I’m a chemist working on the (electro)conversion of CO2 into economically valuable products. In my opinion, making this process profitable would be the only way to convince big companies to significantly invest in the process. I can tell you that we are far from making the process economically viable
Edit: to clarify, I’m not defending that we should prioritize the economy. I’m saying that that’s what policy makers/ big companies prioritize, so it won’t happen until the process is profitable, which is far from now. We thus rely on different approaches to mitigate climate change
With the price of food so high, the demand is there. It’s bullshit we pay farm subsidies. Made sense during the Great Depression but hasn’t since the agro boom of the 60’s-70’s
Subsidizing fuel also makes no sense and hides it’s true cost
No, this application is already economically feasible. Though messing with concrete is always going to take some time for acceptance. Though not as extreme as aviation, the concrete world takes a long time to accept change.
Some projects will pay extra for carbon neutral concrete because the loan rates for climate friendly buildings can be lower. From the supplier's point of view, they just need policies to be stable for long enough to pay off the investment in the new process and distribution infrastructure.
Unfortunately it’s not likely to be… during some research into emissions one of the stickiest issues is that we produce a lot of concrete and it’s one of the most emission intensive things we do, but we need it… it’s relatively cheap, it’s long lasting, and it’s useful for building. Private incentive of businesses is to buy the cheap stuff even if the broader incentive is for a cleaner planet. With no regulations, no one will do that since it disadvantages them against competitors that won’t, a prisoners dilemma if you will.
It’s really a complicated mess. If we could produce cleaner energy, use that energy to produce cleaner cement, maybe it will work. Then you have issues with clean energy and transfer, say you produce clean energy in one place but you need it somewhere else, then you need better electrical wires to do it in order to send it further away and not lose the power.
It’s truly one of those problems where the more you look at it the more you go “oh shit” because solving one issue doesn’t mean we’re good, it’s like peeling back layer after layer of an onion.
We have products like hempcrete already that are carbon NEGATIVE but sure let’s keep kicking the can down the road and pumping money into carbon neutral and other failed ventures that won’t rescue us from our current trajectory (primary focus of course to line the pockets of the big players like concrete already at the top of the economic pyramid)
It's chemistry. When you make Cement the chemical process releases lots of CO2. Look it up on Wikipedia. Has nothing to do with how you make the heating.
As long as dumping carbon is cheaper than not dumping carbon, they can say, "it's impossible".
When the atmosphere can no longer support life, the economics will then have worked themselves out just fine, no human intervention required.
Or combine carbon tax with carbon Credit [like from Ministry for the Future](https://www.npr.org/2022/11/11/1136169902/the-carbon-coin-a-novel-idea#:~:text=Kim%20Stanley%20Robinson's%202020%20sci,word%20debate%20in%20policy%20circles).
But bottom line, we need to value our Earth. Damaging the Earth needs a real cost, and helping solve the problem needs an economic reward.
I'm also a chemist who worked on electro conversion of CO2 at one point and in my opinion its neat science but a terrible and unrealistic solution to climate change.
We'll never be as good as plants in carbon sequestration so we should be using plants as the collection method
In my opinion, if you take a massive step back and think about a global picture of the climate change problem....it becomes clear that it might be easier and better to "suck"/process the CO2 out of the *ocean* rather than out of the air.
The vast majority of the excess CO2 that we've been pumping out gets absorbed into the oceans, where it has been increasing the acidity of the water and posing a threat to carbonaceous living things. It's basically been acting as a big sink for all that extra carbon this whole time.
We may as well take advantage of that fact and process the seawater directly and remove the carbon from there, rather than from the air (where it is too diluted to collect easily anyway).
It's funny how the obvious solution is staring everyone in the face, but no-one wants to acknowledge it. All kinds of yahoos want to profit from it or else they don't give a hoot. Politics, Business, and Intellect all powered by human greed is our worst enemy.
Of course, it took a planet really jammed full of plants like a hundred million years to pull the CO2 out of the air and bury it, which we are returning to the air over like a hundred years.
So,
1. We won't do better than plants at CO2 sequestration and
2. Plants aren't anywhere good enough to do the job on the timescale we need.
It's very easy to scale up plants though. Not even comparable with scaling up complicated machines, so nature is the way to go.
But we destroyed so much nature, anything regrowing will take decades to even negate the effects of destruction before contributing to binding ancient co2..
Simply cut down mature trees and sequester the wood in new buildings or store the logs where they won't rot. Plant new trees which grow fast in the freed-up space.
The amount of energy and the sheer volume of CO2 required to be removed its astronomical. The system has to be be powered entirely by non-carbon generating power which we simply don't have the capacity for, but also needs to be built and maintained without producing lots of carbon which is currently impossible. We're woefully inefficient compared to plants, so if we would need enough electrolyzers to cover an area bigger than what we've deforested just to get back from the effects of deforestation let alone CO2 release from fossil fuels.
We're talking about covering a significant proportion of the surface of the earth in electrolyzer stacks and somehow powering them.
The research is interesting and could lead to ways of producing sustainable fuels, but it cannot itself be a method for carbon removal to fight climate change. It will never reach that scale, its like trying to move a mountain one grain of sand at a time.
thanks for being honest about that .. and thanks for your work .. its really important research.
The new Iceland Carbon Capture plant will remove around 36ktons Co2/yr ..
but globally we are emitting 38 GIGA tons/yr CO2..
so, yeah wed need a million of them .. such is the scale of the problem.
.. I looked up the figures for the Iceland plant, and emissions .. I think thats correct.
The carbon removal plant removes one Millionth of the amount we are emitting - kilo, mega, giga each x1000 iirc
A great research project.. and the tech will improve over time .. but not something that will really make a dent in the problem .
I was not being sarcastic .. not sure what you meant by "backwards" ?
Carbon Capture cannot be the sole means of reducing carbon emissions. At most, it is part of many means to be utilized. The main one has to be to actually reduce the emissions from processing and consumption of fossil fuels as well as reducing the consumption of fossil fuels themselves.
sure .. but think about net-zero .. when we get there it will be around +2.5C .. and all that CO2 stays there for a long time, so net-zero == max CO2 == max-heat.
We will need to reduce that peak temp to survive - there are 2 ways : remove CO2 or reflect sunlight.
hence Ive been talking about SRM .. releasing particulates to increase cloud cover to reflect more sunlight so less is absorbed by the oceans .. which does have a cooling effect.
How efficient can conversion be? How cheap would power have to be to make it competitive? Raw power from solar panels (without storage) might fit the bill. Does conversion circumvent conventional refining costs?
> I can tell you that we are far from making the process economically viable
How can it be EVER economically viable? That sounds physically impossible to me. Pure CO2 is not a useful material
by itself and any chemical usages will be very much limited in scope. [1]
IF we had a nearly free abundant energy source (e.g. fusion) and a government ready to spend some money, one could draw CO2 out of air (e.g. for energy storage, chemical industry or even sequestration), but that would be a government funded expense not a "normal" economic activity..
[1] I guess something like artificial photosynthesis might be a possibility
The idea of how it can be profitable is actually simple. If you can convert CO2 into a valuable chemical whose market value is above the cost transforming it, then it suddenly is profitable
What would be an example of
X+CO2=> something of significantly higher value than X
?
Especially given that one would need something on a VERY large scale to be a factor in the climate change.
We need to make fuel from air (or CO2 in water) more cheaply than pumping it, then store the excess under ground. Or make it into food or plastic. I applaud your efforts to make it economically viable. Please hurry.
Profitable?! The optimistic, bullshitty “prediction” DAC companies make is that it will “one day” cost $100 per ton. Down from the nearly $1000 it costs today. Profitability isn’t even on the table, but getting more taxpayer subsidies certainly is.
We emitted 35B tons of CO2 in 2020. Surely that number is higher now that we observed the largest YOY jump in emissions.
$35T/year to absorb the CO2.
Queue the "just plant more trees we can keep burning fossil fuels" bro
The process wouldn’t be profitable on its own. The point of it is to be able to convert it into something more valuable than the cost of trapping it and converting it, that’s how it becomes profitable. But yeah, the problem is that we’re far from that point
Maybe the value of the enterprise should be seen as maintaining life on earth? But that’s the problem isn’t it? Convincing the policy makers and broader population that everything we put a value on is at risk, both in our built environment and the natural one we currently know.
Unfortunately, that is the case, indeed :/ people don’t take climate change as something serious (or in some cases, even real) and they don’t understand that what’s coming will be devastating
GHG is a negative production/consumption externality. All you need to resolve it is an appropriately structured Pigouvian tax and a mechanism to use the tax proceeds to convert/sequested GHG. The fix is rather simple.
A new law that says each ton of GhG from all sources you will be taxed at the equivalent of conversion/sequestration. Perform a periodic auction for the conversion/sequestration on the emissions you want to cut from the last period. The auction produces the tax rate.
GHG producers have the option of changing/eliminating processes, or conversion/sequestration themselves or through a 3rd party. Auction proceeds go to winners of the auction for conversion/sequestration.
And Voila. GHG production is priced at a fair, efficient rate. Producers have an efficient, transparent variable tax rate to adjust the prices of their products. The biggest obstacle, outside no one caring that the world is burning or wanting to pay for the activity that is causing it, is implementing it comprehensively in multiple jurisdictions.
But what about all the deaths from air pollution. And deaths that are from air pollution that are not linked to it because we don't know. Getting rid of fossil fuels and exhaust pipes is the only way forward.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t do it because it’s expensive, quite the opposite. What I argue is that in the world that we live in, it won’t happen because it’s expensive
Paying healthcare costs for lung cancer and other conditions related to air pollution is also way too expensive. Generally costs go down with high demand and technology getting better. EVs use to have 60 mile range 15 years ago and now they are getting closer and closer to 500.
The first law of thermodynamics means it could only work at scale of we piggyback off a natural process.
The second law of thermodynamics makes the chances of the above too impossible, in a timescale that would save civilization, anyways.
Diffuse CO2 in the atmosphere is a high in entropy state... which is why we could so much work (in the physics sense) by creating it.
I dont think it will *ever* be profitable, but it's is *necessary*. If we want to reverse the damage we have done, we need to rethink our economic priorities.
The idea is that if you can turn it into some other valuable product, then the capture and conversion of CO2 would indeed be profitable. But yes, it certainly is depressive that we value the economy over literally human lives
Switching ag subsidies from corn to oil-seed brassicas would certainly make conversion of CO2 to long-term stable solid and liquid form more profitable. My understanding is that, thermodynamically, carbon fixation by plants is way more efficient and, economically, less capital intensive than just about any DAC. Do you think that intuition is correct?
The part I'm not sure about is how hard it is to turn a vegetable oil feedstock into a precursor for plastics, carbon fiber, or other durable carbon-based goods. Do you have any insight into this?
Wouldn't it be much easier and cheaper to stop the biggest polluters like large diesel ships that burn Bunker oil that transport cheap junk and people on cruise vacations?
The problem is that that’s far from being enough. Huge portions of green house gases emissions are due to the production of cement (much needed to build houses for a constantly growing population), the production of ammonia (used in fertilizers), or the livestock industry. Regulating the means of transportation is a necessary step, but definitely not enough
From what i've researched carbon capture tech is not a viable solution due to how much energy and machinery it takes. It also technically removes pollution emitted from every country which makes it a hard sell on a massive scale. Why would India pay money to remove
CO2 produced by China.
Can we do it without creating more GHG?
GHG will be produced by creating the machines.
We produce GHG by running them.
So will the reduction or removal of GHG from the atmosphere be more than the production of GHG by these processes? Genuinely curious.
The production of all the machinery would inevitably emit GHG, but in the long run the project would result in negative emissions, since it would eventually suck more GHG than those emitted. As for running the machines, the idea of using electrochemical methods rather than thermal ones is to minimize the amount of energy required, run by clean sources.
I got to highlight again though that we are indeed far from this ideal scenario, and therefore we need not to rely on it and adopt different policies as soon as possible.
So we run on green electricity and long term positive effect outweighs negative. But it's far off. I suppose we need to accelerate research and investment .
I wonder how bad things need to get before society sees beyond profit/growth, which imo is flawed.
We're Already seeing the impact in so-called supply chains problems.
What energy are you consuming to pull it from the air with, how are you filtering it out without creating more waste, and how will it be stored permanently? Is storing it permanently a reliable thing, or does it use even more energy? Are there any meaningful products you can create with said carbon that can help this activity turn a profit to help it expand?
Some general questions that should help answer that nicely.
This is why it has to be plants that are used to sequester carbon. Doesn't have to be trees though, phytoplankton grow faster and self-sequester by falling to the bottom of the ocean when they die.
And then die and rot and emit CO2 and methane
Stuff has to get fossilized to offset extracted fossil fuels otherwise we just keep increasing the total amount of biospheric carbon
The trees help, but the sequestration should be super permanent or we need to just use the energy to get off fossil fuels
Right! And with a little fertilizer and other sound agricultural practices they can grow even more.
The only non-plant process that can compete might be enhanced weathering. Crushed granite or olivine spread on farmland or beaches can sequester carbon long term for a relatively modest energy investment.
In the ideal world that we don’t yet live in, but would be the goal of all this research, the answers are: the energy would come from renewable sources, filtration systems can be reused and recycled, storing it is a bit useless, and it can already be transformed into quite useful products (ethylene, propane, methanol, ethanol, etc)
DAC methodologies often answer all of this. It’s not really described in this article because the article is more critical of the concept and of carbon assets as a hole being used to offset continuing emissions instead of being used to remove emissions that already exist.
I see a lot of arguments about absolutes, there are no absolutes with this. The transition to renewable energy won't and shouldn't be 100%, because people have real lives and the used car market will thrive, same with lawnmowers and some old utility equipment. We don't need 100% transition, we just need to reduce as much as possible in key sectors that normal people won't even notice like industrial shipping, municipal construction projects, packaging for consumer goods, etc. You just go "oh neat" when your Amazon package gets delivered by electric vehicle and the package has a recycling label that actually means its going to be recycled responsibly. That's it!
So how about burying the plants afterwards? Say Bull Kelp. Fastest growing plant on the planet. Plant a field in the water, harvest the plant. Liquify it. Possibly remove non carbon portions through heat or mechanical means. Pump the remaining liquid back into empty oil fields. Set it up in the middle of the ocean outside shipping lanes, power the mechanical portions with floating solar or turbines from ocean currents. Defer some costs by selling a portion of the kelp (it's edible), by providing new fishing grounds because your kelp farm will make a good fish nursery (license the new fishing lanes) and by charging to clear and package plastic trash from the ocean (international contributions). Start at 10,000 acres and see what new fish populations it will support, you may be able to profit off of in house fishery services. But always sequestering carbon from the kelp.
When you realize the scale of the problem you'll know that there's no capturing it.
We emit almost 40 BILLION TONS of the stuff each year. We'd have to capture at least that to get to zero ADDED. We should really do at least 60 BILLION TONS each year to have a chance of undoing just what we put in in the past 20 years. And it would still take 3 DECADES.
There's no capturing this shit.
Just to try and put in perspective: the weight of ALL humans and ALL our domesticated animals is about ONE billion tons.
Explain again to me how you mine for the materials needed, how you manufacture the machines needed, how you deploy it all, how you power it all, how you filter, store, transport it all?
Lol oh man, I know the scale of the problem. Do gooder solutions wither and die in the face of the sheer volume of disaster we engineered for ourselves. Commodifying the problem and turning the solution into a gold rush for profit is the only way I can think to turn this tide. Most of the oceans on this planet are a lot like deserts. Not a lot of life, most larger organisms moving across it to more active coastal regions. So what if it becomes profitable to farm the open, mostly inactive, overly carbonated ocean? And require a percentage of the biomass to get sequestered as a function of the system. Think of it as farming carbon over 40 percent of the planet's surface. That would be the long term goal. Of course none of this matters if you keep pumping an Armageddon worth of carbon out every year. But no single solution is going to save us. We need everything all at once, and realistically it needs to profit the greedy sociopaths that always rise to the top. If you have better ideas, please share.
That's BECCS, and there are a variety of ways to do it. My favorite is Charm Industrial- they turn leftover crop waste into bio-oil that they inject back into old oil wells where it solidifies.
Long answer: if we went to zero emissions today, we still need to suck the excess carbon out of the air. So yes, if the process is permanent and carbon negative: see Climeworks
No. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. Why are fossil fuel companies so interested in this technology? They use the captured CO2 to extract additional oil from wells. It's just another distraction to avoid the elephant in the room and continue business as usual.
No, not even close. If we somehow managed to increase the effectiveness of the machinery by several orders of magnitude and ran them on entirely renewable energy sources, we'd still be nowhere near capable of manufacturing them on the scale we'd need.
Removing CO2 isn't theoretically impossible, but it is practically impossible.
You know the money and effort that's been spent on developing fossil fuel infrastructure over the last 150 years? We'd have to duplicate that and more, on top of ceasing all emissions. It's simply not happening.
Agreed. The other part that is ignored; is methane. As temps continue to climb, trapped methane is released. There would have to be a plan for capturing (or mitigating) that too. No chance of that happening at the scale needed either.
If you powered the plants with solar and wind, and made the captured carbon into fuel and sold it at an increased price, i bet a good number of people would pay extra for net zero fuel as opposed to buying a new car.
Fuel is a better energy store than batteries are. And all the transportation and distribution infrastructure is already in place.
The problem with fuel is that it burns again, and we need to reduce the concentration of CO2, we cannot really afford to maintain our current levels. Instead, it should be transformed to other compounds retained on Earth, such as polymers
As something that can be implemented without the need to replace every fuel consuming appliance on the planet it would certainly be helpful. Just pick a spot in the world, coat it in panels, and connect it to fuel plants. The impact is absolutely immediate.
If you want to reduce the effect of fuel consumption in the short term, bringing combustion to net zero is a LOT faster than replacing literally everything
Any new product has a scaling rate. This is very low for carbon capture, numbers I have seen show that even with great Investment it will only be relevant in 40, 60 years. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, you never know what may happen. Even planting trees takes tremendous time and investment. But, as the latest numbers show, we will hit 3C, and thus it is best to do ALL approaches, and that is what most experts, agencies and governments suggest.
Bottom line is in order to get us back to 350 ppm, some kind of carbon capture is necessary. It will be expensive - and certainly no replacement for decarbonizing power generation and transportation. But as long as your timeframe is “ever” the answer is unequivocally “yes.”
I'm more interested in using algae/ plankton in the ocean, consumes carbon then becomes a sink at the bottom of the ocean. Likely how much of the oil deposits were originally formed millions of years ago. Photosynthesis provides the energy needed to make this conversion and is superior to trees as the carbon sink cannot burn.
Carbon capture can reverse the problem if climate change but nearly all human CO2 emissions need to be eliminated first. Then carbon carbon capture would have to be implemented on a massive scale worldwide.
If the carbon dioxide is dissolved in water similar to what is done with soft drinks then the water is pumped into saltwater aquifers the carbon will combine with other minerals and turn to stone.
Running such carbon capture would require an enormous amount of carbon free electricity to power it. I don't see renewables being adequate. However there is another power source which can safely produce enormous amounts of reliable, constant carbon free electricity.
Separating carbon dioxide from everything else in air will also require a lot of energy to do.
Isn't this just a fools errand? What are we trying to accomplish with this technology? Wouldn't the money be much better off on better batteries, more efficient solar panels, etc?
I think we would have to have a surplus of clean energy generation to make this worthwhile. Given the correlation between CO2 levels and the climate I would say yes it would have an effect if deployed on a large enough scale.
It's interesting to note that the energy these "CO2 vacuums" appear to use is electricity.... that most likely comes from a power plant that uses.... fossil fuels. It looks more like a thought experiment rather than a practical device.
There are these things called plants. They suck CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into oxygen. The oceans also suck CO2 from the atmosphere.
Now if we lower the level of CO2 too much the whole planet dies. Don’t F with nature.
Who is proposing lowering CO2 even to levels from 100 years ago?
Plants and the ocean also give up CO2. This is the natural carbon cycle and if it was a solution we wouldn't have seen levels go up in recent history.
The ocean absorbs about 50% of the CO2 but as it does it becomes more acidic and less efficient but man will still be less efficient than nature at conquering CO2
NO .. not anytime soon, and were headed to nearly +2C by 2040.
**The new Iceland CCS plant catches 36 KILO tons of CO2/yr .. and we are emitting 38 GIGA tons of CO2/yr globally**
Simple MATH says we need 1 MILLION of these .. so they are not at the scale we need to solve the problem.
Planting trees is also great, but that takes land scpace and time and money also .. and they need to get large to capture a good amount of Carbon.
Keep in mind that NET-ZERO == MAX CO2 == MAX TEMP .. all that CO2 stays up there a long time, which means it stays hot for a long time.
There are 2 ways to reduce the heat/temp - remove CO2 or reflect more sunlight.
So.. we have to start doing SRM - release particulates to increase cloud cover over the oceans, to reflect more sunlight so less is absorbed.. thus exerting a cooling effect.
Basically we have no choice - we will need to do SRM to bring peak-heat down, so that we can survive coming decades and begin the long slow process of removing CO2.
It never will be. Without subsidies or carbon tax. The grim reality is that we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. If we profit from the removal process then all the better. This is why some companies are trying to push this. But we could just as well profit if we give carbon tax money to vetted companies that plant trees.
The energy costs for this, not to mention things like pollen and insects that flow through the air, will make this so expensive. All The profit these companies need is from the government contracts that allow the company to get grants and funding for these ideas. I’m sure it will work well for the politicians writing the bills, and giving funding for the idea, with no common sense allows everyone to kick the can down the road on carbon taxes.
Imagine transforming the very gas contributing to global warming into one of the most revolutionary materials of our era—graphene. Our startup proposes a groundbreaking method to capture atmospheric CO2 and convert it directly into high-quality graphene, using a novel, energy-efficient process. This isn't just about creating an advanced material; it's about redefining waste as a resource. By leveraging the excess CO2, we aim to produce graphene that could revolutionize industries—from electronics and energy storage to construction and beyond—while simultaneously combating climate change. Join us as we turn today's biggest challenge into tomorrow's greatest opportunity.
No.
If you want to suck CO2 out of the air you need to do it at the smokestack itself where it is concentrated. Once it's out in the atmosphere at .04%, it's like trying to catch bears in Manhattan.
No. That’s like having a gushing aortic wound and trying to replace lost blood with a 0.000000005ml transfusion.
You want to save the patient, stop the damn bleeding.
We need to STOP emitting FIRST. We released a record high amount of CO2 last year! It’s ridiculous to think about carbon capture when emissions are rising year on year.
Never. Reality is that filtering all the CO2 out of four times the volume of the Houston astrodome yields ONE TON and would take tons of ffs to operate, yet we spew 40+ gigatonnes (billions) of C into the atmosphere annually.
We are quickly approaching a serious and dangerous CO2 deficit... the lowest levels in millions of years. No CO2 - no plant life. No plant life - NO OXYGEN.
Just wondering WTF are you guys talking about massively reducing or trying to eliminate CO2. Wouldn't walking in front of a bus be quicker without killing the rest of life on Earth.
Before we invest in this we need to protect the phytoplankton in the oceans. They already sequester more carbon on a daily basis than we will ever be able to with these ridiculous air sucking machines. However, we're killing our best oxygen producers with ocean acidification and forever chemicals.
It seems pretty obvious that the most economic form of CCUS (carbon capture and utilisation) is to use an advanced form of photosynthetic processing to produce high tensile material for some use that locks the carbon up for at least some hundreds of years, or alternatively can be used to as fuel to displace some fossil fuels - oh thats right - tree.!
Will doing the reverse of what caused climate change help slow its growth? Uh, yeah.
Will it be enough and on time to save us? That’s the trillion dollar question.
Trees and plants do it naturally. If they had never started chopping down the Amazon, we might not be in this mess. But now we have forest fires every single year here in Canada, so even less trees to suck up the CO2.
It’s just a dangerous money making scheme. I will make somebody rich, add taxpayers expense. We would have to subsidize it. An intelligent person would know if you don’t put it in the air. You don’t have to pay to take it out.
It will provide no useful benefit. CO2 is already just a trace gas, at 0.04% of the atmosphere. The amount of "carbon capture" to make a dent on that would be immense (i.e., at the scale of all of the cars and industry since the industrial revolution, if you believe that's the cause) and if that large it would still take more than a century to have an effect.
Carbon capture schemes are really just scams to take your money and to let you buy the absolution that you may think you need
Efficiency losses on all the DAC systems are awful. We can't have a solution that requires a huge burden on our energy grids.
Grow biomass, digest it through an anaerobic system and convert the biogas to renewable natural gas and CO2. That CO2 was drawn from the air via. photosynthesis.
It's energy positive and does the same function scalably and repeatably.
NOT Really, want to really change the environment drastically you use water and grow vegetation, which means converting desert back into productive growing places and for that you must begin with WATER.
The rest is all for profit smoke and mirrors.
N. S
So basically just planting more trees right?
Oh but I forgot you can't make money off trees so we have to make all this crap technology and overpay for it so we can do what a tree does.
The real goal is to suck up taxpayers dollars, via incompetent and/or complicit State officials, like when CA awarded Tesla $1B for their fake Battery Swap Stations.
Ever? Anything is possible. But I think it’s not practical in a timeframe that helps humanity to survive at its current levels of population and standard of living.
I appreciate this article, but it seems to be leaning hard toward the TNG Effect, and waiting 3 decades for the engineering to be affordable seems a lot like waiting for the 3rd act when Georgie will somehow reconfigure the main deflector dish to save the day.
Not to be one of those 'just plant some trees!' people but if it takes the same 3 decades for a tree to reach its full carbon processing ability, why not just do that instead? Instead subsidizing this industry why not just pay people to grow metric tonnes worth of bamboo?
my understanding is that passive capture (i.e. when you're just sucking c02 out of the air) is really not efficient and that the only way it really works is if you do the capture directly at the point of emission.
>Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change?
Yes, but the primary focus first must be a rapid reduction in the _release_ of human-caused emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases because we fast are running out of time.
***
>Steve Smith at the University of Oxford says Mammoth and Stratos are the start of a rapid expansion in global direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) capacity. “A dozen or so more DACCS projects are planned to go live in the next couple of years, by various companies,” he says. “If these all materialise, DACCS capacity could be nudging 800,000 tonnes per year.”
>Overall, ambitions are high – both Occidental and Climeworks plan to be operating multiple plants with capture capacities of 1 million tonnes apiece by 2035.
***
In the year 2023, estimated global emissions of carbon dioxide amounted to 36.8 billion tonnes of CO2 ([36.8 GtCO2](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary "https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary")), excluding CO2 emissions caused by warfare and excluding most of the other CO2 emissions caused by military organizations worldwide.
At 9:00 a.m., if 1,000 DACCS plants magically appear out of the mist, and each plant captures 1 million tonnes of atmospheric CO2 (1 megatonne of CO2) in one year, the 1,000 plants operating without any interruptions would capture a total of 36.8 GtCO2 after 36.8 years, but 1,000 such plants do not exist.
At 9:00 a.m., if 36,800 such DACCS plants magically appear out of the mist and operate without any interruptions, they would capture a total of 36.8 GtCO2 per year, but 36,800 such plants do not exist.
***
In the 330-year period, January 25, 1694–May 15, 2024, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by approximately CO2 150.09 ppm, or an increase of approximately 1168.05 billion tonnes of atmospheric CO2 (1168.05 GtCO2).^1
At 9:00 a.m, if a total of 1,000 DACCS plants magically appear from the mist, and each plant captures 1 million tonnes of atmospheric CO2 per year without interruption, those 1,000 DACCS plants would capture a total of 1168.05 GtCO2 over the following 1168.05 years, by June in the year 3192 CE, but 1,000 such plants do not exist.
At 9:00 a.m, if 36,800 such DACCS plants magically appear out of the mist and operate without interruption, they would capture a total of 1168.05 GtCO2 over 31.74 years, by March 2056, but 36,800 such DACCS plants do not exist.
***
^1 CO2 150.09 ppm is equal to approximately 1168.05 GtCO2 — ESSD Global Carbon Budget 2023 > Executive [Summary](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary "https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary") > "Table 1 Factors used to convert carbon in various units ..." > Enlarged [Table 1](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/essd-15-5301-2023-t01.png "https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/essd-15-5301-2023-t01.png").
On May 15, 2024, the NOAA [Mauna Loa](https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/ "https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/") Observatory ([OBOP](https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/ "https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/")) measured the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at CO2 [427.45 ppm](https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html "https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html").
255.93 years before the present (255.93 yr BP), the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was approximately CO2 [277.36 ppm](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/antarctica2015co2composite.txt "https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/antarctica2015co2composite.txt") (NOAA [NCEI](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/17975 "https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/17975")) — In the phrase _255.93 years before the present_ (255.93 yr BP), _present_ is the designated reference date [January 1, 1950](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present"). 255.93 yr BP is equivalent to Gregorian calendar date January 25, 1694 CE.
In the 330-year period, January 25, 1694–May 15, 2024 period, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increased by about CO2 150.09 ppm, or by approximately 1168.05 GtCO2.
I’m a chemist working on the (electro)conversion of CO2 into economically valuable products. In my opinion, making this process profitable would be the only way to convince big companies to significantly invest in the process. I can tell you that we are far from making the process economically viable Edit: to clarify, I’m not defending that we should prioritize the economy. I’m saying that that’s what policy makers/ big companies prioritize, so it won’t happen until the process is profitable, which is far from now. We thus rely on different approaches to mitigate climate change
My college buddy was working on turning CO2 emissions into carbon neutral concrete. Sounded pretty cool, not sure how profitable it would be.
We will have to subsidize it to make it profitable.
I mean we already do it for fossil fuels and agriculture i don’t see the problem with it
With the price of food so high, the demand is there. It’s bullshit we pay farm subsidies. Made sense during the Great Depression but hasn’t since the agro boom of the 60’s-70’s Subsidizing fuel also makes no sense and hides it’s true cost
We should simply start from de-subsidize fossil fuels and throw that money into renewables.
It's better to reduce anthropogenic CO2 generation
No, this application is already economically feasible. Though messing with concrete is always going to take some time for acceptance. Though not as extreme as aviation, the concrete world takes a long time to accept change.
So you're saying the people in the concrete world aren't very flexible? Maybe even set in their ways?
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Yeah, but I heard they don’t deal well with tense situations
Some projects will pay extra for carbon neutral concrete because the loan rates for climate friendly buildings can be lower. From the supplier's point of view, they just need policies to be stable for long enough to pay off the investment in the new process and distribution infrastructure.
Unfortunately it’s not likely to be… during some research into emissions one of the stickiest issues is that we produce a lot of concrete and it’s one of the most emission intensive things we do, but we need it… it’s relatively cheap, it’s long lasting, and it’s useful for building. Private incentive of businesses is to buy the cheap stuff even if the broader incentive is for a cleaner planet. With no regulations, no one will do that since it disadvantages them against competitors that won’t, a prisoners dilemma if you will. It’s really a complicated mess. If we could produce cleaner energy, use that energy to produce cleaner cement, maybe it will work. Then you have issues with clean energy and transfer, say you produce clean energy in one place but you need it somewhere else, then you need better electrical wires to do it in order to send it further away and not lose the power. It’s truly one of those problems where the more you look at it the more you go “oh shit” because solving one issue doesn’t mean we’re good, it’s like peeling back layer after layer of an onion.
We have products like hempcrete already that are carbon NEGATIVE but sure let’s keep kicking the can down the road and pumping money into carbon neutral and other failed ventures that won’t rescue us from our current trajectory (primary focus of course to line the pockets of the big players like concrete already at the top of the economic pyramid)
Interesting. They burn coal for the carbon to make concrete. I wonder if this captured co2 could be used somehow to replace this process?
It's chemistry. When you make Cement the chemical process releases lots of CO2. Look it up on Wikipedia. Has nothing to do with how you make the heating.
Yeah, turning limestone into quicklime necessarily releases CO2, but it does matter how you generate the necessary heat (1050 °C).
There are several companies working on it
As long as dumping carbon is cheaper than not dumping carbon, they can say, "it's impossible". When the atmosphere can no longer support life, the economics will then have worked themselves out just fine, no human intervention required.
The atmosphere can support life even with double the amount of carbon we have right now. Question is, can it support OUR life...
They only way to to have a really big carbon tax, then it's make it allot easier to make it viable.
Or combine carbon tax with carbon Credit [like from Ministry for the Future](https://www.npr.org/2022/11/11/1136169902/the-carbon-coin-a-novel-idea#:~:text=Kim%20Stanley%20Robinson's%202020%20sci,word%20debate%20in%20policy%20circles). But bottom line, we need to value our Earth. Damaging the Earth needs a real cost, and helping solve the problem needs an economic reward.
I'm also a chemist who worked on electro conversion of CO2 at one point and in my opinion its neat science but a terrible and unrealistic solution to climate change. We'll never be as good as plants in carbon sequestration so we should be using plants as the collection method
Trees and seaweed is where carbon capture money should be going.
In my opinion, if you take a massive step back and think about a global picture of the climate change problem....it becomes clear that it might be easier and better to "suck"/process the CO2 out of the *ocean* rather than out of the air. The vast majority of the excess CO2 that we've been pumping out gets absorbed into the oceans, where it has been increasing the acidity of the water and posing a threat to carbonaceous living things. It's basically been acting as a big sink for all that extra carbon this whole time. We may as well take advantage of that fact and process the seawater directly and remove the carbon from there, rather than from the air (where it is too diluted to collect easily anyway).
It's funny how the obvious solution is staring everyone in the face, but no-one wants to acknowledge it. All kinds of yahoos want to profit from it or else they don't give a hoot. Politics, Business, and Intellect all powered by human greed is our worst enemy.
Of course, it took a planet really jammed full of plants like a hundred million years to pull the CO2 out of the air and bury it, which we are returning to the air over like a hundred years. So, 1. We won't do better than plants at CO2 sequestration and 2. Plants aren't anywhere good enough to do the job on the timescale we need.
It's very easy to scale up plants though. Not even comparable with scaling up complicated machines, so nature is the way to go. But we destroyed so much nature, anything regrowing will take decades to even negate the effects of destruction before contributing to binding ancient co2..
Simply cut down mature trees and sequester the wood in new buildings or store the logs where they won't rot. Plant new trees which grow fast in the freed-up space.
Now, you underestimate the science. For the time being, yes. However we need to fix the economy.
Why is it unrealistic?
The amount of energy and the sheer volume of CO2 required to be removed its astronomical. The system has to be be powered entirely by non-carbon generating power which we simply don't have the capacity for, but also needs to be built and maintained without producing lots of carbon which is currently impossible. We're woefully inefficient compared to plants, so if we would need enough electrolyzers to cover an area bigger than what we've deforested just to get back from the effects of deforestation let alone CO2 release from fossil fuels. We're talking about covering a significant proportion of the surface of the earth in electrolyzer stacks and somehow powering them. The research is interesting and could lead to ways of producing sustainable fuels, but it cannot itself be a method for carbon removal to fight climate change. It will never reach that scale, its like trying to move a mountain one grain of sand at a time.
thanks for being honest about that .. and thanks for your work .. its really important research. The new Iceland Carbon Capture plant will remove around 36ktons Co2/yr .. but globally we are emitting 38 GIGA tons/yr CO2.. so, yeah wed need a million of them .. such is the scale of the problem.
Did you mean that backwards?
.. I looked up the figures for the Iceland plant, and emissions .. I think thats correct. The carbon removal plant removes one Millionth of the amount we are emitting - kilo, mega, giga each x1000 iirc A great research project.. and the tech will improve over time .. but not something that will really make a dent in the problem . I was not being sarcastic .. not sure what you meant by "backwards" ?
Carbon Capture cannot be the sole means of reducing carbon emissions. At most, it is part of many means to be utilized. The main one has to be to actually reduce the emissions from processing and consumption of fossil fuels as well as reducing the consumption of fossil fuels themselves.
sure .. but think about net-zero .. when we get there it will be around +2.5C .. and all that CO2 stays there for a long time, so net-zero == max CO2 == max-heat. We will need to reduce that peak temp to survive - there are 2 ways : remove CO2 or reflect sunlight. hence Ive been talking about SRM .. releasing particulates to increase cloud cover to reflect more sunlight so less is absorbed by the oceans .. which does have a cooling effect.
How efficient can conversion be? How cheap would power have to be to make it competitive? Raw power from solar panels (without storage) might fit the bill. Does conversion circumvent conventional refining costs?
> I can tell you that we are far from making the process economically viable How can it be EVER economically viable? That sounds physically impossible to me. Pure CO2 is not a useful material by itself and any chemical usages will be very much limited in scope. [1] IF we had a nearly free abundant energy source (e.g. fusion) and a government ready to spend some money, one could draw CO2 out of air (e.g. for energy storage, chemical industry or even sequestration), but that would be a government funded expense not a "normal" economic activity.. [1] I guess something like artificial photosynthesis might be a possibility
The idea of how it can be profitable is actually simple. If you can convert CO2 into a valuable chemical whose market value is above the cost transforming it, then it suddenly is profitable
What would be an example of X+CO2=> something of significantly higher value than X ? Especially given that one would need something on a VERY large scale to be a factor in the climate change.
We need to make fuel from air (or CO2 in water) more cheaply than pumping it, then store the excess under ground. Or make it into food or plastic. I applaud your efforts to make it economically viable. Please hurry.
Hoping to rely on undeveloped, unproven technologies isn't a great idea to save the planet
Profitable?! The optimistic, bullshitty “prediction” DAC companies make is that it will “one day” cost $100 per ton. Down from the nearly $1000 it costs today. Profitability isn’t even on the table, but getting more taxpayer subsidies certainly is.
We emitted 35B tons of CO2 in 2020. Surely that number is higher now that we observed the largest YOY jump in emissions. $35T/year to absorb the CO2. Queue the "just plant more trees we can keep burning fossil fuels" bro
The process wouldn’t be profitable on its own. The point of it is to be able to convert it into something more valuable than the cost of trapping it and converting it, that’s how it becomes profitable. But yeah, the problem is that we’re far from that point
Maybe the value of the enterprise should be seen as maintaining life on earth? But that’s the problem isn’t it? Convincing the policy makers and broader population that everything we put a value on is at risk, both in our built environment and the natural one we currently know.
Unfortunately, that is the case, indeed :/ people don’t take climate change as something serious (or in some cases, even real) and they don’t understand that what’s coming will be devastating
GHG is a negative production/consumption externality. All you need to resolve it is an appropriately structured Pigouvian tax and a mechanism to use the tax proceeds to convert/sequested GHG. The fix is rather simple. A new law that says each ton of GhG from all sources you will be taxed at the equivalent of conversion/sequestration. Perform a periodic auction for the conversion/sequestration on the emissions you want to cut from the last period. The auction produces the tax rate. GHG producers have the option of changing/eliminating processes, or conversion/sequestration themselves or through a 3rd party. Auction proceeds go to winners of the auction for conversion/sequestration. And Voila. GHG production is priced at a fair, efficient rate. Producers have an efficient, transparent variable tax rate to adjust the prices of their products. The biggest obstacle, outside no one caring that the world is burning or wanting to pay for the activity that is causing it, is implementing it comprehensively in multiple jurisdictions.
Op didn’t ask about it being economically viable.
They didn’t, but as sad as it is, it either becomes profitable or it won’t be done, that was what I meant
But does it actually work? Meaning does the energy needed to suck carbon out of the air produce more carbon than is removed?
But what about all the deaths from air pollution. And deaths that are from air pollution that are not linked to it because we don't know. Getting rid of fossil fuels and exhaust pipes is the only way forward.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t do it because it’s expensive, quite the opposite. What I argue is that in the world that we live in, it won’t happen because it’s expensive
Paying healthcare costs for lung cancer and other conditions related to air pollution is also way too expensive. Generally costs go down with high demand and technology getting better. EVs use to have 60 mile range 15 years ago and now they are getting closer and closer to 500.
The first law of thermodynamics means it could only work at scale of we piggyback off a natural process. The second law of thermodynamics makes the chances of the above too impossible, in a timescale that would save civilization, anyways. Diffuse CO2 in the atmosphere is a high in entropy state... which is why we could so much work (in the physics sense) by creating it.
Also if you power the process with a carbon emitting energy source it wont help much
The idea is to use clean renewable sources
I dont think it will *ever* be profitable, but it's is *necessary*. If we want to reverse the damage we have done, we need to rethink our economic priorities.
The idea is that if you can turn it into some other valuable product, then the capture and conversion of CO2 would indeed be profitable. But yes, it certainly is depressive that we value the economy over literally human lives
Switching ag subsidies from corn to oil-seed brassicas would certainly make conversion of CO2 to long-term stable solid and liquid form more profitable. My understanding is that, thermodynamically, carbon fixation by plants is way more efficient and, economically, less capital intensive than just about any DAC. Do you think that intuition is correct? The part I'm not sure about is how hard it is to turn a vegetable oil feedstock into a precursor for plastics, carbon fiber, or other durable carbon-based goods. Do you have any insight into this?
Wouldn't it be much easier and cheaper to stop the biggest polluters like large diesel ships that burn Bunker oil that transport cheap junk and people on cruise vacations?
The problem is that that’s far from being enough. Huge portions of green house gases emissions are due to the production of cement (much needed to build houses for a constantly growing population), the production of ammonia (used in fertilizers), or the livestock industry. Regulating the means of transportation is a necessary step, but definitely not enough
From what i've researched carbon capture tech is not a viable solution due to how much energy and machinery it takes. It also technically removes pollution emitted from every country which makes it a hard sell on a massive scale. Why would India pay money to remove CO2 produced by China.
Can we do it without creating more GHG? GHG will be produced by creating the machines. We produce GHG by running them. So will the reduction or removal of GHG from the atmosphere be more than the production of GHG by these processes? Genuinely curious.
The production of all the machinery would inevitably emit GHG, but in the long run the project would result in negative emissions, since it would eventually suck more GHG than those emitted. As for running the machines, the idea of using electrochemical methods rather than thermal ones is to minimize the amount of energy required, run by clean sources. I got to highlight again though that we are indeed far from this ideal scenario, and therefore we need not to rely on it and adopt different policies as soon as possible.
So we run on green electricity and long term positive effect outweighs negative. But it's far off. I suppose we need to accelerate research and investment . I wonder how bad things need to get before society sees beyond profit/growth, which imo is flawed. We're Already seeing the impact in so-called supply chains problems.
What energy are you consuming to pull it from the air with, how are you filtering it out without creating more waste, and how will it be stored permanently? Is storing it permanently a reliable thing, or does it use even more energy? Are there any meaningful products you can create with said carbon that can help this activity turn a profit to help it expand? Some general questions that should help answer that nicely.
This is why it has to be plants that are used to sequester carbon. Doesn't have to be trees though, phytoplankton grow faster and self-sequester by falling to the bottom of the ocean when they die.
Plants grow at a larger scale than could ever be achieved by human effort.
And then die and rot and emit CO2 and methane Stuff has to get fossilized to offset extracted fossil fuels otherwise we just keep increasing the total amount of biospheric carbon The trees help, but the sequestration should be super permanent or we need to just use the energy to get off fossil fuels
Convert biomass to biochar, and you can sequester the carbon in soil for a thousand years or so.
It never occurred to me that the CO2 would need to get fossilized to offset the amount produced, I guess that makes sense though. We're so fucked.
Right! And with a little fertilizer and other sound agricultural practices they can grow even more. The only non-plant process that can compete might be enhanced weathering. Crushed granite or olivine spread on farmland or beaches can sequester carbon long term for a relatively modest energy investment.
How does that work? Never heard of it before
Which is great as long as they don't burn or rot in the air. Meanwhile we're busy ripping it up building stuff. Not the slam dunk many think it is.
In the ideal world that we don’t yet live in, but would be the goal of all this research, the answers are: the energy would come from renewable sources, filtration systems can be reused and recycled, storing it is a bit useless, and it can already be transformed into quite useful products (ethylene, propane, methanol, ethanol, etc)
DAC methodologies often answer all of this. It’s not really described in this article because the article is more critical of the concept and of carbon assets as a hole being used to offset continuing emissions instead of being used to remove emissions that already exist.
Flimsy excuse to keep drilling oil. This isn't the answer. The answer is burning less and less fossil fuels.
Sure, but just in case not everyone cooperates …
I see a lot of arguments about absolutes, there are no absolutes with this. The transition to renewable energy won't and shouldn't be 100%, because people have real lives and the used car market will thrive, same with lawnmowers and some old utility equipment. We don't need 100% transition, we just need to reduce as much as possible in key sectors that normal people won't even notice like industrial shipping, municipal construction projects, packaging for consumer goods, etc. You just go "oh neat" when your Amazon package gets delivered by electric vehicle and the package has a recycling label that actually means its going to be recycled responsibly. That's it!
Plants do it for free
For a while. Then they die and they give it right back.
So how about burying the plants afterwards? Say Bull Kelp. Fastest growing plant on the planet. Plant a field in the water, harvest the plant. Liquify it. Possibly remove non carbon portions through heat or mechanical means. Pump the remaining liquid back into empty oil fields. Set it up in the middle of the ocean outside shipping lanes, power the mechanical portions with floating solar or turbines from ocean currents. Defer some costs by selling a portion of the kelp (it's edible), by providing new fishing grounds because your kelp farm will make a good fish nursery (license the new fishing lanes) and by charging to clear and package plastic trash from the ocean (international contributions). Start at 10,000 acres and see what new fish populations it will support, you may be able to profit off of in house fishery services. But always sequestering carbon from the kelp.
When you realize the scale of the problem you'll know that there's no capturing it. We emit almost 40 BILLION TONS of the stuff each year. We'd have to capture at least that to get to zero ADDED. We should really do at least 60 BILLION TONS each year to have a chance of undoing just what we put in in the past 20 years. And it would still take 3 DECADES. There's no capturing this shit. Just to try and put in perspective: the weight of ALL humans and ALL our domesticated animals is about ONE billion tons. Explain again to me how you mine for the materials needed, how you manufacture the machines needed, how you deploy it all, how you power it all, how you filter, store, transport it all?
Lol oh man, I know the scale of the problem. Do gooder solutions wither and die in the face of the sheer volume of disaster we engineered for ourselves. Commodifying the problem and turning the solution into a gold rush for profit is the only way I can think to turn this tide. Most of the oceans on this planet are a lot like deserts. Not a lot of life, most larger organisms moving across it to more active coastal regions. So what if it becomes profitable to farm the open, mostly inactive, overly carbonated ocean? And require a percentage of the biomass to get sequestered as a function of the system. Think of it as farming carbon over 40 percent of the planet's surface. That would be the long term goal. Of course none of this matters if you keep pumping an Armageddon worth of carbon out every year. But no single solution is going to save us. We need everything all at once, and realistically it needs to profit the greedy sociopaths that always rise to the top. If you have better ideas, please share.
Phytoplankton
That's BECCS, and there are a variety of ways to do it. My favorite is Charm Industrial- they turn leftover crop waste into bio-oil that they inject back into old oil wells where it solidifies.
Isn't it hot down there?
Thank you I never heard of this. I have some reading to do
So we turn the oceans into an unhealthy monoculture we need to continuously dump fertilizer into? Great.
Second growth forests that are replanted for logging yes. Protected old growth forests are actually carbon sinks though they store it underground.
We could turn their dead bodies into biochar, or charcoal, a stable solid form of carbon that lasts much longer.
Phytoplankton
I'm more in the Greek phylloplankton
Plants do it at a slower rate than what we emit. And we also get rid of them to use their land, which makes it even worse
Short answer: no Long answer: noooooooooo
Detailed explanation: No, because definitely not.
Long answer: if we went to zero emissions today, we still need to suck the excess carbon out of the air. So yes, if the process is permanent and carbon negative: see Climeworks
No. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. Why are fossil fuel companies so interested in this technology? They use the captured CO2 to extract additional oil from wells. It's just another distraction to avoid the elephant in the room and continue business as usual.
The answer is No
No, not even close. If we somehow managed to increase the effectiveness of the machinery by several orders of magnitude and ran them on entirely renewable energy sources, we'd still be nowhere near capable of manufacturing them on the scale we'd need. Removing CO2 isn't theoretically impossible, but it is practically impossible. You know the money and effort that's been spent on developing fossil fuel infrastructure over the last 150 years? We'd have to duplicate that and more, on top of ceasing all emissions. It's simply not happening.
Agreed. The other part that is ignored; is methane. As temps continue to climb, trapped methane is released. There would have to be a plan for capturing (or mitigating) that too. No chance of that happening at the scale needed either.
No - it’s been promoted as a solution but the scale of such an effort makes it impossible.
If you powered the plants with solar and wind, and made the captured carbon into fuel and sold it at an increased price, i bet a good number of people would pay extra for net zero fuel as opposed to buying a new car. Fuel is a better energy store than batteries are. And all the transportation and distribution infrastructure is already in place.
The problem with fuel is that it burns again, and we need to reduce the concentration of CO2, we cannot really afford to maintain our current levels. Instead, it should be transformed to other compounds retained on Earth, such as polymers
As something that can be implemented without the need to replace every fuel consuming appliance on the planet it would certainly be helpful. Just pick a spot in the world, coat it in panels, and connect it to fuel plants. The impact is absolutely immediate. If you want to reduce the effect of fuel consumption in the short term, bringing combustion to net zero is a LOT faster than replacing literally everything
Any new product has a scaling rate. This is very low for carbon capture, numbers I have seen show that even with great Investment it will only be relevant in 40, 60 years. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, you never know what may happen. Even planting trees takes tremendous time and investment. But, as the latest numbers show, we will hit 3C, and thus it is best to do ALL approaches, and that is what most experts, agencies and governments suggest.
Bottom line is in order to get us back to 350 ppm, some kind of carbon capture is necessary. It will be expensive - and certainly no replacement for decarbonizing power generation and transportation. But as long as your timeframe is “ever” the answer is unequivocally “yes.”
Would do better planting trees and banning plastic water bottles .
I'm more interested in using algae/ plankton in the ocean, consumes carbon then becomes a sink at the bottom of the ocean. Likely how much of the oil deposits were originally formed millions of years ago. Photosynthesis provides the energy needed to make this conversion and is superior to trees as the carbon sink cannot burn.
Sure: reforestation, wetland regeneration, etc.
burn carbon to suck carbon? too little, too late, and neither the thermodynamics or the economics make sense. just fancy greenwashing.
Carbon capture can reverse the problem if climate change but nearly all human CO2 emissions need to be eliminated first. Then carbon carbon capture would have to be implemented on a massive scale worldwide. If the carbon dioxide is dissolved in water similar to what is done with soft drinks then the water is pumped into saltwater aquifers the carbon will combine with other minerals and turn to stone. Running such carbon capture would require an enormous amount of carbon free electricity to power it. I don't see renewables being adequate. However there is another power source which can safely produce enormous amounts of reliable, constant carbon free electricity. Separating carbon dioxide from everything else in air will also require a lot of energy to do.
Isn't this just a fools errand? What are we trying to accomplish with this technology? Wouldn't the money be much better off on better batteries, more efficient solar panels, etc?
Hope so, changes in policy and regulation almost completely solved the ozone crisis of the 80’s. Can’t hurt to remain hopeful.
I think we would have to have a surplus of clean energy generation to make this worthwhile. Given the correlation between CO2 levels and the climate I would say yes it would have an effect if deployed on a large enough scale.
It's necessary. It won't happen soon or quickly enough.
It's interesting to note that the energy these "CO2 vacuums" appear to use is electricity.... that most likely comes from a power plant that uses.... fossil fuels. It looks more like a thought experiment rather than a practical device.
Trees: look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!
phytoplankton
No.
No
It will be successful in fooling some people.
No. It's band aid solution for a gaping wound, championed by the guy that is continuing to stab you.
No
If you do it properly, there are ways to pull carbon out of the air without using vacuums. Most of them are natural processes.
Just sucking it in will help but it takes lots of energy. So strap a ton of solar panels and say it works.
Step 1: Release copious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Step 2: Removed copious amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. Step 3: Profit.
There are these things called plants. They suck CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into oxygen. The oceans also suck CO2 from the atmosphere. Now if we lower the level of CO2 too much the whole planet dies. Don’t F with nature.
Who is proposing lowering CO2 even to levels from 100 years ago? Plants and the ocean also give up CO2. This is the natural carbon cycle and if it was a solution we wouldn't have seen levels go up in recent history.
The ocean absorbs about 50% of the CO2 but as it does it becomes more acidic and less efficient but man will still be less efficient than nature at conquering CO2
With enough of those machines spread around the way I can’t see why it wouldn’t work.
No.
No, Think about all the infrastructure that generates CO2, Carbon capture infrastructures need to be of similar scale to make a difference.
As useful as the thermal blanket Venezuela put on their melted glacier
No.. just kill/ retard plant life.. you know the stuff that keeps us animals alive
NO .. not anytime soon, and were headed to nearly +2C by 2040. **The new Iceland CCS plant catches 36 KILO tons of CO2/yr .. and we are emitting 38 GIGA tons of CO2/yr globally** Simple MATH says we need 1 MILLION of these .. so they are not at the scale we need to solve the problem. Planting trees is also great, but that takes land scpace and time and money also .. and they need to get large to capture a good amount of Carbon. Keep in mind that NET-ZERO == MAX CO2 == MAX TEMP .. all that CO2 stays up there a long time, which means it stays hot for a long time. There are 2 ways to reduce the heat/temp - remove CO2 or reflect more sunlight. So.. we have to start doing SRM - release particulates to increase cloud cover over the oceans, to reflect more sunlight so less is absorbed.. thus exerting a cooling effect. Basically we have no choice - we will need to do SRM to bring peak-heat down, so that we can survive coming decades and begin the long slow process of removing CO2.
It never will be. Without subsidies or carbon tax. The grim reality is that we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. If we profit from the removal process then all the better. This is why some companies are trying to push this. But we could just as well profit if we give carbon tax money to vetted companies that plant trees.
The energy costs for this, not to mention things like pollen and insects that flow through the air, will make this so expensive. All The profit these companies need is from the government contracts that allow the company to get grants and funding for these ideas. I’m sure it will work well for the politicians writing the bills, and giving funding for the idea, with no common sense allows everyone to kick the can down the road on carbon taxes.
no
Imagine transforming the very gas contributing to global warming into one of the most revolutionary materials of our era—graphene. Our startup proposes a groundbreaking method to capture atmospheric CO2 and convert it directly into high-quality graphene, using a novel, energy-efficient process. This isn't just about creating an advanced material; it's about redefining waste as a resource. By leveraging the excess CO2, we aim to produce graphene that could revolutionize industries—from electronics and energy storage to construction and beyond—while simultaneously combating climate change. Join us as we turn today's biggest challenge into tomorrow's greatest opportunity.
Nope. The thought that carbon is the control knob of temperature does not fit the facts
No. If you want to suck CO2 out of the air you need to do it at the smokestack itself where it is concentrated. Once it's out in the atmosphere at .04%, it's like trying to catch bears in Manhattan.
No. That’s like having a gushing aortic wound and trying to replace lost blood with a 0.000000005ml transfusion. You want to save the patient, stop the damn bleeding.
We need to STOP emitting FIRST. We released a record high amount of CO2 last year! It’s ridiculous to think about carbon capture when emissions are rising year on year.
Never. Reality is that filtering all the CO2 out of four times the volume of the Houston astrodome yields ONE TON and would take tons of ffs to operate, yet we spew 40+ gigatonnes (billions) of C into the atmosphere annually.
Most “green initiatives” are payback schemes to big political donors, no matter political party affiliation
We are quickly approaching a serious and dangerous CO2 deficit... the lowest levels in millions of years. No CO2 - no plant life. No plant life - NO OXYGEN. Just wondering WTF are you guys talking about massively reducing or trying to eliminate CO2. Wouldn't walking in front of a bus be quicker without killing the rest of life on Earth.
Isn’t that what making a bog does? Making a bog is cheap and still it isn’t profitable.
Before we invest in this we need to protect the phytoplankton in the oceans. They already sequester more carbon on a daily basis than we will ever be able to with these ridiculous air sucking machines. However, we're killing our best oxygen producers with ocean acidification and forever chemicals.
It seems pretty obvious that the most economic form of CCUS (carbon capture and utilisation) is to use an advanced form of photosynthetic processing to produce high tensile material for some use that locks the carbon up for at least some hundreds of years, or alternatively can be used to as fuel to displace some fossil fuels - oh thats right - tree.!
Will doing the reverse of what caused climate change help slow its growth? Uh, yeah. Will it be enough and on time to save us? That’s the trillion dollar question.
Trees and plants do it naturally. If they had never started chopping down the Amazon, we might not be in this mess. But now we have forest fires every single year here in Canada, so even less trees to suck up the CO2.
It’s just a dangerous money making scheme. I will make somebody rich, add taxpayers expense. We would have to subsidize it. An intelligent person would know if you don’t put it in the air. You don’t have to pay to take it out.
No
It will provide no useful benefit. CO2 is already just a trace gas, at 0.04% of the atmosphere. The amount of "carbon capture" to make a dent on that would be immense (i.e., at the scale of all of the cars and industry since the industrial revolution, if you believe that's the cause) and if that large it would still take more than a century to have an effect. Carbon capture schemes are really just scams to take your money and to let you buy the absolution that you may think you need
each square meter on earth has 14 pounds of CO2 overhead.
No it will not.
Are there studies on the comparative viability of water vapor capture or cloud seeding for climate cooling?
No. In a word.
hasnt this been disproven more than multiple times.....?
Efficiency losses on all the DAC systems are awful. We can't have a solution that requires a huge burden on our energy grids. Grow biomass, digest it through an anaerobic system and convert the biogas to renewable natural gas and CO2. That CO2 was drawn from the air via. photosynthesis. It's energy positive and does the same function scalably and repeatably.
NOT Really, want to really change the environment drastically you use water and grow vegetation, which means converting desert back into productive growing places and for that you must begin with WATER. The rest is all for profit smoke and mirrors. N. S
So basically just planting more trees right? Oh but I forgot you can't make money off trees so we have to make all this crap technology and overpay for it so we can do what a tree does.
The real goal is to suck up taxpayers dollars, via incompetent and/or complicit State officials, like when CA awarded Tesla $1B for their fake Battery Swap Stations.
> like when CA awarded Tesla $1B for their fake Battery Swap Stations. Source please https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_battery_station
Plants do this. They love CO2.
Ever? Anything is possible. But I think it’s not practical in a timeframe that helps humanity to survive at its current levels of population and standard of living.
Cut a hole in ozone layer and all carbon will get sucked into outer space
Worth a shot
I appreciate this article, but it seems to be leaning hard toward the TNG Effect, and waiting 3 decades for the engineering to be affordable seems a lot like waiting for the 3rd act when Georgie will somehow reconfigure the main deflector dish to save the day. Not to be one of those 'just plant some trees!' people but if it takes the same 3 decades for a tree to reach its full carbon processing ability, why not just do that instead? Instead subsidizing this industry why not just pay people to grow metric tonnes worth of bamboo?
No
my understanding is that passive capture (i.e. when you're just sucking c02 out of the air) is really not efficient and that the only way it really works is if you do the capture directly at the point of emission.
>Will sucking carbon from air ever really help tackle climate change? Yes, but the primary focus first must be a rapid reduction in the _release_ of human-caused emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases because we fast are running out of time. *** >Steve Smith at the University of Oxford says Mammoth and Stratos are the start of a rapid expansion in global direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) capacity. “A dozen or so more DACCS projects are planned to go live in the next couple of years, by various companies,” he says. “If these all materialise, DACCS capacity could be nudging 800,000 tonnes per year.” >Overall, ambitions are high – both Occidental and Climeworks plan to be operating multiple plants with capture capacities of 1 million tonnes apiece by 2035. *** In the year 2023, estimated global emissions of carbon dioxide amounted to 36.8 billion tonnes of CO2 ([36.8 GtCO2](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary "https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary")), excluding CO2 emissions caused by warfare and excluding most of the other CO2 emissions caused by military organizations worldwide. At 9:00 a.m., if 1,000 DACCS plants magically appear out of the mist, and each plant captures 1 million tonnes of atmospheric CO2 (1 megatonne of CO2) in one year, the 1,000 plants operating without any interruptions would capture a total of 36.8 GtCO2 after 36.8 years, but 1,000 such plants do not exist. At 9:00 a.m., if 36,800 such DACCS plants magically appear out of the mist and operate without any interruptions, they would capture a total of 36.8 GtCO2 per year, but 36,800 such plants do not exist. *** In the 330-year period, January 25, 1694–May 15, 2024, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by approximately CO2 150.09 ppm, or an increase of approximately 1168.05 billion tonnes of atmospheric CO2 (1168.05 GtCO2).^1 At 9:00 a.m, if a total of 1,000 DACCS plants magically appear from the mist, and each plant captures 1 million tonnes of atmospheric CO2 per year without interruption, those 1,000 DACCS plants would capture a total of 1168.05 GtCO2 over the following 1168.05 years, by June in the year 3192 CE, but 1,000 such plants do not exist. At 9:00 a.m, if 36,800 such DACCS plants magically appear out of the mist and operate without interruption, they would capture a total of 1168.05 GtCO2 over 31.74 years, by March 2056, but 36,800 such DACCS plants do not exist. *** ^1 CO2 150.09 ppm is equal to approximately 1168.05 GtCO2 — ESSD Global Carbon Budget 2023 > Executive [Summary](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary "https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/#executive_summary") > "Table 1 Factors used to convert carbon in various units ..." > Enlarged [Table 1](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/essd-15-5301-2023-t01.png "https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/essd-15-5301-2023-t01.png"). On May 15, 2024, the NOAA [Mauna Loa](https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/ "https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/") Observatory ([OBOP](https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/ "https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/")) measured the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at CO2 [427.45 ppm](https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html "https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html"). 255.93 years before the present (255.93 yr BP), the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was approximately CO2 [277.36 ppm](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/antarctica2015co2composite.txt "https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/antarctica2015co2composite.txt") (NOAA [NCEI](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/17975 "https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/17975")) — In the phrase _255.93 years before the present_ (255.93 yr BP), _present_ is the designated reference date [January 1, 1950](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present"). 255.93 yr BP is equivalent to Gregorian calendar date January 25, 1694 CE. In the 330-year period, January 25, 1694–May 15, 2024 period, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 increased by about CO2 150.09 ppm, or by approximately 1168.05 GtCO2.
No
Wouldn’t it be better to funnel power plant exhaust into these machines instead?