Carbon removal plant absorbs CO2 at 99,000 times the rate of all Earth's oceans
thebrighterside.newsA 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?
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.
Honest question: are we burning mountain ranges of carbon every year? I’m trying to get a feel for the size of the problem compared to the solution. Or is there a reason for the size difference if not?
Assuming the answer is yes, do we see the ground level around oil wells sinking by a comparable amount where we pump the oil out? Seems like we’d have to, wouldn’t we?
We aren't burning mountain ranges per year, but we have burned a mountain range total
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.
> 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.
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-...
> 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.
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.
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.
Headline: "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?
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.
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.
Could this be fitted over the exhaust stack at coal and gas fired power stations for even greater efficiency?
No, it leverages ocean water
Isn't this bad for marine life? We should be pumping the ocean full of O2, not CO2.
Additional CO2 in the oceans is indeed very bad for marine life. It makes the ocean more acidic. Ocean pH has dropped from 8.15 to 8.05, so far.
Pumping O2 into it isn't really any better. Sea creatures evolved for a certain equilibrium. Adding more of anything will throw off the balance. Some organisms would benefit, but others won't, and so the population levels can shift, throwing off the entire food web.
Those webs are pretty resilient, and it takes an awful lot of emissions to alter them significantly. But we've managed to overcome a huge amount of buffering to increase ocean acidity, and that's potentially very, very dangerous.
I wonder why Stripe would buy green hydrogen from them.
What possibly could go wrong?
I had an idea for a short story about humans trying to reduce co2 in the atmosphere and triggering another snowball.
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.
carbon capture is a scheme