The world’s largest direct carbon capture plant just went online
The world’s largest direct carbon capture plant just went online
Climeworks has just opened the world’s largest direct carbon capture plant. It can suck around 36,000 tons of CO2 from the air each year, burying it underground.
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What a giant waste of resources.
Right? It sequesters 0.0001% of our annual carbon output. They say they hope to reduce the cost to $400-$600/ton by 2030 so,even using their 2030 estimate, this plant cost $14.4M - $28.8M. To sequester 1% of our current carbon emissions per year would cost $144B - $288B. $7.2T - $14.4T to do 50%.
This doesn't sound like a productive use of the limited R&D funds that go into combating climate change.
We need some solution to offset mandatory or near mandatory carbon costs though. Obviously as long as we are using carbon for energy production outside of very specific use cases, its a non starter as a scale solution. But things like farming still generate carbon, and we don't have realistic non-carbon options for planes/rockets. The R&D for that also needs to start now. Or like, 30 years ago.
The plant works just as intended and has already captured a lot of that sweet sweet greentech R&D money and subsidies.
You know... that actually doesn't seem that bad when you consider that the global GDP was 90T in 2022 - assuming linear scaling, sequestering the entire global carbon footprint would take 30% of global GDP.
Assuming that the economy grows (let's say 3%/yr) with lower carbon intensity (i.e we do some of the other things on the climate change bucket list) and manage to prevent emissions from growing, the global GDP surplus by 2030 would cover sequestering the costs for capturing all global emissions.
Now that's just napkin maths - and carbon capture is terribly inefficient and seems like an upper bound of cost. So, now consider how much less it might cost if we use efficient methods: Renewables, nuclear, HVACs, hydrogen steel, co2-binding concrete etc etc.
Eh, just a thought.