently a 777-200 has a 117350 L fuel tank, and the density of jet fuel is approximately 800 g / L.
The emitted carbon dioxide combines oxygen from the air with carbon from the jet fuel. Apparently the average chain length is 12, so it would be C_12H_10 for a straight hydrocarbon.
Factoring in the molecular masses, the amount of CO2 from two full tanks would be: (12 * 12.011 + 212.01115.999) / (1.0080 * 10 + 12 * 12.011) * 117350 * 800 * 2/ 1E6 = 643 tonnes.
Now, they might not use the full tank. Another estimate is that long haul flights use about 0.1 g / passenger / km. Apparently it is 4308 km in a straight line from SF to London, and a 777 seats about 350 people depending on the configuration, so multiplying by 2 for a return trip comes out at 302 tonnes of CO2 (that's probably an underestimate since it is a straight line).
So I think 4000 tonnes is an overestimate (and they said tons, which is even more than a metric tonne, at 4480), but the emissions of such a flight is still significant (and the global warming impact is higher because combustion also disperses water, which also has a warming effect at that altitude).
They make it impossible to do the math. Energy consumption, lifetime capital cost per ton, are what make or break this scheme.
Anyway, apparently 3 MWh/tonne is a not-unrealistic claim, so they're only demanding 1.5 MW (on average, though if solar-powered it would make sense to oversize) and a km2 of solar panels could reasonably generate 50-100 MW on average (this is conservative for most places, though not for Iceland). A km2 of tress, by their calculations, gets 1,000 tonnes, so DAC comes out ahead, although you're right to observe that trees do have a synergistic use for the carbon they capture.
Heck, those money people don't even care about money questions.
Examples of non-existing due dilligence include: WeWork, Theranos, Nikola, FTX. Just from top of my head.
166 kW/ton in a sunny place:
1000 square meters/ton in a sunny place:
4 million square meters = ~1000 acres of PV to power. One unit.
Yeah, that’s going to happen. /s “We’re too ashamed of our energy requirements to post them on our page and are well aware they’re dooming this technology until cold fusion comes out” is what I read between the lines on their fluff page.
EDIT: Apparently, one ton of CO2 is released by 1000 kWh of electricity:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
So you have a coal plant generating energy and emitting CO2 just for this factory next to it to capture all that CO2 again. Seems more efficient to just not run the coal factory.
It seems like this idea will be worthwhile when the last coal factory closes.
Imagine you have a teaspoon of salt and a cup of water.
Adding salt into the water is dead simple and requires little energy. Now how hard is it to remove that teaspoon of salt?
That's effectively what's happening with the atmosphere.
Secondly, the solar panels are a bit more liquid than a comparable area of trees, when industrial demand is high, you can route it there, when it's low, it can be working on sequestration. There are some advantages there. Especially considering the atmosphere is fairly homogeneous, but soil in proper condition for forests is less so.
They claim 4000 tons per year, I did the math on 4000 tons per day. So ~3-4 acres of PV to power, not 1000 acres.
To completely counteract the 37 billion tons per year produced worldwide, and do it with PV only, assuming desert southwest conditions, would require ~30 million acres of PV. That sounds impossibly high, but is only about the size of the US state of Mississippi. 20% of the land area of Texas, on the El Paso side, would be sufficient to keep pace with the entire world's carbon dioxide emissions.
I remain skeptical that this is the most cost-effective approach, as well as skeptical of its ability to scale, but I apologize for crapping on it at first gloss.
But than I became so jaded regarding start-ups, especially "ddep" tech ones, lately that I tend to see even more negatively than I already do in general.
Sanity check anyone?
1. Pipes and bearings clog up or corrode.
2. Trace contaminants irreversibly react with the sorbent material.
3. Stuff in the beds shifts around in unexpected ways, aided by the heat cycling.
4. The problem gets harder the more dilute the gas is. The older zeolite beds on ISS struggle to keep CO2 levels below 5000 ppm, vs. 400 ppm ambient on Earth. Submarines (which use amine sorbents) have the same problem getting below 5000 ppm.
I have no idea how Climeworks addresses these challenges, but they are kind of unavoidable when you're trying to remove a trace gas with a reversible process in thermodynamically unfavorable conditions. They will have to move vast quantities of air, and everything that is in it, through the system, and heat and cool the components thousands of times. I'm sure the problems are surmountable, but are they surmountable in a way that keeps total carbon used in the process (including manufacturing and repair) negative?
I am no expert in the field, but this is an area that at least gives me some positive outlook on the future. I could imagine, for example, that we start over provisioning electricity with renewables; and instead of scaling them down when there is no energy demand, we will redirect the superfluous energy into carbon capture.
For example. The US would consume its entirety of pumped hydro storage in a third of a day.
The only thing which matters is to use energy in the most CO2 efficient way to achieve goals overall.
CO2 fixation might also follow this curve, in fact, as a technology in isolation that's what I would bet on. Economics aside, a machine that sucks CO2 directly out of the air will remove much more CO2 than the equivalent parcel of land would if biology were used.
I don’t think horses are particularly similar, but nitrogen fixation in the fertilize vs crop rotation case gets closer.
For this application it doesn’t matter if it works or not.
This is already happening on windy days in the summer in northern Europe (Finland and northern parts of Sweden/Norway).
Or the equivalent co2 savings of building one wind turbine to replace polluting forms of energy production.
What a joke.
But you're right: first we need to prioritize reducing our carbon output.
Who decides when we should stop sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere?
For pure CO2, developed countries produce about 5t/year/person on the low end (Switzerland, Sweden, Italy) and >15 on the high end (Luxembourg, Australia).
To the surprise of no one, the US is on the high end (15.5), so are petrostates (Saudi Arabia 16, Brunei 18, UAE 23, and Qatar takes the top at 37).
https://charmindustrial.com/plans?planName=consumer&budget=6...
Charm's pricing is actually approaching reasonable to offset a single person's net CO2 emissions if you're comfortably middle class; in the low 4 digits per month. Add a tax benefit and get the costs a bit lower, and it starts to look doable.
I could spend maybe £1-2k a year, especially given the futility of this (I would be one of the 0.00...01% of people doing this, large industries will continue to increase pollution, there is no political will for meaningful measures to reduce emissions). There really isn't a lot of value in this. I'd rather invest in a green energy company, or even just pay the bills of a large energy producer decarbonising (replacing a pollution-heavy power plant with something near carbon zero).
Can some company do this carbon filtering at the source more cost-effectively (potentially at no cost to the source/industry/plant producing CO2 now)? I'd rather buy carbon offset from them and pay for that operation. I think they could sequester 10T a year for far below £10k.
If you have some centralized source like that, you should invest on replacing it with something that doesn't emit CO2. It's always a better deal.
Carbon capture is for sources where you just can't plug something like this.
But I agree with the sentiment. I think CO2 offsets could be more effective if done through a fund that funds specific de-carbonisation projects for our industries. For example, they could fund a transition from coal power plants to renewable power plants for power companies, so long as the power companies agree to not increase their carbon emissions and decommission their coal power plants in the process.
Or even a fund that simply subsidizes carbon filters for sources of pollution. Or a lobbying fund that's actually for the good of humanity, not for greed.
There are many creative solutions that could offset a ton of CO2 emissions cheaper. But not the carbon-offset grift we have now. Instead, actual programs with actual reports, auditing, and accountability. If such a fund claims they've recaptured one tonne of CO2, I would expect that there is at least 273kg-heavy pile of carbon or, more realistically, some kilograms of some carbonated substance somewhere.
The only issue is that, ironically, source capture is a limited resource. Once that 60kg/s worth of cheap carbon offsets are bought up, the next person has to buy offsets from a slightly more expensive source capture setup. Eventually all the output of all the power plants will be captured in this way and you have to start capturing from smaller sources like vehicles. I don’t know the state of the art in automobile exhaust capture but I do recall the math on a basic temperature swing adsorption system for diesel trucks that relies on waste engine heat to avoid performance penalties and could capture 90% of CO2 emissions. A full tank of diesel emissions is roughly one ton of CO2 and you needed something ridiculous like ten tons of adsorbent to capture that. (I am sure it is possible to do much better.)
It probably makes sense for ships, maybe for trucks, probably not for cars, and I can’t see it ever being sensible for aircraft.
The nice thing about direct air capture is that it provides a simple economic limit. You don’t need to figure out how to do carbon capture on a plane, you just capture it from the air after the fact.
It's great if this technology works, but side effects have to be studied as well before they are put in use at scale.
Capturing CO2 in ppm quantities out of air is ridiculously difficult. Capturing at point of emission is easier/better. But it’s even better if you don’t produce it in the first place.
See: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/12/chevrons-fig-leaf-part-...
[1]: https://www.stockholmexergi.se/en/environment-and-sustainabi...
Disclosure: I used to work with them, though not on that project, and my current employer still works with them
And after you do that, you will still need capture from air.
But on the company's side, it's probably because the companies that own large static exhaust pipes aren't interested on helping cleaning anything up.
The company may not be interested until ordered by judge. Or resented an air cleaning bill. Or having loss of market when customers require ecology-aware approach. Sometimes companies aren't interested even then. Our job is to change this.
Separating out the CO₂ would make it possible to either use it in some form where it replaces CO₂ otherwise produced by other means - e.g. for welding, cooling, carbonation of liquids etc. - or to sequester it in some way.
Of course we need to address the public health issues related to burning fossil fuel. But in addition to that we should also clean up what we already polluted - even if that seems like an invitation to pollute more, it's not.
Why is this better than just growing trees and then cutting them down and burying them so the co2 never gets back into the atmosphere?
You cant get VC funding without risk.
In sum, it’s not better.
Like top comment suggests, it doesn't make sense to just capture, you have to get off carbon positive processes entirely.
This company aims to do both, effectively.
In other words, it’s the carbon content that’s more endangered over the next billion years than the oxygen.
The problem with this technology isn’t side effects like this, it’s prohibitive power requirements.