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> U.S. oil firm Occidental is currently developing the largest direct-air-capture facility, to pull 1 million tonnes per year This prompted me to look up more
by dane-pgp 5y ago
> U.S. oil firm Occidental is currently developing the largest direct-air-capture facility, to pull 1 million tonnes per year
This prompted me to look up more details, and I found another article about that company[0] which said:
> If governments around the world take climate targets seriously, models estimate that the world will need to bury as much as 10 billion tons of CO2 underground annually by 2050.
So the world needs to build about 10,000 of those facilities over the next 30 years? That seems logistically manageable, so it's probably just a question of what the running costs are for such facilities. If the main cost is the electricity, then the falling costs of renewables could be doubly important in the coming decades.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-13/occidental-oxy-wants-to-go-green-to-produce-more-oil https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-13/occidenta...
- ncmncm 5y agoThe great thing about applications like this is that they really only need to run when the sun shines and the batteries are already fully charged, or anyway when your customer energy demand falls below present renewable generating capacity. Any extra capacity at minimum price does not need to be wasted, because there are infinite uses for the product. Other similar processes include producing and liquifying hydrogen and ammonia for industrial and agricultural processes. There is not much economy of scale for these uses, so you can add them to any installation, big or small.
- jtsiskin 5y agoThe Afghanistan war cost an estimated $2 trillion. Let’s double the 10,000 and say it takes 20,000 facilities to ‘solve’ the climate crisis. That gives us $100 million to spend per facility to equal the cost of the war.