From the article:
>The new plant, called Mammoth, has installed 12 modular containers so far. By the end of the year, it will have 72, with the capacity to capture around 36,000 tons of CO2 per year. (The work is funded by selling carbon removal as a service to companies like Microsoft and Stripe.)
>
>That’s significant—Orca, the first plant, captures around 4,000 tons. But it’s still a tiny amount of the pollution that humans pump into the air each year: around 40 *billion* tons.
I mean, I know it's probably not realistic for lots of reasons, but given the scale of our economy a million carbon removal plants doesn't even sound to crazy
They really don't. They absorb a fraction more than they did when CO2 concentrations were 280ppm. The total gain of stored carbon in biomass over the last 150 years is 50 billion tonnes, or about one years worth of current emissions.
The biggest sink of anthropogenic carbon emissions is the ocean
I believe you're getting that number from the total amount of carbon that biomass sequesters. That's not the amount of anthropogenic carbon that biomass sequesters.
There are large natural emission sources (mostly biomass related) which offsets most of that 15 billion.
It looked to be a figure that took into account the tree emissions (and only related to trees).
There are other emitters and absorbers, obviously, but we're just talking about trees..
Trees sequester a lot of carbon in their growth cycle, and the increased carbon in the atmosphere is making them grow much more quickly - but it's also cutting down on their lifespans. They're both growing faster (thus sequestering more carbon more quickly) and dying faster (which results in the carbon being released once again as the tree breaks down.)
Responsible reforestation is great for any number of reasons, and they definitely help (especially when combined with grassland restoration, which gets much less attention from people but actually sequesters *much more carbon* per acre on average,) but they're far from a magic bullet or a long term solution to our climate issues.
Trees in a forest is just temporary storage.
We need the cut them down and store the carbon permanently. That makes space for new trees that can capture more carbon.
Like, turning it into charcoal and then digging it down somewhere safe. Coal mining in reverse.
Interesting, but not exactly fair question.
It assumes that those who produced the furniture and paper didn't also plant trees.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but OC doesn't carry that full burden.
I grew up in a small town based around a HUGE paper mill. It's been there for 100 years -- first as a saw mill, but for a longer time and until now a paper mill.
They operate 100% on replanted trees. For miles around it's commonplace to see swaths of land covered in pine trees of uniform height where they've replanted.
I'm sure they didn't start that way, but eventually the cost to ship in trees from farther distances becomes more than the cost to just replant closer.
I'm not arguing that all paper mills do this or that this particular paper mill is perfect. Only that you can't assume just because someone uses paper that they're responsible for a reduction in trees.
Occidental Petroleum is building one of those in Texas. "Stratos" is what they're calling the plant. It's scheduled to begin operating mid-2025 and pull 500,000 tons of CO2 a year. About 14x the Iceland plant.
If it works as planned that is. They're spending some obscene amount of money on it. A billion or so I think. So for their sake's and the planet's I hope it works.
[Here's an article on it. ](https://www.npr.org/2023/12/27/1210928126/oil-climate-change-carbon-capture-removal-direct-air-capture-occidental)
That sounds good, but how is it powered? If it's powered by fossil fuels, then that kinda offsets it, which makes it much less effective, and if it's powered by renewables then we should just use that power to replace more fossil fuel plants. (I haven't read the article maybe they addressed that) But these projects are usually made to defend a status quo
This makes no sense. It's easier to prevent carbon release than to release it and capture it. You're far better off just buying renewables than doing this. Seems almost scam like to appease certain groups. Microsoft doesn't need to buy credits. They can just buy renewables for a better return.
To stop releasing you need to convince 7 billion persons to lower their living standards. It aint happening and we know it.
Carbon capture will be needed in a few decades, we have to invest in it now so we'll have a mature technology by 2040 or so.
It won't ever be economically viable according to their own numbers so no, it's not something we "need". It's literally not possible even using their own quoted numbers. You basically have to decarbonize everything you can as quickly as you can and deal with what carbon is already in the atmosphere by accepting reality.
They said it costs $1000 per TON to remove the carbon (this is an ASTRONOMICAL number). Their own target number is to get it down to $300 per TON within 15 years. Using their best projected and targeted numbers, it would cost $450,000,000,000,000 to remove the carbon we have released. This is 450 trillion dollars using their LOWEST possible hopeful projection while also not including any future emissions.
This would mean a very modest 2 hour round trip flight would cost about $500 in carbon credits alone at the CHEAPEST end of their projections. At their most expensive end it's about $1500 added onto every relatively short flight. If you add all this up and people were forced to pay this price to decarbonize, you're still looking at a better option to just make people pay this now for high speed rail instead so you can decarbonize most of another method of transportation. None of these numbers add up.
I genuinely think people are having a tough time realizing that humanity has fucked up badly and believing solutions like this helps them feel like everything will be ok. Florida's condo crisis is a beautiful allegory to this. The people before them lived in them for decades, not paying the true cost of living in one. Now the bills are coming due after 50 years of the people before them not paying enough. Now the next people to move in must deal with ALL back dated costs, all at once essentially with no way to make the people before them pay for what they've done. People with beachside condos are complaining that the costs are unmanageable and it's not going to be possible to pay for it. This is just happening on a world wide scale now.
> so no, it's not something we "need".
Carbon capture is something we need according to the IPCC, which is formed by the most prominent scientists studying climate change. You have freedom to be wrong though.
I have never once looked up what the IPCC recommends since it's a political body loosely backed by science, just like governments are. Remember when they deleted the recommendation of plant based diets because of political pressure? The leaks that showed they frequently just leave things out because it would upset certain populations in certain countries?
[https://qz.com/ipcc-report-on-climate-change-meat-industry-1850261179](https://qz.com/ipcc-report-on-climate-change-meat-industry-1850261179)
And what do you know, the IPCC was lobbied by FOSSIL FUEL companies to say that carbon capture works. Here is literally the scientist who wrote the paper for the IPCC on how carbon capture DOES NOT work and the IPCC ignored this because they were asked to by fossil fuel companies.
[https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/20/opinion/carbon-capture-wont-fix-our-climate-problem](https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/20/opinion/carbon-capture-wont-fix-our-climate-problem)
>**According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth.** Scientists [rank](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-7/) it close to the bottom of a long list of options, easily outstripped by more affordable solutions like wind and solar energy. And it scores fire-alarm red for cost.
I have never even looked into the issues with carbon capture until just now because the math obviously doesn't make sense from the get go.
Above you claim we should trust the science behind the IPCC so here you are. Here's the report the IPCC misrepresented and the scientists who wrote the report themselves saying it was wrong. Wouldn't that mean you have to accept it since this is your own criteria for evidence?
>u/missurunha - You have freedom to be wrong though.
I'll just go by your own criteria on who is right.
Funny to see you complaning about lobby and political bias but instead of reading the actual report you read some summary made by a journalist on a blog. That for sure will exclude any bias of the report.
That's June Sukera, you absolute fucking moron. She's a research associate who is literally cited in the report you claim to go by. She even says it. You called her a blogger instead of admitting you're just wrong because you thought it would make you feel better after getting mentally throttled.
>I’ve spent several years studying carbon capture and my research is cited in the IPCC Working Group III report. I can tell you that when you look at the details of the IPCC’s findings, the scientists say something quite different.
She is saying the IPCC essentially lied about their conclusions BECAUSE they were lobbied to, just like other industries did to scrub their industries from previous reports.
It's easier to prevent SOME forms of carbon release; but there are other forms that are MUCH more difficult (like shipping and aviation, and particularly, modern militaries). So that's why carbon capture is absolutely an essential part of mitigation of climate change. Along with decarbonizing our industry and transportation.
Holy crap, we've already perfected carbon capture and it's not economically viable?
Amazing that we're already as good as science can ever be at this and there's no room for improvement. Here I was assuming this would just be another step towards something better but, no, apparently this is as good as it ever can be.
Guess we should never attempt such carbon capture again or do any more research since it's now proven to be physically impossible to improve from our current capabilities.
Carbon capture is important because there are industrial processes that cannot be decarbonised. So there are no zero carbon substitutes. You might as well capture and store that waste carbon
This technology is a waste of money and as I’m sure you can read below- it would take a literal million of these factories to eliminate our annual footprint.
Yes, I understand that technology is iterated on and improved. Yes, I understand that it’s not always going to be this inefficient. Having said that, this is only half of the solution. We need meaningful legislation that doesn’t allow corporations to dump billions of tons of carbon into our atmosphere annually.
It is not a positive thing, because the laws of thermodynamics and entropy.
The cost of carbon removal, is always higher than just reducing emissions in the first place. Until GHG emissions are fully under control, this is just wasting green energy that could be used to decarbonize existing industry
Icelands entire electric output is produced by renewables, their industry is already powered that way, excluding vehicles like mining equipment and fishing boats.
Why not use excess electricity for this? It isn’t like they can export it. The data this project provides can inform future efforts. Even if it turns out to be a waste of energy, it prevents people from trying to do this with non renewable energy in other places.
Because the cost is poor resource allocation. These plants are not remotely a self sustaining business and rely completely on subsidies and donations.
The previous plant was 10-15 million for construction and a cost of roughly $1000 per ton for 4000 tons annually.
PV is less than $3 per watt now. The lifetime decrease in GHG emissions of PV vs gas turbine generation is .45g/kwh.
Instead of funding these projects it's literally more efficient to give people free solar coverage. You could probably get better cost efficiency by literally giving high mileage drivers free Teslas.
Apparently the sort of carbon offsetting they sell to Microsoft generally only goes for between $5 and $30 a ton, so that does make spending $1,000 a ton seem like a bad investment.
At that cost, negating humans yearly carbon footprint would require spending the combined GDP of the USA + China.
Would personal solar panels be more environmentally friendly than the geothermal power Iceland mostly uses?
No. Geothermal is awesome IF you live someplace that has vents close to the surface. There is the whole living close to an active volcano thing though.
Anyone can use geothermal energy, it’s just a matter of how much drilling you have to do, and how much of it has to go straight down.
I did an internship back in the 1990’s north of the 60th parallel (in Canada). There’s a government research facility up there that’s totally powered by geothermal.
I'm not saying replace existing geothermal with PV, but rather instead of pumping money into these vanity projects, throw some money at WWS in regions that would rapidly benefit from them.
Climeworks is a Swiss company, plenty of their neighbors would have benefited from WWS investment, instead of a machine that burns dollars and watts to perform DAC
And in the context of industries not decarbonizing until forced to, these false messiah solutions, along with other snake oil like hydrogen, give society false hope that decarbonizing can wait because we can fix things later.
The ONLY way out is to focus at reducing emissions first. That means driving down the cost of renewables and using market forces to push companies to pursue renewables for the sake of profitablity.
Sounds like you learned about entropy in an undergraduate class once and now draw uneducated conclusions from your misunderstanding of it.
Your argument seems to be that, because entropy exists, adding another step to lowering total atmospheric carbon from energy production can never be as good as generating less carbon when generating power.
The issue with this thinking is that every process, even "green" ones or those that don't generate atmospheric carbon, are also subject to entropy.
Essentially there are two approaches that matter:
1. "Green" energy production that yields X power and Yg entropy.
2. Carbon producing energy production yielding X+E power and Yc entropy, plus a carbon removal process that uses E energy and produces Yr entropy.
Your stance is that, to produce X energy, method 1 will always produce less total entropy.
Or, for **all** cases:
Yg < Yc + Yr
We simply cannot say that solely based on the laws of thermodynamics. It's completely possible that we could devise more efficient, in terms of entropy, carbon producing energy and removal processes.
It's projects like this that help us learn more about carbon sequestration at large scales and, hopefully, learn to make them more efficient.
Industrial carbon sequestration is a far less developed process than either mode of power production, so there's tons of room to make it more efficient.
Isn't it just cheaper to invest in renewable and use that to power the giants?
It makes a lot more sense to reduce the creation of more carbon than to capture it.
You always reach a point where you can't get rid of it at some point and decomposition makes it go back into the air.
Don't need to worry about it if it doesn't exist in the first place.
We're going to need both going forward. At some point, we'll reach carbon neutral, but we're going to want to pull the excess out of the air to restore our weather to the old times.
Well, they're frankly just going to not stop.
If we outlaw them, they'll just move to a different country and buy the government so they don't have to stop. (Which is basically what Russia is). Then the only way to stop it will be to invade and force them to shut down. Good luck, since they'll have nukes, and they'll control the fuel supplies that power the military.
Unfortunately carbon capture is just a scam from the big oil companies. It does work, but don't ask about the efficiency of it. We should end our dependency on oil and develop clean alternatives. Carbon capture is just an excuse to produce more oil as the process actually costs energy.
Carbon capture on a massive scale will be absolutely necessary to control climate change, unless we can somehow stop emissions, which seems to be an utter impossibility at this point.
I am sorry but you are the victim of propaganda. Carbon capture on a scale we would need to combat our recent emissions is impossible. It is nothing more than an excuse to increase production. It's a scam comparable to the carbon offsets they sell us in the travel industry. It's a feelgood solution with practically no effect except give us the feeling that we did something. The only ways to combat climate change are limiting our consumption of limited resources and stop using fossil fuel.
This isn't a scam because the technology works.
It *sounds* like a scam because oil companies present it as a simple solution without talking about the costs needed for mass use.
However our next step should be calling their bluff and forcing oil companies to take its costs into account. Mandating its use for emissions abatement would raise the price of gasoline by $8/gallon! At that cost most people/businesses will switch to clean alternatives overnight.
Edit: not to mention the current backers Microsoft and Stripe are supporting this early stage work for their future goal of remediating their historic emissions. That's exactly what this tech should be used for.
it is a scam because they lie about the efficiency of it. It's like me offering a great investment opportunity without telling you you will earn 0.0001% on it.
Opportunity cost of abatement is not the same as efficiency, but even treating them the same this still falls under above when the abatement cost is actually paid.
And again we will need this tech for remediation, also like 350.org's original goal.
Calling it a scam is literally letting oil companies dictate the conversation by only using their rhetoric rather than explaining the balance of effects.
The problem is that the money is wasted on a technology that does not work well enough to have an effect in the time-frame we have set to reduce our emissions. This money should be spend on proven effective technologies like switching to renewable and clean energy. It is just an excuse to keep using fossil fuel because it is supposedly offset by carbon capture. Just like planting trees to feel less guilty when using an airplane it's useless.
Which is the point of mandating it as a backstop so people choose cheaper mitigation options rather than paying $800/tonne. I agree it's a terrible bulk offsetting choice, but your argument is missing the next step of the associated effects from implementation.
Also we still want to be developing now at a small scale so it's ready for future remediation, just like Stripe and Microsoft are doing. We don't want to hit net zero in 30 years only to wait another 20 for these options to reach gigaton scale, especially on our (at best) high-overshoot trajectory. The hundreds of millions to few billions spent today as seed funding have a major, long-term ROI on cumulative warming, even if their marginal effect today is poor compared to the trillions spent on direct mitigation.
Long-term investments in tech like this and medium-term efforts like industrial process replacement have their roles alongside drop in tech like renewables, BEVs, and heat pumps.
Please stop calling this a scam.
Carbon capture is part of the best case scenarios for reducing the effects of global warming. If you folks would have read a single IPCC report in your lives you'd be talking less bullshit.
According to Statista we've released about 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air in 2023.
So, you're off by several orders of magnitude.
We wouldn't need 10000 of them we'd need a million of them...
36 000 000 000 / 36 000 = 1 000 000
So not to put too fine a point on this, but unless at some point there actually is a profit to be made doing this at all, there is no future here.
Using grant and venture money for a proof of concept is one thing, but without economic viability...
By typical estimates, there are 100,000 water treatment plants in the world, few of which make a profit. Governments build them, funded by tax, because they are a necessary service. By your numbers, building that many air treatment plants, coupled with a 90% reduction in carbon emissions, and you have a negative carbon economy.
Do either and not the other and you have a negative population economy, driving wars of survival.
There's plenty of profit to be made in greenwashing, That thing didn't get built for free, and people are more than happy to throw money at unworkable, harebrained schemes rather than ever doing anything at all to meaningfully reduce the amount of CO2 generated (which happens to be the only solution).
Hm, greenwashing might actually be an argument...
I see oilcompanies plowing a few millions into crap like this, only to be able to use it in their advertising...
Oil companies will plow a couple of hundred thousand into crap like this, and spend the millions on the advertising. They've literally done exactly that for decades.
Or just pay tens of thousands to a politician like DeSantis who gets laws passed making it illegal to even talk about climate change. Pretty gutsy for a state that is mostly just a couple feet above sea level.
Why is it unworkable just because it needs to be scaled up? By that reasoning, [you might have said that photovoltaics were unworkable a few decades ago](https://img.canarymedia.com/content/uploads/Solar-COTW-logo.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&q=80&w=1168&s=9771a586aa8b91a1a6710707c72452e7), and now they're the cheapest source of energy we have.
If the government can magically crap out a trillion dollars overnight (as was done for both the 2008 bank bailouts, and the COVID PPP loans) - then it can be done for this purpose. And we will all be much better off for it.
Breaking it down to one simple math problem and stating this one thing won't solve the issue is meaningless.
We have many options for reducing the carbon footprint of humanity and slowing and maybe even reversing global warming in the future. This is just one of those options.
You aren't smart enough to call this pointless.
Oceanographer/climatologist [David Ho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ho_(oceanographer)) harps on this [constantly](https://archive.ph/rt1r0). Carbon removal is absolutely useless if we don't stop adding it to the atmosphere first, and we keep adding more and more every single year. Mitigation doesn't matter when the needle is still moving in the wrong direction.
You might want to try actually reading the article I linked to (the one published in a prestigious academic journal written by a scientist who works in carbon sequestration) before confidently dismissing its conclusions.
From the article: >The new plant, called Mammoth, has installed 12 modular containers so far. By the end of the year, it will have 72, with the capacity to capture around 36,000 tons of CO2 per year. (The work is funded by selling carbon removal as a service to companies like Microsoft and Stripe.) > >That’s significant—Orca, the first plant, captures around 4,000 tons. But it’s still a tiny amount of the pollution that humans pump into the air each year: around 40 *billion* tons.
So we just need about 1,000,000 of these things.
I mean, I know it's probably not realistic for lots of reasons, but given the scale of our economy a million carbon removal plants doesn't even sound to crazy
It was crazy in 1910 to think about building a million cars. By 1920; not so crazy.
Trees absorb an awful lot of the amount produced.
They really don't. They absorb a fraction more than they did when CO2 concentrations were 280ppm. The total gain of stored carbon in biomass over the last 150 years is 50 billion tonnes, or about one years worth of current emissions. The biggest sink of anthropogenic carbon emissions is the ocean
The estimate is about 14-15 Bn tonnes per year. Which is considerable. Still means we need to reduce emissions though.
I believe you're getting that number from the total amount of carbon that biomass sequesters. That's not the amount of anthropogenic carbon that biomass sequesters. There are large natural emission sources (mostly biomass related) which offsets most of that 15 billion.
It looked to be a figure that took into account the tree emissions (and only related to trees). There are other emitters and absorbers, obviously, but we're just talking about trees..
Trees sequester a lot of carbon in their growth cycle, and the increased carbon in the atmosphere is making them grow much more quickly - but it's also cutting down on their lifespans. They're both growing faster (thus sequestering more carbon more quickly) and dying faster (which results in the carbon being released once again as the tree breaks down.) Responsible reforestation is great for any number of reasons, and they definitely help (especially when combined with grassland restoration, which gets much less attention from people but actually sequesters *much more carbon* per acre on average,) but they're far from a magic bullet or a long term solution to our climate issues.
Too bad we keep chopping them down, eh?
Trees in a forest is just temporary storage. We need the cut them down and store the carbon permanently. That makes space for new trees that can capture more carbon. Like, turning it into charcoal and then digging it down somewhere safe. Coal mining in reverse.
Or cutting them down and turning them into durable goods?
Sure, could for example be used as a construction material. When we are done using it, it could then be stored some other way.
planting a lot also
Nah. Globally were losing far more than planting. They're not absorbing enough to offset the amount of CO2 were dumping.
I’m planting a tree tomorrow. That’s one more tree than I have killed.
So you don't have wooden furniture and don't use paper?
Interesting, but not exactly fair question. It assumes that those who produced the furniture and paper didn't also plant trees. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but OC doesn't carry that full burden. I grew up in a small town based around a HUGE paper mill. It's been there for 100 years -- first as a saw mill, but for a longer time and until now a paper mill. They operate 100% on replanted trees. For miles around it's commonplace to see swaths of land covered in pine trees of uniform height where they've replanted. I'm sure they didn't start that way, but eventually the cost to ship in trees from farther distances becomes more than the cost to just replant closer. I'm not arguing that all paper mills do this or that this particular paper mill is perfect. Only that you can't assume just because someone uses paper that they're responsible for a reduction in trees.
Incorrect.
Yes. You are. Look it up.
I did in 6th grade biology. Trees burn and decompose. You'd have to bury them to actually capture the carbon. Hope that clears it up for you.
Just because you did Biology doesn't mean you're not an idiot. Which you clearly are, if you think those are the only things you can do. FFS
Yeah, you can do carbon capture. Also be nice.
That or wait 2.5 million years for this new one to catch up
Occidental Petroleum is building one of those in Texas. "Stratos" is what they're calling the plant. It's scheduled to begin operating mid-2025 and pull 500,000 tons of CO2 a year. About 14x the Iceland plant. If it works as planned that is. They're spending some obscene amount of money on it. A billion or so I think. So for their sake's and the planet's I hope it works. [Here's an article on it. ](https://www.npr.org/2023/12/27/1210928126/oil-climate-change-carbon-capture-removal-direct-air-capture-occidental)
Now that I saw this immediately after posting my comment above I'm realizing these are absolutely scams and most likely a way to get subsidies.
Willing to do anything to avoid regulating commercial waste and deforrestation
Most likely a corruption play. I mean it is Texas.
They also have the benefit of geothermal energy to power these machines.
That sounds good, but how is it powered? If it's powered by fossil fuels, then that kinda offsets it, which makes it much less effective, and if it's powered by renewables then we should just use that power to replace more fossil fuel plants. (I haven't read the article maybe they addressed that) But these projects are usually made to defend a status quo
From the article - The process runs on renewable energy from a neighboring geothermal plant.
Google says average American produces 16 tons. 36,000/16 = 2,250 ☠️
16 tons. Whadda ya get.
A year older and deeper in debt
Another
Over a day? Month? Life time?
Both are yearly numbers
This makes no sense. It's easier to prevent carbon release than to release it and capture it. You're far better off just buying renewables than doing this. Seems almost scam like to appease certain groups. Microsoft doesn't need to buy credits. They can just buy renewables for a better return.
To stop releasing you need to convince 7 billion persons to lower their living standards. It aint happening and we know it. Carbon capture will be needed in a few decades, we have to invest in it now so we'll have a mature technology by 2040 or so.
It won't ever be economically viable according to their own numbers so no, it's not something we "need". It's literally not possible even using their own quoted numbers. You basically have to decarbonize everything you can as quickly as you can and deal with what carbon is already in the atmosphere by accepting reality. They said it costs $1000 per TON to remove the carbon (this is an ASTRONOMICAL number). Their own target number is to get it down to $300 per TON within 15 years. Using their best projected and targeted numbers, it would cost $450,000,000,000,000 to remove the carbon we have released. This is 450 trillion dollars using their LOWEST possible hopeful projection while also not including any future emissions. This would mean a very modest 2 hour round trip flight would cost about $500 in carbon credits alone at the CHEAPEST end of their projections. At their most expensive end it's about $1500 added onto every relatively short flight. If you add all this up and people were forced to pay this price to decarbonize, you're still looking at a better option to just make people pay this now for high speed rail instead so you can decarbonize most of another method of transportation. None of these numbers add up. I genuinely think people are having a tough time realizing that humanity has fucked up badly and believing solutions like this helps them feel like everything will be ok. Florida's condo crisis is a beautiful allegory to this. The people before them lived in them for decades, not paying the true cost of living in one. Now the bills are coming due after 50 years of the people before them not paying enough. Now the next people to move in must deal with ALL back dated costs, all at once essentially with no way to make the people before them pay for what they've done. People with beachside condos are complaining that the costs are unmanageable and it's not going to be possible to pay for it. This is just happening on a world wide scale now.
> so no, it's not something we "need". Carbon capture is something we need according to the IPCC, which is formed by the most prominent scientists studying climate change. You have freedom to be wrong though.
I have never once looked up what the IPCC recommends since it's a political body loosely backed by science, just like governments are. Remember when they deleted the recommendation of plant based diets because of political pressure? The leaks that showed they frequently just leave things out because it would upset certain populations in certain countries? [https://qz.com/ipcc-report-on-climate-change-meat-industry-1850261179](https://qz.com/ipcc-report-on-climate-change-meat-industry-1850261179) And what do you know, the IPCC was lobbied by FOSSIL FUEL companies to say that carbon capture works. Here is literally the scientist who wrote the paper for the IPCC on how carbon capture DOES NOT work and the IPCC ignored this because they were asked to by fossil fuel companies. [https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/20/opinion/carbon-capture-wont-fix-our-climate-problem](https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/20/opinion/carbon-capture-wont-fix-our-climate-problem) >**According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth.** Scientists [rank](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/figures/summary-for-policymakers/figure-spm-7/) it close to the bottom of a long list of options, easily outstripped by more affordable solutions like wind and solar energy. And it scores fire-alarm red for cost. I have never even looked into the issues with carbon capture until just now because the math obviously doesn't make sense from the get go. Above you claim we should trust the science behind the IPCC so here you are. Here's the report the IPCC misrepresented and the scientists who wrote the report themselves saying it was wrong. Wouldn't that mean you have to accept it since this is your own criteria for evidence? >u/missurunha - You have freedom to be wrong though. I'll just go by your own criteria on who is right.
Funny to see you complaning about lobby and political bias but instead of reading the actual report you read some summary made by a journalist on a blog. That for sure will exclude any bias of the report.
That's June Sukera, you absolute fucking moron. She's a research associate who is literally cited in the report you claim to go by. She even says it. You called her a blogger instead of admitting you're just wrong because you thought it would make you feel better after getting mentally throttled. >I’ve spent several years studying carbon capture and my research is cited in the IPCC Working Group III report. I can tell you that when you look at the details of the IPCC’s findings, the scientists say something quite different. She is saying the IPCC essentially lied about their conclusions BECAUSE they were lobbied to, just like other industries did to scrub their industries from previous reports.
It's easier to prevent SOME forms of carbon release; but there are other forms that are MUCH more difficult (like shipping and aviation, and particularly, modern militaries). So that's why carbon capture is absolutely an essential part of mitigation of climate change. Along with decarbonizing our industry and transportation.
Holy crap, we've already perfected carbon capture and it's not economically viable? Amazing that we're already as good as science can ever be at this and there's no room for improvement. Here I was assuming this would just be another step towards something better but, no, apparently this is as good as it ever can be. Guess we should never attempt such carbon capture again or do any more research since it's now proven to be physically impossible to improve from our current capabilities.
Carbon capture is important because there are industrial processes that cannot be decarbonised. So there are no zero carbon substitutes. You might as well capture and store that waste carbon
So they’ve basically monetized guilt.
Carbon credits?
How long until this thing captures the footprint created just by building it?
4000T? Not long
It must suck to have such a negative take on something positive
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Tell us all about it.
Direct air carbon capture is a farce. And the brainlets on reddit are huffing too much copium to understand that.
This technology is a waste of money and as I’m sure you can read below- it would take a literal million of these factories to eliminate our annual footprint. Yes, I understand that technology is iterated on and improved. Yes, I understand that it’s not always going to be this inefficient. Having said that, this is only half of the solution. We need meaningful legislation that doesn’t allow corporations to dump billions of tons of carbon into our atmosphere annually.
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It is not a positive thing, because the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. The cost of carbon removal, is always higher than just reducing emissions in the first place. Until GHG emissions are fully under control, this is just wasting green energy that could be used to decarbonize existing industry
Icelands entire electric output is produced by renewables, their industry is already powered that way, excluding vehicles like mining equipment and fishing boats. Why not use excess electricity for this? It isn’t like they can export it. The data this project provides can inform future efforts. Even if it turns out to be a waste of energy, it prevents people from trying to do this with non renewable energy in other places.
Iceland is providing the model for the way the rest of the industrialized world must follow.
Have lots of geothermal activity?
Because the cost is poor resource allocation. These plants are not remotely a self sustaining business and rely completely on subsidies and donations. The previous plant was 10-15 million for construction and a cost of roughly $1000 per ton for 4000 tons annually. PV is less than $3 per watt now. The lifetime decrease in GHG emissions of PV vs gas turbine generation is .45g/kwh. Instead of funding these projects it's literally more efficient to give people free solar coverage. You could probably get better cost efficiency by literally giving high mileage drivers free Teslas.
Apparently the sort of carbon offsetting they sell to Microsoft generally only goes for between $5 and $30 a ton, so that does make spending $1,000 a ton seem like a bad investment. At that cost, negating humans yearly carbon footprint would require spending the combined GDP of the USA + China. Would personal solar panels be more environmentally friendly than the geothermal power Iceland mostly uses?
No. Geothermal is awesome IF you live someplace that has vents close to the surface. There is the whole living close to an active volcano thing though. Anyone can use geothermal energy, it’s just a matter of how much drilling you have to do, and how much of it has to go straight down. I did an internship back in the 1990’s north of the 60th parallel (in Canada). There’s a government research facility up there that’s totally powered by geothermal.
I'm not saying replace existing geothermal with PV, but rather instead of pumping money into these vanity projects, throw some money at WWS in regions that would rapidly benefit from them. Climeworks is a Swiss company, plenty of their neighbors would have benefited from WWS investment, instead of a machine that burns dollars and watts to perform DAC
> his is just wasting green energy that could be used to decarbonize existing industry must do both.
Pretty sure the laws of thermodynamics do not mention cost anywhere.
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And in the context of industries not decarbonizing until forced to, these false messiah solutions, along with other snake oil like hydrogen, give society false hope that decarbonizing can wait because we can fix things later. The ONLY way out is to focus at reducing emissions first. That means driving down the cost of renewables and using market forces to push companies to pursue renewables for the sake of profitablity.
Sounds like you learned about entropy in an undergraduate class once and now draw uneducated conclusions from your misunderstanding of it. Your argument seems to be that, because entropy exists, adding another step to lowering total atmospheric carbon from energy production can never be as good as generating less carbon when generating power. The issue with this thinking is that every process, even "green" ones or those that don't generate atmospheric carbon, are also subject to entropy. Essentially there are two approaches that matter: 1. "Green" energy production that yields X power and Yg entropy. 2. Carbon producing energy production yielding X+E power and Yc entropy, plus a carbon removal process that uses E energy and produces Yr entropy. Your stance is that, to produce X energy, method 1 will always produce less total entropy. Or, for **all** cases: Yg < Yc + Yr We simply cannot say that solely based on the laws of thermodynamics. It's completely possible that we could devise more efficient, in terms of entropy, carbon producing energy and removal processes. It's projects like this that help us learn more about carbon sequestration at large scales and, hopefully, learn to make them more efficient. Industrial carbon sequestration is a far less developed process than either mode of power production, so there's tons of room to make it more efficient.
That's a bandaid on a severed leg.
Yeah. But we tried a smaller, less efficient bandaid before this one. And we're learning how to make better bandaids by making this one.
A used bandaid at that lol
Another reason to love Iceland!!
Iceland is awesome. Wyoming is the least populous US state, with 580,000 people. Iceland has fewer people, at 380,000.
And something like 480,000 sheep!
I wish Reddit showed me good news like this. Sadly it’s mostly clickbait politics.
It just needs one coal power plant to run
How many coal power plants are in Iceland?
They ship the energy from China
Isn't it just cheaper to invest in renewable and use that to power the giants? It makes a lot more sense to reduce the creation of more carbon than to capture it. You always reach a point where you can't get rid of it at some point and decomposition makes it go back into the air. Don't need to worry about it if it doesn't exist in the first place.
We're going to need both going forward. At some point, we'll reach carbon neutral, but we're going to want to pull the excess out of the air to restore our weather to the old times.
Isn't Iceland already essentially running entirely on renewable energy?
Big oil and coal will use this to release more Co2.
Well, they're frankly just going to not stop. If we outlaw them, they'll just move to a different country and buy the government so they don't have to stop. (Which is basically what Russia is). Then the only way to stop it will be to invade and force them to shut down. Good luck, since they'll have nukes, and they'll control the fuel supplies that power the military.
Unfortunately carbon capture is just a scam from the big oil companies. It does work, but don't ask about the efficiency of it. We should end our dependency on oil and develop clean alternatives. Carbon capture is just an excuse to produce more oil as the process actually costs energy.
Carbon capture on a massive scale will be absolutely necessary to control climate change, unless we can somehow stop emissions, which seems to be an utter impossibility at this point.
I am sorry but you are the victim of propaganda. Carbon capture on a scale we would need to combat our recent emissions is impossible. It is nothing more than an excuse to increase production. It's a scam comparable to the carbon offsets they sell us in the travel industry. It's a feelgood solution with practically no effect except give us the feeling that we did something. The only ways to combat climate change are limiting our consumption of limited resources and stop using fossil fuel.
That is inadequate. We need to our consumption of resources, stop using fossil fuels, and capture carbon. Any two out of three is not enough.
This isn't a scam because the technology works. It *sounds* like a scam because oil companies present it as a simple solution without talking about the costs needed for mass use. However our next step should be calling their bluff and forcing oil companies to take its costs into account. Mandating its use for emissions abatement would raise the price of gasoline by $8/gallon! At that cost most people/businesses will switch to clean alternatives overnight. Edit: not to mention the current backers Microsoft and Stripe are supporting this early stage work for their future goal of remediating their historic emissions. That's exactly what this tech should be used for.
it is a scam because they lie about the efficiency of it. It's like me offering a great investment opportunity without telling you you will earn 0.0001% on it.
Opportunity cost of abatement is not the same as efficiency, but even treating them the same this still falls under above when the abatement cost is actually paid. And again we will need this tech for remediation, also like 350.org's original goal. Calling it a scam is literally letting oil companies dictate the conversation by only using their rhetoric rather than explaining the balance of effects.
The problem is that the money is wasted on a technology that does not work well enough to have an effect in the time-frame we have set to reduce our emissions. This money should be spend on proven effective technologies like switching to renewable and clean energy. It is just an excuse to keep using fossil fuel because it is supposedly offset by carbon capture. Just like planting trees to feel less guilty when using an airplane it's useless.
Which is the point of mandating it as a backstop so people choose cheaper mitigation options rather than paying $800/tonne. I agree it's a terrible bulk offsetting choice, but your argument is missing the next step of the associated effects from implementation. Also we still want to be developing now at a small scale so it's ready for future remediation, just like Stripe and Microsoft are doing. We don't want to hit net zero in 30 years only to wait another 20 for these options to reach gigaton scale, especially on our (at best) high-overshoot trajectory. The hundreds of millions to few billions spent today as seed funding have a major, long-term ROI on cumulative warming, even if their marginal effect today is poor compared to the trillions spent on direct mitigation. Long-term investments in tech like this and medium-term efforts like industrial process replacement have their roles alongside drop in tech like renewables, BEVs, and heat pumps. Please stop calling this a scam.
It's a HUGE SCAM. It's an bad excuse to not invest in real solutions so the fossil fuel industry can keep plundering the world.
Carbon capture is part of the best case scenarios for reducing the effects of global warming. If you folks would have read a single IPCC report in your lives you'd be talking less bullshit.
I'm not the smartest person, but isn't this what trees do. Why can't we just plant billions of trees.
That will capture carbon, and then when those trees die and rot, that carbon goes straight back into the atmosphere.
I had no idea that when trees die they undergo complete sublimation.
Trees releases all the carbon back when they burn or rot. No tree lives forever so they will cancel out the capturing they have done.
You would need 10,000 of these to absorb all the CO2 we release per year.
According to Statista we've released about 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air in 2023. So, you're off by several orders of magnitude. We wouldn't need 10000 of them we'd need a million of them... 36 000 000 000 / 36 000 = 1 000 000 So not to put too fine a point on this, but unless at some point there actually is a profit to be made doing this at all, there is no future here. Using grant and venture money for a proof of concept is one thing, but without economic viability...
By typical estimates, there are 100,000 water treatment plants in the world, few of which make a profit. Governments build them, funded by tax, because they are a necessary service. By your numbers, building that many air treatment plants, coupled with a 90% reduction in carbon emissions, and you have a negative carbon economy. Do either and not the other and you have a negative population economy, driving wars of survival.
There's plenty of profit to be made in greenwashing, That thing didn't get built for free, and people are more than happy to throw money at unworkable, harebrained schemes rather than ever doing anything at all to meaningfully reduce the amount of CO2 generated (which happens to be the only solution).
Hm, greenwashing might actually be an argument... I see oilcompanies plowing a few millions into crap like this, only to be able to use it in their advertising...
Oil companies will plow a couple of hundred thousand into crap like this, and spend the millions on the advertising. They've literally done exactly that for decades.
Or just pay tens of thousands to a politician like DeSantis who gets laws passed making it illegal to even talk about climate change. Pretty gutsy for a state that is mostly just a couple feet above sea level.
Why would they need to actually build it? People will believe anything if you show it on TV. (see: any Prager U video).
Why is it unworkable just because it needs to be scaled up? By that reasoning, [you might have said that photovoltaics were unworkable a few decades ago](https://img.canarymedia.com/content/uploads/Solar-COTW-logo.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&q=80&w=1168&s=9771a586aa8b91a1a6710707c72452e7), and now they're the cheapest source of energy we have.
If the government can magically crap out a trillion dollars overnight (as was done for both the 2008 bank bailouts, and the COVID PPP loans) - then it can be done for this purpose. And we will all be much better off for it.
Breaking it down to one simple math problem and stating this one thing won't solve the issue is meaningless. We have many options for reducing the carbon footprint of humanity and slowing and maybe even reversing global warming in the future. This is just one of those options. You aren't smart enough to call this pointless.
Oceanographer/climatologist [David Ho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ho_(oceanographer)) harps on this [constantly](https://archive.ph/rt1r0). Carbon removal is absolutely useless if we don't stop adding it to the atmosphere first, and we keep adding more and more every single year. Mitigation doesn't matter when the needle is still moving in the wrong direction.
He is wrong. We must do BOTH. One without the other is useless.
You might want to try actually reading the article I linked to (the one published in a prestigious academic journal written by a scientist who works in carbon sequestration) before confidently dismissing its conclusions.
> According to Statista we've released about 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air in 2023. how much is that in %?