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Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

98 points by petethomas 9y ago

myrloc 9y ago
I'm a fan of the Climeworks concept, but the article and the Climeworks website fail to address the obvious question: what's the net sum of CO2 collected to CO2 created in creating the energy needed to power their plants?
- monk_e_boy 9y ago
  50 tonnes a year per machine doesn't sound much, compared to just growing bamboo or something similar.
  - ghshephard 9y ago
    "Each year, a hectare of Moso bamboo absorbs 5.1 tons of carbon" http://inesad.edu.bo/developmentroast/2013/05/what-can-bamboo-do-about-co2/ http://inesad.edu.bo/developmentroast/2013/05/what-can-bambo... You would need 10 Hectares of land to equal one of these machine. Sounds reasonably impressive to me. Even more impressive if the climework "tonne" is 2200 pounds and the bamboo ton is just 1000 pounds.
    - Tade0 9y ago
      There goes my genius idea to grow bamboo and turn it into charcoal to trap carbon.
  - p0nce 9y ago
    It's still early beginnings for carbon capture. If you have money, by funding ClimeWorks and such you encourage further research on this topic.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Wouldn't that depend on the source of energy running the CO2 extractor?
- titojankowski 9y ago
  I like where your question is headed. Carbon dioxide removal tech must be powered by solar/wind with low emissions for this to work.
gd1 9y ago
Why would you want to do this? Nothing could be better for life on earth than to get some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle.
intended 9y ago
I find that the idea of "climate engineers" and "geo engineering" has markers which will make it appeal to the same people currently peddling climate denial. My running bet/prediction is that 1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue, 2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat 3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to the same people they feed all sorts of Denialism. This will sell well because it has "WE'LL MAKE THE WORLD GREAT AGAIN! WITH HARD WORK AND GUMPTION", and will of course be subsidized by the Government so it will have "JOB CREATION!" written all over it. I could write a satirical Ad for it today, and be assured that its twin will play for real in 20 years. While this comes across as deeply cynical (it isn't cynical enough), it's based on the debacle that is Environmental Protection, from before I started reading news papers in the 1980s. The news today may be dominated by what America is doing, but lets not forget that it was and still is a MASSIVE uphill struggle to get people to care for decades. And I am ignoring the effects of funding into Climate Denialism , and FUD campaigns. In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment. In a world where clean coal can be marketed, "Climate Engineering" sounds like an entire industry waiting to be born. sorry, I wish I had something more optimistic to say.
- shoo 9y ago
  to add to your optimism: * geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms * the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers * much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production * geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere * but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above! edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification
ribfeast 9y ago
> quickly bonded over their shared loves for mountain climbing and beer Didn't realize that was so unusual in Switzerland.
rdl 9y ago
I wonder how much use CO2 extracted from the air has. Greenhouse CO2 supplementation sounds interesting but I assume there are cheaper ways to produce CO2 already.
- Reason077 9y ago
  Presumably, most of the captured CO2 eventually ends up back in the atmosphere anyway - either through leakage, or eventual decomposition of the greenhouse plants being grown. But it's still a net gain if the CO2 would otherwise have come from fossil-derived sources?
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    One of the CO2 trapping strategies would be to grow plants and then bury them to stop it going back.
  - andyjohnson0 9y ago
    Some work has been done on mineralising extracted CO2, ending-up with a stable form that doesn't return to the atmosphere. For example: "... use electrolysis or heat to split common salt, sodium chloride, into hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, then react the soda with the carbon dioxide to make bicarbonate." [1] The obvious question is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way. Either way its just a fix: we need to stop putting the CO2 into the atmosphere in the first place. [1] https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/25-april-2011/solid-as-a-rock-mineralising-carbon-dioxide/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/25-april-2011/solid-as-...
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      > is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way Wind, PV and waves can be employed for this. You don't need a constant supply and can control capture rate to match available energy. For many uses, renewables like these are already perfect.
dalbasal 9y ago
These sorts of ideas are in a weird place. To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts. ATM, the debate is (1)"is the carbon-climate problem real?" and (2) "If so, how do we reduce carbon emissions?". "Climate Engineering" would complicate 2 a lot, probably splitting political support. Politically, they open the door to continued or increased carbon emmissions today. They let us avoid addressing the "root cause." This is all regardless of timelines or progress. Just the existence of the idea in public debate might be enough to swing the opinion balance. I imagine there are some who would ideally like to keep geoengineering as a quite Plan B so as not to disturb current efforts, but that's not really possible. Overall, I think these ideas (if actually viable) will inevitably enter the discourse in the long term. We are already engineering in some sense. We have models and targets for both carbon and temperature. IE, we want to take control (to a small extent) of the climate. That's engineering, and engineers always look for more tools eventually.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  There is no debate and no climate scientist sees this as a threat. Reduction is needed but it won't cut it its too late for natural carbon sequestering at its normal pace. People who work on reduction also often work on sequestering and if not do not see these efforts as a threat to any of their work.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    Sure there's a debate. We're debating and discussing right now.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      For the most part we aren't climate scientists, there is absolutely no debate about carbon emissions and climate change.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts. This is sad. People thinking like this are actively sabotaging their own efforts and dreams. It's like a boat with a hole in it. You desperately need to stop the inflow of water (limiting emissions), but you could also use some way to pump out the water that's already in the boat (geoengineering). Because, 1) it's not the inflow that ultimately kills you, it's what has accumulated, and 2) pumping out gives you more time to fix the inflow. We need the plan B now. We also need plans C, D and E. What worries me though, is the "human playing god" magical thinking crowd will latch onto geoengineering efforts and gain popular support, the way anti-GMO and anti-vaccine groups did. Humanity is amazing at preventing itself from solving problems.
legulere 9y ago
> Working around the clock, each capture plant can vacuum about 50 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere a year, Wurzbacher says. For a comparison the per capita CO₂ emissions per capita in the US are 20 tons. With an average household size of 2.58 you would need one of those plants + CO₂ storage facilities per household.
- Tade0 9y ago
  Or, given that the world annual CO2 emissions are around ~400*10^9 tonnes, there should exist one for literally every human being.
Tade0 9y ago
There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere. Some of the resistance to action on climate change comes from the notion that the cost is unknown, which in turn stems from the fact, that to date there was no scalable way to undo the emissions. Now that a way has been demonstrated emitters can choose whether they want to reduce their emissions or undo them(assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place). I believe most will go with the former option until it stops being economical.
- titojankowski 9y ago
  Yes! Pricing is a key step to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An invitation for entrepreneurs hop on board. How much does a ton of carbon dioxide sell for? Can I pull it out cheaper? Reducing emissions is necessary but not sufficient. Even if fossil fuel emissions stopped 100% tomorrow, we would still have an issue: 403 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We must develop tech to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The ideal outputs are economically-priced carbon-products without subsidy.
- mac01021 9y ago
  The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them. The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. But unless we're starting from some kind of reasonable estimate of the cost of the damage, however approximate, it can't be right to say that these guys are setting the price on atmospheric CO2.
  - Tade0 9y ago
    > The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. This is what I'm getting at. There's resistance because we're not giving any specific numbers, only saying that they're "probably very high". This is far from a convincing argument. With this technology we can instead say: "Ok, so clearing a tonne of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere is going to cost $X. These are going to be your additional expenses in the foreseeable future."
enugu 9y ago
Wouldnt it be cheaper to first capture CO_2 from the output of coal plants and other industries where it is in concentrated form? Also, economies of scale. Once we bring those down,we would still have to deal with decentralized sources like cars(electric cars and renewables can help), container ships, and the meat industry.
- titojankowski 9y ago
  Agreed - check out Opus12 for an example of point-source capture: https://www.opus-12.com https://www.opus-12.com Would be relevant to get Climeworks' perspective on the question of point source vs atmospheric carbon dioxide.
knowThySelfx 9y ago
Do they have plans to remove Methane and NOx. Methane emissions have increased and we are seeing weather changes. One shouldn't forget CO2 is also needed in the atmosphere.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  You don't need to remove those. You just need to make sure they get them wet, so entropy can follow its inexorable path.
  - knowThySelfx 9y ago
    Getting wet alright, Irma probably does it.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Methane goes away pretty quickly on its own, so that's less pressing. CO2 is needed in the atmosphere, but not nearly as much as we have. Pre-industrial levels were 30% lower than current levels.
blkhawk 9y ago
wow - <sarcasm>This technology is the future</sarcasm> - as per the article each plant sequesters about 11 Cars worth of CO2 each year. Since there are currently about 1.015 billion motor vehicles (lets assume those are cars) we would only need 93 million of these things - how much energy do they use and can they suck more CO2 running them causes?
jtraffic 9y ago
For some reason I thought the runaway in temps will come from water vapor from melting permafrost, which is starting now. In other words, the CO2 ship has sailed, no?
- AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
  Why would melting permafrost release more water vapor than the warming oceans, which are massively larger?
- irukavina 9y ago
  My hope is that this study is correct: https://m.phys.org/news/2017-08-hydrate-gun-hypothesis.html https://m.phys.org/news/2017-08-hydrate-gun-hypothesis.html
tryingagainbro 9y ago
dumb question: say they take xxxx tons from somewhere in Switzerland. How long does it take for the air to mix with the rest so the co2 is averaged worldwide? This looks like a great thing. The state can tax emissions and force emitters to pay such carbon gathering companies to become carbon neutral. You release xxxxx tons a years, show that you sequestered at least the same or pay a tax. You could also have a Bill Gates type donate all his money to a such company. Or the government can fund them. If this works, it's just a matter of cash and we have it /can find it.
- titojankowski 9y ago
  How long does it take for air to mix worldwide? I visited NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii last month. It's one of the key global sites where carbon dioxide is monitored. The scientist giving the tour answered this, and I believe it was on the order of a few weeks for mixing to occur. Here's a visualization that starts to answer your question: https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-computer-model.html https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-comp... I would love a more detailed answer to this question as well. (I visited the Mauna Loa Ovservatory because of our open source project to track carbon dioxide worldwide: https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby http://carbondoomsday.com http://carbondoomsday.com)
  - mturmon 9y ago
    That is a nice link (showing global CO2 estimates in 2006). It illustrates how turbulence mixes the atmosphere at global scales. The video mentions that better measurements will result from the OCO-2 mission, which launched in the meantime and has been measuring CO2 in ~3km^2 footprints across the globe since 2014. A result is: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4514 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4514 which shows vertically-resolved CO2. Both videos make it clear that CO2 is generally well-mixed both horizontally and vertically in the atmosphere, with the exception of Northern vs Southern hemisphere. I believe CO2 emissions from China, for example, take on the order of a week to propagate across the Pacific and reach the Western US.
vonnik 9y ago
There are basically two approaches to geo-engineering, and they both have unpredictable consequences: * reflect sunlight back into space through "albedo modification", either by spraying sulfates high in the stratosphere to mimic a volcano, or by conducting cloud whitening. complication: it will affect precipitation patterns, and allows the CO2 buildup to continue, meaning a sudden cessation would produce wrenching warming. it also does not slow ocean acidification. * suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. also known as carbon sequestration. That's what Climeworks is doing, but their method is not the only approach. What they've built is a kind of chemical tree. Another approach is to create algae blooms by seeding the ocean with iron filings, since iron is often the limiting parameter to algal growth. algae: the amazon of the sea. a joker named Russ George dumped a tanker of iron into the northern Pacific a few years ago to show this could be effective, but his experiment was poorly designed. carbon sequestration does not address the underlying cause. but we are losing the battle against the underlying cause, which is basically our addiction to economic growth driven by fossil fuels, and existing carbon in the atmosphere will continue to warm the planet for many decades to come, even we switch entirely to clean energy today. so it's likely that humanity will have to combine carbon sequestration with clean energy to avert even worse climate change. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/geoengineering-caldeira-climate-change/ http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/geoengineerin... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170724105044.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170724105044.h... http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/iron-dumping-leaves-geoengineers-with-egg-on-their-faces-me-too-15147 http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/iron-dumping-leaves-geoe... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/re-engineering-the-earth/307552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/re-engi...
- collyw 9y ago
  Serious question. Why not just plant a shit load more trees?
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    Costs at scale, mostly. Algea grows faster and doesn't require land.
adrianN 9y ago
Is this cheaper than growing wood and turning it into charcoal? That doesn't take energy (in fact you get some out), it only takes time and land.
- DennisP 9y ago
  At the scale we'd need to turn things around, land is a significant limiting factor. I saw a study in Nature a couple years ago saying we could manage a gigatonne/year of carbon sequestration from biochar without major impacts on biodiversity and food production, which is pretty good but not sufficient on its own.
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  I have a better alternative: growing excess food and dumping it on the ground.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Char takes a lot longer to rot. So the carbon is pulled out of the short cycle.
mac01021 9y ago
> Working around the clock, each capture plant can vacuum about 50 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere a year, Wurzbacher says. And then from [https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions]: > Global carbon (C) emissions from fossil fuel use were 9.795 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2014 (or 35.9 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide). This doesn't seem like a great solution to me.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
program_whiz 9y ago
People seem upset that this is working? Maybe because this provides a solution to the problem that doesn't mean we have to fundamentally change society, or bring down the 1st world, or say that "America was the bad guy to ignore all the EU regulations".
- frany 9y ago
  The technology presented here is not a paradigm shift, it is merely another way of capturing CO2. What is remarkably about it (compared to other, known techs is that it does not require an enormous amount of biomass. But by their own admission it is no really cheap technology: <100$ for 1t of CO2. [1] But there are several fundamental problems that remain: 1. Storage: CO2 has to be stored safely for an (on human scale) indefinite amount of time. 2. Scale: The amount of CO2 recaptured is gigantic (see other comments). 3. The problem of investment without immediate benefit. On a national level, the money needed to deploy this technology at a large scale is basically "lost" for the immediate future, the (positive) effects will be felt later on. This is similar to the situation right now, where we "only" have to reduce the amount of climate-forcing gases, but cannot be bothered to really weigh in on the problem. 4. Most importantly: this kind of technology is already factored in in current mitigation scenarios. So on top of reducing emissions (close) to 0, deployment of carbon-capturing technology is a prerequisite for remaining inside anything like the 2°C climate change by the end of the century. [2] So the problem is one of framing for this technology. It is not so much a game-changer but more of a sight of hope that maybe given an heroic effort in emission-reduction, this technology might help to achieve the internationally agreed upon goals for climate-change. Hence it is often seen as a kind of moral hazard, when portrayed as a means to happily keep on emitting. [1] http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/ http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/ [2] e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fossil-fuels https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  - CO2 is plant food. Indoor growers supplement CO2 levels up to 1500 ppm (after which they say that there is not much return) to enhance growth. There is no reason to remove it from the atmosphere. - Supposedly CO2 is also a green house gas that helps earth trap some heat from the sun. The link between how much heat CO2 captures based on the concentration is very difficult to find, suggesting that the link is not very strong and propaganda driven "climate science" deliberately doesn't want anyone to know. My guess is that it is very weak at best which is why they supplement the theory with heating will cause water vapor concentration to rise, which is also a green house gas, which will cause snowball effect. This could be tested in a controlled greenhouse but most probably it didn't turn out to be favorable for the propaganda so the research has not been published. - Climate has been changing throughout the history of the earth and there are no known consistent patterns that we have been able to model which can help us predict anything, not that we have seen working at least. Overall though, it has been cooling and there is no reason that it will not continue to do so in the long run. - The causal relation between CO2 levels and global temperatures has not only not been established, but it is impossible to establish because of large number of factors affecting it and affecting each other. The best we can get is some kind of correlation but even that hasn't been consistent over time. They keep adding more explanations to anomalies to pretend that they know what is going on but it's obvious that they just don't want to accept it. Max Plank said "Science advances one funeral at a time", but it seems increased life expectancy will keep "climate science" going for a while. So, yeah some people may be upset that people are touting this solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
godshatter 9y ago
Each capture plant takes 50 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year. We are putting roughly 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. That's only 800 million capture plants needed, or roughly 44 million customers similar to the one they have lined up (using 900 tons per year). Every little bit helps, and I'm glad they are making money doing this, but it's not a viable solution to the problem as a whole. They also didn't say what powers the turbines in their capture plants.
traviswingo 9y ago
I've always imagined blimps floating around and filtering our air above all the major cities and places where air pollution/CO2 density is worst. Does anyone have any reasoning as to why this isn't really being done?
- chadgeidel 9y ago
  The magnitude of the emissions. We are putting tens of billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year. Even assuming the filtering process is very efficient (net-carbon negative) where do we store that in the blimp? How many blimps would we need? As a thought experiment - look at the average car - a Toyota Camry for example. That car emits 206 grams per kilometer. Over the course of the car's lifetime (about 200 thousand kilometers or so) that's 41 thousand kilograms of CO2. For one family car.
carbonhater 9y ago
Personally, I will not rest until every last drop of carbon dioxide is removed from our atmosphere.

98 points by petethomas 9y ago

I'm a fan of the Climeworks concept, but the article and the Climeworks website fail to address the obvious question: what's the net sum of CO2 collected to CO2 created in creating the energy needed to power their plants?

monk_e_boy 9y ago
50 tonnes a year per machine doesn't sound much, compared to just growing bamboo or something similar.
- ghshephard 9y ago
  "Each year, a hectare of Moso bamboo absorbs 5.1 tons of carbon" http://inesad.edu.bo/developmentroast/2013/05/what-can-bamboo-do-about-co2/ http://inesad.edu.bo/developmentroast/2013/05/what-can-bambo... You would need 10 Hectares of land to equal one of these machine. Sounds reasonably impressive to me. Even more impressive if the climework "tonne" is 2200 pounds and the bamboo ton is just 1000 pounds.
  - Tade0 9y ago
    There goes my genius idea to grow bamboo and turn it into charcoal to trap carbon.
- p0nce 9y ago
  It's still early beginnings for carbon capture. If you have money, by funding ClimeWorks and such you encourage further research on this topic.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
Wouldn't that depend on the source of energy running the CO2 extractor?
titojankowski 9y ago
I like where your question is headed. Carbon dioxide removal tech must be powered by solar/wind with low emissions for this to work.

gd1 9y ago

Why would you want to do this? Nothing could be better for life on earth than to get some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle.

intended 9y ago

I find that the idea of "climate engineers" and "geo engineering" has markers which will make it appeal to the same people currently peddling climate denial. My running bet/prediction is that 1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue, 2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat 3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to the same people they feed all sorts of Denialism. This will sell well because it has "WE'LL MAKE THE WORLD GREAT AGAIN! WITH HARD WORK AND GUMPTION", and will of course be subsidized by the Government so it will have "JOB CREATION!" written all over it. I could write a satirical Ad for it today, and be assured that its twin will play for real in 20 years. While this comes across as deeply cynical (it isn't cynical enough), it's based on the debacle that is Environmental Protection, from before I started reading news papers in the 1980s. The news today may be dominated by what America is doing, but lets not forget that it was and still is a MASSIVE uphill struggle to get people to care for decades. And I am ignoring the effects of funding into Climate Denialism , and FUD campaigns. In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment. In a world where clean coal can be marketed, "Climate Engineering" sounds like an entire industry waiting to be born. sorry, I wish I had something more optimistic to say.

shoo 9y ago
to add to your optimism: * geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms * the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers * much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production * geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere * but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above! edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification

ribfeast 9y ago

> quickly bonded over their shared loves for mountain climbing and beer Didn't realize that was so unusual in Switzerland.

rdl 9y ago

I wonder how much use CO2 extracted from the air has. Greenhouse CO2 supplementation sounds interesting but I assume there are cheaper ways to produce CO2 already.

Reason077 9y ago
Presumably, most of the captured CO2 eventually ends up back in the atmosphere anyway - either through leakage, or eventual decomposition of the greenhouse plants being grown. But it's still a net gain if the CO2 would otherwise have come from fossil-derived sources?
- mattmanser 9y ago
  One of the CO2 trapping strategies would be to grow plants and then bury them to stop it going back.
- andyjohnson0 9y ago
  Some work has been done on mineralising extracted CO2, ending-up with a stable form that doesn't return to the atmosphere. For example: "... use electrolysis or heat to split common salt, sodium chloride, into hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, then react the soda with the carbon dioxide to make bicarbonate." [1] The obvious question is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way. Either way its just a fix: we need to stop putting the CO2 into the atmosphere in the first place. [1] https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/25-april-2011/solid-as-a-rock-mineralising-carbon-dioxide/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/25-april-2011/solid-as-...
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    > is whether this can be done in an energy neutral way Wind, PV and waves can be employed for this. You don't need a constant supply and can control capture rate to match available energy. For many uses, renewables like these are already perfect.

dalbasal 9y ago

These sorts of ideas are in a weird place. To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts. ATM, the debate is (1)"is the carbon-climate problem real?" and (2) "If so, how do we reduce carbon emissions?". "Climate Engineering" would complicate 2 a lot, probably splitting political support. Politically, they open the door to continued or increased carbon emmissions today. They let us avoid addressing the "root cause." This is all regardless of timelines or progress. Just the existence of the idea in public debate might be enough to swing the opinion balance. I imagine there are some who would ideally like to keep geoengineering as a quite Plan B so as not to disturb current efforts, but that's not really possible. Overall, I think these ideas (if actually viable) will inevitably enter the discourse in the long term. We are already engineering in some sense. We have models and targets for both carbon and temperature. IE, we want to take control (to a small extent) of the climate. That's engineering, and engineers always look for more tools eventually.

dogma1138 9y ago
There is no debate and no climate scientist sees this as a threat. Reduction is needed but it won't cut it its too late for natural carbon sequestering at its normal pace. People who work on reduction also often work on sequestering and if not do not see these efforts as a threat to any of their work.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Sure there's a debate. We're debating and discussing right now.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    For the most part we aren't climate scientists, there is absolutely no debate about carbon emissions and climate change.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts. This is sad. People thinking like this are actively sabotaging their own efforts and dreams. It's like a boat with a hole in it. You desperately need to stop the inflow of water (limiting emissions), but you could also use some way to pump out the water that's already in the boat (geoengineering). Because, 1) it's not the inflow that ultimately kills you, it's what has accumulated, and 2) pumping out gives you more time to fix the inflow. We need the plan B now. We also need plans C, D and E. What worries me though, is the "human playing god" magical thinking crowd will latch onto geoengineering efforts and gain popular support, the way anti-GMO and anti-vaccine groups did. Humanity is amazing at preventing itself from solving problems.

legulere 9y ago

> Working around the clock, each capture plant can vacuum about 50 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere a year, Wurzbacher says. For a comparison the per capita CO₂ emissions per capita in the US are 20 tons. With an average household size of 2.58 you would need one of those plants + CO₂ storage facilities per household.

Tade0 9y ago
Or, given that the world annual CO2 emissions are around ~400*10^9 tonnes, there should exist one for literally every human being.

Tade0 9y ago

There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere. Some of the resistance to action on climate change comes from the notion that the cost is unknown, which in turn stems from the fact, that to date there was no scalable way to undo the emissions. Now that a way has been demonstrated emitters can choose whether they want to reduce their emissions or undo them(assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place). I believe most will go with the former option until it stops being economical.

titojankowski 9y ago
Yes! Pricing is a key step to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An invitation for entrepreneurs hop on board. How much does a ton of carbon dioxide sell for? Can I pull it out cheaper? Reducing emissions is necessary but not sufficient. Even if fossil fuel emissions stopped 100% tomorrow, we would still have an issue: 403 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We must develop tech to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The ideal outputs are economically-priced carbon-products without subsidy.
mac01021 9y ago
The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them. The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. But unless we're starting from some kind of reasonable estimate of the cost of the damage, however approximate, it can't be right to say that these guys are setting the price on atmospheric CO2.
- Tade0 9y ago
  > The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. This is what I'm getting at. There's resistance because we're not giving any specific numbers, only saying that they're "probably very high". This is far from a convincing argument. With this technology we can instead say: "Ok, so clearing a tonne of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere is going to cost $X. These are going to be your additional expenses in the foreseeable future."

enugu 9y ago

Wouldnt it be cheaper to first capture CO_2 from the output of coal plants and other industries where it is in concentrated form? Also, economies of scale. Once we bring those down,we would still have to deal with decentralized sources like cars(electric cars and renewables can help), container ships, and the meat industry.

titojankowski 9y ago
Agreed - check out Opus12 for an example of point-source capture: https://www.opus-12.com https://www.opus-12.com Would be relevant to get Climeworks' perspective on the question of point source vs atmospheric carbon dioxide.

knowThySelfx 9y ago

Do they have plans to remove Methane and NOx. Methane emissions have increased and we are seeing weather changes. One shouldn't forget CO2 is also needed in the atmosphere.

marcosdumay 9y ago
You don't need to remove those. You just need to make sure they get them wet, so entropy can follow its inexorable path.
- knowThySelfx 9y ago
  Getting wet alright, Irma probably does it.
mikeash 9y ago
Methane goes away pretty quickly on its own, so that's less pressing. CO2 is needed in the atmosphere, but not nearly as much as we have. Pre-industrial levels were 30% lower than current levels.

blkhawk 9y ago

wow - <sarcasm>This technology is the future</sarcasm> - as per the article each plant sequesters about 11 Cars worth of CO2 each year. Since there are currently about 1.015 billion motor vehicles (lets assume those are cars) we would only need 93 million of these things - how much energy do they use and can they suck more CO2 running them causes?

jtraffic 9y ago

For some reason I thought the runaway in temps will come from water vapor from melting permafrost, which is starting now. In other words, the CO2 ship has sailed, no?

AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
Why would melting permafrost release more water vapor than the warming oceans, which are massively larger?
irukavina 9y ago
My hope is that this study is correct: https://m.phys.org/news/2017-08-hydrate-gun-hypothesis.html https://m.phys.org/news/2017-08-hydrate-gun-hypothesis.html

tryingagainbro 9y ago

dumb question: say they take xxxx tons from somewhere in Switzerland. How long does it take for the air to mix with the rest so the co2 is averaged worldwide? This looks like a great thing. The state can tax emissions and force emitters to pay such carbon gathering companies to become carbon neutral. You release xxxxx tons a years, show that you sequestered at least the same or pay a tax. You could also have a Bill Gates type donate all his money to a such company. Or the government can fund them. If this works, it's just a matter of cash and we have it /can find it.

titojankowski 9y ago
How long does it take for air to mix worldwide? I visited NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii last month. It's one of the key global sites where carbon dioxide is monitored. The scientist giving the tour answered this, and I believe it was on the order of a few weeks for mixing to occur. Here's a visualization that starts to answer your question: https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-computer-model.html https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-comp... I would love a more detailed answer to this question as well. (I visited the Mauna Loa Ovservatory because of our open source project to track carbon dioxide worldwide: https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby http://carbondoomsday.com http://carbondoomsday.com)
- mturmon 9y ago
  That is a nice link (showing global CO2 estimates in 2006). It illustrates how turbulence mixes the atmosphere at global scales. The video mentions that better measurements will result from the OCO-2 mission, which launched in the meantime and has been measuring CO2 in ~3km^2 footprints across the globe since 2014. A result is: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4514 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4514 which shows vertically-resolved CO2. Both videos make it clear that CO2 is generally well-mixed both horizontally and vertically in the atmosphere, with the exception of Northern vs Southern hemisphere. I believe CO2 emissions from China, for example, take on the order of a week to propagate across the Pacific and reach the Western US.

vonnik 9y ago

There are basically two approaches to geo-engineering, and they both have unpredictable consequences: * reflect sunlight back into space through "albedo modification", either by spraying sulfates high in the stratosphere to mimic a volcano, or by conducting cloud whitening. complication: it will affect precipitation patterns, and allows the CO2 buildup to continue, meaning a sudden cessation would produce wrenching warming. it also does not slow ocean acidification. * suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. also known as carbon sequestration. That's what Climeworks is doing, but their method is not the only approach. What they've built is a kind of chemical tree. Another approach is to create algae blooms by seeding the ocean with iron filings, since iron is often the limiting parameter to algal growth. algae: the amazon of the sea. a joker named Russ George dumped a tanker of iron into the northern Pacific a few years ago to show this could be effective, but his experiment was poorly designed. carbon sequestration does not address the underlying cause. but we are losing the battle against the underlying cause, which is basically our addiction to economic growth driven by fossil fuels, and existing carbon in the atmosphere will continue to warm the planet for many decades to come, even we switch entirely to clean energy today. so it's likely that humanity will have to combine carbon sequestration with clean energy to avert even worse climate change. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/geoengineering-caldeira-climate-change/ http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/geoengineerin... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170724105044.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170724105044.h... http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/iron-dumping-leaves-geoengineers-with-egg-on-their-faces-me-too-15147 http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/iron-dumping-leaves-geoe... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/re-engineering-the-earth/307552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/07/re-engi...

collyw 9y ago
Serious question. Why not just plant a shit load more trees?
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Costs at scale, mostly. Algea grows faster and doesn't require land.

adrianN 9y ago

Is this cheaper than growing wood and turning it into charcoal? That doesn't take energy (in fact you get some out), it only takes time and land.

DennisP 9y ago
At the scale we'd need to turn things around, land is a significant limiting factor. I saw a study in Nature a couple years ago saying we could manage a gigatonne/year of carbon sequestration from biochar without major impacts on biodiversity and food production, which is pretty good but not sufficient on its own.
anotherbrownguy 9y ago
I have a better alternative: growing excess food and dumping it on the ground.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Char takes a lot longer to rot. So the carbon is pulled out of the short cycle.

mac01021 9y ago

> Working around the clock, each capture plant can vacuum about 50 tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere a year, Wurzbacher says. And then from [https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions]: > Global carbon (C) emissions from fossil fuel use were 9.795 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2014 (or 35.9 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide). This doesn't seem like a great solution to me.

deleted 9y ago
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program_whiz 9y ago

People seem upset that this is working? Maybe because this provides a solution to the problem that doesn't mean we have to fundamentally change society, or bring down the 1st world, or say that "America was the bad guy to ignore all the EU regulations".

frany 9y ago
The technology presented here is not a paradigm shift, it is merely another way of capturing CO2. What is remarkably about it (compared to other, known techs is that it does not require an enormous amount of biomass. But by their own admission it is no really cheap technology: <100$ for 1t of CO2. [1] But there are several fundamental problems that remain: 1. Storage: CO2 has to be stored safely for an (on human scale) indefinite amount of time. 2. Scale: The amount of CO2 recaptured is gigantic (see other comments). 3. The problem of investment without immediate benefit. On a national level, the money needed to deploy this technology at a large scale is basically "lost" for the immediate future, the (positive) effects will be felt later on. This is similar to the situation right now, where we "only" have to reduce the amount of climate-forcing gases, but cannot be bothered to really weigh in on the problem. 4. Most importantly: this kind of technology is already factored in in current mitigation scenarios. So on top of reducing emissions (close) to 0, deployment of carbon-capturing technology is a prerequisite for remaining inside anything like the 2°C climate change by the end of the century. [2] So the problem is one of framing for this technology. It is not so much a game-changer but more of a sight of hope that maybe given an heroic effort in emission-reduction, this technology might help to achieve the internationally agreed upon goals for climate-change. Hence it is often seen as a kind of moral hazard, when portrayed as a means to happily keep on emitting. [1] http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/ http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/ [2] e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fossil-fuels https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
anotherbrownguy 9y ago
- CO2 is plant food. Indoor growers supplement CO2 levels up to 1500 ppm (after which they say that there is not much return) to enhance growth. There is no reason to remove it from the atmosphere. - Supposedly CO2 is also a green house gas that helps earth trap some heat from the sun. The link between how much heat CO2 captures based on the concentration is very difficult to find, suggesting that the link is not very strong and propaganda driven "climate science" deliberately doesn't want anyone to know. My guess is that it is very weak at best which is why they supplement the theory with heating will cause water vapor concentration to rise, which is also a green house gas, which will cause snowball effect. This could be tested in a controlled greenhouse but most probably it didn't turn out to be favorable for the propaganda so the research has not been published. - Climate has been changing throughout the history of the earth and there are no known consistent patterns that we have been able to model which can help us predict anything, not that we have seen working at least. Overall though, it has been cooling and there is no reason that it will not continue to do so in the long run. - The causal relation between CO2 levels and global temperatures has not only not been established, but it is impossible to establish because of large number of factors affecting it and affecting each other. The best we can get is some kind of correlation but even that hasn't been consistent over time. They keep adding more explanations to anomalies to pretend that they know what is going on but it's obvious that they just don't want to accept it. Max Plank said "Science advances one funeral at a time", but it seems increased life expectancy will keep "climate science" going for a while. So, yeah some people may be upset that people are touting this solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

godshatter 9y ago

Each capture plant takes 50 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year. We are putting roughly 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. That's only 800 million capture plants needed, or roughly 44 million customers similar to the one they have lined up (using 900 tons per year). Every little bit helps, and I'm glad they are making money doing this, but it's not a viable solution to the problem as a whole. They also didn't say what powers the turbines in their capture plants.

traviswingo 9y ago

I've always imagined blimps floating around and filtering our air above all the major cities and places where air pollution/CO2 density is worst. Does anyone have any reasoning as to why this isn't really being done?

chadgeidel 9y ago
The magnitude of the emissions. We are putting tens of billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year. Even assuming the filtering process is very efficient (net-carbon negative) where do we store that in the blimp? How many blimps would we need? As a thought experiment - look at the average car - a Toyota Camry for example. That car emits 206 grams per kilometer. Over the course of the car's lifetime (about 200 thousand kilometers or so) that's 41 thousand kilograms of CO2. For one family car.

carbonhater 9y ago

Personally, I will not rest until every last drop of carbon dioxide is removed from our atmosphere.