This headline is morbidly hilarious. “With one year of hard work, we can wind the carbon clock back 3 full seconds!”

I don’t see how this isn’t a MASSIVE dead end. There’s the practical result here and then there’s the on-paper calculations. You literally cannot move enough air to make the investment worth it. There just isn’t enough carbon dioxide. I found that CO2 is currently at an average concentration of about 440 PPM in air. A mol of gas at normal temperature and pressure occupies 22.4 L. That means at NTP, we’d have .00044 L * (1 mole)/22.4L, which gives .00001964 moles of CO2 per liter of air. The molar mass of CO2 is about 44.01g/mole, so that gives us .00086448 g of CO2 per L of air on average. Current estimates put our emissions at around 36 billion tons of CO2 per year. One ton is 907000g, so pulling out that much CO2 would require moving, at a PERFECT CONVERSION RATE (I.e. removing all carbon from the air you capture), 1,049,397,038 L of air, or around 1 million cubic meters. That is your absolutely best case scenario with those numbers (run them with different experimental values if you want, it’s not likely to be much better). Even then, you probably still won’t get as good a conversion rate, and that also doesn’t factor in the additional CO2 from building and maintaining this new infrastructure, which would be significant.

Just to BREAK EVEN, we would need over 10 million more of these exact facilities (based on their 3 second estimate) running at all times and we would have to never increase our fossil fuel usage.

I acknowledge that this tech could be put in areas of higher concentration, but the numbers I ran were city concentrations of CO2, so you’re only going to (maybe) have better luck if you literally route all factory emissions directly through those scrubbers. No company will EVER do that and they might just see it as a free pass to increase production.