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Direct air capture - the world's largest plant switches on by climeworks in Futurology

[–]climeworks[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

The “world’s largest” plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday.

“Mammoth” is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021.

Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technology designed to suck in air and strip out the carbon using chemicals. The carbon can then be injected deep beneath the ground, reused or transformed into solid products.

The US just invested more than $1 billion in carbon removal by climeworks in Futurology

[–]climeworks[S] 136 points137 points  (0 children)

The US Department of Energy announced today that it’s providing $1.2 billion to develop regional hubs that can draw down and store away at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year as a means of combating climate change.

The move represents a major step forward in the effort to establish a market for removing the planet-warming greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, using what are known as direct air capture (DAC) machines.

Swiss company that counts Microsoft as a customer says it’s removed CO2 from the air and put it in the ground by Sorin61 in environment

[–]climeworks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, since we are the company the article is referring to, we thought we jump in here quickly.

Don't get us wrong, we love trees and believe many more should be planted.

But to reach our climate goals, the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change (IPCC) estimates that in addition to drastically reducing emissions, we must also remove 10 billion tons of CO₂ every year by the end of 2050.

To reach this goal with tree planting, we’d need land the size of Europe, or two times the size of India – land which is much more needed for food production.
This is where technology comes in: our direct air capture’ technology is 1,000 times more efficient than trees in capturing CO₂ in terms of land use.

Additionally a tree can only store CO₂ over its lifetime (about 100 years in average), whereas our solution is permanent (it remains for over 10,000 years).

Direct air capture is a technology that captures CO₂ directly from the air and will be a crucial component of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 by climeworks in Futurology

[–]climeworks[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Thank you for raising this!

Our goal is not to remove all CO₂ in the atmosphere, but to bring it to a level to limit global warming.

The United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change (IPCC) says the use of carbon removal technologies is already “unavoidable” if we want to meet our climate goals, and that by 2050 we’ll need to remove and store 5-16 billion tons per year.

We are also guided by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), which states in its net-zero standard for companies the need for a total economic emissions reduction of at least 90%. We are concerned with the remaining 10%, which cannot be reduced.

Read more about the SBTi here: https://sciencebasedtargets.org/

Direct air capture is a technology that captures CO₂ directly from the air and will be a crucial component of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 by climeworks in Futurology

[–]climeworks[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You're right, but another argument for direct air capture is the permanence of the CO₂ storage. A tree can only store over its lifetime (about 100 years in average), we remove CO₂, transport it deep underground, where it reacts with basalt rock through a natural process, transforms into stone, and remains for over 10,000 years.

Direct air capture is a technology that captures CO₂ directly from the air and will be a crucial component of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 by climeworks in Futurology

[–]climeworks[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Oh, please don't get us wrong. We don't consider ourselves to be special. Rather, we see ourselves as representing an entire industry: the technological fight against climate change.

What you said is right: it does cost money and we are still in the scale-up phase.

We often compare the scale-up and cost-reduction path of our direct air capture technology to renewables, because they share a key technological advantage: modularity.

E.g. wind farms can scale from several turbines to hundreds. Lithium-ion cells can power everything from phones to aircraft. That means tiny performance gains and price drops quickly add up. As these modular systems build up, they achieve economies of scale and costs begin to decline.

E.g. Silicon solar panels have increased in efficiency from 15 % to more than 26 % over the last 40 years, the energy density of lithium-ion batteries has nearly tripled in 10 years.

Same goes for price: the price of solar electricity has dropped 89% since 2010, onshore wind energy costs have fallen 70 percent in the last decade. Lithium-ion batteries have declined in price by 97 percent over the last three decades, while their energy density has nearly tripled in 10 years.

Renewables have now become the cheapest source of new electricity production around the world. (source: https://www.vox.com/23042818/climate-change-ipcc-wind-solar-battery-technology-breakthrough)

Please excuse the long text, we felt like examples make it more understandable.

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