this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Well, what if we used renewable energy to run a DAC process? That would require lots of solar and wind power, but we’re going to need a lot of that anyway to get permanently rid of fossil fuels.
As you pointed out, the low concentratiions are a serious issue for any process, but maybe plants will do a better job our current machines can. Either way, once you have that carbon, we would really need put it back where it came from. The way I see it, slowing down global warming is a step in the right direction and becoming carbon neutral is another step. However, what we really need is a complete ban on all fossil fuels and an efficient way to reduce the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
Also, I have fairly negative view on CCU, since it doesn’t really solve the problem. CCS on the other hand seems like a better option. If you do it with plants and store the carbon as biochar, I’m all for it. If you want to do it with electricity and chemistry, I’m ok with that too, as long as it gets the job done.
The problem with using wind and solar is that you’d need a lot of it due to the energy requirements. While both should be used extensively, there comes a point where the resources required (these would likely use precious metal catalysts) to build the CCS plants and all the power infrastructure for it and waste produced makes it the obvious choice to just use trees.
If you look at how trees function, it is an incredibly complex process with some rather extreme conditions which are difficult to replicate with machines. If someone does manage to get it done efficiently then that’s great (though I think this is unlikely). But I don’t want it to become like recycling did: an excuse for companies to do whatever they want. The original expression was “reduce, reuse, recycle” with recycling being the last resort, but now we never hear about the first two because they get in the way of obscene profit.