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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

#7
> Recently, Equatic announced the start of engineering designs for the world's first commercial-scale, ocean-based CDR plant. According to Sanders, this plant could remove CO2 at a rate 99,000 times faster than the oceans naturally do.

The clickbait headline implies the plant to do this exists, but the article reveals they’ve started to think about how they can maybe do this in the future.

Everything in this article reads like snake oil shilling. I’m all for finding “the brighter side of news” but not if the news is literally imaginary.

Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans

#8
post #5

This 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.

For reference, there were about 62,500 power plants in existence about a decade ago [1], many probably constructed several decades ago. In 2022, China, the biggest industrial force, constructed an order of 100 power plants [2]. This is for something that people desperately need for our modern life to function.

But suppose, we do go crazy and build in short order 62500 of these Carbon Capture plants, which provide zero benefit to any individual but have positive externalities. That will amount to offsetting 0.69% of current emission rate. Laughable.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=28392

[2] https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...

Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans

#9
Are 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.

Re: Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans

#10
A 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 put the processed rock somewhere else?

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