6 ms·

The sense of scale is fascinating. Each facility will have a goal of scrubbing 1 million tons of CO2/yr. However, we currently emit 30+ Billion tons of CO2/yr

The sense of scale is fascinating. Each facility will have a goal of scrubbing 1 million tons of CO2/yr. However, we currently emit 30+ Billion tons of CO2/yr.

msandford 5y ago
If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. I would expect that the people who only care about profits to quickly allocate capital to this endeavor (if it's profitable) up until the point where diminishing returns makes it less profitable. Hopefully that doesn't happen until we're slowly decreasing CO2 versus slowly increasing. Even just cutting the growth rate by half would do a lot, and it would give international bodies like the UN some footing to establish a carbon price. Right now the carbon market is highly illiquid; nowhere near enough people are able to manufacture credits. If you could guarantee that it's always possible to make more credits that changes the political and perhaps even economic dynamic.
- dataflow 5y ago
  > If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. That would just leave us where we're at right now, right? Even with emissions not increasing (unlikely...), we'd still need 60k just to decrease CO2 levels at the same rate... meaning it'd take several decades to bring them to acceptable levels. We'd probably need a few times that many facilities to be able to do this at the pace we need...
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Today is not a bad place to be, especially compared to many of the other potential outcomes.
  - pstuart 5y ago
    It beats the alternative that's likely to happen, which is "oops, nobody told me it was going to break!"
  - jjk166 5y ago
    If you held emissions constant, yes, but realistically you'd also be reducing emissions at the same time.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    We'll have to build an assembly line for them.
  - gorkish 5y ago
    1 facility for every ~100k people isn't unreasonable. It's like building an air treatment plant for every water treatment plant there is. Anyway, while these plants are busy reprocessing the entire planet's atmosphere they can do other useful things besides removing CO2.
    - mikro2nd 5y ago
      Interested to know what those "other things" might be.
      - smileysteve 5y ago
        Any activity with carbon that doesn't involve aerobic activity. Creating soil (worms or bokashi vs compost), creating plastic, creating pencil lead.
    - DanTheManPR 5y ago
      That gives an interesting sense of scale to the problem. Dealing with C02 emissions is similar to water waste treatment, both in concept and in scale of infrastructure required.
- cyberge99 5y ago
  Or go the rasberry pi route and produce household units inexpensively or free DIY plans. Crowd-source it to municipalities and makers.
  - pokstad 5y ago
    You mean trees?
    - boplicity 5y ago
      Tree aren't great for carbon capture. They take up land space, which then has to be reserved for those trees. Then, they eventually die, and decompose, which means a new tree has to grow to re-capture the carbon that is released when the tree decomposes. Better to put the excess carbon back underground, where it came from.
      - haimez 5y ago
        The term is “sequestration”. You are correct that trees are a temporary capture, and even then- only when you plant woodlands that did not previously exist. Given enough time, the trees that are planted will decompose or burn in a forest fire to become net neutral. Trees buy time, but they aren’t a clean up plan.
      - sdenton4 5y ago
        Trees decomposing and being consumed by other trees is literally how it's worked for untold millions of years, so doesn't seem like a problem to me ... Forests also provide local cooling, improve the water cycle, and aid biodiversity. A world with forests is a healthier world.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        adrianN 5y ago
        Trees dying and not decomposing is how we got all that coal that we're now turning back to CO2.
- dTal 5y ago
  Why would it be economical? It's burning power. There's no business model beyond "get governments to pay".
boplicity 5y ago
If the cost of removal is a mere $100 per ton of carbon, the annual cost of removing 30 billion tons of C02 would be $3 Trillion. (3,000,000,000,000) The cost for most of these technologies right now is over $400 per ton, so that works out to $12 trillion. Yikes.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  For comparison, the Gross World Product is about $90 Trillion, so a global sales tax of about 3% would cover the lower figure. Another way to look at it is that the GWP has an average growth rate of over 3%, so economic growth could continue even if the $3 Trillion spent per year was considered economically unproductive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
- Edman274 5y ago
  So - twice the cost of the war in Afghanistan per year, after financing is calculated?
- alkonaut 5y ago
  For comparison, estimates of the yearly costs created by 1.5 degree warming seems to be around 5T/year (e.g. [1]). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66275-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66275-4
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  I actually thought that sounds kind of cheap. On average each German person emits roughly 10 tons of carbon per year. So for a $1000 dollars per year, I can be carbon neutral without any additional changes? Sounds pretty good to me.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    I feel like just letting the climate change over the next 100 years and adapting as needed would be cheaper than spending $1.2 quadrillion on a global geo-engineering project.
tito 5y ago
Yes the scale is fascinating! 2018 per capita emissions in the USA are 15 tons of carbon dioxide per person. So 1 million tons is the yearly emissions for 66,666 people. Still early days. We need to get 2x better at carbon removal every 12 months for the next decade to get to gigaton scale carbon removal. See my note about AirMiners Boot Up below http://bootup.airminers.org http://bootup.airminers.org
perrygeo 5y ago
30 billion+ and growing at roughly 5% annually. That means 1.5 billion tons CO2/yr, or 1,500 new facilities coming online this year and every year after... just to maintain our current (devastatingly high) CO2 levels. All this talk about scaling the technology to fully draw down carbon feels like an fantasy if we can't even proven the concept of keeping pace with our year-over-year growth.

The sense of scale is fascinating. Each facility will have a goal of scrubbing 1 million tons of CO2/yr. However, we currently emit 30+ Billion tons of CO2/yr.

msandford 5y ago

If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. I would expect that the people who only care about profits to quickly allocate capital to this endeavor (if it's profitable) up until the point where diminishing returns makes it less profitable. Hopefully that doesn't happen until we're slowly decreasing CO2 versus slowly increasing. Even just cutting the growth rate by half would do a lot, and it would give international bodies like the UN some footing to establish a carbon price. Right now the carbon market is highly illiquid; nowhere near enough people are able to manufacture credits. If you could guarantee that it's always possible to make more credits that changes the political and perhaps even economic dynamic.

dataflow 5y ago
> If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. That would just leave us where we're at right now, right? Even with emissions not increasing (unlikely...), we'd still need 60k just to decrease CO2 levels at the same rate... meaning it'd take several decades to bring them to acceptable levels. We'd probably need a few times that many facilities to be able to do this at the pace we need...
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Today is not a bad place to be, especially compared to many of the other potential outcomes.
- pstuart 5y ago
  It beats the alternative that's likely to happen, which is "oops, nobody told me it was going to break!"
- jjk166 5y ago
  If you held emissions constant, yes, but realistically you'd also be reducing emissions at the same time.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  We'll have to build an assembly line for them.
- gorkish 5y ago
  1 facility for every ~100k people isn't unreasonable. It's like building an air treatment plant for every water treatment plant there is. Anyway, while these plants are busy reprocessing the entire planet's atmosphere they can do other useful things besides removing CO2.
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    Interested to know what those "other things" might be.
    - smileysteve 5y ago
      Any activity with carbon that doesn't involve aerobic activity. Creating soil (worms or bokashi vs compost), creating plastic, creating pencil lead.
  - DanTheManPR 5y ago
    That gives an interesting sense of scale to the problem. Dealing with C02 emissions is similar to water waste treatment, both in concept and in scale of infrastructure required.
cyberge99 5y ago
Or go the rasberry pi route and produce household units inexpensively or free DIY plans. Crowd-source it to municipalities and makers.
- pokstad 5y ago
  You mean trees?
  - boplicity 5y ago
    Tree aren't great for carbon capture. They take up land space, which then has to be reserved for those trees. Then, they eventually die, and decompose, which means a new tree has to grow to re-capture the carbon that is released when the tree decomposes. Better to put the excess carbon back underground, where it came from.
    - haimez 5y ago
      The term is “sequestration”. You are correct that trees are a temporary capture, and even then- only when you plant woodlands that did not previously exist. Given enough time, the trees that are planted will decompose or burn in a forest fire to become net neutral. Trees buy time, but they aren’t a clean up plan.
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      Trees decomposing and being consumed by other trees is literally how it's worked for untold millions of years, so doesn't seem like a problem to me ... Forests also provide local cooling, improve the water cycle, and aid biodiversity. A world with forests is a healthier world.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - adrianN 5y ago
        Trees dying and not decomposing is how we got all that coal that we're now turning back to CO2.
dTal 5y ago
Why would it be economical? It's burning power. There's no business model beyond "get governments to pay".

boplicity 5y ago

If the cost of removal is a mere $100 per ton of carbon, the annual cost of removing 30 billion tons of C02 would be $3 Trillion. (3,000,000,000,000) The cost for most of these technologies right now is over $400 per ton, so that works out to $12 trillion. Yikes.

dane-pgp 5y ago
For comparison, the Gross World Product is about $90 Trillion, so a global sales tax of about 3% would cover the lower figure. Another way to look at it is that the GWP has an average growth rate of over 3%, so economic growth could continue even if the $3 Trillion spent per year was considered economically unproductive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
Edman274 5y ago
So - twice the cost of the war in Afghanistan per year, after financing is calculated?
alkonaut 5y ago
For comparison, estimates of the yearly costs created by 1.5 degree warming seems to be around 5T/year (e.g. [1]). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66275-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66275-4
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
I actually thought that sounds kind of cheap. On average each German person emits roughly 10 tons of carbon per year. So for a $1000 dollars per year, I can be carbon neutral without any additional changes? Sounds pretty good to me.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I feel like just letting the climate change over the next 100 years and adapting as needed would be cheaper than spending $1.2 quadrillion on a global geo-engineering project.

tito 5y ago

Yes the scale is fascinating! 2018 per capita emissions in the USA are 15 tons of carbon dioxide per person. So 1 million tons is the yearly emissions for 66,666 people. Still early days. We need to get 2x better at carbon removal every 12 months for the next decade to get to gigaton scale carbon removal. See my note about AirMiners Boot Up below http://bootup.airminers.org http://bootup.airminers.org

perrygeo 5y ago

30 billion+ and growing at roughly 5% annually. That means 1.5 billion tons CO2/yr, or 1,500 new facilities coming online this year and every year after... just to maintain our current (devastatingly high) CO2 levels. All this talk about scaling the technology to fully draw down carbon feels like an fantasy if we can't even proven the concept of keeping pace with our year-over-year growth.