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Also: “The Texas project will be led by the American company Occidental and other partners, including Carbon Engineering. It could be developed to eliminate up
by mrweiner 3y ago
Also: “The Texas project will be led by the American company Occidental and other partners, including Carbon Engineering. It could be developed to eliminate up to 30 million tons of CO2 per year, according to a statement from Occidental.”
And if anybody else was wondering:
“In 2021, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions totaled 6,340.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, or 5,586.0 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents after accounting for sequestration from the land sector.”
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20U.S.%20greenhouse%20gas,sequestration%20from%20the%20land%20sector https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas....
- alex_young 3y agoSounds like carbon neutral would take ~200 of these things.
- sillywalk 3y agoMore like at least 20,000 or more, plus whatever emissions it takes to construct, transport and operate the plants.
- tito 3y agoThe goal of these systems isn't to neutralize the planet's emissions (edit: by themselves). We need to both massively decarbonize and remove carbon from the air. The goal of these removal systems is to clean up the last bit. That's because removing carbon from the air is very expensive. It's more efficient not to emit it in the first place.
- alex_young 3y agoWhy not both? If we can power these things with clean energy and build hundreds of them it seems like a great addition to a carbon tax or whatever other system we can implement to change our energy system.
- tito 3y agoBoth are required! (did I make it seem like it was either/or, lemme know)
- sillywalk 3y agoCarbon Neutral requires the removal of Billions of Tonnes of emissions. That is what CARBON NEUTRAL means. Cut emissions to zero, and for "CARBON NEUTRAL" you still need to remove billions of tonnes from the atmosphere. At least 20,000 or more, plus whatever emissions it takes to construct, transport and operate the plants.
- tito 3y agoAh you're totally right, my bad. Better to say "The goal of these systems isn't to neutralize the planet's emissions all by themselves"
- sillywalk 3y ago"Each site would have carbon-sucking vacuums that could eliminate up to one million tons of carbon dioxide annually. This is equal to the yearly emissions of 445,000 gas-powered cars." Another way to put it is, if we could instantly build 10,000 of these facilities today (which don't exist and are supposed to capture orders of magnitude more CO2 than any existing plant) and ignoring the cost/emissions from the construction and operation, and they instantly stored their ~1million tonnes of emissions, this would almost be enough to sequester ~1/3rd of last years emissions.
- mrweiner 3y agoHow’s your math work? If they sequester 1 million per year and we produce 5,600 million per year, 10,000 of these would capture nearly 2x one year of emissions, not 1/3.
- sillywalk 3y agoI'm terrible at math, so here goes: Global emissions of around 36+ Billion Tonnes/yr, so 10k facilities * 1Mtonnes_removed/year/facility = 10 Billion Tonnes removed /year. = < 1/3rd global emissions. not included: + all the wildfire emissions + whatever emissions it takes to actually create 10k+ DAC facilities, and operate them forever,
- mrweiner 3y agoAh, global emissions. I was confused because you’d responded to the comment about US emissions. Thanks for clarifying.