Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.”
Oh yes, let’s just hedge our bets and use projects with the guise of being a climate solution to actually help oil companies scrape the bottom of the barrel. What the hell.
CNN is notorious for stretching the truth in pursuit of the class interest of their owners.
AFAIK, the oil companies need a large volume of gas that’s free from oxygen. I wonder how energy intensive this “carbon capture” tech is compared to capturing the 78% nitrogen that makes up our atmosphere? This implementation of the technology might be worse for the environment than doing nothing.
This particular project doesn’t do that. And it’s all very much in the proof of concept stage. There may still come a time when this sort of technology is our last resort. In the meantime it won’t hurt to keep developing it.
Ummm it’s called a forest, and we’re burning them down, not planting them.
It would be great if these approaches would actually contribute in a meaningful way. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the case.
This is an article with some relevant info:
Climeworks’ “Mammoth” vacuum cleaner is not a solution to the climate crisis
Climeworks’ newest DAC plant, Mammoth, is purported to capture ten times the amount of CO2 as Orca; some 36,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. (…) If 36,000 tonnes sounds like a big number, it’s not: It equates to one one-millionth of our annual global emissions. Even if Climeworks and other DAC companies do build hundreds of these DAC plants, it would not equate to even one per cent of current annual global emissions.
From our world in data on CO2 emissions:
we now emit over 35 billion tonnes each year
For comparison, a hectar of trees remove about 10 tons CO2 per year.
A hectar is 100m to 100m.
10 tons is ~22000 lbs
100m is ~330 feet
So a forest of 35 hectar would replace that machine. That’s a very small forest that you can cross in 30 minutes by foot.
Trees don’t grow where this machine is placed, though.
Here’s how it works: it doesn’t
Hey whats your background in this field?
Are you also saying it will never work no matter how many iterative improvements are made for the design, and no matter how cheap production becomes after refining the manufacturing process?
I have a bachelors in chemical engineering, the energy balance on these devices never works out favourably. As soon as you scale up to any meaningful impact on GHGs, you get power inputs on the scale of entire countries.
If you’d like to do a proper literature review instead of daydreaming, I’d be happy to look it over
Like power output of switzerland or china?
If it were powered by nuclear energy, for example, then would they would have utility? Or you are saying money is better spent elsewhere full stop?
The epitome of capitalist dystopia. Tech won’t save us of our problems as society.
36 kilotons a year. Only short by 6 sig figs. You’d need over a 100,000 of these to reach net zero. And the cost for each ton removed is “closer to $1,000 a ton than $100 a ton”. Let’s say $500 a ton, which is less than the actual cost. That’s $18 million a year for this one facility, and you’d need >$1.8 trillion annual to run all the facilities for net zero. It would become the largest single industry in the world (passing agriculture at $1.3 trillion annually)
It’s something that needs to be done eventually, but can’t be used to get us to net zero.
So, yeah. Neat, but something for after the transition.
If only someone thought to have Trump christen it while standing very, very close.
Lonestar is our only hope
