“Here’s how it works.”
Spoler: it does not.
It works by taking in tax money and then outputting hookers and cocaine for the shareholders.
A decade ago people argued that solar and wind didn’t work.
That’s absolutely not true. My mom had solar panels put on her house more than a decade ago and there are giant wind farms all over this state that have not been put up in the last 10 years.
Also, people argued a lot more than a decade ago that free energy machines didn’t work. And they were right. And they’re still right. Because just because someone says their technology will work doesn’t mean it ever will.
In this case, it’s literally just an excuse to pump more oil out of the ground.
And it’s thanks to earlier adopters, like your mom, that helped fund the technology that we have such great green energy tech today.
This article shows it pretty well : https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/the-cheapest-sources-of-electricity-in-the-us/
The top graph shows that wind and solar are some of the cheapest electricity options available, even compared to fossil fuels.
On the bottom graphs shows that if wind and solar technology had stayed at 2009 levels (more than a decade ago to your point), they would be among the most expensive.
So thank your mom for me.
“Most expensive” and “didn’t work” are very different, but she was far from an early adopter considering Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House in the 1970s and I remember some very wealthy people having them on their homes when I was a kid in the 1980s.
Also, it saved her huge amounts on her electric bill, so I don’t know that it was the most expensive for her.
And we will be earlier adopters than our children. Yeah that’s very cool of your mom… and Jimmy Carter :)
There is no serious scientist alive today that thinks this will scale in any sort of meaningful way. For solar it was clear from the start that it was scaleable and even at small scale had an immediate practical effect. Solar would have taken over the world 20 years ago if it wasnt for the massive anti renewable lobbying by the fossil fuel industry and grid providers.
People argue that it doesn’t work today but it’s been something that we use regularly (decades for solar and LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF FUCKING YEARS FOR WIND! JESUS CHRIST, YES, REALLY! What did people think windmills and sails were?).
This is not the same thing and unless there is a fundamental shift away from fossil fuels, powering these things will be a fool’s errand. It is, at best, a bandaid, and at worst it’s an excuse used to continue down the disastrous path we are on.
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We burn carbon-based stuff like oil, coal and gas to give us energy and fart co2. It takes even more energy than we gained to convert X tons of co2 back to solid form.
Every single joule of energy spent on capture would have mattered more if it was used for electricity directly, and reduced fuel consumption for a power plant by the same amount.
It’s hard to see this as anything else than a greenwashing distraction intended to instill an illusion that emissions production can remain at its current level.
Iceland has loads of green energy though (geothermal & wind) and is too far from anywhere else to really transport it (although that would be nice!). So it is helping, and it is helping to advance the technology/engineering knowledge for the future.
The fracking ones being built by the oil companies are less beneficial… Better than not doing it probably, but not exactly green… So with you on those ones!
The most crucial part of the process is that you and i will be the ones paying for the energy used for carbon capture, but the fossil fuel companies will be the ones profiting from selling the energy.
Don’t they trade certificates, so they can pay for it?
Agreed, net/net energy usage reduction is more efficient. However, carbon capture and/or geoengineering are now unfortunately necessary in tandem with reducing emissions for humanity (and the other species unfortunate enough to be sharing this planet with our mistakes) to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. We simply didn’t do enough soon enough, and several warming effects are already in motion.
And unfortunately, both climate deniers and activists alike have been fighting against additional funding and research in these technologies, so we’re pretty far behind in our understanding.
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.
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.
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.
This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
el oh el
Yeah, pure greenwashing.
The Icelandic plant is NOT doing that though (just to be clear)
Yet. Not doing that yet. That’s cause it’s not up and running yet lol. We’ll see who pays them top dollar for their CO2.
… I mean, Iceland doesn’t have oil, it’s an island made by volcanoes on a plate boundary.
Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
Well, they have to sell the carbon they capture to make money. If you suck up carbon and put it underground, where’s your revenue stream? The ground ain’t paying you to stuff it full of carbon. These big vacuums ain’t free, they have to pay for them somehow.
They’re essentially using it for fracking so it’ll end up in the water supply.
We get free bubbly water? I don’t see any downsides at all.
Occidental is the oil company - they aren’t going to sell the carbon to themselves, they are just going to use it to pump more oil out of old wells compounding the effect
It’s for profit. They aren’t doing it for funsies or to help environment
“Enhanced oil recovery” really sounds like fracking with extra steps
Carbon Capture is a fraud. It’s always been a fraud.
Our Conservative Sask Party government blathered on about it for years as an alternative to “Trudeau’s evil Carbon Tax”. And it went about as well as you’d expect.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/carbon-capture-projects-not-meeting-targets-1.6241420
Have they actually got any proof these work yet? Last I saw the biggest current running one was just lying about it’s figures
The science behind us sound (and pretty simple). Making technology like that work on a huge scale is always a challenge.
The science is sound, but the scale is the problem.
This facility, if it meets its stated numbers, removes 1.24% of the yearly carbon output of one (1) average billionaire.
Catbon capture alone will not solve, or even begin to dent, this problem. Only a total global economic revolution will save our planet.
Very much agree.
The scale needed is ridiculous. You’d probably need one of those plants for every 1000 people on the planet.
I’d much rather capture CO2 from waste incinerators or (bio) gas plants or any other “residual” CO2 emitter that’s not burning fossil fuels. At least it’s pretty simple to filter out of their exhausts.
And I’m 95% sure these plants will be used as an argument for running fossil fuel devices longer. It’s “not so bad” after all.
Yeah its critical to cut emissions. At the same time I’m excited to see this field growing. It’s another tool.
How much power could $36 million dollars worth of solar panels produce over 1 year I wonder? And then keep them going for 30 years? And another $180 million worth of panels over the next 5 years, and millions more in panels up to 2050? I feel like the power produced by an array that size over 30 years would far eclipse the value of what little carbon this will extract.
Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That’s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
I think 36mil couldve convinced 7800 people to never drive again much easier…
36000000 ÷ 7800 = $4615 per person. Maybe you miss-calculated? That’s not enough to convince many people I’m sure.
Or I misunderstood your comment.
The rate we can be building electricy-based transit infrastructure and biking infrastructure should be turned up big time alongside any other research projects. A well paced metro line takes many thousands of cars off the road and we know it works.
My city is getting a $500 million freeway interchange, but we’re also barely able to setup a single fast bus route. Our civilizations priorities are completely out of whack.
Very much agree that moving away from fossil fuels is most important. Given how long these large scale technologies take to develop, I’m glad that we are working on this tech now, even though these exact plants are not producing a net benefit.
“Here’s how it works.”
That’s the neat part. It doesn’t. Purely performative.
All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency.
There are already much bigger DAC plants in the works from other companies. Stratos, currently under construction in Texas, for example, is designed to remove 500,000 tons of carbon a year, according to Occidental, the oil company behind the plant.
But there may be a catch. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company’s use of captured carbon in a process called “enhanced oil recovery.” This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil — allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, everything seems fine here.
She better not go from suck to blow…
Here’s how it works
Later, a report will come out that it doesn’t really work just like every other time something like this has come out, but then we’ll just continue on this path with unrestrained fossil fuel use because we think we can invent our way out later, making things worse and worse because we’re just a bunch of fucking idiots I guess.
I agree with the video. Carbon capture is no replacement for reducing emissions.
Also, I am excited that people are working on direct capture too because many of the same arguments that the video makes, were valid arguments against solar and wind a decade ago, but not any more thanks to those early pilot projects.
The article states that the plant needs to be 10x more efficient to be considered a viable tool.
Carbon capture is needed in the long term, so it’s good that technologies for it are already being developed. Ending emissions isn’t enough, we need to also remove the GHG’s that are already up in the air. But that comes later. The most pressing thing currently is to remove emissions, or to stop shitting on the floor, as Adam put it.
Even then, I am sceptical about the scalability of DAC solutions. Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) seems more scalable, like building huge platforms for seaweeds to grow on, and then sinking them and their stored carbon into the depths of the ocean.
My friend was working on a start-up for marine carbon capture. I have a lot of friends moving to green energy and related fields. It’s promising to see.
