I’m sure they thought of this (and this one is in Iceland so they have a bunch of geothermal energy), but wouldn’t the power consumption and the emissions that come with producing the power negate some of the practical capacity of these carbon vacuums?
I assume it would be using renewable, non-carbon producing forms of energy to power this; ie. geothermal, solar, wind, heck - even nuclear would be a good power source for this sort of machinery (with a consistent power requirement).
The more pertinent question IMO is, how many of these machines would be need to first bring global net-Carbon emissions to 0 - and the. How many more would we need to reverse the last century+ of CO2 pollution and bring air quality back to pre-industrial revolution levels?
I don’t want to be a downer, but I’m afraid people will see the extra emissions headroom and speed up production instead of letting the carbon capture reverse anything.
This machine pulls in 36,000 tons of carbon per year, our average carbon output is about 36 billion tons per year, so you’d need to build a million of these to offset our current output.
Reversing the last century of emissions is interesting because we would likely have to carefully monitor and adjust how much we pull in as we go along because any dramatic changes could have serious climate consequences.
It would be more effective to just move location agnostic, power consuming stuff like data centres to Iceland to run on the green energy instead of sucking up power from grids with fossil fuels in them.
I’m sure they thought of this (and this one is in Iceland so they have a bunch of geothermal energy), but wouldn’t the power consumption and the emissions that come with producing the power negate some of the practical capacity of these carbon vacuums?
I assume it would be using renewable, non-carbon producing forms of energy to power this; ie. geothermal, solar, wind, heck - even nuclear would be a good power source for this sort of machinery (with a consistent power requirement).
The more pertinent question IMO is, how many of these machines would be need to first bring global net-Carbon emissions to 0 - and the. How many more would we need to reverse the last century+ of CO2 pollution and bring air quality back to pre-industrial revolution levels?
I don’t want to be a downer, but I’m afraid people will see the extra emissions headroom and speed up production instead of letting the carbon capture reverse anything.
This machine pulls in 36,000 tons of carbon per year, our average carbon output is about 36 billion tons per year, so you’d need to build a million of these to offset our current output.
Reversing the last century of emissions is interesting because we would likely have to carefully monitor and adjust how much we pull in as we go along because any dramatic changes could have serious climate consequences.
It would be more effective to just move location agnostic, power consuming stuff like data centres to Iceland to run on the green energy instead of sucking up power from grids with fossil fuels in them.
A good video by Adam Something on the subject.