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.
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.
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.
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.
A good video by Adam Something on the subject.