How Much Energy Would It Take to Pull Carbon Dioxide out of the Air?
How Much Energy Would It Take to Pull Carbon Dioxide out of the Air?
A physicist runs the math on direct air capture and warns: This tech won't save us from climate catastrophe.
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If we wanted to remove enough CO2 to get back to the preindustrial level of 280 ppm, it would take 2.39 x 10^20 joules of energy. For a reality check, that's almost as much as the world's total annual energy consumption (5.8 x 10^21 joules every year).
Isn't that over an order of magnitude difference? What am I missing? How is that "almost as much"?
Yep, it's close to 4% of the total. Not really "almost as much".
That's honestly pretty good, I can see world leaders coming together and just doing that. There must be other technical challenges to this other than raw power usage
I don't know much about the technology, so I can't comment on that. But I don't really see politicians pushing for this, at least not succesfully. There are too many rightwing obstructionists in most Western governments right now...
Other than the currently dying Tory party (and even sort of them), every single major UK political party is for green energy and against climate change to varying degrees. And I mean on a policy level, not just words.
I'm not too familiar with other governments, but Europe seems to be going well on that front too. And as much as China bad, they seem open to green policies, and the US democrats seem pretty okay on climate, especially as carbon capture helps out fossil fuel companies.
I know that's not a massive ringing endorsement, but considering the cost of 4% energy expenditure for a single year, it seems like a no brainer. If you spread it over 20 years that's 0.2% of energy, less than AI or crypto uses by far
I'm guessing they don't understand scientific notation, and "numbers are close" without understanding the numbers are much more significant
even if 10^20 was almost 10^21 (which is isn't) 2.39 is not almost 5.8. It's less than half!
Why do we listen to people who do not know what the fuck they are talking about? Have we lost our ability to know who is, and is not, completely full of shit?
This is why STEM education is important. You clearly learned from yours and that's awesome!
The problem is that this is a theoretical minimum, not an actual, proposed process. We'd need a way to attract CO2 to separate it from the rest of the air, and afaik that doesn't exist. Any actual process is likely to be far less than 100% efficient, probably an order of magnitude or more less.
This is an example of a real proposal, but I have no idea how efficient it is. It would be a lot more helpful if this article provided a realistic example instead of some back-of-the-napkin math.
Oh yeah, I agree it's super inefficient currently. But if the theoretical 100% efficient process is 5% of our current yearly energy expenditure, that sounds promising and suggests we shouldn't just write off the idea.
Exactly. I want to see some investment into CO2 removal. If that's cheaper than retooling everything, we should do it. If it's not, we should do a little bit of it to help remove the negatives of climate change as we transition to a more responsible society.
I say we tax carbon emissions at around the theoretical removal cost, and then use some of that to invest in removal tech.
We'd need a way to attract CO2 to separate it from the rest of the air, and afaik that doesn't exist.
Call me crazy but what about plants and trees?! 🤷🏼♂️
They might not be 100% efficient but it's dirt cheap to plant them, let alone not destroy the rest we still have
That's important too, but it doesn't scale very quickly, and requires a lot of space (read: lifestyle changes).
I didn’t read the article but it seems off. With only 1/20 of energy used by the world in a single year we could undo the damage of 300 years?
Seems too low. If that’s true we could shut down completely for just two weeks to undo
Can't imagine "shutting down completely for just two weeks" would exactly be reasonable, but yeah I wonder if the article had a typo in it. I'm not sure. As of right now, the numbers are still the same in the article.
If the numbers are correct, expending like 5-10% of our energy expenditure for a single year on carbon capture sounds a lot more reasonable than the article suggests. Even if it were half of our yearly energy usage, that sounds pretty reasonable if you draw that out over a few decades.
That’s like 24x more….