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I'm curious, did you try to calculate the mass of ores that would need to be mined?
by bwestergard 3y ago
I'm curious, did you try to calculate the mass of ores that would need to be mined?
- tzs 3y agoNo, I just wanted to know if we covered some large deserts with solar panels could that power enough DAC to make a difference. A quick Googling to find current worldwide solar panel production suggests that it would take about 90 years of current production for the panels for a 500 000 km^2 solar farm, so to build enough to just cancel out current emissions would need about 180 times the resources that currently go annually into solar panel production. So we'd probably need to increase mining (and several other things) by about 20x if we wanted to use this approach to get enough DAC to bring emissions to net zero. I think that's about as far as I can go. I don't know enough about the availability of various resources to figure out if the various things needed are abundant enough and accessible enough that we could increase production by 20x.
- hedora 3y agoPrices of panels keep halving, so that suggests potential production keeps doubling.