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A new carbon capture plant will pull 36k tons of CO2 from the air each year
- qeternity 4y agoAs nice as DAC projects sound, I really cannot wrap my head around them. 36kt is not much. We’d need around 1.5m of these plants to reach carbon neutrality (without any other changes).
- mattashii 4y agoYes, but the point is that you need to start somewhere. And 36kt CO2 captured /year means over 2 million euros in tradable emissions each year, at current ETS prices of 60+ euros per metric ton CO2 emissions.
- qeternity 4y agoEvery DAC system I’ve seen has costs that are an order of magnitude higher than where current compliance markets are trading (like EUAs).
- conductr 4y ago> Climeworks was launched by Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald in 2009 out of ETH Zürich, the main technical university in Switzerland. Since then, Wurzbacher told CNBC, DAC technology has improved by leaps and bounds. “We started with milligrams of carbon dioxide captured from the air,” he said. “Then we went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms to tons to 1,000 tons.” That sort of leveling up over the course of 13 years is no small feat. > To meet its future goals, though, the company will have its work cut out for it; they’re aiming to remove millions of tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by 2050. It's a startup and growth is the name of the game
- jeffbee 4y agoSounds like a lot? How many oil wells do you think the world has built? There are 2 million operating oil and gas wells in the U.S. alone. Building carbon infrastructure at scale is something humans are good at. We just need to reverse the sign.
- tito 4y agoYes, reverse the sign. Carbon emissions are not tracked in our existing accounting systems. Integrating carbon tracking and emissions into our society is inevitable, but it's only going to get more expensive the longer we wait.
- binarymax 4y agoYeah but the oil wells were built as part of an energy providing supply chain - it has actual use. This carbon is going to be injected into the ground, so there’s no economic incentive to building and operating these plants. If the subsidies are enough, and therefore the incentive great enough, then they will be built - but the incentive for reversing climate change has been a difficult area to break through.
- lovemenot 4y ago>> We just need to reverse the sign. Economics looks a lot like entropy. We know of no way to do economically valuable work by burying carbon.
- jeffbee 4y agoThe economic benefits of controlling the climate should be fairly obvious. What you really meant is that we don't know how to make carbon capture enrich the specific person of Charles Koch, yet.
- lovemenot 4y agoNope, I get your meaning and it wasn't mine. I see economic processes like physical ones. Water flows downhill, never up. Sure, there are huge spectacular waterfalls like your most hated billionaire. But that's essentially still the same downhill flow process as a meandering wide river. We can discuss the best route from top to bottom. Fine. Perhaps I too would prefer to avoid such precipitous drops. But the issue here is that we have the need for uphill flow.
- qeternity 4y agoI’m not sure what comparison you’re drawing. They have nothing to do with each other. The economics and purpose are entirely different.
- datadata 4y ago> DAC’s energy usage, particularly when it’s considered in conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 it’s capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from renewable sources helps, but it’s still not unlimited nor free. What are the actual downsides of energy usage here given that the enterprise is strongly carbon negative? Given that it is consuming geothermal energy in Iceland, 1) wouldn't the energy become waste heat in the environment regardless, 2) Is there a consumer of the energy that would be "better"?
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- tito 4y ago(edit: oops was wrong here, updating my comment) This is addressed in the article: "Or would the geothermally-generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars?" There's no such thing as waste heat really. In the short term you can argue that limited units of energy are better used towards carbon neutrality, things like powering electric cars. Ultimately, we need removal tech, and we need to make it energy efficient, fast. Putting money and energy into carbon removal systems needs to be looked at as an investment for it to make sense. Powering an electric car gets you to go a mile, powering a DAC system lets you remove a little carbon and is an investment in developing more efficient systems too.
- datadata 4y agoBy waste heat I meant that geothermal energy would eventually be released into the environment regardless of if humans extract useful work from it on the way. My assumption was that the article was talking about the waste of energy in this sense. My own opinion is that the waste heat from energy usage is negligible relative to thermal contribution of carbon emissions. I wrote a comment a few months ago here with some questions about this kind of metric, as someone apparently working in this space I would be most curious about your opinion on these things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30989744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30989744
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- 6d6b73 4y agoHow many years before this plant becomes carbon neutral itself? I can bet that this is another waste of money and natural resources that will not help the environment.
- pengaru 4y agoTFA makes it pretty clear that the energy source is geothermal.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> TFA makes it pretty clear that the energy source is geothermal. Is it more likely that when this plant switches on, other people will just make do with that much less electricity, or that when this plant switches on, electricity production will go up?
- pengaru 4y agoAIUI Iceland has excess geothermal energy resources vs. their needs.
- 6d6b73 4y agoThats not the point. To design ,build and operate this plant you first need to use a lot of energy, tools and resources that are not carbon neutral. Before this plant is even operational it will be carbon negative.
- pengaru 4y agoInterestingly if they produced everything used in the plant local to Iceland, at least in terms of energy used it would basically be 100% geothermal sourced.
- 6d6b73 4y agoBut they won't be able to. Industrial controllers, motors, computers are not made in Iceland. These items alone need a lot of CO2 to be made.
- nharada 4y agoDAC is nowhere near the scale needed to make even a tiny dent in our carbon emissions, and it's easy to be cynical looking at this (this plant can capture about 2000 American's carbon emissions). One thing I do like about this is that we get an actual, concrete, and correct "cost of carbon" from it. Sure, there are caveats (i.e. you can't just build 5MM of these in Iceland), but having a real number that doesn't include hand-waving around whether the Brazilian farmer would have cut down those trees or not is a good thing for offsets, future planning, markets, etc.
- tito 4y ago"Cost of carbon" -- yes, one scenario is that society dumps a few billion dollars into carbon removal technologies only to learn "oh shit this stuff is realllllllly expensive to pull out later...let's decarbonize overnight". Pretty sure all of us air miners would take that as a win. edit: I've also seen a similar argument made for developing geoengineering solutions. Being willing to dump chemicals into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight makes a lot of people think "oh shit they're really serious about this climate change stuff arent' they", and then the outcome of "we should take this more seriously".
- brundolf 4y agoDoes it also serve as a test-bed for improving the technology? Like with fusion reactors that will never themselves be energy-positive
- kec 4y agoCO2 makes up roughly 0.04% of the atmosphere. Handwaving, that means for every ton of carbon you remove you'd need to process at least 250 tons of air. To capture humanities current yearly output, you'd need to process over 7 Trillion tons of air per year... the scales just don't make sense.
- tito 4y agoYes the scales are hard to fathom. And we've been doing that for about 100 years. It's not pretty, but there's a trillion tons of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We need to stop emitting as fast as possible and remove the rest. Every gallon of gasoline burned adds 20 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
- rootusrootus 4y agoI imagine we're going to need a number of different technologies in order to make a real dent? What about biochar? That seems like an obvious choice, too. Easy, can make syngas, makes its own energy, enriches soil, etc. No panaceas, but we're going to need a lot more than one magic bullet.
- tito 4y agoIndeed, we need a thousand shots on goal for carbon removal solutions. Anyone up for the task is welcome to come join our community at AirMiners: http://airminers.org/ http://airminers.org/
- jseliger 4y agoDirect release from Climeworks: https://climeworks.com/news/climeworks-announces-groundbreaking-on-mammoth https://climeworks.com/news/climeworks-announces-groundbreak...
- bamboozled 4y agoI’ve been sponsoring these guys for a while now. Saw it on my credit card bill last night and wondered what they were up too!
- gumby 4y agoI have no faith in machines that suck the atmosphere through a straw. The thermodynamics and fluid dynamics just don't pencil out. We need to remove something like 3.5 Tt of CO2, so 3.5 Kt is nothing. Our only hope in this regard is solar/uv-powered systems, mainly biological, for example algaes in pelagic waters (that grow and then die and sink to the bottom of the ocean). These systems aren't trivial to build either. For other GHG and pollutants there are uv-powered systems like TiO2, olivine etc, though there are also limits to how much they can do. Basically we have to "mash our hand on the keyboard", i.e. try to do them all, but I can't see machines like these making any meaningful contribution. Note: I'm working on methane destruction straight in the atmosphere, so I'm putting my money (and my time) where my commenting is.
- keithnz 4y agoso, in the article it says "they’re aiming to remove millions of tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by 2050." So, this is just a step on the path....but, those numbers do seem pretty aspirational at this stage.
- malthuswaswrong 4y agoEverything is going to be okay.
- FredPret 4y agoMalthus was wrong, hopefully Gretha as well
- lnwlebjel 4y agoMalthus was wrong because of innovation, and if Gretha is wrong, it will also be because of innovation.
- mrguyorama 4y agoHow do you innovate out of basic thermodynamics? We could stop emitting every single atom of CO2 right now and still suffer from some significant consequences. There is no solution that doesn't involve "wasting" energy (and since we live in a capitalist world, money) on capturing CO2
- theodric 4y ago7.5 tons/household/year. This is good for 4800 households. Nice, but nothing, ultimately.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoSounds pretty good to me, every 5k households just need to build one of their own.
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- akomtu 4y agoImo, the solution to co2 and plastic pollution won't be a piece of high tech, it will be a form of fungi.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoThere will be no one solution. The population will shrink, we'll switch to electric cars, we'll eat less beef, we'll replant some forests, we'll capture some carbon from the air, we'll grow some algae in tanks, we'll scoop up the plastic in the sea and bury it. Then hopefully, with a little wishful thinking, future generations appreciate our environment a little more. Hopefully nobody will go to war, or starve, or go bankrupt in the process.
- malthuswaswrong 4y agoThere are already self replicating carbon drawing machines. They are called trees.
- roamerz 4y agoThose are not a viable solution as they don’t give politicians any power. Imagine what good it would bring to society if we were able to have a grow / harvest cycle that would give us an abundance of inexpensive lumber to build housing.
- 542458 4y agoTrees eventually rot or burn, which releases most of the carbon again. Once a forest is mature carbon sequestration is minimal to zero: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210325150055.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210325150055.h...
- ryan_j_naughton 4y agoIn their natural form, you are correct. But if you cut down those trees and put them in Wood Vaults, specially engineered enclosures to ensure anaerobic environments, thus preventing wood decay -- then you would properly sequester the carbon. That is literally what happened in the carboniferous period that caused all the trees to turn into coal. There is recent research on this that indicates we could achieve a 10 gigaton annual sequestration rate with only a 5% impact on the total terrestrial tree production and at a cost of $30/ton.[1] "The quantity of this wood utilization can be controlled carefully to maintain a desired amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to keep the Earth’s climate from diving into the next ice age, acting as a climate thermostat." [1] https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021-022-00202-0 https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021...
- ambrose2 4y agoIs there anyone implementing this Wood Vault concept yet?
- yread 4y ago650M$ in funding and they will remove emissions from about 10 000 cars! You could just spend 32 500$ per each car to replace it with an EV and the second 32 500 on renewable energy and storage. We would need 100 000 of these plants to get back to equilibrium.
- tito 4y ago$650M in funding and they are developing first of its kind technology that will inspire better, more efficient systems and planetary change. I offer that anyone looking at a DAC machine today could see the equivalent of the first transistor sitting on a bench in Bell Labs [0]. Gooey, weird, and packed with potential. [0] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102618871 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10261887...
- missedthecue 4y agoEarly lightbulbs had a lifespan of 14 hours and weren't much brighter than a set of candles. I'm glad they didn't quit and invest the money into candle factories! The analogy isn't perfect, but the point is clear. Refining and developing imperfect Co2 extraction technology today can pay massive dividends in the future.
- tito 4y agoI like the analogy! I think it's clearer than the one about transistors I offered above.
- 11101010001100 4y agoAnalogies get people interested in the topic. Science works on first principles.
- yread 4y ago14 hours is not way off from a lifetime of a candle. Not 100 000 times shorter for sure. And it doesn't smoke, can't start a fire and you can light thousands of them at the same time. I mean you could be right, it could go right and they could figure out the thermodynamics and somehow built insane number of huge plants without adding significant additional CO2 emissions. Or it could suck up billions in resources to produce 2M$ in revenue and give polluters a license to pollute some more
- rob_c 4y agoFantastic, how long until it scales up I wonder and can the tech be adapted to other gases?
- tito 4y agoRe: adapting to other gases, this is something I'm curious about as well. As someone mentioned here, removing one ton of carbon dioxide means cycling through many more times the amount of air. At what point does removing other pollutants at the same time become effective. Carbon dioxide is just the most prevalent and a good place to start.
- sylvinus 4y agoI'm surprised by all the negativity here. Usually HN commenters are good at understanding exponential growth. Maybe it's easier when talking about Active Users? Climeworks (and others) are just a couple orders of magnitude away from having real impact, with a clear roadmap lying ahead. Let's support them, along with all other potential solutions? We're going to need more than one.
- gfaster 4y agoThe pessimism here is because there is no real money to be made in carbon capture without significant and expensive policy change. Put simply, carbon capture is a public good, which will require significant public expense even in the most optimistic of cases. If we're willing to go that far, we're better off just implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme for emissions. Our problem is that this is a technological solution for a problem that needs a policy solution.
- icegreentea2 4y agoThe problem needs both policy and technological solutions. In fact, in a certain way the policy part is already there - the latest IPCC reports project that carbon removal will have to be part of our strategies for staying below the 1.5C target (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-removal-unavoidable-as-climate-dangers-grow-new-ipcc-report-says/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-removal-un...).
- ncmncm 4y agoThat is not a policy. It is just a hint that a policy would be welcome if anybody would ever come up with one.
- sterlind 4y agoclimate change regulation is the political equivalent of achieving fusion power, though. it's so hard. it's a planet-scale prisoner's dilemma. every economic/political actor sees only long-term benefits from fixing the climate, and those benefits are the average of each actor's carbon contributions. everyone has an incentive to cut corners (spin up those coal plants to keep energy cheap) unless doing the right thing just so happens to be the easiest thing (solar costs less now.) infinite economics and peace Nobels for whoever solves that. or physics Nobels for whoever makes fusion practical. it's basically the same thing, after all.
- Alupis 4y ago> The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground, where a chemical reaction converts it to rock. I'm really worried we have no idea what we're doing, and will find out down the road things like this only made things worse, or caused other unforeseen problems. I do not subscribe to the philosophy that "doing something is better than nothing", particularly when we likely don't fully understand what it is we're doing or actually trying to achieve. Doing the wrong thing can be, and often is, worse than doing nothing. > Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, that’s equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars). That's some hand-wavy numbers there. 790 of what type of car? 1970 muscle car without a catalytic converter and modern fuel injection system? Or a 2022 Prius? One outputs a huge amount of CO2 and other gases, and the other hardly any at all. Car emissions are really good on average. As technology progresses, it might be fathomable that 7,900 cars, or eventually 79,000 cars produce the same amount of emissions as today. This "metric" sounds impressive, but it's useless. > DAC’s energy usage, particularly when it’s considered in conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 it’s capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from renewable sources helps, but it’s still not unlimited nor free. So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering this thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes? > Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year. 36,000 tons (the quantity of CO2 that will be captured by the Mammoth facility) is a negligible fraction of that total. Is it even worth the energy usage, construction and maintenance costs, and frankly, the effort? Or would the geothermally-generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars? Ah, they even mention this in the article. Of course the CEO hand waves this away... I'm not convinced this is the future - seems more like a get rich quick scheme if anything. Sort of like those companies you can pay to "offload" your emission burden and supposedly they plant trees or something and you get to claim your carbon neutral. Scams... all of them.
- tito 4y agoI hear you! What do you propose is the future instead? Curious to hear about what you're working on, we need people working across all areas of planetary solutions.
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- dominic_cocch 4y ago"Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, that’s equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars). Now Climeworks is building another facility that makes Orca seem tiny by comparison. The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With a CO₂ capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca." A lot of negativity in this thread, oddly. This is a 10X improvement over a previous version. Another magnitude or two and this becomes incredible for the environment. Other solutions should also happen, but a problem as big as climate change should have many parallel solutions. We don't have time to put all our eggs in one basket.
- jeffdn 4y agoIt's a 10x improvement by being 10x the size -- it hasn't improved efficiency by 10x or anything remotely like that.
- tito 4y agoYa this is an aspect I'm curious about as well. Is this all scaling up/copy pasting or are there other improvements?
- lucb1e 4y ago> A lot of negativity in this thread, oddly. It's better to reduce emissions than to try and capture a couple of 0.0X% of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's obvious to everyone and so everyone agrees and that gets upvoted. In reality, good luck having cows and steel (=iron+carbon) and cement on this planet without GHG emissions. Even plane fuel (long-distance flights) is basically going to have to do carbon capture to make 'electrofuels' (or biofuels) that they then burn and put back into the atmosphere, at least with how it's currently looking. It saddens me to see that people are rambling, and others are voting it to be the current top comment, about teratons (a unit even I hadn't heard being thrown around before) which is of course a ridiculous notion. The point of this technology is to neutralize unavoidable emissions in thirty-odd years. We can't, in thirty years, start to develop this tech and hope it works the next week. It also allows us to put a direct price point on CO2. You pick: remove CO2 or don't emit it. A smart company will choose the cheaper option. Only a few years ago, planting trees or "preventing emissions" magic accounting was considered offsetting. This sets a new standard. So long as it's within proportion, I really see no downsides to funding the development of this tech. The roll-out to megaton or gigaton scales, yeah we should see about that when we actually have renewable energy to spare, not when the gas, nay, coal plants are still in full operation. But for now, we're struggling to reach a few dozen kilotons economically, and that's why this is necessary work and good news.
- Perseids 4y agoMost comments are missing the point of Direct Air Capture (at least the point the people working on this are making): In no economic way can DAC compete with not putting CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place. It is vital that we do our very best to first reduce and then eliminate our emissions. But even with this very best, there is still going to be lots of CO2 we've blasted into the atmosphere on the way to zero emissions that we will want to get back. And sure hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2 is extremely expensive, but by then removing it out of the air is our only option, and it is (probably - if the economy of scale works out) still cheaper than the damage climate change inflicts. Still, why do DAC now, when there currently are better options available (preventing emissions)? The reason is that we need to give those economics of scale a chance, and the prices can't come down without incremental improvements and real world experiments that will take some time. For everyone who likes podcasts as a medium, here is an in-depth interview with Peter Psarras who's researching DAC: omega tau science & engineering podcast: 387 - Direct Air Capture Episode webpage: http://omegataupodcast.net/387-direct-air-capture/ http://omegataupodcast.net/387-direct-air-capture/ Media file: http://omegataupodcast.net/podlove/file/394/s/feed/c/mp3/omegatau-387-directAirCapture.mp3 http://omegataupodcast.net/podlove/file/394/s/feed/c/mp3/ome...
- hemogloben 4y agoJust to put some numbers to this for anyone unfamiliar. Climeworks currently estimates 2.5MWhr / tonnes of carbon (1000kg) (heat energy). That's an hours worth of energy for 2500 homes, PER 1000 kg. Mammoth sounds like it'll capture (36000 ton per year / 365 days / 24 hr) ~4 tonnes an hour = 10MWhr. Most solar farms in the US are currently less than 5MW and thus ALL of their energy couldn't support a single one of these capture facilities. Two Comments: 1) All that energy for 36000 tonnes / year just doesn't seem like it is viable. 2) I don't really think we should be prioritizing using clean energy to recapture carbon over replacing other sources.
- tito 4y agoI work in the carbon removal industry, and your calculations add up. Where I encourage you to explore is what an equivalent unit of energy spent on developing new carbon removal systems is right now vs the equivalent unit of energy spent to make another solar panel. There's a trillion tons of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so even if we stopped every carbon dioxide emission tomorrow, the planet would still continue to warm for the next century. My conclusion is that ultimately we need both, and that short term the energy spent on carbon removal solutions needs to be framed as an investment for it to make sense.
- 542458 4y agoHonestly, those numbers seem pretty good to me for a first generation product. As a baseline, at Ontario electricity prices that means I can get my carbon emissions to net zero ignoring any zero lifestyle changes for ~$5000/an. That’s high, but not ludicrous. I assume you could find further savings by further R&D on the process and by integrating electricity production. Now add in lifestyle and other technological changes (EVs, more efficient homes, more responsible purchases, more renewable electricity generation, etc) and we’re IMO into highly viable territory.
- datadata 4y agoShouldn't the comparison be carbon removed by this per unit energy used vs carbon produced by hydrocarbon powered power plant per unit energy created? E.g doing the math with some looked up data, this removes 1 ton of carbon per 2.5MWH. One ton of coal generates 8.1MWH. One ton of goal generates 2.4 tons of CO2, So it my math is correct (please verify), this already runs at an efficiency ratio of (8.1 (MWH) / 2.4 (tons CO2) / 2.5 (MWH / tons CO2) ) = 1.35, which being larger than 1 already, means that hypothetically you could power this via a coal plant and have a system that is net carbon negative and/or has some extra power remaining? Obviously we shouldn't do that, but to me the energy efficiency here is pretty impressive.
- coffeeblack 4y agoThose plants already exist. They are called “forests”.
- glerk 4y agoTrees can trap carbon, but only if you prevent them from burning or dying and decomposing.
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- TheDudeMan 4y agoHow much power does it take to run one of these things?
- aaron695 4y ago
- charbull 4y agoCan't we just plant trees ?!? And take care of the oceans? Plankton and trees are the answer ! We are removing trees to build giant factories ?
- vonadz 4y agoJust for reference, 36,000 tons of CO2 is like the ~950th most polluting plant in the US (https://findenergy.com/power-plants/ https://findenergy.com/power-plants/ for reference).
- jasec57322 4y agoWhat's wrong with carbon dioxide? Why not just plant more trees?