World’s 1st carbon removal facility to capture 30,000 tons of CO2 over decade | Also Canada’s first commercial direct air capture project, Deep Sky’s carbon removal innovations facility aims to capture 3,000 tons of CO2 per year.

8 comments

1. Well, 1kt pa is a start, but you know, it’s another 19999999 kt pa just to reach status quo. I know we need to start somewhere, but man, there is still so much ground to cover.

2. Everyone is experiencing climate grief:

   1. climate denial
   2. climate anger
   3. climate bargaining
   4. climate depression
   5. climate acceptance

   Different people are just in different states of grief.

   I don’t think people understand the insignificance of 3000 tons / year of powered CO2 removal. It is not even a step toward something significant. I dug up an old comment of mine from 1.5 years ago to provide some numbers:

   If you’re not familiar with the required scale of CO2 removal, here’s some context: [People have emitted ~1.6 trillion tons of atmospheric CO2 since 1800, from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production alone – and emit ~35 billion tons annually now.](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions) Let’s suppose we aim to remove 1.0 trillion tons, to lower the global average CO2 level to a ppm that could restore the climate. The recent CO2 capture plant in Iceland, the world’s largest, is supposed to remove 4400 tons per year. It would take that plant over 227 million years to remove 1.0 trillion tons. Even with 100 CO2 capture plants operating at 100x that capacity each, it would take over 22,700 years for them to do it. The point here is that CO2 removal will require a scale-changing technology, and will undoubtedly require significant additional power to operate.

   With current technology, direct air capture of CO2 does not look like a scalable approach to removing enough excess CO2 from the environment. Another approach is through removal and sequestration of CO2 from seawater. Oceans naturally absorb CO2 and by volume hold up to 150x the mass of CO2 as air does, and provide a way to sequester the CO2. Here’s [a proposed method of capturing and sequestering CO2 from seawater](https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-co2-in-atmosphere).

   Unfortunately, doing the math shows that if you are removing 10-20 billion tons of CO2 per year and locking it in synthetic limestone, the sheer masses involved make disposal practically impossible.

   Powered CO2 removal looks like another misdirection promoted by the fossil fuel industry, and another vehicle for financial scams. It relies on the gullibility of people who are in stage 2, 3 or 4 of climate grief.

3. The scale of these facilities is nothing short of pathetic. For reference, most of the Amazon rainforest stores 500-600 tonnes of CO2 per hectare. Meaning a Walmart parking lot of trees does better than this facility. Two MILLION hectares were deforested in 2022 in the Amazon alone.

   Well this is just a start, right? The technology is going to scale?

   Not so. Set aside that this facility is only marginally larger than the previous largest that tried to pull down 2000 tns/yr built five years ago (they never met their targets). The real problem is thermodynamics. It’s enormously inefficient to remove CO2 this way. Under the most optimistic projections we’d effectively need to double global electricity production in order to meet our climate targets, and needless to say, all that new electricity needs to come from renewables. Also needless to say, if we were able to do that then we’d have solved the climate crisis already. I strongly recommend watching this YouTube video by a physisict at Colombia University:

   https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EBN9JeX3iDs

   I suppose you could argue that ‘we need to do everything’. Sure. But given the cost of these facilities, it might have been easier to keep that Walmart parking lot of rainforest standing, had we been willing to pay the value of the timber/pasture.

   Of course there’s been a lot of fraud in forest protection/restoration schemes, particularly in the carbon offset market. That’s a problem in regulatory oversight rather than a problem with the trees imo. Some of the most successful programs have been run by governments.

4. I understand it’s not enough, but it’s an attempt at SOMETHING and in the pursuit of something more realistic it may just be a stepping stone. A multi-pronged approach is surely needed. I know we can’t plant enough trees and wait for them to grow but we should be planting them anyway etc…

5. Pathetic. Pathetic. And once again,pathetic.

6. Is that 30k tons gross or net?
   Also, people already complain about how much space we give over to cars for just parking, are we really going to give over what looks like another entire city block worth of land for every 2-3 cars on earth just to scrub their carbon equivalent over the span of a decade? Do we really have a quarter of a billion city blocks worth of space to give over to scrubbing the emissions from just cars? Do we even have enough of all the necessary resources here on earth to build tens or hundreds of millions of these facilities?

7. Sounds like a big ass scam, More when we’re losing forest rapidly, bad agricultural practices are still used, coal is still being burned when solar is already more efficient and emissions are still very high. Thats not a solution.

8. A mere 4 acres of redwood forest would surpass that. 1 acre stores 890 tons per year, over 10 years that’s 8900, and x 4 acres = 35,600.

   And it costs zero materials or fossil fuels to maintain, generates no waste, and in addition to capturing CO2 they also cool the surrounding region because trees terraform their environments.

   https://www.savetheredwoods.org/press-releases/research-confirms-significant-role-of-redwood-forests-in-californias-climate-fight/