Inspiring. Innovating.
Inspiring. Innovating.
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!
209 comments
-
-
How much carbon dioxide was produced to build this fucking thing.
-
How much environmental damage from surface disturbance and tailings?
-
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
-
-
-
Trees are better carbon capture devices, you even get lumber from them.
-
I believe that's what OPs caption in the post body is getting at
-
And sea algae are even better.
-
-
I would probably name it T.R.E.E. Terrestrial Regeneration and Ecosystem Engine.
-
Fuck no I hope this fail, plant trees or die
-
In the middle of a desert? Planting trees is good, but its not enough to save us by itself.
-
-
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
-
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
-
-
Occidental's plant was purely greenwashing. They never had any intention of fixing the damage their company contributed.
-
-
Only if there was a small pipe or "smoke stack" that could emit these in super high concentrations of CO2 where we could just pipe it straight to the ground instead of capturing it through the air. Better yet, if we find all of those sources we could even stop them producing in the first place and leaving all the carbon in the ground. 🤔
/s
-
There's actually a new kind of gas turbine thermodynamic cycle that does in fact emit super-critical CO2 in a highly concentrated form that is extremely easy to collect and sequester. https://netpower.com/technology/
They're building a 300MW facility in Texas right now. I'd say this is a really solid contender for a transitionary power generation while we stand around with our heads in the sand.
-
Yeah, capturing it from the source is way better than capturing from some random air. A capture rate of 90% as an addon to current coal/gas infra including cement production would buy us a ton of transition time
-
-
Well we still need to capture the excess CO2 that we’ve pumped into the air for the last 200 years.
-
-
Current state of the art DAC plants are incredibly inefficient. Also, even if they would come with efficiency that is comparable to trees, they would still lack other positive ecological functions of trees.
-
current state
No state will be efficient. Burning shit in reverse takes more energy than you got out of it in the first place. It's a physical impossibility to make an energy efficient direct carbon capture plant.
-
-
carbon capture is always a bad idea because the energy it uses cancels out the co2 it pulls from the atmosphere
-
Unless it uses hydro, nuclear, wind, solar
-
It still uses the energy, and most of the time it just makes more sense to directly swap whatever you're running to one of those cleaner energy sources instead of using more energy than it would take to run the machine that releases carbon to undo that.
-
How about we start with using those sources instead of generating co2 we have to clean. Tht would be more effective.
-
And the amount of CO2 it captures is miniscule in comparison.
-
Which Trump has canceled many projects of those.
-
Can we start using heat generated by data centers yet?
-
-
If you put it right on the exhaust of a power plant it should be good no? Or not good as in good good, but better than nothing.
-
No. Direct carbon capture is essentially burning fuel in reverse, and at a bare minimum requires roughly the same amount of energy as was released when you burned the fuel. Consider you have a coal power plant operating at 45% energy conversion efficiency. That means for each 1,000 kW of power produced, you actually released 2,200 kW of thermal power total burning the coal. Guess how much energy you need to completely negate the impact of the power plant? It's much closer to that 2,200 kW number. Let's say that it only has a thermodynamic requirement of 2000kW due to a favorable storage reaction. However, those machines aren't 1000% efficient. Even at something like 80% efficiency (much higher than I have ever seen) that still bumps you up to needing 2500 kW, and at 50% efficiency you get to 4000 kW. So in order to run your carbon capture scheme, even in the most optimal conditions, you need more than double (and potentially quadruple) the power output of the plant you're putting it on. Now you might say "but you could use green energy to run the carbon capture!" But you could also just replace the plant with green energy and bypass the whole problem.
Carbon capture technology is essentially just PR from fossil fuel companies and it's a total scam the way that it's sold to the general public. It's like if you saw a toddler going around dumping out containers of glitter and said "We need to invest in a better vacuum cleaner to keep the house clean of all this glitter to keep up with this toddler" instead of focusing on stopping the toddler from dumping out more glitter first and worrying about the vacuuming up later. Carbon capture cannot possibly keep up with or make a meaningful dent in total CO2 concentrations until we dramatically reduce emissions. It is a thermodynamic impossibility, and it legitimately pisses me off that there are engineers working on these scams who are either too stupid to realize this or are complacent in the scams.
-
-
-
People will do anything other than planting more trees and looking after the worlds ocean ecosystem health. Most air is cleaned by algae in oceans and then trees in land, in that order. But people will just make machines for things which were taken care of by mother earth for millennia.
-
Way to reinvent the tree I guess?
-
Fun fact, most of the O2 we breathe is processed from CO2 by algae, not trees.
I mean, trees help, but the planet is mostly covered in water, so algae has a bit of an advantage.
The problem is that the ocean has historically been one part that environmental activism has struggled with, because how do you hold someone accountable for ecological damage done on international waters?
Any damage there tends to then affect bays, natural marinas, shore lines, and other areas where algae like living.
Trees are good, but they can probably do more good by replacing these carbon capture systems with algae ponds. They're powered by the sun too.
-
-
Is this the next gen Nvidia card?
-
My first thought was "bitcoin farm".
-
CO2in
-
-
-
I can't believe the ghouls in the Texas government let anyone past their ideological minefield to even get the permits signed, much less build the thing.
-
Carbon capture is the preferred solution to climate change for oil and gas companies, because is the only one that doesn't require a reduction on oil and gas extraction.
-
The amount of energy, created through burning fossil fuels, required to run the things offsets the benefit. This is Texas greenwashing burning energy for no reason.
-
You would be very surprised by the hypocrisy in Texas.
While they are saying all this ridiculous anti green stuff:
“Texas ranks first in the nation for wind power generation, second for solar power generation, second in the nation for battery storage, and third in the nation for the number of electric vehicle registrations through 2023, according to the online Renewables on the Rise 2024 dashboard released on Wednesday by Environment Texas Research & Policy Center.”
Shhh, don’t draw too much attention to it or the fucktard republicans will try to kill it.
-
Rick Perry said "Energy is energy is energy" and pushed to modernize the grid. It had some successes like lots of generation from renewables. But no new nukes and the coal plants still chugged along.
-
-
-
The biggest carbon sink on the planet are oceans. We need to stop messing them up.
-
Too late.
The thing about oceans is they have massive amounts of inertia.
We're still surviving on the inertia from before we fucked them up, but we've already fucked them up, and some of the consequences of that won't be apparent until 50 or 100 years from now.
Same with fixing them. We won't see the effects (or the unintended side effects) of anything we do to fix them for decades, and even then they'll probably be unnoticeable under the effects of how much we fucked them up before trying to fix them.
Stopping is probably indeed the best option, hopefully we haven't damaged them enough that they won't fix themselves eventually... but that'll take hundreds or more probably thousands of years.
-
-
Direct air capture is a scam. It requires energy that comes from somewhere else. Capturing CO2 requires energy, it’s basic physics/chemistry.
Nothing about it makes sense excpet as an expensive boondoggle and a distraction for correcting the root causes of climate change.
-
This will only ever make sense when we have carbon neutral energy that is “too cheap to meter.” So, like, nuclear fusion, or solar panels become cheaper than tar roofs. In other words, these systems will make sense after climate change is solved. lol.
-
Exactly.
-
-
We need a study to determine how much energy is released from burning billionaires. That's the only way these things might be carbon-neutral!
-
Finally, someone who gets it!
-
-
That energy can come from somewhere that doesn't produce more carbon than these kinds of machine sequester. Solar, wind, nuclear. Obviously we need to stop burning fossil fuels, but also we need to turn the carbon we've already produced back into a form that won't find its way back into the air.
-
It can, but it isn’t and it won’t. DAC is a scam and a distraction until fossil fuels are out of the equation. It is a false hope, a glamour, to keep us from addressing the root causes.
-
Cmon bro
They’re building nuclear plants for AI, you think they’re gonna build what, wind farms to run a DAC plant? They just basically made it unaffordable to put solar on your own home, do you think they won’t be like “lol build a natural gas power plant to run it”
Nothing gets done if the Saudis don’t win.
-
-
That article's only real point is that we shouldn't pin our hopes entirely on sequestration. Nothing about it being invalid or "a scam."
Basically summed up in these two paragraphs:
On the one hand, putting more money into carbon removal will help scale up—and drive down the cost of—technologies that will be needed in the future.
On the other hand, the growing excitement around these technologies could feed unrealistic expectations about how much we can rely on carbon removal, and thus how much nations and corporations can carry on emitting over the crucial coming decades. Market demands are also likely to steer attention toward cheaper solutions that are not as reliable or long-lasting.
Carbon sequestration is likely to play a part in becoming carbon negative, and deserves to be explored.
-
Until fossil fuels are not a part of the energy equation, DAC is a band-aid where a tourniquet is required. Sure do research, but DAC will never work while we are burning fossil fuels for energy. It doesn’t even make economic sense.
-
-
-
This feels like Big Oil PR.
Like, 'nothing to worry about, we can just scrub the air later.' Which is a total lie.
-
Only if we would have natural solution to this problem.... Let's fuck up the planet even more by producing more shit. How about planting trees and stopping the deforestation.
-
Planting trees doesn’t produce revenue for billionaires and shareholders. This does. Ergo we must produce expensive, over engineered machines to replace trees. Bees are next.
-
Trees are inefficient too but we actually already know what we need to do to ramp up the efficiency of the photosynthesis process in trees with genetic tinkering.
The bigger problem is that we have reached a point where trees aren’t enough anymore. The oceans have acidified. There’s just too much co2 to capture at this point.
-
-
Neither trees nor these can help much if fossil fuels continue to be burned at increasing rates.
-
That's for sure. But as I don't see people going away from fossil fuels anytime soon, we have to at least make it less terrible. EVs aren't an answer, as making the batteries fucks up the nature a lot, wind power takes more energy to build than it will return in it's lifetime and the machines will haunt us after they are decommissioned. I live in northern Sweden and because people in south aren't too keen to look at those ugly things, they place it around their colony, the north. So we have new roads in forests, trees are being cut fo huge wind farms screwing up our ecosystem and being transported up here mostly from Denmark. Everyone trying to minimize their impact is currently at least a dim path forward. People are against nuclear, but if properly executed, it is currently the cleanest energy we have. Let's hope cold fusion comes quick.
-
-
Also this plant are (with the latest technology) really less efficient than trees, like 60-70% less efficient IIRC.
-
Planting trees is only a temporary carbon hold. Also, it takes like 200 trees to offset the carbon for a years worth of driving from a single car.
I do have strong doubts about the usefulness of these fans, though.
-
Looks like your get the post text!
-
-
"The Mechanical Forest" sounds like a Ray Bradbury story.
-
I'll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective...
-
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that "refines" the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
(There's no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
-
(There’s no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
Only because it's not being built, so really very very very misleading.
In sunny places like the southern parts of the USA, if you took the land footprint of a typical nuclear power station and covered it with solar panels with regular sized walkways in between, you generate pretty much the same power output, but with none of the toxic nuclear waste.
If you put a used EV battery under every 40-80 of them, now you have 24 hour instantly responsive power.
Onshore wind power is the cheapest way of generating electricity, by some margin.
Guess why we're not doing all this. Is it the cost? Of course not! It's far more expensive to build a nuclear power plant. Is it the output? Of course not! Is it the environmental impact? Of course not! Is it the political lobbying and online FUD from vested interests in the power industry? Bingo bingo bingo! Of course it is!
Get energy nearly for free from the sky? But then who would pay for the oil cartel's overpriced energy?! Exactly. And there you have in one the reason we want this and the reason there's so much right wing opposition to it.
-
Don't count solar out, the growth trajectory is looking like it'll supply most of the world's electricity in a couple of decades. Solar will be the MVP that makes all these inefficient energy uses more viable.
-
-
planting trees also only works for carbon capture if you don't cut them down until they have lived their entire natural lives, which is not the way it's done anywhere.
-
Explain that one to me. The tree is made of carbon, storing the tree somewhere outside the carbon cycle would reduce the amount of carbon. Why would they need to be fully mature?
-
Even if you let them fully mature they will eventually breakdown because that’s what trees do and then all that stored carbon will return to the atmosphere. This carbon capture is mostly fruitless as the amount of carbon they store is negligible compared to how much we are adding to the atmosphere but if they are turning it into “rock” which is likely just graphite that would take carbon out of the carbon cycle and actually sequester it. which we desperately need to do to offset the ridiculous amount sequestered carbon we are adding to the atmosphere
-
-
I remember when people said the same of electric cars and grid scale solar and wind.
-
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You'd also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you'll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we've generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we'll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world's power on CO2 scrubbing, we'd end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won't do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora's box and it'll cost us centuries to close it
-
Entirely different use cases. Planting trees makes a deeper reservoir to store carbon, but it doesn't take that carbon out of the carbon cycle. There is still more carbon than the carbon cycle evolved to handle. We need to do both, and also stop bringing more carbon from outside the carbon cycle into it.
-
-
Why spend energy to make energy when you could make solar. Or capture at source tech for non energy producing carbon sources?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
What you're missing is they use the carbon to push out more oil from the ground. That's where the profit is.
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
It's performative, the biggest 'carbon capture' facility made so far, didn't even come close to offsetting its own carbon footprint.
-
Totally agree.
-
-
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.
-
-
-
And the look much better than trees too /s
-
Why does this look like someone threw it together in Minecraft
-
I thought it was just a picture of a new graphics card that was coming out. I almost didn't read it because I said to myself I couldn't afford a new graphics card in the next few years.
-
-
I thought someone did the math because co2 scrubbing and the facility would be size of Georgia and have to draw in hurricane winds
-
Yep, it is, in part, a scam diversion by the fossil fuel industry
-
Leave it to those ghouls to greenwash in a way that is actually a net negative, rather than just ineffectual
-
I wouldn't doubt it. Personally I'd rather they put down a field of mirrors to reflect the sunlight. I'd be curious how effective that would be
-
-
-
Don't they sell the CO2 to fracking companies?
-
Only need half a million of them to keep up with current emissions.
For comparison, there are far fewer power plants that release co2. Based on some rough estimates I foind, there are fewer than 10,000 in total plants, most have more than one generator.
And those turn a profit, no one is going to fund half a million capture plants. Building out more solar and wind is insanely more financially prudent. N.
Over building with nuclear power with its massive capital costs makes far more sense than these things.
These solutions always remind of this scene from Futurma.
-
Honestly, my staunch conservationists viewpoints aside, tech just isn't as cheap or as efficient (holistically) as biological systems, or simply not destroying these systems.
All solutions like this do are to highlight my point, and the inherent value ecosystems have. However since plants don't make the line go up no one gives a shit or wants to look at the writing on the wall
-
Developing this technology isn't a bad idea, since we'll need it to reduce damage in the future, but it isn't the solution we need to be focusing on.
-
This is how I have felt. I have never come across one of these where they can say it removes for carbon than are put in by a polluting source of electricity. The numbers you point out is also I hate when geoengineering comes up. The number of planes that you have to regularly fly to cloud seed or such and thats if it actually somehow worked and did not have some other bad effect. Its like we can visit these if we are pretty much at 100% not polluting. At that point maybe tech to reduce might make sense. might.
-
-
so burning fossil fuels to take Carbon dioxide out of atmosphere? hmmm
-
We just need to put solar pannels on them!!!
-
-
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!
-
-
I'm a little fuzzy on the part where it "turns into rock."
-
Carbon is an amazingly flexible element that gets bound up with lots of other elements. Oxygen is also incredibly reactive and makes up almost half the mass of the Earth's crust. Add in all the heat down there for activation energy, and it starts to make sense. I'm no expert though.
-
You know, in a few hundred thousand years.
-
For the machines? They're getting at how carbon can easily turn into CaCo3 it's stable provided pH is neutral
-
In short, these machines make hot CaCo3. Now if we can figure how to inject marshmallows, we will have the most-wonderful volcanoes.
-
-
-
Trees do not permenantly sequester carbon, they act as a reservoir. If we cover the entire land area of the earth in amazon rainforest, it'll sequester like 150 years worth of our carbon emissions. After that, there would be no more land left to plant trees on, and we would be back to where we are now. The only solution is to simultaneously stop bringing carbon from outside the carbon cycle into the carbon cycle, and also remove the carbon that we've already brought in.
-
You could fell them and pile them up, then replant. We need to stop bringing more in sure, but we also need to sequester what was already brought. But it took 100 years to get here, so surely it will take longer to get back.
-
-
Total waste of fuckin resources
-
Correct, but tech bros get rich so that's all that matters, right?
-
-
It would probably take decades to offset its own carbon footprint, let alone making it negative. And then it would need to actually be significant.
Just plant trees and restore carbon sinks you fucking techno fascists. -
Nice, now the techbros can finally achieve their lifelong dream of paving all the forests and selling tickets for the tree museums.
After that they can plant trees on Mars.
-
I'm not a huge fan of this approach.
-
Forests: are we a joke to you?
-
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
-
I like that the headline calls them DAC plants
Plants
Plants
Plants
Just fucking plant plants holy shit
-
-
It can't even look cool. God this timeline sucks.
-
If they can make like the size of 100-floor building, maybe there will be some differences rather than using trees that only occupied horizontal plane.
-
I remember seeing something about fitting ACs for carbon capture. What ever happened with that?
-
Nowhere because it makes no sense. ACs aren't directly burning fuel, nor would capturing carbon help in their operation. It's like selling an extra unrelated device on top of an already expensive appliance. Sounds like a marketing scheme to shift responsibility to individual consumers.
-
What we really need are ACs that utilise AI by cloud computing on the Blockchain
-
-
-
Now reunite Mythbusters and stack like 30 seconds of freeway traffic worth of cars facing it. Go.
-
My first act as president would be to create a cabinet-level Department of Myth Busting, headed by Adam savage and headquartered at the James Randi Laboratories.
-
-
They put all the trees in a tree museum.
-
What would work better... Trees? Or a machine consisting of rare earth metals which need to be mined and processed and are only partially recyclable... A tree outlives a machine. Replacing old machines with new ones is good for the economy, so yeah, let's do that! Wait, what was our goal exactly?
-
If trees did their god damned jobs, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place
-
Those lazy ass trees just standing thur.
-
Seriously, after we cleared out so much room for them, too
-
-
-
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 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.
-
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 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.
-
-
-
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..
-
-
Powered by diesel engines
-
Mechanical forest, because organic forest are too darn archaic
-
what would be really funny is if they cut down some trees to place these lol
-
Moron
-
You like the skies here? In your history, humanity discovered a way to spare the planet they were in the process of murdering. Here they just... keep the corpse on life-support
-
Sorry guys, that's just the cooler for my new Nvidia card.
-
Non plainer slicing(3d printer) would actually make something like this feasible.
-
Fun fact: it isn't nearly enough and is prohibitively expensive making it never feasible to be enough
-
It's prohibitively expensive and inefficient, but also it's a necessary early step in making a way to take carbon out if the carbon cycle that isn't prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
-
209 comments
Greenwashing is an issue, but so is avoiding complicated nuance by simply laughing at an idea without understanding it.
The country I live in is mostly powered by renewables, they focus on reducing emissions, then capture at source, but they are currently having a healthy nuanced debate on whether to implement something like this.
The original set of these were built without reguard to their specific carbon offset as they were built to be exerpimental and to experiment with the technology. As with almost anything on engineering.
Modern ones have to go through a Life Cycle Assement (LCA) where they figure out when the break-even point will be before they are built and they are typically built where there is renewable energy sources. They must be net carbon negative for government subsidy.
Arizona and Texas are mostly desert where trees may not be a viable option but they have solar and wind farms. Deforestation is awful and reforestation can be a great option but these two climates in particular have not had forrests for thousands of years.
The largest one in Texas is owned and operated by an oil company, likely powered by oil, and the CO2 is used to frack more oil. For them it needs to be net profit rather then net carbon negative. Protest and ridicule away.
Iceland has the most successful powered by geothermal and is over 90% net carbon negative already and likely to increase the longer it runs.
Other places inject the CO2 into concrete building blocks making them stronger and a viable non destructive form of storage.
Others turn them into burnable fuels effectively "recycling" the CO2.
Others use them for industrial production of urea, methanol, fire exstinguishers, or even for drink carbonation or food preservation. Scrubbing the air for CO2 instead of the traditional method of capturing off-gases.