The problem is, projects like this turn our heads away from the real problems. Politicians and investors will justify not reducing greenhouse gas emissions because we have this new technology which will save us all. Fact is, climate change has already been solved, we know what we have to do since decades. It is not a problem which will be solved by technology, it is a political problem. In addition to that people will say that they are doing enough by investing in carbon capture but will not address the biodiversity crisis which can only be addressed by proposing real environmental policy change.

Totally agree. Same with electric cars. Yes, they are not great. But we need to find a way to reduce emissions rapidly. Which means re-using already built infrastructure. Which is, as much as it sucks, roads.

It's not the most kid friendly metaphor but I tend to look at it as "the bucket of fucks". Everything you give a fuck about has a certain amount of weight and there is an nigh infinite amount of things to give a fuck about. But you are a person, you can only carry around so many fucks or else the fuck bucket gets too heavy to move. Having an immovable fuck bucket is dispiriting so you give up.

But the people who are generally successful in resolving the fucks for everyone generally select a couple manageable ones for themselves to handle. But you have to invest DEEP into that fuck. But you know what? Making progress on something is relative. This achievement is HUGE to the people who invested in this particular thing to give a fuck about and it is making things a little better. We can afford to be a little inspired while realizing that all the things in our own fuck buckets are important too.

The worst part is, one of the "downsides" of renewables like wind and solar is curtailment. A "problem" that needs to be fixed is that they sometimes produce excess energy that you end up having to simply discard if demand isn't there. This is often invoked disingenuously by the allies of apocalypse as some major problem with the tech -- that building enough renewables to basically cover regular power requirements would entail having hugely excess production that gets curtailed, which is somehow wasteful.

DAC and green hydrogen are ways to eat up excess supply and reap benefit from it and should be categorized in similar veins to other forms of energy storage. They are both undeniably necessary technologies to achieve overall goals. Can either solve the problem on their own? God no. But who's saying they can?

It's not even a drop in the bucket. A drop maybe contains 0.1 ml, a bucket contains 10l, so that's 0.001%. This is way less of the needed volume of capture, 0.000225%.

I haven’t done the math but I studied a lot energy stuff for my degree. I can say for sure that’s it’s a hell of a lot more money and work than just reducing emissions in the first place. The below comment is accurate, if cynical; I knew someone who works on it in the states. You collect a bunch of co2 (using energy), then compress it (with energy), then ship it (yep diesel trucks), to salt caves where it is pumped (with energy) into the empty salt lined cave where the pressure causes the salt to sort of seal in a partial melt from the pressure. And hope we don’t accidentally frack it all back out. Needless to say I think it’s a waste of technology, money, and political will that’d be better spent on a plethora of other options.

I mean just looking at the amount of concrete in that picture, I get pessimistic. When will this particular site have dug itself out of the carbon "hole" created by its construction?

As for trees: That is really, really hard to measure and even harder to know in advance. Some factors appear to be:

• different tree species store different amounts of carbon
• tree plantation or actual forest?
• prior use of the site (e.g. meadows do store carbon too)
• development over time (most trees need to grow a couple years before they start storing significant amounts of carbon)
• failure of sites due to being planted in a bad way (e.g. a lot of Chinese Green Wall sites and quick-buck billion tree projects seem to be affected by this)

IIRC, a tree absorbs up to 3 tons/year, and takes a bunch of years to get to that stage.

The trees also don't sequester underground, and will need surface area staying as forest for the rest of time.

As many have echoed: an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure. Most bang for our buck would be to change our lifestyle and regulations. But as that's not feasible we're at the geo engineering and artificial sequestration stage.

I don't know what more efficient means here. The CO2 is stored sorta permanently underground, whereas trees release their CO2 when they rot or burn.

Trees are kind of better because they grow on their own, and don't require massive amounts of green energy to scrub the atmosphere.

How do you measure "efficiency" ? By money spent? Then yes, trees are currently cheaper. But trees are complicated (see other comments). Additionally, even if we cover the whole landmass with trees, there is still a catastrophic amount of Co2 left in the atmosphere.

than* trees

Right? It sequesters 0.0001% of our annual carbon output. They say they hope to reduce the cost to $400-$600/ton by 2030 so,even using their 2030 estimate, this plant cost $14.4M - $28.8M. To sequester 1% of our current carbon emissions per year would cost $144B - $288B. $7.2T - $14.4T to do 50%.

This doesn't sound like a productive use of the limited R&D funds that go into combating climate change.

Tey press it in the ground near volcsnos where it turns into limestone. The plant is powered by geothermal.

I don't think there's a lot of oil around volcanos. Iceland isn't known for it, at least.

There's lots of industrial uses for CO2 -- this style of DAC plant can be viewed as a green producer. That said, it's really easy to outpace industrial demands and we can expect any facility like this will need to be sequestering most of their "production". It's hard to overstate how much excess CO2 there is in the atmosphere compared to the sum total of all industrial carbon dioxide needs. Since CO2 is thermodynamicly very stable, splitting it up to get pure carbon would be quite inefficient.

It's part of the business model of every single DAC project pretty much without exception. Any way you can make back a bit of money selling that CO2 rather than sequestering it is an opportunity to offset costs. And no matter what you think of market economics, they're very effective at reducing costs.

One of the most interesting uses is with projects like e.g. CarbonCure, where they dope cement production with CO2 which has known effects to strengthen (or at least not weaken) concrete. They don't produce their own CO2 for their plants and so need to align themselves with renewable CO2 production facilities (which they do Heirloom Carbon).

Big issue is they it's hard to compete with fossil-based CO2 production. So the next step once tech like this is proven is to start regulating/banning fossil-based CO2 production.

That's one of the big goals, plants like this are important too because they allow the tech to be developed and tested so we have real world numbers to work with when planning and designing for commercial applications

Ackshulaaly, they claimed it can handle "nearly 10". 9 is nearly 10. Pushes glasses back up bridge of nose

I shared the article because it is relevant to this community but I personally do not like carbon capture. You don’t need to capture what you don’t create