Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
Climeworks did not give an exact cost for each ton of carbon removed, but said it was closer to $1,000 a ton than $100 a ton – the latter of which is widely seen as a key threshold for making the technology affordable and viable.
As the company scales up the size of its plants and bring costs down, the aim is to reach $300 to $350 a ton by 2030 before hitting $100 a ton around 2050, said Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, on a call with reporters.
… and TIL
There are already much bigger DAC plants in the works from other companies. Stratos, currently under construction in Texas, for example, is designed to remove 500,000 tons of carbon a year, according to Occidental, the oil company behind the plant.
But there may be a catch. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
Carbon Capture is a fraud. It’s always been a fraud.
Our Conservative Sask Party government blathered on about it for years as an alternative to “Trudeau’s evil Carbon Tax”. And it went about as well as you’d expect.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/carbon-capture-projects-not-meeting-targets-1.6241420
So it’s just fracking with recycled gases?
The Icelandic one isn’t.
The ones run by oil companies are.
The one in texas funded by the oil company isn’t built yet.
I agree with the video. Carbon capture is no replacement for reducing emissions.
Also, I am excited that people are working on direct capture too because many of the same arguments that the video makes, were valid arguments against solar and wind a decade ago, but not any more thanks to those early pilot projects.
The article states that the plant needs to be 10x more efficient to be considered a viable tool.
Carbon capture is needed in the long term, so it’s good that technologies for it are already being developed. Ending emissions isn’t enough, we need to also remove the GHG’s that are already up in the air. But that comes later. The most pressing thing currently is to remove emissions, or to stop shitting on the floor, as Adam put it.
Even then, I am sceptical about the scalability of DAC solutions. Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) seems more scalable, like building huge platforms for seaweeds to grow on, and then sinking them and their stored carbon into the depths of the ocean.
My friend was working on a start-up for marine carbon capture. I have a lot of friends moving to green energy and related fields. It’s promising to see.
This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
el oh el
Yeah, pure greenwashing.
The Icelandic plant is NOT doing that though (just to be clear)
Yet. Not doing that yet. That’s cause it’s not up and running yet lol. We’ll see who pays them top dollar for their CO2.
So how are they going to make a profit off of this? Cause as I was told, that‘s the sole reason to do anything on this planet.
Here’s how it works
Later, a report will come out that it doesn’t really work just like every other time something like this has come out, but then we’ll just continue on this path with unrestrained fossil fuel use because we think we can invent our way out later, making things worse and worse because we’re just a bunch of fucking idiots I guess.
Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
Well, they have to sell the carbon they capture to make money. If you suck up carbon and put it underground, where’s your revenue stream? The ground ain’t paying you to stuff it full of carbon. These big vacuums ain’t free, they have to pay for them somehow.
They’re essentially using it for fracking so it’ll end up in the water supply.
Occidental is the oil company - they aren’t going to sell the carbon to themselves, they are just going to use it to pump more oil out of old wells compounding the effect
It’s for profit. They aren’t doing it for funsies or to help environment
Why not trees?
“Here’s how it works.”
That’s the neat part. It doesn’t. Purely performative.
All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency.
There are already much bigger DAC plants in the works from other companies. Stratos, currently under construction in Texas, for example, is designed to remove 500,000 tons of carbon a year, according to Occidental, the oil company behind the plant.
But there may be a catch. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, everything seems fine here.
$1000 for a ton.
An average tree weighs a ton.
Eli5 how carbon capture works? And why is it not violating the second law of thermodynamics? With the same money and time, are they better than planting trees?
A typical process passes ambient air over some liquid or solid solvent that can absorb CO2, then later inserts energy to separate the CO2 again for storage. For example, sodium hydroxide reacts with CO2 in the air to form sodium carbonate. Then later, the sodium carbonate is heated to release pure CO2, regenerating the sodium hydroxide in the process.
This doesn’t violate any laws of thermodynamics because of the constant energy required. Compared to growing trees, direct air capture is generally much more expensive, requiring large capital investment and constant energy input. It is more space efficient though.
Thanks for the explanation. Second law of thermodynamics, as in, is the energy used to heat the solvent creates more CO2 than the CO2 it captured? What about algae or moss? They can be more space efficient than trees, and we can technically build a structure vertically.
is the energy used to heat the solvent creates more CO2 than the CO2 it captured?
Ah yeah, no absolutely not. In total it takes much more energy to capture the CO2 than was generated by burning the fossil fuel that emitted it.
What about algae or moss? They can be more space efficient than trees, and we can technically build a structure vertically.
I’m not too familiar with algea/moss CO2 absorption, but it could be better. Usually the downside of a vertical structure is you increase the capital investment again, negating the advantage of plants. And to provide lighting you’ll need energy which takes space as well (e.g. solar panel field)
Have they actually got any proof these work yet? Last I saw the biggest current running one was just lying about it’s figures
“Enhanced oil recovery” really sounds like fracking with extra steps
I’m sure they thought of this (and this one is in Iceland so they have a bunch of geothermal energy), but wouldn’t the power consumption and the emissions that come with producing the power negate some of the practical capacity of these carbon vacuums?
I assume it would be using renewable, non-carbon producing forms of energy to power this; ie. geothermal, solar, wind, heck - even nuclear would be a good power source for this sort of machinery (with a consistent power requirement).
The more pertinent question IMO is, how many of these machines would be need to first bring global net-Carbon emissions to 0 - and the. How many more would we need to reverse the last century+ of CO2 pollution and bring air quality back to pre-industrial revolution levels?
I don’t want to be a downer, but I’m afraid people will see the extra emissions headroom and speed up production instead of letting the carbon capture reverse anything.
It would be more effective to just move location agnostic, power consuming stuff like data centres to Iceland to run on the green energy instead of sucking up power from grids with fossil fuels in them.
This machine pulls in 36,000 tons of carbon per year, our average carbon output is about 36 billion tons per year, so you’d need to build a million of these to offset our current output.
Reversing the last century of emissions is interesting because we would likely have to carefully monitor and adjust how much we pull in as we go along because any dramatic changes could have serious climate consequences.
