16 ms·

Climeworks lays the foundation to scale up carbon dioxide removal significantly

106 points by jseliger 6y ago

hosh 6y ago
I first heard if this tech from the Netflix series, Down To Earth. I think sequestering the carbon into the soil through plants is a better idea. The mineralization will not be bioavailable in the ecosystem. It isn’t as if carbon itself is a bad thing so much as its excess amount in the atmosphere. Futhermore, having more plants and fungi and living ecosystems fixes other problems besides greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Or better yet, fix the underlying thing on our global civilization’s obsession with technology that emits all of this in the first place. I am not necessarily talking about the tech so much as why we in our society think we can’t live without it.
- ianlevesque 6y ago
  It wasn’t bioavailable buried in the ground as oil or coal, so that doesn’t seem like an important concern to me.
  - hosh 6y ago
    It may not have been bioavailable as oil or coal, but it is possible to sequester carbon in a way that accumulates fertility in the soil. That not only restores the declining fertility we have in general, by increasing fertility in general, people are better able to feed themselves in general. Furthermore, greater fertility supports a greater diversity of ecosystems, which enhances the resiliency of the overall living system. Greater overall resiliency helps bring basic security to the people and the land (the basic level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), and enables us to develop our own potential (self actualization), and our relationships within our ecosystem. As an example, carbon can be sequestered in the form of biochar. Carbon in that form is not bioavailable to plants so much as bioavailable to fungi. The fungis don’t consume it so much as live in it. It becomes hydrophillic, and allows the soil to hold a lot more water and nutrients. That in turn enables greater fertility. Since it is not consumed, it can act as a long-lasting soil amendment (greater than a thousand years). Human-made biochar is the reason there are some spots in the Amazon that supports and holds a great deal of fertility, enough to support a vast civilization (that only got destroyed by infectious disease from Europe during the colonial period). Without biochar, the frequent rain washes away nutrients, making those part of the jungle fragile.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >by increasing fertility in general, people are better able to feed themselves in general. but if you're using that fertile soil to grow food, wouldn't that mean the carbon is going to be un-sequestered?
      - samatman 6y ago
        Your question is answered in detail, and in the negative, in the very post you're replying to.
- bloudermilk 6y ago
  The reality of the situation is such that we need to do all of the above. We must decarbonize the global economy. We still have to remove much of the carbon we’ve already emitted. In order to reach the scale required, we need to commercialize both biospheric and mechanical solutions to carbon removal. I would also argue that it’s not society that can’t live without hydrocarbons as much as it is the entrenched industries that profit from them.
  - hosh 6y ago
    I also think the entrenched industries profit from them too. More fundamentally, it is a paradigm of value extraction that is deeply embedded as a value within our civilization. The profit motive are driven by individuals who seek to accumulate wealth and control access to them. That same game is played by people who don’t have wealth yet expect the tide to raise all boats. But we also compare ourselves to other people to give ourselves a sense of progress. The general ethical principles do not include a relationship with place, land, communities.
    - megameter 6y ago
      The bright side of it, if there is one, is that the modern industrial pace of extraction has not gone on that long - fewer generations than you can fit on your fingers. So the cultural hole we are in is really just a few hundred years deep, not thousands. It's just not so visible that that is the case, except perhaps to some indigenous cultures, or those who have visited the undeveloped world. This capacity for self-harm was built by forgetting our holistic selves and putting other things first - work, wealth, fame and glory, the national interest. It'll take a little work, but we can remember.
      - bioipbiop 6y ago
        Lovely stuff, our society may be imperfect, but our material well-being is not something to be dismissed. Our secure food supply, sanitation, clean drinking water, medicine, and ability to adjust the climate to a comfortable level are absolutely marvellous achievements and dependent upon resource extraction. I’d hate to think anyone would suggest we should regress a millimetre away from that. We need to find ways to satiate our hunger for resources in a sustainable manner (or find a way to import them from a nearby object in space), but we shouldn’t be ashamed of the progress we’ve made.
- neurobashing 6y ago
  it's a bit of an intentionally snarky response but any time anyone talks about machines to do it, I always reply: they already exist, they're called _trees_.
  - foobar1962 6y ago
    Respectfully ignoring the snark, we have an immediate problem and tress aren't fast enough, take up too much land, and the land needs to be suitable. I've watched the past 30-odd years - and my father for 50-odd years before that - as fertile farmland with good reliable rain (this is not a common combination in Australia) has been built-over with housing. Agriculture has been pushed further out to areas with less fertility and rainfall. Most of the remaining wide open spaces in Australia can support little more than bush and patches of grass. All the good land with rainfall has people living on it.
    - samatman 6y ago
      This is a problem all over. Before it was Silicon Valley, the Peninsula was said to be the best citrus growing land on Earth. It's a nice place to live, don't get me wrong. But I can't help feeling like growing detached single-family homes instead wasn't a good trade.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        You, or anyone else here, can reverse this trade today by buying up homes, demolishing them, and planting citrus trees. You wouldn't make a profit doing so though, which tells you that the collective hivemind that makes up the economy prefers houses over trees.
        prox 6y ago
        Youcould set up a collective farm, where a neighborhood essentially owns a farm.
        6y ago
- rayiner 6y ago
  > Or better yet, fix the underlying thing on our global civilization’s obsession with technology that emits all of this in the first place. I am not necessarily talking about the tech so much as why we in our society think we can’t live without it. What a fatalistic view of the future.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
g0rbongler 6y ago
Another company to watch in this space is Terraformation, using reforestation to efficiently offset carbon at scale. See: https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-project-is-how-we-fix-climate-change-36afc6d4dc2 https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-pr...
- kickout 6y ago
  Cool concept. I think these ideas are where the actual solution lies. Plants and trees can do a lot of carbon sequestersting--at scale no less.
  - ta8908695 6y ago
    I could be majorly misunderstanding how it works, but as far as I'm aware plants/trees are not really a solution. Plants are part of the carbon cycle and the issues is that we took sequestered carbon and injected it into the carbon cycle. To make plants a solution you would need to take all the plant matter after the plants die and sequester it somewhere where it can't decompose. I think planting trees helps delay large scale issues, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. Maybe there's some increased plant to land area ratio that means a larger percent of the carbon in the carbon cycle is always spent in solid plant form? Even if that's the case it requires always maintaining this amount of plants even as populations grow or cutting down trees after they grow and storing the wood in a vacuum chamber or something like that.
    - notabee 6y ago
      You make a good point, but I'm sure the rate of decay matters a lot in this situation as well. Properly treated wood used as building materials could last decades or even centuries without significantly decaying if planned and managed properly[0], but a dead tree on a forest floor will decay very quickly. If we start rapidly growing trees en masse, it might work almost as well to imagine some grand building projects in lieu of giant sealed burial pits. Likely, we would need to do both. And like each offered solution on this topic, plants alone will not fix everything. I'm also interested in some of the novel engineered materials we might be able to make with wood if we discover efficient processes to do so[1]. It irritates me a lot when people lazily say, "just plant trees", but they can for sure be part of the solution. 0. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-wooden-architecture-concrete-global-warming https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-w... 1. https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-researchers-create-super-wood-stronger-most-metals https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-researchers-create-supe...
yahyaheee 6y ago
So if humans are putting 38 billion tons into the atmosphere every year does this even make a dent?
- avmich 6y ago
  Let's see :) https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- danimal88 6y ago
  38,000,000,000/4000 = 9,500,000 plants needed to get to net zero, just for the the carbon we are currently putting out, to say nothing of all the carbon currently causing warming... Seems reasonable to say no.
  - totetsu 6y ago
    How much carbon release is needed to make 9,500,000 plants..
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - namuol 6y ago
    Reasonable if you assume that progress of this technology has already plateaued. I'm pretty sure we could be putting a lot more money behind this and we would see substantial improvements to efficiency (i.e. $/kg/year). We need every tool we can get to fight this thing.
  - new_realist 6y ago
    There are 3.04 trillion trees on earth.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      A tree absorbs around 20kg of carbon dioxide a year while growing. To sequester 38 Gigatons you'd need to plant and cut down and bury around 10^12 trees each year, give or take an order of magnitude or two.
baryphonic 6y ago
I've always wondered if someone could bio-engineer particularly dense wood as a way to sequester carbon. But I admit, I know next to nothing about how anyone would go about doing that and what the constraints would be, other than its extremely tough to make genetic engineering work.
- redisman 6y ago
  There already are some like the Empress tree. A big problem with any super trees is that they tend to be highly invasive
  - civilized 6y ago
    That seems like a good thing if you are serious about scaling up their use...
    - hosh 6y ago
      Instead of scaling up like that, there are other ways that take advantage of positive feedback loops and decentralization — that is, a technology that can go “viral”. There would not be a single source of failure. Such a system can be self -healing. It can potentially be adaptive if local people are able to implement it in ways that make sense for their place and community. (Otherwise, it runs into the same kind if globalist mindset from high modernity). You don’t have to find a single tree species to do this. Instead, you look at what is already growing in the local area and plant those. Doing it that way solves way more problems than carbon emissions. We are talking about food forests (solve the food distribution problem), emotional and mental health (humans recover from illnesses better when they can see trees), resiliency (from decentralized food systems and biodiversity), and so on.
    - redisman 6y ago
      I mean you could in theory make a plant so good that it would outcompete almost any other plants. Then you might get a fungus or other disease that targets that monoculture and can now easily jump through the whole globe since it's covered in the same super plant. Being invasive is not a good feature.
tito 6y ago
Great to see air mining getting featured on HN! For an index of 100+ companies working on mining carbon dioxide from the air, check out AirMiners http://www.airminers.org http://www.airminers.org
- fmakunbound 6y ago
  What’s the economics of this? Who buys tons of carbon?
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    Carbon credits do
  - darksaints 6y ago
    I would assume the primary customers would be purchasers of carbon credits, and possibly governments. However, there is likely a large future market for synthetic fuels, and carbon dioxide is an important building block for synthetic hydrocarbons.
  - comnetxr 6y ago
    In the long term, if we eventually make it to the scenario where we stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere on net, then each kg of CO2 input into the atmosphere must be compensated by a kg of CO2 removed by some mechanism or another. The reasonable thing to do in that equilibrium would be to set the price to output CO2 - collected by governments as a carbon fee - equal to the price to capture CO2, paid out by governments as a negative carbon reward. Of course we could just do that now, the trick is how to get to that equilibrium scenario without collapsing the economy in the process.
  - henearkr 6y ago
    There are surely others, but the ones coming to my mind right now: - Agriculture: lots of CO2 are produced on-site under greenhouses by burning gas, because it speeds up the growing of crops. - Sparkling drinks industry.
    - 6y ago
diptanu 6y ago
Random question - At what scale do we need to do this to get back to where the planet was 50 years back?
- jaggederest 6y ago
  3210 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere (410ppm) 275 ppm (Target PPM, based on pre-industrial levels) 3210 gigatonnes - ((3210 gigatonnes / 410) * 275) = 1057 gigatonnes to remove. Advertised scale: 4000 tons per year (1057 gigatonnes / 4000 tons per year) = 264250000 years reasonable timeline: 30 years 30 years / 264250000 years = 8808333x increase needed. Call it roughly 10^7 times faster. So, a lot.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mc32 6y ago
    You forgot stabilizing pop growth.
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      Population growth hasn't been the problem for decades. The problem is per-capita consumption. The "westernization" of India and China is 2.5-3 billion people that want western consumption patterns.
      - ECA_stax 6y ago
        > Population growth hasn't been the problem for decades. Of course it is. Populations always eventually demand development, aka "westernization". So as the world population grows, so does the consumption.
        seanwilson 6y ago
        > So as the world population grows, so does the consumption. This includes dairy + meat consumption, where about 70 billion animals are farmed for food each year right now. When someone brings up that humans are overpopulating the planet, I've never heard someone mention that overpopulating the planet with livestock is also an issue.
bozoUser 6y ago
FAQ on the topic: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-carbon-sequestration?qt-news_science_products https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-carbon-sequestration?qt-news_...
totetsu 6y ago
Has anyone made a paperclips/cookieclicker-esq game about carbon sequestration yet?
- keithtom 6y ago
  Underrated comment
exabrial 6y ago
Are they really going to beat the efficiency of trees or algae? I highly doubt it
- sacred_numbers 6y ago
  It's extremely easy to beat the efficiency of photosynthesis since plants are so inefficient. The highest estimate I have seen for carbon sequestration by trees is 7 tons of CO2 per acre, which doesn't include losses from converting wood to biochar for long term carbon capture. Direct air capture of CO2 requires about 2000 KWh per ton of CO2. An acre of solar panels produces an average of 357000 KWh of electricity per year. That means that direct air capture is at least 25x more efficient at converting solar energy to captured CO2. That efficiency is important considering the scale at which we will need to sequester carbon in the next few decades. Cost efficiency is a different matter, but even then I believe direct air capture will beat biochar very soon if it hasn't already.
  - imhoguy 6y ago
    Why we are blindly fixated at CO2 only? The artificial cure may be worse than disease. Plants sequester other substances and retain water, regulate temperatures and is home to biodiversity. With artificial solution we will endup with dead deserts of hard to recycle hardware. Nature did it better for millions of years.
    - kisamoto 6y ago
      Bio-solutions will definitely make up the future of carbon removal but while nature was able to keep itself in equilibrium for millions of years a few centuries of human behaviour has thrown it out of balance. Humans will need to undo their own damage _and_ restore nature.
    - exabrial 6y ago
      Until carbon sequestration can make bricks or another useful material as a carbon sink, it'll sit as a niche own used for virtue signaling by politicians rather than actual change that moves the meter.
kisamoto 6y ago
Carbon removal is definitely required at this stage. I read a lot of "Trees are _The_ solution"-esq news whenever Climeworks is brought up and while they do sequester carbon the reality is they are slow and cannot solely be used to lower atmospheric CO₂ levels. Earth, as we know it today, has the potential to plant an additional 0.9 billion ha of canopy cover (~1.2 trillion trees)[0] Trees will ultimately help in the long run, no doubt, but will need to be supported by a myriad of other methods such as Climeworks. Ryan Orbuch of Stripe wrote a great primer on some of the other carbon removal methods[1]. If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today. [0] https://carbonremoved.com/learn/forestation/ https://carbonremoved.com/learn/forestation/ [1] https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/ https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/
- bioipbiop 6y ago
  > If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today. Why not both? Allow companies to buy additional carbon credits from co2 sinks? Allow companies to decide between stopping a harmful industrial process or paying for its externalities.
  - kisamoto 6y ago
    Fundamentally I agree but only if choosing to do both, not either or. To truly reverse the emissions an individual or company has, Carbon Removal is really the only way. Carbon credits _can_ encourage businesses to reduce their emissions (and if a company has money to help - great!) but reducing a third-parties emissions is not a green-light to justify my own wrongdoings. If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there. If I emit a ton and remove a ton I am at net zero emissions.
    - bioipbiop 6y ago
      > If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there The basic idea is to allow companies to ramp down their emissions by releasing fewer credits each year. I could see a compromise being that one carbon credit is worth a tonne of carbon emissions, but two tonnes of sequestered carbon. So companies would have to pay for the removal of some factor of what they produce.
jesstaa 6y ago
This seems completely ridiculous. If it was profitable to do then companies would be doing it directly at the source of emissions more much efficiently.
- Swenrekcah 6y ago
  This is of course only profitable within an emissions tax/trade framework, and hopefully those will extend to the factories causing emissions and thus enabling them to take part (by avoiding the tax imposed on their products by responsible countries). Nevertheless, that can only decrease the addition of CO2, while this can potentially reduce the absolute amount in due course.
- hannob 6y ago
  Realistically carbon removal will only happen after we removed most carbon emission sources. Carbon removal will likely be more expensive than reducing emissions for decades to come. This is a future technology for the time, for the "fuck, we already produced far too much emissions, what do we do now?"
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    We're well past that point. The things are melting. Stopping all CO2 production tomorrow isn't going to re-freeze the melty bits.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  It isn't profitable because these cost of CO₂ generation is just externalized to nature.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Having refused to do 1000 other things. We're now offered a 1001st option. We will refuse this option too. Because the problem isn't that we can't stop climate change, it's that we don't want to. That's not a science, engineering, technology problem. It's a human nature, leadership problem.
- malux85 6y ago
  But if some technology makes it 1000x easier, cheap, and doesn't require the involvement or even consent of governments, then that's a win for science right? And avoids leadership / human nature.
  - awalton 6y ago
    It still boils down to "who pays." And we're in the "I won't even pay my taxes since I can just hide them somewhere and the government won't come after me" phase of capitalism. The world's going to hell fast. If past is prologue, the Rich will pay for their parts of the world being nice and habitable. Everyone else will be left to suffer. Get ready to see domed city concepts getting more serious and more cities like Vegas with connected tunnels and shafts between buildings to avoid going outdoors for any reason...
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    If you could find a solution that was a few tens of billions times cheaper than any current solution, a private individual might be able to fund it. That might work. But right now, no government will pay even for a solution 1000x cheaper than current options. This is why no one is considering Geo Engineering. Remember, if you don't want to solve a problem, the cost of solving it is always too high, even if the cost is only 1USD...
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      I doubt governments would refuse to pay 1USD to solve global warming. This is an absurdly reductive take.
baskire 6y ago
The USA does 5903 million metric tons of co2 annually [1] You’d need 1.5 million of these to remove just the USA’s yearly co2 emissions. [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...
- twoslide 6y ago
  True, for another perspective, one way across the atlantic is about 1 ton, so this is 2000 one way trips or (roughly) 10 flights of 200 people. On the other hand, if this amount doubled every year, it would equal total US CO2 production in 21 years, total global CO2 production in 27 years. Agree with the other comments that preventing emissions in the first place is far more efficient. Also, I think that CO2 removal is now included in many climate change models, so the benefit might not be too great.
  - pyrale 6y ago
    > On the other hand [...] This tells more about the ridiculous progression of exponential functions than about the efficiency of this process.
    - twoslide 6y ago
      Agreed that doubling every year is wildly optimistic, other technological growth is much slower, e.g. mobile phones were about 36% annually between 1990 and 2018: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2
  - Teever 6y ago
    > On the other hand, if this amount doubled every year, it would equal total US CO2 production in 21 years, total global CO2 production in 27 years. So can we make the machines that make the carbon out of the carbon that the machines capture?
- wongarsu 6y ago
  That sounds doable and much easier than getting Americans to change their behavior.
asah 6y ago
Silly q: don't we need to also remove co2 from the upper atmosphere as well? How much missing is there with the lower atmosphere?
aaron695 6y ago
Lol, so rather than sending the energy elsewere to stop CO2 being released (there are many ways to do this, currently Iceland does it through Aluminium production) we do something useless like putting CO2 into the ground. If only we could do some sort of bio-tech and create some sort of plant that could convert solar energy in sequestered CO2. Plants are pretty useless as well I guess. Random fact Iceland abundance of energy is from dams and nothing to do with geothermal, that's just for branding because it's cool and people can't think.
zaroth 6y ago
In the distant past we had much higher CO2 levels but the sun was also about 4% weaker. At this price point, launching a few million tons of solar shades into the L1 Lagrange point is probably more economical.
- jonstewart 6y ago
  What's the price point? I didn't see anything in the article/press release.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    Solar shading is on the order of $1 trillion per decade, assuming SuperHeavy+Starship and full reusability as I recall ($10,000 per ton). As a bonus, the capability to launch 10s of millions of tons to orbit fundamentally changes the capability and reach of humanity. Sucking gigatons of CO2 from the air at the current efficiency is basically infinite dollars, but it could conceivably be cost competitive with the solar shade in a few decades. It basically just requires massive amounts of fully renewable energy, so the benefit is it’s a massive renewable energy generation subsidy. But renewables are already more than cost competitive, the problem we have now is energy storage (batteries).
    - jonstewart 6y ago
      I mean, maybe a solar shade is possible, but it still requires a massive engineering investment and maybe has some accidental risks like “ends photosynthesis” (which is hyperbole, but still, it’s a big one shot project with global consequences). DAC has limitations that likely keep it from being the sole solution to CO2 levels, but it can be developed incrementally without much risk and then deployed on the margins where it makes sense (e.g., on top of geothermal, in the Sahara next to a PV array).
      - zaroth 6y ago
        The L1 Lagrange point is not perfectly stable. Anything we put there would drift after about a decade. So it requires constant upkeep but also means nothing you do there can be catastrophic. Both technologies are not “one-shot” but rather are things which are deployed along a spectrum measured in “gigatons of CO2 extracted” or “tons of diffractive material deployed”. You don’t put one big mirror in place as a binary thing. You deploy thousands to millions of tons of “mirrors” overall, ~100 tons at a time. Imagine a payload of carbon fiber snowflakes which get dropped off, coated in such a way that they self orient broad-side toward the sun. I wonder what the effective carbon offset of 100 tons of diffractive material at L1 buys you. Given that you could draw a direct cost/benefit comparison.
andi999 6y ago
To me this looks all like snake oil currently. The problem is, that carbon is not a pollutand (like fckw) but the energy carrier-source. So generally to take it out from the athmosphere you need more energy then you got from putting it into the athmosphere (backed by the laws of thermodynamics). So it would only make senso if you have huge (i mean HUGE) amount of renewable energy which somehow is too far away from the industry to use it directly. We are not at that stage. The real problem is to generate enough renewables. Then you can first start to replace your fossil plants by those and then later down the line maybe this technology starts to make sense. For iceland they could just build more aluminium plants now and this would probably be better for the total CO2 reduction. An analogy: Its like we have a hydroelectric power plant, but people need so much power the water coming out of it is flooding towards the city to distroy it and there is an article 'scientists invented the 10 gallon bucket, allowing to move water back up the dam faster.'. I think this is also harmful, since these kind of successes might give people the wrong inpression where we actually stand.
- jonstewart 6y ago
  According to the article, they're building it right on top of a large existing geothermal power source in Iceland.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Yes. But it is a solution that does not and cannot scale.
    - jonstewart 6y ago
      It doesn't have to scale to be the single solution to CO2 level management on the planet. It only needs to scale to countries party to the Paris Agreement as a portion of their emissions control portfolio, and is obviously attractive to such countries with abundant renewable power sources.
      - andi999 6y ago

106 points by jseliger 6y ago

hosh 6y ago

I first heard if this tech from the Netflix series, Down To Earth. I think sequestering the carbon into the soil through plants is a better idea. The mineralization will not be bioavailable in the ecosystem. It isn’t as if carbon itself is a bad thing so much as its excess amount in the atmosphere. Futhermore, having more plants and fungi and living ecosystems fixes other problems besides greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Or better yet, fix the underlying thing on our global civilization’s obsession with technology that emits all of this in the first place. I am not necessarily talking about the tech so much as why we in our society think we can’t live without it.

ianlevesque 6y ago
It wasn’t bioavailable buried in the ground as oil or coal, so that doesn’t seem like an important concern to me.
- hosh 6y ago
  It may not have been bioavailable as oil or coal, but it is possible to sequester carbon in a way that accumulates fertility in the soil. That not only restores the declining fertility we have in general, by increasing fertility in general, people are better able to feed themselves in general. Furthermore, greater fertility supports a greater diversity of ecosystems, which enhances the resiliency of the overall living system. Greater overall resiliency helps bring basic security to the people and the land (the basic level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), and enables us to develop our own potential (self actualization), and our relationships within our ecosystem. As an example, carbon can be sequestered in the form of biochar. Carbon in that form is not bioavailable to plants so much as bioavailable to fungi. The fungis don’t consume it so much as live in it. It becomes hydrophillic, and allows the soil to hold a lot more water and nutrients. That in turn enables greater fertility. Since it is not consumed, it can act as a long-lasting soil amendment (greater than a thousand years). Human-made biochar is the reason there are some spots in the Amazon that supports and holds a great deal of fertility, enough to support a vast civilization (that only got destroyed by infectious disease from Europe during the colonial period). Without biochar, the frequent rain washes away nutrients, making those part of the jungle fragile.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >by increasing fertility in general, people are better able to feed themselves in general. but if you're using that fertile soil to grow food, wouldn't that mean the carbon is going to be un-sequestered?
    - samatman 6y ago
      Your question is answered in detail, and in the negative, in the very post you're replying to.
bloudermilk 6y ago
The reality of the situation is such that we need to do all of the above. We must decarbonize the global economy. We still have to remove much of the carbon we’ve already emitted. In order to reach the scale required, we need to commercialize both biospheric and mechanical solutions to carbon removal. I would also argue that it’s not society that can’t live without hydrocarbons as much as it is the entrenched industries that profit from them.
- hosh 6y ago
  I also think the entrenched industries profit from them too. More fundamentally, it is a paradigm of value extraction that is deeply embedded as a value within our civilization. The profit motive are driven by individuals who seek to accumulate wealth and control access to them. That same game is played by people who don’t have wealth yet expect the tide to raise all boats. But we also compare ourselves to other people to give ourselves a sense of progress. The general ethical principles do not include a relationship with place, land, communities.
  - megameter 6y ago
    The bright side of it, if there is one, is that the modern industrial pace of extraction has not gone on that long - fewer generations than you can fit on your fingers. So the cultural hole we are in is really just a few hundred years deep, not thousands. It's just not so visible that that is the case, except perhaps to some indigenous cultures, or those who have visited the undeveloped world. This capacity for self-harm was built by forgetting our holistic selves and putting other things first - work, wealth, fame and glory, the national interest. It'll take a little work, but we can remember.
    - bioipbiop 6y ago
      Lovely stuff, our society may be imperfect, but our material well-being is not something to be dismissed. Our secure food supply, sanitation, clean drinking water, medicine, and ability to adjust the climate to a comfortable level are absolutely marvellous achievements and dependent upon resource extraction. I’d hate to think anyone would suggest we should regress a millimetre away from that. We need to find ways to satiate our hunger for resources in a sustainable manner (or find a way to import them from a nearby object in space), but we shouldn’t be ashamed of the progress we’ve made.
neurobashing 6y ago
it's a bit of an intentionally snarky response but any time anyone talks about machines to do it, I always reply: they already exist, they're called _trees_.
- foobar1962 6y ago
  Respectfully ignoring the snark, we have an immediate problem and tress aren't fast enough, take up too much land, and the land needs to be suitable. I've watched the past 30-odd years - and my father for 50-odd years before that - as fertile farmland with good reliable rain (this is not a common combination in Australia) has been built-over with housing. Agriculture has been pushed further out to areas with less fertility and rainfall. Most of the remaining wide open spaces in Australia can support little more than bush and patches of grass. All the good land with rainfall has people living on it.
  - samatman 6y ago
    This is a problem all over. Before it was Silicon Valley, the Peninsula was said to be the best citrus growing land on Earth. It's a nice place to live, don't get me wrong. But I can't help feeling like growing detached single-family homes instead wasn't a good trade.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      You, or anyone else here, can reverse this trade today by buying up homes, demolishing them, and planting citrus trees. You wouldn't make a profit doing so though, which tells you that the collective hivemind that makes up the economy prefers houses over trees.
      - prox 6y ago
        Youcould set up a collective farm, where a neighborhood essentially owns a farm.
        6y ago
rayiner 6y ago
> Or better yet, fix the underlying thing on our global civilization’s obsession with technology that emits all of this in the first place. I am not necessarily talking about the tech so much as why we in our society think we can’t live without it. What a fatalistic view of the future.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

g0rbongler 6y ago

Another company to watch in this space is Terraformation, using reforestation to efficiently offset carbon at scale. See: https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-project-is-how-we-fix-climate-change-36afc6d4dc2 https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-pr...

kickout 6y ago
Cool concept. I think these ideas are where the actual solution lies. Plants and trees can do a lot of carbon sequestersting--at scale no less.
- ta8908695 6y ago
  I could be majorly misunderstanding how it works, but as far as I'm aware plants/trees are not really a solution. Plants are part of the carbon cycle and the issues is that we took sequestered carbon and injected it into the carbon cycle. To make plants a solution you would need to take all the plant matter after the plants die and sequester it somewhere where it can't decompose. I think planting trees helps delay large scale issues, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. Maybe there's some increased plant to land area ratio that means a larger percent of the carbon in the carbon cycle is always spent in solid plant form? Even if that's the case it requires always maintaining this amount of plants even as populations grow or cutting down trees after they grow and storing the wood in a vacuum chamber or something like that.
  - notabee 6y ago
    You make a good point, but I'm sure the rate of decay matters a lot in this situation as well. Properly treated wood used as building materials could last decades or even centuries without significantly decaying if planned and managed properly[0], but a dead tree on a forest floor will decay very quickly. If we start rapidly growing trees en masse, it might work almost as well to imagine some grand building projects in lieu of giant sealed burial pits. Likely, we would need to do both. And like each offered solution on this topic, plants alone will not fix everything. I'm also interested in some of the novel engineered materials we might be able to make with wood if we discover efficient processes to do so[1]. It irritates me a lot when people lazily say, "just plant trees", but they can for sure be part of the solution. 0. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-wooden-architecture-concrete-global-warming https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-w... 1. https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-researchers-create-super-wood-stronger-most-metals https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-researchers-create-supe...

yahyaheee 6y ago

So if humans are putting 38 billion tons into the atmosphere every year does this even make a dent?

avmich 6y ago
Let's see :) https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
danimal88 6y ago
38,000,000,000/4000 = 9,500,000 plants needed to get to net zero, just for the the carbon we are currently putting out, to say nothing of all the carbon currently causing warming... Seems reasonable to say no.
- totetsu 6y ago
  How much carbon release is needed to make 9,500,000 plants..
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- namuol 6y ago
  Reasonable if you assume that progress of this technology has already plateaued. I'm pretty sure we could be putting a lot more money behind this and we would see substantial improvements to efficiency (i.e. $/kg/year). We need every tool we can get to fight this thing.
- new_realist 6y ago
  There are 3.04 trillion trees on earth.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    A tree absorbs around 20kg of carbon dioxide a year while growing. To sequester 38 Gigatons you'd need to plant and cut down and bury around 10^12 trees each year, give or take an order of magnitude or two.

baryphonic 6y ago

I've always wondered if someone could bio-engineer particularly dense wood as a way to sequester carbon. But I admit, I know next to nothing about how anyone would go about doing that and what the constraints would be, other than its extremely tough to make genetic engineering work.

redisman 6y ago
There already are some like the Empress tree. A big problem with any super trees is that they tend to be highly invasive
- civilized 6y ago
  That seems like a good thing if you are serious about scaling up their use...
  - hosh 6y ago
    Instead of scaling up like that, there are other ways that take advantage of positive feedback loops and decentralization — that is, a technology that can go “viral”. There would not be a single source of failure. Such a system can be self -healing. It can potentially be adaptive if local people are able to implement it in ways that make sense for their place and community. (Otherwise, it runs into the same kind if globalist mindset from high modernity). You don’t have to find a single tree species to do this. Instead, you look at what is already growing in the local area and plant those. Doing it that way solves way more problems than carbon emissions. We are talking about food forests (solve the food distribution problem), emotional and mental health (humans recover from illnesses better when they can see trees), resiliency (from decentralized food systems and biodiversity), and so on.
  - redisman 6y ago
    I mean you could in theory make a plant so good that it would outcompete almost any other plants. Then you might get a fungus or other disease that targets that monoculture and can now easily jump through the whole globe since it's covered in the same super plant. Being invasive is not a good feature.

tito 6y ago

Great to see air mining getting featured on HN! For an index of 100+ companies working on mining carbon dioxide from the air, check out AirMiners http://www.airminers.org http://www.airminers.org

fmakunbound 6y ago
What’s the economics of this? Who buys tons of carbon?
- LegitShady 6y ago
  Carbon credits do
- darksaints 6y ago
  I would assume the primary customers would be purchasers of carbon credits, and possibly governments. However, there is likely a large future market for synthetic fuels, and carbon dioxide is an important building block for synthetic hydrocarbons.
- comnetxr 6y ago
  In the long term, if we eventually make it to the scenario where we stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere on net, then each kg of CO2 input into the atmosphere must be compensated by a kg of CO2 removed by some mechanism or another. The reasonable thing to do in that equilibrium would be to set the price to output CO2 - collected by governments as a carbon fee - equal to the price to capture CO2, paid out by governments as a negative carbon reward. Of course we could just do that now, the trick is how to get to that equilibrium scenario without collapsing the economy in the process.
- henearkr 6y ago
  There are surely others, but the ones coming to my mind right now: - Agriculture: lots of CO2 are produced on-site under greenhouses by burning gas, because it speeds up the growing of crops. - Sparkling drinks industry.
  - 6y ago

diptanu 6y ago

Random question - At what scale do we need to do this to get back to where the planet was 50 years back?

jaggederest 6y ago
3210 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere (410ppm) 275 ppm (Target PPM, based on pre-industrial levels) 3210 gigatonnes - ((3210 gigatonnes / 410) * 275) = 1057 gigatonnes to remove. Advertised scale: 4000 tons per year (1057 gigatonnes / 4000 tons per year) = 264250000 years reasonable timeline: 30 years 30 years / 264250000 years = 8808333x increase needed. Call it roughly 10^7 times faster. So, a lot.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mc32 6y ago
  You forgot stabilizing pop growth.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Population growth hasn't been the problem for decades. The problem is per-capita consumption. The "westernization" of India and China is 2.5-3 billion people that want western consumption patterns.
    - ECA_stax 6y ago
      > Population growth hasn't been the problem for decades. Of course it is. Populations always eventually demand development, aka "westernization". So as the world population grows, so does the consumption.
      - seanwilson 6y ago
        > So as the world population grows, so does the consumption. This includes dairy + meat consumption, where about 70 billion animals are farmed for food each year right now. When someone brings up that humans are overpopulating the planet, I've never heard someone mention that overpopulating the planet with livestock is also an issue.

bozoUser 6y ago

FAQ on the topic: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-carbon-sequestration?qt-news_science_products https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-carbon-sequestration?qt-news_...

totetsu 6y ago

Has anyone made a paperclips/cookieclicker-esq game about carbon sequestration yet?

keithtom 6y ago
Underrated comment

exabrial 6y ago

Are they really going to beat the efficiency of trees or algae? I highly doubt it

sacred_numbers 6y ago
It's extremely easy to beat the efficiency of photosynthesis since plants are so inefficient. The highest estimate I have seen for carbon sequestration by trees is 7 tons of CO2 per acre, which doesn't include losses from converting wood to biochar for long term carbon capture. Direct air capture of CO2 requires about 2000 KWh per ton of CO2. An acre of solar panels produces an average of 357000 KWh of electricity per year. That means that direct air capture is at least 25x more efficient at converting solar energy to captured CO2. That efficiency is important considering the scale at which we will need to sequester carbon in the next few decades. Cost efficiency is a different matter, but even then I believe direct air capture will beat biochar very soon if it hasn't already.
- imhoguy 6y ago
  Why we are blindly fixated at CO2 only? The artificial cure may be worse than disease. Plants sequester other substances and retain water, regulate temperatures and is home to biodiversity. With artificial solution we will endup with dead deserts of hard to recycle hardware. Nature did it better for millions of years.
  - kisamoto 6y ago
    Bio-solutions will definitely make up the future of carbon removal but while nature was able to keep itself in equilibrium for millions of years a few centuries of human behaviour has thrown it out of balance. Humans will need to undo their own damage _and_ restore nature.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    Until carbon sequestration can make bricks or another useful material as a carbon sink, it'll sit as a niche own used for virtue signaling by politicians rather than actual change that moves the meter.

kisamoto 6y ago

Carbon removal is definitely required at this stage. I read a lot of "Trees are _The_ solution"-esq news whenever Climeworks is brought up and while they do sequester carbon the reality is they are slow and cannot solely be used to lower atmospheric CO₂ levels. Earth, as we know it today, has the potential to plant an additional 0.9 billion ha of canopy cover (~1.2 trillion trees)[0] Trees will ultimately help in the long run, no doubt, but will need to be supported by a myriad of other methods such as Climeworks. Ryan Orbuch of Stripe wrote a great primer on some of the other carbon removal methods[1]. If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today. [0] https://carbonremoved.com/learn/forestation/ https://carbonremoved.com/learn/forestation/ [1] https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/ https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/

bioipbiop 6y ago
> If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today. Why not both? Allow companies to buy additional carbon credits from co2 sinks? Allow companies to decide between stopping a harmful industrial process or paying for its externalities.
- kisamoto 6y ago
  Fundamentally I agree but only if choosing to do both, not either or. To truly reverse the emissions an individual or company has, Carbon Removal is really the only way. Carbon credits _can_ encourage businesses to reduce their emissions (and if a company has money to help - great!) but reducing a third-parties emissions is not a green-light to justify my own wrongdoings. If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there. If I emit a ton and remove a ton I am at net zero emissions.
  - bioipbiop 6y ago
    > If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there The basic idea is to allow companies to ramp down their emissions by releasing fewer credits each year. I could see a compromise being that one carbon credit is worth a tonne of carbon emissions, but two tonnes of sequestered carbon. So companies would have to pay for the removal of some factor of what they produce.

jesstaa 6y ago

This seems completely ridiculous. If it was profitable to do then companies would be doing it directly at the source of emissions more much efficiently.

Swenrekcah 6y ago
This is of course only profitable within an emissions tax/trade framework, and hopefully those will extend to the factories causing emissions and thus enabling them to take part (by avoiding the tax imposed on their products by responsible countries). Nevertheless, that can only decrease the addition of CO2, while this can potentially reduce the absolute amount in due course.
hannob 6y ago
Realistically carbon removal will only happen after we removed most carbon emission sources. Carbon removal will likely be more expensive than reducing emissions for decades to come. This is a future technology for the time, for the "fuck, we already produced far too much emissions, what do we do now?"
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  We're well past that point. The things are melting. Stopping all CO2 production tomorrow isn't going to re-freeze the melty bits.
raxxorrax 6y ago
It isn't profitable because these cost of CO₂ generation is just externalized to nature.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Having refused to do 1000 other things. We're now offered a 1001st option. We will refuse this option too. Because the problem isn't that we can't stop climate change, it's that we don't want to. That's not a science, engineering, technology problem. It's a human nature, leadership problem.

malux85 6y ago
But if some technology makes it 1000x easier, cheap, and doesn't require the involvement or even consent of governments, then that's a win for science right? And avoids leadership / human nature.
- awalton 6y ago
  It still boils down to "who pays." And we're in the "I won't even pay my taxes since I can just hide them somewhere and the government won't come after me" phase of capitalism. The world's going to hell fast. If past is prologue, the Rich will pay for their parts of the world being nice and habitable. Everyone else will be left to suffer. Get ready to see domed city concepts getting more serious and more cities like Vegas with connected tunnels and shafts between buildings to avoid going outdoors for any reason...
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  If you could find a solution that was a few tens of billions times cheaper than any current solution, a private individual might be able to fund it. That might work. But right now, no government will pay even for a solution 1000x cheaper than current options. This is why no one is considering Geo Engineering. Remember, if you don't want to solve a problem, the cost of solving it is always too high, even if the cost is only 1USD...
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    I doubt governments would refuse to pay 1USD to solve global warming. This is an absurdly reductive take.

baskire 6y ago

The USA does 5903 million metric tons of co2 annually [1] You’d need 1.5 million of these to remove just the USA’s yearly co2 emissions. [1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...

twoslide 6y ago
True, for another perspective, one way across the atlantic is about 1 ton, so this is 2000 one way trips or (roughly) 10 flights of 200 people. On the other hand, if this amount doubled every year, it would equal total US CO2 production in 21 years, total global CO2 production in 27 years. Agree with the other comments that preventing emissions in the first place is far more efficient. Also, I think that CO2 removal is now included in many climate change models, so the benefit might not be too great.
- pyrale 6y ago
  > On the other hand [...] This tells more about the ridiculous progression of exponential functions than about the efficiency of this process.
  - twoslide 6y ago
    Agreed that doubling every year is wildly optimistic, other technological growth is much slower, e.g. mobile phones were about 36% annually between 1990 and 2018: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2
- Teever 6y ago
  > On the other hand, if this amount doubled every year, it would equal total US CO2 production in 21 years, total global CO2 production in 27 years. So can we make the machines that make the carbon out of the carbon that the machines capture?
wongarsu 6y ago
That sounds doable and much easier than getting Americans to change their behavior.

asah 6y ago

Silly q: don't we need to also remove co2 from the upper atmosphere as well? How much missing is there with the lower atmosphere?

aaron695 6y ago

Lol, so rather than sending the energy elsewere to stop CO2 being released (there are many ways to do this, currently Iceland does it through Aluminium production) we do something useless like putting CO2 into the ground. If only we could do some sort of bio-tech and create some sort of plant that could convert solar energy in sequestered CO2. Plants are pretty useless as well I guess. Random fact Iceland abundance of energy is from dams and nothing to do with geothermal, that's just for branding because it's cool and people can't think.

zaroth 6y ago

In the distant past we had much higher CO2 levels but the sun was also about 4% weaker. At this price point, launching a few million tons of solar shades into the L1 Lagrange point is probably more economical.

jonstewart 6y ago
What's the price point? I didn't see anything in the article/press release.
- zaroth 6y ago
  Solar shading is on the order of $1 trillion per decade, assuming SuperHeavy+Starship and full reusability as I recall ($10,000 per ton). As a bonus, the capability to launch 10s of millions of tons to orbit fundamentally changes the capability and reach of humanity. Sucking gigatons of CO2 from the air at the current efficiency is basically infinite dollars, but it could conceivably be cost competitive with the solar shade in a few decades. It basically just requires massive amounts of fully renewable energy, so the benefit is it’s a massive renewable energy generation subsidy. But renewables are already more than cost competitive, the problem we have now is energy storage (batteries).
  - jonstewart 6y ago
    I mean, maybe a solar shade is possible, but it still requires a massive engineering investment and maybe has some accidental risks like “ends photosynthesis” (which is hyperbole, but still, it’s a big one shot project with global consequences). DAC has limitations that likely keep it from being the sole solution to CO2 levels, but it can be developed incrementally without much risk and then deployed on the margins where it makes sense (e.g., on top of geothermal, in the Sahara next to a PV array).
    - zaroth 6y ago
      The L1 Lagrange point is not perfectly stable. Anything we put there would drift after about a decade. So it requires constant upkeep but also means nothing you do there can be catastrophic. Both technologies are not “one-shot” but rather are things which are deployed along a spectrum measured in “gigatons of CO2 extracted” or “tons of diffractive material deployed”. You don’t put one big mirror in place as a binary thing. You deploy thousands to millions of tons of “mirrors” overall, ~100 tons at a time. Imagine a payload of carbon fiber snowflakes which get dropped off, coated in such a way that they self orient broad-side toward the sun. I wonder what the effective carbon offset of 100 tons of diffractive material at L1 buys you. Given that you could draw a direct cost/benefit comparison.

andi999 6y ago

To me this looks all like snake oil currently. The problem is, that carbon is not a pollutand (like fckw) but the energy carrier-source. So generally to take it out from the athmosphere you need more energy then you got from putting it into the athmosphere (backed by the laws of thermodynamics). So it would only make senso if you have huge (i mean HUGE) amount of renewable energy which somehow is too far away from the industry to use it directly. We are not at that stage. The real problem is to generate enough renewables. Then you can first start to replace your fossil plants by those and then later down the line maybe this technology starts to make sense. For iceland they could just build more aluminium plants now and this would probably be better for the total CO2 reduction. An analogy: Its like we have a hydroelectric power plant, but people need so much power the water coming out of it is flooding towards the city to distroy it and there is an article 'scientists invented the 10 gallon bucket, allowing to move water back up the dam faster.'. I think this is also harmful, since these kind of successes might give people the wrong inpression where we actually stand.

jonstewart 6y ago
According to the article, they're building it right on top of a large existing geothermal power source in Iceland.
- andi999 6y ago
  Yes. But it is a solution that does not and cannot scale.
  - jonstewart 6y ago
    It doesn't have to scale to be the single solution to CO2 level management on the planet. It only needs to scale to countries party to the Paris Agreement as a portion of their emissions control portfolio, and is obviously attractive to such countries with abundant renewable power sources.
    - andi999 6y ago