Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
climeworks.shopIf you want make your money work against climate change, I wouldn't recommend this service - it's simply not competitive compared to voluntary carbon markets, in which well-certified projects can offset a teqCO2 for less than 10 USD (that's 100 times more efficient carbon offsetting than ClimeWorks, for high-end projects), and do so with additional co-benefits in terms of biodiversity and livelihood of local communities. REDD+ projects such as https://www.standfortrees.org are good examples of that.
The differentiating factor of this service is that it's "Permanent: turn CO2 into stone". That benefit is mostly psychological, not pragmatic. Aside from that, the 'small land and water usage' metric is also biased. Yes, rainforest protection projects use land, and you know what else they do? Protect rainforests!
It's also not that promising as a CCS technology. Just like energy, CO2 is most efficiently captured where its concentration is highest - that is in power plants, steelmaking plants, etc.
I know we love revolutionary startups and shiny new things here, but there are scientific bodies and certification standards which have already done the work well in this space, looking at the problem with a holistic approach and with numbers.
I know people mean well here, but for climate change what matters is results, not intentions - so run the numbers before you throw your money out of the window. Cool startup branding is not what makes a project impactful.
Why not both?
Planting tree is nice, but theses solutions you give have limits, which will only make the cost higher. This is a technological solution, sure it has limits too, but its cost will only go down by being done more efficiently and at one point, we will need to do theses things too, thus the sooner we reach lower price, the better we will be.
As you said, it's 100x more expensive, thus no industrial client will consider this solution yet, but you can afford it. Be the first stone that allow them to become 50x more expensive, etc...
Being client to them show also that we are ready to put money where our mouth are. That push toward more investment in theses spheres because there's money in the game. Investing into planting trees at 1/100 the cost... well except exploiting even more cheap labor... there's no money to be made.
There's a common misconception that voluntary carbon market projects solely consist of planting trees - that's not the case. There are also forest protection projects, energy transition projects, and so on. ClimeWorks' project could be certified as well... but then carbon credit buyers would realize it's just less effective than the alternatives. I guess that's why ClimeWorks's go-to-market strategy is 'high-tech' branding: they go after technology lovers rather rather than informed investors.
Also see what I mentioned about CCS. AFAIK, the most promising CCS technology consist of burning biomass in power plants, and then using geological confinement of the sequestered carbon. The reason it's more effective, as I mentioned, is because the carbon is captured where its concentration is high - less entropy to fight.
It's absolutely true that current offsetting methodologies won't always stay so cheap - and as prices rise, new innovative methodologies will develop. Buying carbon credits is not an impediment to innovation; but it has the advantage of rewarding projects for being efficient, rather than "technologically cool".
> There are also forest protection projects
Same constraint as planting tree... at one point there's no more forest to protect (or the cost of protecting one just increase). It will just get more expensive.
> energy transition projects
This one is interesting, again, will just get more expensive with time, but that one I never seen any project that allow to buy carbon credit for theses kinds of projects.
> AFAIK, the most promising CCS technology consist of burning biomass in power plants, and then using geological confinement of the sequestered carbon.
Where can I offset my CO2 emission that way?
I don't care about investing in a solution that has no future. If what I pay for it means that it will just make the next ton more expensive, when it's already hard to make people pay for it already, I'm not for that solution.
Sure that one is 100x more expensive, but the cost can only go down with scale, and if it doesn't, well it will just push other technological solution to be developed because it's a proof there's money in sustainable solutions.
> This one is interesting, again, will just get more expensive with time, but that one I never seen any project that allow to buy carbon credit for theses kinds of projects.
And yet Gold Standard reports renewable energy projects are a high share of their pipeline: https://www.goldstandard.org/sites/default/files/documents/m...
> Where can I offset my CO2 emission that way?
That's still at an experimental stage AFAIK (like most CCS technology), so unfortunately not yet available for such purposes.
> I don't care about investing in a solution that has no future. If what I pay for it means that it will just make the next ton more expensive, when it's already hard to make people pay for it already, I'm not for that solution.
A more optimistic way to look at it is as such: if we commit to offsetting our emissions by buying carbon credits, rising prices will pressure us towards reducing our emissions.
That's where we want to be headed, because there is NO future where emissions remain high and are totally offset.
I would encourage you to rethink your approach as follows: invest in the transition, not in the destination.
> Sure that one is 100x more expensive, but the cost can only go down with scale, and if it doesn't, well it will just push other technological solution to be developed because it's a proof there's money in sustainable solutions.
What makes you so sure that ClimeWork's solution can scale better? Their solution requires huge energy expenditures, and its not like we have a lot of geologically favourable sites for their solution.
If you want long-term innovation, why not fund general CCS research instead? It's much more likely to yield impactful and well-thought solutions.
> Gold Standard reports renewable energy projects
How does renewable energy project have anything to do with athmospheric carbon capture? It's a way to lower carbon emission into the atmosphere sure, but we got 100 years of CO2 to take out of it too. I also already do everything I can to go toward renewable energy.
> That's still at an experimental stage AFAIK
Okay... so not an alternative for me right?
> A more optimistic way to look at it is as such: if we commit to offsetting our emissions by buying carbon credits, rising prices will pressure us towards reducing our emissions.
We aren't all the same person you know? We are currently talking about someone that can afford 100x the price to offset his emission and is ready to do it. I'm not too far from being that person, I'm already trying to reduce my emission, why not both?
I have nothing against planting tree, it's an amazing solution, but its limit are well below what needed right now.
People don't want to pay more right now, it's a HUGE issue. Go look at Canada carbon taxes, most of the provinces are currently fighting it in court, they are putting sticker on gas stations to tell people that they'll have to pay hundred more. 100% of that tax which is MUCH lower than the true environmental cost of that CO2 will be used to refund people. I'm already ready to pay more, 100x even, but planting more tree won't make theses people more likely to offset their emission if it make it more costly, that solution though not only offset my emission, but also invest into a potential solution and show there's a market for atmospheric carbon capture.
> That's where we want to be headed, because there is NO future where emissions remain high and are totally offset.
Which come back to my first answer, why not both. There's no future where we don't take out the CO2 already in the atmosphere either. I have seen multiple article talking about how the current warming is enough already that what get naturally released from glacier melting is more than what we release. Something being too expensive is no longer a reason to not research toward a solution, we need to research them all.
> I would encourage you to rethink your approach as follows: invest in the transition, not in the destination.
I never talked about destination, I talk about what we will need during the transition.
>What makes you so sure that ClimeWork's solution can scale better?
Where did I say their solution will be the right one? Excluding it from being the right one is a much bigger issue. What I'm sure about is that if there's a solution that scale better, but also allow to scrub atmospheric level, but still not viable, seeing any investment into ClimeWork's solution will make them much more likely to go toward that, instead of waiting for tree planting initiative to become costly enough to finally justify researching their costlier solution.
>If you want long-term innovation, why not fund general CCS research instead?
As a private individual earning in the mid 5 figures, that's the best I can do. I can surely pay 100x more carbon capture than I consume, but that's not a viable solution if it will just make it costlier for someone else, and won't actually solve the issue. Instead I vote with my wallet, and that's one that seems viable to me.
If I've calculated correctly, this service costs $1100 per ton. A flight from New York to London emits about 1 ton of co2.
The site talks about averages, but averages can be deceiving. Most people don't fly, and those that fly fly a lot. If you fly, you should probably try to overshot the average (by a lot) when you offset.
I flew from UK to Canada recently, and KLM was offering to "offset my CO2 emissions" for something stupid like $5. Surely....that's not actually a thing? What can they do for $5 that would offset so much CO2?
Examples: forest protection programs in low-wage countries, investing in renewable energy on high-carbon-intensity grids, distributing enhanced ovens to reduce wood consumption...
Carbon offsetting is cheap currently, but won't always stay so, getting more expensive as we exhaust the low-hanging fruits.
I figured they must be planting a tree for that $5 and it seems I wasn't far off:
If there were 200 passengers on that flight then $5 per passenger neatly comes down to 1k USD as mentioned above.
1 ton is for one passenger (yes, flying is a climate catastrophy). So the 1k USD is for one passenger.
Did you read the fine print?
absolutely nothing. If the cost of carbon removal was 5$/ton, we wouldn't be having this climate change problem whatsoever.
Actually, you can buy carbon credits for less than that if you make bulk purchases. It's usually for preventing emissions from occurring rather than capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
But we couldn't keep this price so low if we scaled this to world emissions - the price of carbon offsetting is low now because we're still picking the low-hanging fruits of carbon offsetting.
In europe the carbon cost is EUR24/ton right now.
The quality of offsetting programs varies drastically. For example, if I just say I'm going to offset your emissions then do nothing, I can offer that service for $1EUR/ton. At the other end of the spectrum would be something like methane recapture tents over abandoned mines, where there is no risk of addition or gaming (because it costs so much to build mines in comparison to what this earns). And in the middle is something like planting trees. It's not clear where on the quality spectrum the program you're referring to is, but I would guess it is not going to be at the high end.
The other thing to keep in mind is that we are only looking at low-hanging fruit right now. That's actually one of the really appealing things about this climeworks idea. It can be scaled indefinitely. Carbon capture from mines and manure digesters can only scale so much, because there are only so many abandoned mines and only so much undigested animal manure.
If someone had a $5/ton carbon removal machine, they would be demonized as standing in the way of the policies that advocates want.
That doesn't make sense. Wouldn't that even be a boon? You would end up with less resistance by those who proclaim doom by empirical evidence, as a provided solution theoretically would exist.
If you actually care about an actual threat, yes, that would be awesome. My point is that the most vocal advocates aren't that, that they want restrictions on fossil fuels regardless of AGW and this is just the latest pretense, so they have to demonize any easy way out.
Plant several trees.
when was that ?
Last week.
Is that number per passenger?
Of course! How would a transatlantic flight only emit 1 tonne of CO2?
Can we destroy bitcoin first??
https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1234493080583143424?s=20
Bitcoin energy consumption hits a new all time high of nearly 9GW, comparable to Chile, a country with 18M people. Carbon footprint is ~37 Mt CO2 annually, about that of New Zealand. And yet it still does ~4 transactions per second...
Why stop at bitcoin if we could destroy Internet? People could do much more instead of watching cat videos or porn.
Sure, as long as we're going to be even-handed about resource-wasting products rather than singling this one out. There are a billion things that produce no net social value but are ignored. And even if we did target Bitcoin, then -- like everything else -- it should be a matter of "are you paying your environmental cost? Cool, then carry on", not "hey I didn't like this for unrelated reasons, so this is my pretense for shutting it down regardless of how much its users are willing to pay for the damage they're doing".
My longer comment on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19193938
> There are a billion things that produce no net social value but are ignored.
Was going to reply "name three", but I see you covered that in your other post - well, two out of three; "Ferraris for show-off producers in LA, or Hello Kitty backpacks".
But those other things don't have a superlinear growth in energy consumption baked into the fundamentals of operation. A Hello Kitty backpack doesn't need schoolchildren to keep burning electricity just to secure its contents.
Most things are O(n) - O(n log n) in energy use to general utility provided, and top out at some point. Proof of Work chains need that just to keep the network working, regardless of any utility provided on top (which arguably is near-zero for any legitimate use case).
But I agree with the general point - pricing in full externalities of energy use would go a long way towards fixing things, including Bitcoin's existence.
>But those other things don't have a superlinear growth in energy consumption baked into the fundamentals of operation. A Hello Kitty backpack doesn't need schoolchildren to keep burning electricity just to secure its contents.
Unrestricted social signaling games absolutely have runaway costs and zero net social benefits; if we're going to address those, we're right back to "charge for externalities", which was the solution anyway, and completely unspecific to Bitcoin.
Edit:
>But I agree with the general point - pricing in full externalities of energy use would go a long way towards fixing things, including Bitcoin's existence.
Why do you say that? it would just change the total equilibrium expenditure on mining, not render it pointless, since the blockchain just has too be too expensive to attack, and the same constraints would apply to attackers and miners.
> Why do you say that? it would just change the total equilibrium expenditure on mining, not render it pointless, since the blockchain just has too be too expensive to attack, and the same constraints would apply to attackers and miners.
I feel it would significantly slow its growth, perhaps making it not worth the while relative to alternative solutions.
Also, the way I understand it, PoW has its growth limited only by a) how fast can you provision the hardware, and b) how much energy you can throw at it. I worry that we'll never arrive at the point of having clean energy too cheap to meter, if we have a black hole fueled by pure, refined greed, which can suck all the energy surplus pretty much instantly.
Mining expenditures are limited by the benefits relative to the cost. Increasingly expensive mining is added until the expected revenues of bitcoins sold don't make up for them. At the moment right now, more mining could come online, but isn't taken online because it wouldn't pay for itself.
If energy becomes more expensive -- say, by pricing in the externalities of some energy sources -- that decreases the equilibrium expenditure, because marginal mining can't pay for itself anymore.
The concept of "pricing out miners" doesn't even make sense to begin with. Miners are competing with other miners (including malicious ones). Any resource constraint affects all of them; it can't make all of them give up. To the extent that other coins become popular, that (again) just prices out marginal miners.
I am paying my environmental footprint under the name of "US federal tax" If you are expecting me to pay more, you have something else coming from your blindside.
Most bitcoin power estimates assume all the miners are using horrendously outdated mining hardware.
Mining is pretty centralised, and most players keep secret exactly how efficient their hardware is - and you can bet it'll end up much more efficient than publically available hardware.
There's no 'first' - it's a battle we must fight on many fronts :) Destroying Bitcoin, and more generally digital sobriety, is only one of them!
Maybe I didn't read the site thoroughly enough but... how do we know that they are doing their part of the bargain? How do we/they measure how much carbon is effectively removed from the atmosphere?
My thoughts too. How do we know it's not just a website? An annual, independent auditor report would be nice, at least confirming their number of subscribers and estimating the capacity of their chemical process.
Climeworks is a Swiss startup in business since 2003; they have built multiple pilot plants in Switzerland, and are well known here. See e.g. https://www.climeworks.com/about/
I don't think it's technically hard on their end - we totally have the science required to estimate how much their process captures.
Does this system have the potential for substantial improvements in efficiency if we support it?
Are the efficiencies gained in manufacturing scale or can the actual process / hardware be substantially improved?
I've been a subscriber for over a year due to my belief that me doing something in this space is better than me doing nothing. But I didn't do a ton of research first. I'm curious about what options are out there and how they break down in terms of cost effectiveness for sequestration.
This service is like 26 Euros for 46% of average travel. I know some companies use this company to offset their travel. https://pachama.com/. Anyone have advice on others?
Frankly, this service is basically reinventing the wheel of volontary carbon markets, and doing so much, much less efficiently, and with fewer co-benefits.
Well-certified projects can offset emissions at a price of about 10$/teqCO2. I personally recommend https://www.standfortrees.org.
It might be nice to show how many others have subscribed. This is one of those services where people may think,
"i'll do this but i don't want to be the only one." Seeing the scale can be motivating.
It would also be nice to know how this would work at scale. If 100k people sign up, can they support that?
If I calculate that right, it is about $1100 a ton.
I just gave a presentation on BECCS w/ Brazilian Ethanol which comes out closer to $30. I haven't put it up, but here is one of the papers I based it on
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
You are right that this is very expensive. Other firms in this space estimate that there should be a lower bound for direct air capture of $100-200 per ton of CO2 [0].
However, this is a very different product than BECCS - it direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 which would not occur without your purchase, in the only real permanent operating storage facility we currently have. It is very difficult to know what the marginal impact of changes in sugarcane production are, though we do know that there is potential for either indirect land use change, or mitigation of reduction due to shifts in demand/supply and knock-on effects.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
TerraPass offers $10/ton
https://www.terrapass.com/product/productindividuals-familie...
Carbon offsets is not the same as co2 removal.
If carbon offset is done well, wouldn't it be equivalent?
AFAICT offsets are "We stopped one tonne from going in", removal is "We took one tonne out".
Unless I'm missing something, that sounds like the same net effect. Why is one better than the other apart from price?
It's insufficient - there's a cap on how much carbon we can stop emitting, and maxing that out will not be enough to halt climate change. Agreed though, in the sense that we should fully fund the cheap options while also funding research on going carbon negative.
+0 tonnes is not equivalent to -1 tonne of C02 emission, because maths.
Reducing current C02 levels is more difficult and expensive than just reducing C02 output, and has a greater impact on overall reduction, but both are moves in the right direction.
> +0 tonnes is not equivalent to -1 tonne of C02 emission, because maths.
Right, but we're talking about -1 tonne (reducing emissions) vs -1 tonne (taking carbon out of the atmosphere) and last I checked, -1 tonne is equivalent to -1 tonne.
> Reducing current C02 levels is more difficult and expensive than just reducing C02 output, and has a greater impact on overall reduction
It makes sense to me that it's easier/cheaper to reduce C02 output (at least as long as there is lots of low-hanging fruit), but it doesn't make sense to me that one would have a greater impact than the other.
If you look at "reducing 1 tonne" of emission as -1 to the current emission output, sure. But if you see it as +0 to the current C02 levels, it's different math.
-1 tonne (active output) is not equivalent to -1 tonne (overall C02 levels)
It's splitting hairs over what we consider to be better. Either is an improvement that I am happy to see.
I don't follow.
Pretend we have 5 tonnes of co2 in the air. If I have an emitter, say someone wanting to burn a forest. That would emit 1 tonne. Or I have a sequestration process that would remove 1 tonne.
I can pay $X to either #1 or #2. In #1 case I stop the addition, e.g. 5 tonnes total. In #2 the forest gets burned so I'm up to 6 tonnes, but I've pulled down 1 tonnes so back to 5 tonnes.
As mentioned by other posters, there are a _ton_ of side benefits of the different approaches (burn forest for agriculture) vs other benefits of forests. But it seems like from a pure CO2 in atmosphere the two approaches should be similar?
This reminds me of that one gag; let's both put $20 in a box, and I'll sell the box to you for $30. (I can't find the relation to what's at hand tho)
Back on topic; in one we stop someone making a mess, in another we start cleaning it up.
Eventually it ought to start getting cleaned up. i.e. CO2 has to fall.
Developing technologies for that now is good. Stopping people from making messes is also good, and cheaper.
I spot checked some of the projects they list, and not one has any estimates of how much greenhouse gas reduction is attributable to TerraPass investment. Nor is the investment amount or percentage is shown. From which I conclude that TerraPass is a scam.
May I make a guess? You can only get to that number if you ignore landuse changes due to the ethanol production?
Brazil had 379 sugar mills in 2014, thus there is already a land dedicated to sugarcane. This is a real business that makes money without subsidies.
Ethanol plants produce CO2 as a byproduct of fermentation which is nearly pure and easy to purify to the point where it can be compressed to 1200 psi and not have nitrogen phase separate out and not have water vapor mix with the CO2 and make carbonic acid that eats pipe.
So it is a small add-on to existing plants. A larger and more complex add-on would capture CO2 from the bagasse furnace.
This could lead to more land-use changes if it improves the economics and if the ethanol industry can find more markets for fuel and electricity.
Most of the ethanol plants are located near Sao Paulo and Rio because that is where the fuel and electricity are in demand. None of them are in the Amazon basin and few in the area to the south of it that is in risk of "savannafication".
As of eight months ago, it was about $500-600:
> https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/climeworks-carbon-ca...
Yes, but the linked product/subscription also include deep injection, not just the capture.
One important question is not just "Where is CO2 removal now?" but "Where can CO2 removal companies go if they get adequate funding and consumer uptake?" I subscribe to Climeworks and think of it a bit like an ongoing Kickstarter.
A lot of articles about climate change also leave one with an unfortunate sense of helplessness. This is something an average person can do.
That's what I'm doing as well. I assume if climeworks is successful then there will be others interested in the space as well.
This cool. This kind of carbon removal is still very expensive.
Plant a tree.
They have a nice graph on this page describing the problematic nature of that comment:
https://climeworks.shop/how-it-works/
EG the land area + fresh water cost to support a similar revmoval of C02 through forestation is an untenable strategy
I don't know man, the world is a big place and growing trees parallelizes nicely.
Cut them down and make buildings out of them, land area problem solved. The fresh water cost I don't buy, there's rain man, it's free.
Trees that grow and die and decompose release their carbon back into the atmosphere. The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground.
*edited from “neutral”, sorry, typo
We use trees though. We build all kinds of things with them. Granted I would rather see native revegitation, often not great for building with depending on where you live. But given the circumstances and timescales involved, planting trees may give us some buffer time in the form of an initial dip in carbon.
Trees can be one element of many to mitigate emissions, but too often trees are bandied about as a complete solution, and it's greenwashing that distracts from the true scope of the problem at hand.
That argument gets brought up again and again, and is just wrong. Can't people see the basic contradiction in that reasoning? Trees have always died!
What matters with forest-based offsetting is the increase of forest biomass - the deaths of individual trees don't matter. If you grow a forest, the corresponding CO2 is offset for as long as the forest stays there.
We have burnt through hundreds of millions of years of fossil fuels (aka trees) in the past couple centuries. How can we regrow that “forest” one time and make a dent in carbon emissions?
Edit: I’d be happy to proven wrong, I just can’t imagine how if we increased the today’s biomass by an incredible percent, it would come close to the amount of carbon stored over millions of years.
Edit 2: 1.2 trillion trees would cancel out 10 years of human CO2 emissions. The planet currently has 3 trillion trees https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...
I was just refuting the incorrect statement: "The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground."
It would indeed be foolish to believe we can halt climate change just by growing trees. But AFOLU is part of the toolkit we need to use (the most important tool in this toolkit is sobriety).
It takes years for a tree to grow and decades, possibly hundreds of years for a tree to decompose in its entirety through natural processes (that is, after possibly decades of life).
It is a viable solution.
Edit: if anyone disagrees look up about the Carboniferous period
The Carboniferous period stored that much carbon because the microbes at the time were unable to break down wood[1]. So yes, everyone should read about the Carboniferous period in detail to understand just how many millions of years of stored carbon in ancient plant material we're recklessly blowing out into the atmosphere all at once.
1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...
Yes, and trees still take a lot of time to decompose
> The computer model calculates that the “residence times” (how long a tree will take to completely decompose) for conifer species range from 57 to 124 years, while hardwood species are typically around on the forest floor for 46 to 71 years
(I'll stand corrected on the hundreds of years, but it's still a long time)
https://northernwoodlands.org/knots_and_bolts/tree-falls-in-...
Trees require arable land. Trees require water and nutrients. Trees that aren't turned into treated lumber (to prevent decomposing) or buried return the carbon to the system when they die. Most interventions to plant them, water them, fertilize them, or store them at the end will use additional carbon-based energy and negate the benefit. They typically take 10 or 20 years to grow to consume the promised amount of carbon.
Trees are great, but they will not solve the climate issue alone and the notion that they can needs to be put away so that we can plan realistically.
What people miss is that we both cut down trees and burned buried carbon. To reverse global warming we need to reverse both.
Better: protect a forest.
Most solutions to climate change are subtractive, not additive.
>Plant a tree.
How does it compare to what they offer? (as in, metrics please).
About half the mass of a tree is carbon. Seeds cost a couple cents. Plant a big tree (oak, let’s say) in an area where it’s unlikely to burn down and it’s probably good for 1000kg of carbon storage.
Comes with a lot of other benefits too.
What was the land used for before? It doesn't come for free.
This is addressed on the website. I think at scale afforestation becomes a very risky prospect financially and requires a much larger amount of land putting biodiversity at risk and infringing on agriculture as apposed to the proposed CO2 remove technology. The cited paper for this on their website is unfortunately paywalled but I would be really interested in finding out more about this.
Big brain time. Biodiversity isn’t at risk if you plant different kinds of trees in different places. You don’t need to build a massive forest in any given place. Simply rebuilding the forests we used to have would go a long way.
No one is advocating for stopping conservation efforts or reforestation. But we will need a combination of solutions in order to reverse existing damage and meet targets.
I wonder if plants can absorb the Carbon directly via their roots from the CO2-made-stone?
Plants get their carbon from the air (CO2) via photosynthesis.
Would be a good franchise.
People probably prefer if CO2 was removed in their cities and not at some location kilometers away.
What for? the harm done by excess CO2 is global, not local.
CO2 is diffused across the whole world in a matter of months. Its climate-changing effect lasts much longer than that - decades to centuries.
You need clean, low-cost electricity near your city to support this.
And to scale to a impactful level this will also require a very large amount of new, clean electricity generation...
Sure thing.
But how big is the benefit otherwise?