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> 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. So

> 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"?

deleted 4y ago
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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 ago
  By 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
  - tito 4y ago
    I hear what you're saying. The example of the albedo effect of solar panels makes the most sense, the trade off of absorbing heat vs catching photons. I didn't follow the heat pollution example, perhaps because the heat and greenhouse gas effect seem additive. If you have anyone in mind to reach out to, climate scientists I know love to answer curious questions like this. AirMiners has IPCC co-author Bill Collins speaking a few weeks, you could see about posing the question to him: https://lu.ma/airminers https://lu.ma/airminers
icegreentea2 4y ago
On the scale that Climeworks is operating at? Probably not really. You can read that "downside" more generally as DAC (and carbon sequestration in general) is expensive, and no one really knows how efficiently we can do it, especially at the scales we'd probably want. It's also an expression that current low/no carbon energy sources are globally sufficiently constrained that we're in no real position for large scale (aka meaningful) DAC (and many other forms of carbon sequestration - perhaps not all) deployment. Climeworks is clearly out to iterate and gain experience to be well positioned for a presumed DAC (and sequestration) market that may form as all of the easy to decarbonize sources and processes are converted. We're... a ways off here.

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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 ago
By 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
- tito 4y ago
  I hear what you're saying. The example of the albedo effect of solar panels makes the most sense, the trade off of absorbing heat vs catching photons. I didn't follow the heat pollution example, perhaps because the heat and greenhouse gas effect seem additive. If you have anyone in mind to reach out to, climate scientists I know love to answer curious questions like this. AirMiners has IPCC co-author Bill Collins speaking a few weeks, you could see about posing the question to him: https://lu.ma/airminers https://lu.ma/airminers

icegreentea2 4y ago

On the scale that Climeworks is operating at? Probably not really. You can read that "downside" more generally as DAC (and carbon sequestration in general) is expensive, and no one really knows how efficiently we can do it, especially at the scales we'd probably want. It's also an expression that current low/no carbon energy sources are globally sufficiently constrained that we're in no real position for large scale (aka meaningful) DAC (and many other forms of carbon sequestration - perhaps not all) deployment. Climeworks is clearly out to iterate and gain experience to be well positioned for a presumed DAC (and sequestration) market that may form as all of the easy to decarbonize sources and processes are converted. We're... a ways off here.