Despite tech breakthroughs, carbon removal still won’t save the planet

2 comments

1. **From Tim McDonnell in the Semafor [Net Zero](https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/06/05/2024/carbon-removal-still-wont-save-the-planet?utm_campaign=semaforreddit) newsletter:**

   Tech to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere took a big step forward this week, but remains far off course to reach the levels scientists believe will be necessary to keep global temperatures within the Paris Agreement targets.

   Climeworks, a Swiss startup that was among the first companies to build a commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) plant, switched on the world’s largest such facility in Iceland last month. Yesterday, the company unveiled a series of incremental improvements that it says will allow it to capture twice as much CO2 for half the cost and half the energy consumption of its existing tech. Climeworks plans to build its first “generation 3” facility in Louisiana, part of a project that was awarded a $50 million grant from the US Department of Energy in March.

   While Climeworks’ first two plants together are capable of pulling about 40,000 tons of CO2 from the air annually — about 1% of the emissions of a typical coal-fired power plant — the new tech will put the company within reach of hitting several million tons per year by 2030 and a billion tons by 2050, co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher told reporters.

   It’s no surprise that Wurzbacher is bullish on carbon removal. But the company’s own cost forecasts, plus all of the other available evidence about how quickly the nascent industry can mature, suggest that without much more direct government intervention to force high-emitting companies to pay up for carbon removal credits, there will likely be a major shortfall in the availability of carbon removal by midcentury. Carbon removal tech breakthroughs don’t fundamentally make them a more feasible hedge against slow emissions reductions.

   **[Read the full story here.](https://www.semafor.com/article/06/05/2024/carbon-removal-still-wont-save-the-planet?utm_campaign=semaforreddit)**

2. Well, we better stop investing in this since it won’t outright fix all of our problems

   /s