US takes $1.2B gamble on carbon-sucking vacuums
dw.com
dw.com
Climate models say we need to be removing about 10 billion tons per year of carbon dioxide from the air by 2050, in addition to massive decarbonization.
So we need trees, this stuff, and a lot more. A new $1T industry in the next 27 years.
The advantage is that it uses technology we already have. It can also be scaled easily. And can run off cheap electricity when needed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65648361
I wonder about energy used in the weathering capture process. Obviously it's all fossil fuel powered at this point.
- How afforestation efforts are done and what the cultural and labor dynamics are. There's plenty of stories of doing things wrong in the course of carbon afforestation per earlier REDD standards ( see 'REDD alert' - https://youtu.be/FPFPUhsWMaQ )
- What kinds of risks there are in sustaining a nature-based effort, from labor to simply whether an event wipes out the forest and expected carbon storage.
- Realizing afforestation depends a lot on the biome and such and in some cases can make the climate worse - there's a lot of debate about this but this thread from Forrest Fleischman comes to mind ( https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/13062214748025323... )
- How there's systems-theory perspectives (while possibly a bit reductionistic) arguing afforestation won't be enough to deal with carbon sequestration & storage. See https://archive.is/rNJTE which references John Sterman and En-Roads.
Theres a bigger debate around forms of conservation (e.g. 'preserving' or 'rewilding' forests a la John Muir conservation vs. a more participation with nature framework of biocultural restoration as well)
A tree captures about 20 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
So this is the equivalent to 1.5 million trees.
Trees grow at about 800 trees per acre.
This effectively matches the space of 1,875 acres, around 3 square miles.
So in a way one could think of this as opening up more land for other things.
Which means my estimate is 1000 times small. 1 million sq mi is Argentina. Which means we can absorb some CO2 with trees but there isn't enough land for what is needed.
I think you're right. Oof, that's a lot of trees. Still worth doing IMO.
Keep in mind we can divide by 10 since each tree would absorb approximately 250 kg of CO2 over that period of time. That brings us to about 78,000 square miles or 20M hectares, which seems a lot more feasible.
In a year, 1 tree removes the equivalent emissions of 2 gallons of gasoline.
So we need trees, this stuff, and a lot more. A new $1T industry in the next 27 years.
Put in that light, spending $1T on some sort of magic engineered CO2 vacuum gizmo that has yet to be fully baked, will probably break down from time to time, and won't scale particularly well seems like a bad investment. No disrespect intended, just doing the math.
There's that much excess carbon dioxide in the air.
The scale that's needed is far beyond what trees can do.
And trees have their own complications - carbon release (fires, virus, death), measurement, and attractiveness to chop down and use for other stuff. Trees haven't (yet) been optimized as carbon removal and storage devices. They just happen to be somewhat decent at it, but with some shortcomings.
I wrote more about carbon removal in my weekly newsletter here: https://tito.co/posts/do-you-think-we-need-carbon-removal-fo...
Also, 3 square miles is not that much at all. The USA is almost 4 million square miles in area.
This system proposes removing 30 millions tons per year.
A tree captures about 0.02 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
So this is the equivalent to 1.5 billion trees.
Trees grow at about 800 trees per acre.
This effectively matches the space of 1.875 million acres, around 2,929 square miles.
So in a way one could think of this as opening up more land for other things.
This "throw money at whatever companies ask us to" phase of climate change mitigation is pretty wasteful but hopefully we will learn some hard lessons at least.
And you know how employees hate to be fired... And they will vote for anyone willing to protect their industry...
I smell a profit coming.
It’s good to see real action, but it’s only scratching the surface. And even more problematic is the industry response that this tech gives them “license to keep operating”.
https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_what_the_fossil_fuel_indus...
Isn't it so small scale comparing to this particular world problem as to be almost irrelevant?
Therefore, it's not an "if" but a "how". We must scale our ability to remove carbon from the air.
The largest currently operating one is Orca in Iceland and it can only do 4k tonnes.
And if anybody else was wondering:
“In 2021, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled 6,340.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, or 5,586.0 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents after accounting for sequestration from the land sector.”
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas....
The goal of these removal systems is to clean up the last bit. That's because removing carbon from the air is very expensive. It's more efficient not to emit it in the first place.
At least 20,000 or more, plus whatever emissions it takes to construct, transport and operate the plants.
Better to say "The goal of these systems isn't to neutralize the planet's emissions all by themselves"
Another way to put it is, if we could instantly build 10,000 of these facilities today (which don't exist and are supposed to capture orders of magnitude more CO2 than any existing plant) and ignoring the cost/emissions from the construction and operation, and they instantly stored their ~1million tonnes of emissions, this would almost be enough to sequester ~1/3rd of last years emissions.
Global emissions of around 36+ Billion Tonnes/yr, so 10k facilities * 1Mtonnes_removed/year/facility = 10 Billion Tonnes removed /year. = < 1/3rd global emissions.
not included:
+ all the wildfire emissions
+ whatever emissions it takes to actually create 10k+ DAC facilities, and operate them forever,
And, climate models say we need to remove 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year in 2050. It's really inefficient but there's already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.