I can’t wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
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Fuck this postt, this is all fiction. There are initiatives that AMERICA IS DESTROYING.
Occidental and 1PointFive can’t secure permits, let alone funding, it’s all hand waving slop.
3 fucking minutes of research is all it takes
Occidental’s plant was purely greenwashing. They never had any intention of fixing the damage their company contributed.
I knew it was bullshit the moment I saw “The US is building…” and it wasn’t a concentration camp
Hey now, we also build bigger and bigger stroads and bigger cars every year which kill more and more children every year.
I swear we won’t stop with the urban sprawl until our entire country is covered in asphalt
I mean, this may get downvoted, but trees are just trying to live, not fix the climate. They are a very real part of the solution, but I’m fine with considering ‘supplements’.
Sometimes the enemy of the good is the perfect.
If the construction of these can provide a more efficient means of carbon capture than growing trees then turning those trees into building materials over and over …. It’s a good thing.
If not … it’s performative tbh.
Totally agree.
It’s performative, the biggest ‘carbon capture’ facility made so far, didn’t even come close to offsetting its own carbon footprint.
if it’s powered by renewables, sure. if not… uh… seems like we’d be much, much better off reducing output.
It’s not entirely powered by renewables day 1, but a small solar array that they plan to build upon over time.
Power for Direct Air Capture will be sourced from new renewable or low-emission power sources. Power generation will be additional to what is available from the grid today, ensuring DAC is not removing an existing supply of renewable power from the grid.
ah, performative garbage.
My question is, wouldn’t the power needed to run these negate the benefits they bring?
This is also ignoring the gross notion that these can make money so they’re more worthy than trees when considering solutions.
Reading your comment makes this concept even stranger because you can sustainably farm trees to get the same carbon removal benefits and then also make money selling the lumber which will keep the carbon locked up just fine if you make sure to sell it for long term use applications like carpentry.
Trees alone won’t cut it. We’ve burned millions of years of plant growth in just 200 years. We need to plant trillions of trees just to hit the 2C target. Which is impossible since there isn’t enough land. Beside trees we need to restore wetlands and ocean habitats. And on top of that use human made tech since it is a human made problem.
What you’re missing is they use the carbon to push out more oil from the ground. That’s where the profit is.
My question is, wouldn’t the power needed to run these negate the benefits they bring?
The hardest part about green energy is getting it to the time and place where it can be most useful. That’s why real time solar power prices sometimes dip negative (where the producers are literally paying people to take that excess power off the grid), and sometimes in consistent and predictable ways (e.g., California’s “duck curve” in spring and autumn).
So with solar power being the cheapest form of generation, but highly dependent on weather conditions, the solution might be to build up overcapacity where production during cloudy days is enough, and then find some way to store the excess on sunny days for nighttime, and maybe using intermittent power sinks that can productively use energy only when the production is high (charging batteries, preemptively cooling or heating buildings and storing that for later, capturing carbon, performing less time-sensitive computer calculations like data analysis for science, etc.)
If we have systems that produce too much energy, then carbon capture (including through manufacture of fuel or other chemical feedstocks) can vary by time of day to address overcapacity.
In theory, hardware like this is designed to function as a solar sink, utilising surplus production during peak hours when storage devices (batteries, dams, etc.) are fully charged.
In AZ and likely Texas, they could be powered by clean energy. They’re not, but they could. AZ can produce an insane amount of solar, and sun farms are continuing to grow. Texas can produce a hell of a lot of wind power if they could quit arguing against themselves. AZ also has some hydro from Hoover, and a nuclear plant.
There’s just a hell of a lot more effective steps we could be doing before trying to get to these capture systems. And even if the capture works and completely offsets the carbon used to build the systems and the power used to run them and 100x more, it’ll just be used as further excuse to continue to do nothing.
Total waste of fuckin resources
Correct, but tech bros get rich so that’s all that matters, right?
Sorry guys, that’s just the cooler for my new Nvidia card.
I’m not a huge fan of this approach.
Forests: are we a joke to you?
I like that the headline calls them DAC plants
Plants
Plants
Plants
Just fucking plant plants holy shit
Forests are a reservoir, they do not remove carbon from the carbon cycle. The only actual solution is to stop bringing carbon from outside the carbon cycle into the carbon cycle, while also removing the carbon we’ve already added. Natural phenomena cannot permanently sequester carbon, this is something humans will have to construct
Trees are socialist scum, I’ve heard they can even share resources via root and mycelium systems. Clearly false, because science can’t help but lie, but DISGUSTING nonetheless
Who’s gonna pay for the build cost and maintenance? Just curious.
I was thinking how much CO2 it would take to build it and maintain it
That was the whole point of the Kyoto agreement no? Make it costly to produce co2, so solution could be made to offset it and get paid for it. But yeah the US of course didn’t sign it so yeah…
what would be really funny is if they cut down some trees to place these lol
Don’t they sell the CO2 to fracking companies?
Non plainer slicing(3d printer) would actually make something like this feasible.
Happy to see that nobody in the comment section seems to fall for this. I’m sure that’s representative for the global human race
But if we can pretend that we might have an idea to solve it in the future we don’t have to even pretend to do anything now!
everyone seems to be jumping on how shit of an idea this is and that we just need more trees, but the point of this is that they can directly sequester the carbon back into the ground. Yes you can plant a lot of trees but when those trees die and rot away the carbon just ends up straight back in the atmosphere, you need to actually bury it to stop it re-entering the atmosphere again.
Go look up how much CO2 is actually in the air. Then look up how much air exists in the atmosphere. Then, finally, look up how much air these things are capable of filtering out.
Then you will see why this is a scam.
Some trees can continue to grow for hundreds to thousands of years before just dying and rotting away. I don’t see the carbon capture machines lasting that long without steady power and maintenance.
And when they rot away, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Hundreds or thousands of years isn’t nearly enough, we need to take it out of the carbon cycle permanently. These particular machines will last maybe a couple of years, and will probably generate hundreds of times more carbon in their construction and maintainence than they’ll sequester, but it’s a necessary first step. It’s not possible to put the carbon back in the ground where it belongs at a viable cost and energy expenditure without building these machines first.
One of the many problems is at least in the US, it tends to be used for fracking …… storing it under ground to pump more oil
Some of the carbon might return to the atmosphere via rot, but far more of it would be put into the soil or trapped in lumber. Besides, the solution is extremely cheap and effectively self replacing, just let new trees grow as old ones die.
How much carbon dioxide was produced to build this fucking thing.
And then to run it! I hate how these ideas get funding and are immediately being built without question. How much energy was put in the materials, in building it, and how much more will they need to run it to extract how much CO2 exactly? And then let’s say it works. It works so well that in that region CO2 levels fall well below and reach normal levels. What then? They leave it there? Move it?
Ssssssh. Sssssssssssssssh. Only dreams now.
Only kisses Jenny
How much environmental damage from surface disturbance and tailings?
They put all the trees in a tree museum.
Why spend energy to make energy when you could make solar. Or capture at source tech for non energy producing carbon sources?
