3 ms·

The projections include a lot less carbon capture than 100 GT/yr. The 2C projections include 1000 GT for whole century. There is research that 600 GT is the mos

The projections include a lot less carbon capture than 100 GT/yr. The 2C projections include 1000 GT for whole century. There is research that 600 GT is the most feasible. It would be infeasible to capture all of emissions, but would be feasible to replace emissions, and then use green energy to capture some of it. BTW, I like rock weathering as option for carbon capture. Crush olivine rock and dump it in the sea. That would be huge scale, but we know how to do mining, crushing, and shipping on large scale.

jandrewrogers 2y ago
New emissions are on the scale of several tens of gigatons per year and we have a century of accumulation at those kinds of rates to remove. I am not sanguine about the timelines. The term “large scale” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. We are talking about something qualitatively higher scale than the largest “large scale” projects. We don’t have orders of magnitude of extra capacity anywhere in our existing supply chains, never mind across all of it that would be necessary for such an endeavor. This would all have to be built, and building that has its own supply chains that need to scale to an extreme. It will create severe resource pressures very far removed from the actual carbon capture. It is a “for want of a nail” kind of situation. This is also economically non-productive. We can’t divert enough expertise, manpower, and minerals from the normal economy to make it plausible. We are a very long way from having the kind of automation that would let us work around this issue. I am interested in viable solutions but the impossibility of scaling this particular solution is kind of basic industrial engineering. It is hard to explain where the resources will come from.