Isn't this bad for marine life? We should be pumping the ocean full of O2, not CO2.
Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
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Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#12This is cool. CO2 emissions are 36B tons per year. At $100 per ton, it would cost $3.6T to offset assuming you could build enough of these plants. At 4000 tons per year we’d need to build 9 million of these plants.
It will be more expensive at 36 gigaton scale scale because the supply chain and minerals don't currently exist to support that scale. These prototypes are small enough that they can essentially freeload off of existing industrial supply chains for accounting purposes.
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#13This is cool. CO2 emissions are 36B tons per year. At $100 per ton, it would cost $3.6T to offset assuming you could build enough of these plants. At 4000 tons per year we’d need to build 9 million of these plants.
On the other hand, can I pay them already now a few thousand dollars a year to remove my share? That would be the first actual carbon offsetting.
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#14This is cool. CO2 emissions are 36B tons per year. At $100 per ton, it would cost $3.6T to offset assuming you could build enough of these plants. At 4000 tons per year we’d need to build 9 million of these plants.
> CO2 emissions are 36B tons per year
It shouldn’t be analyzed (or sold) as a technology that has to solve the whole problem. We need a toolbox of solutions for different geographies, scales and budgets while we also reduce our overall emissions. Having said that, if we reduce emissions by an order of magnitude and improve the efficiency of this process by an order of magnitude then it might enter the ballpark of viability.
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#15Headline: "Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth’s oceans combined"
Subheadline: "The world’s oceans act as nature’s most significant carbon sink, soaking up roughly 25% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by human activities."
Good news, climate change is solved! Within 1-2 days, this plant will bring CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels!
How do such obvious bullshit "news" make it onto the front page?
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#16A newer larger pilot plant is set to remove 4000 metric tons / year. Annual emissions are > 36 Billion tons. Even if the 'commercial scale plant' could remove 4 million tons / year, and they would need to make thousands to really make a difference. It's unclear how many emissions are required operate it. How much rock is required, and how many emissions does it take to mine/process/transport it to the plant, and then…
Running the math on scaling any proposed systems up to a rate where they can actually make a dent on the atmosphere is VERY depressing.
It doesn't matter what sequestration process you want to use. The volume of material you end up with after removing a couple hundred gigatons out of the atmosphere isn't a pile and isn't a mountain, it's a mountain range. This is a HUGE industrial process that is going to be required, and the volume of material that will come out of that industrial scale sequestration facility is very hard to imagine.
It doesn't matter what form you choose to sink the carbon into. Carbon density per cubic foot just doesn't vary much, even if you go all the way up to exotic targets like diamond. Hundreds of gigatons maps to huge volumes, and always will.
Worse, most things you might choose to sink the carbon into are energetically favorable for burning that carbon back into CO2 should mankind ever realize it could turn that huge pile of whatever into a source of energy. That sets up a situation where even if we solve the problem "now", most approaches would have us creating an attractive nuisance that is very likely to get burned back into the atmosphere 500 or 1000 years from now if we ever forget why it exists. Such an enormous amount of available potential energy will be very valuable financially and VERY difficult for humanity to refrain from burning back into the antmosphere again.
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#17Are there any possible consequences to sequestering CO2 rather than splitting it into C and O and putting the oxygen back into the atmosphere? If we were to sequester all the CO2 we have emitted as a species, the end result would be oxygen making up less of the atmosphere than before we started.
Fundamentally it takes a lot of energy to split the molecules back apart, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of these plans involve doing so. There's so much Oxygen in the atmosphere that we really can't make significant changes to it. CO2 is a very small constituent in comparison, but it still has significant effects. The best analogy I've seen is that it's comparable to the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee.
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#18What possibly could go wrong?
Well, you could waste a lot of money that could be put to better use.
Recent research shows that the global warming we are experiencing is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2, not the other way around.[0] Better to spend some money on investigating the actual reason for the warming.
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#19A newer larger pilot plant is set to remove 4000 metric tons / year. Annual emissions are > 36 Billion tons. Even if the 'commercial scale plant' could remove 4 million tons / year, and they would need to make thousands to really make a difference. It's unclear how many emissions are required operate it. How much rock is required, and how many emissions does it take to mine/process/transport it to the plant, and then…
Running the math on scaling any proposed systems up to a rate where they can actually make a dent on the atmosphere is VERY depressing. It doesn't matter what sequestration process you want to use. The volume of material you end up with after removing a couple hundred gigatons out of the atmosphere isn't a pile and isn't a mountain, it's a mountain range. This is a HUGE industrial process that is going to be required…
When sequestering, it is imperative that the carbon in scope is buried in a form that is both stable and non combustible to prevent future potential combustion.
From Climeworks:
> Once the CO₂ is released from the filters, storage partner Carbfix transports the CO₂ underground, where it reacts with basaltic rock through a natural process, which transforms into stone, and remains permanently stored.
Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
#20I wonder why Stripe would buy green hydrogen from them.