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 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.