This is/has been a test facility, not a large scale million-s tons a year thing. Because that’s not yet possible, this is a step in a good direction. It’s a tremendous advancement that can hopefully continue to be scaled up.
It’s a technofix for a problem that should be adressed way earlier in the pipeline, as is basically all carbon capture in general. These efforts divert energy and attention from solutions that actually matter.
DAC is also a nice deus ex drop in for climate scientists to make the findings more palable for corruct heads of states, padding a non existing carbon budget or even making it possible to return to semi stable ghg concentrations “theoretically possible”.
Are you describing getting tired of trying to make the world slightly less shitty, to the point where you post denigrating comments saying anything that isn’t “We fixed everything in one go, turns out it was easier than we all thought” as pointless?
Or are you just annoyed at the fact that people care enough about the concept of survivng the next 100 years to actually do something about it?
Ehh, the devil is in the details. Most DAC techniques requires more energy to capture the CO2 then the energy used to produce the CO2. This particular site might not have that issue, the article doesn’t say, but they are pumping the CO2 underground to be stored. Which sounds a lot like phracking… (I doubt they are pumping the CO2 into the rocks as a gas)
It’s also the amount of Co2 captured by roughly 10000 trees in a year - with apparently around 1.2 million being planted in Australia each day. I’m no expert, but I do think trees are a slightly cheaper and simpler solution for creating stuff with captured carbon.
Aka wood.
Sure but every tree you plant takes up space and there is a limit how much you can do this. Unless you then farm them and store th carbon long term somehow
Australia isn’t exactly going to be running out of space for forests any time soon. They are going to run out of forests if they keep it up though, cutting roughly 55 million tonnes of co2 worth of trees annually.
Kinda doubt it makes much sense to be building 22 000 carbon capture plants a year just to break even, instead of replanting the trees.
Making a cubic metre of concrete creates almost half a ton of Co2, so it will take years if not decades for the plant to even make up being built. A tree starts capturing immediately and keeps doing so for decades all by itself.
In theory. Nobody actually manufactures it yet in any quantity, and it will take a long time to be able to replace even a measurable fraction of the 30 billion tons the world uses annually.
An alternative way to look at it is that we should focus on the solutions that actually make sense. Carbon capture is like plastic recycling, the solution to it isn’t to try to recycle harder, it’s to reduce the use of plastics so we don’t have anything to recycle.
Also, do you know what the majority of the captured Co2 is currently used? To extract oil.
The 2,500 tons of Co2 are roughly equivalent to the tailpipe emissions of 550 avg. australian cars.
So, a wet fart.
This is/has been a test facility, not a large scale million-s tons a year thing. Because that’s not yet possible, this is a step in a good direction. It’s a tremendous advancement that can hopefully continue to be scaled up.
It’s a technofix for a problem that should be adressed way earlier in the pipeline, as is basically all carbon capture in general. These efforts divert energy and attention from solutions that actually matter.
DAC is also a nice deus ex drop in for climate scientists to make the findings more palable for corruct heads of states, padding a non existing carbon budget or even making it possible to return to semi stable ghg concentrations “theoretically possible”.
It’s better than shitting in your hands and clapping, as the saying goes
Given activism fatigue and attention etc are limited, I would say it’s way worse.
The fuck is activism fatigue?
Are you describing getting tired of trying to make the world slightly less shitty, to the point where you post denigrating comments saying anything that isn’t “We fixed everything in one go, turns out it was easier than we all thought” as pointless?
Or are you just annoyed at the fact that people care enough about the concept of survivng the next 100 years to actually do something about it?
Activism fatigue is getting old. My friends in their 60s to 80s don’t show to as many protests anymore. My dead friends show to even fewer.
Ehh, the devil is in the details. Most DAC techniques requires more energy to capture the CO2 then the energy used to produce the CO2. This particular site might not have that issue, the article doesn’t say, but they are pumping the CO2 underground to be stored. Which sounds a lot like phracking… (I doubt they are pumping the CO2 into the rocks as a gas)
It’s also the amount of Co2 captured by roughly 10000 trees in a year - with apparently around 1.2 million being planted in Australia each day. I’m no expert, but I do think trees are a slightly cheaper and simpler solution for creating stuff with captured carbon.
Aka wood.
Sure but every tree you plant takes up space and there is a limit how much you can do this. Unless you then farm them and store th carbon long term somehow
Australia isn’t exactly going to be running out of space for forests any time soon. They are going to run out of forests if they keep it up though, cutting roughly 55 million tonnes of co2 worth of trees annually.
Kinda doubt it makes much sense to be building 22 000 carbon capture plants a year just to break even, instead of replanting the trees.
Build one of these in a year, or plant 10 thousand trees and wait decades for them to grow…
Making a cubic metre of concrete creates almost half a ton of Co2, so it will take years if not decades for the plant to even make up being built. A tree starts capturing immediately and keeps doing so for decades all by itself.
Carbon neutral concrete exists.
In theory. Nobody actually manufactures it yet in any quantity, and it will take a long time to be able to replace even a measurable fraction of the 30 billion tons the world uses annually.
So let’s just give up because it’s a tough engineering problem, right?
People need to stop letting perfect be the enemy of good.
An alternative way to look at it is that we should focus on the solutions that actually make sense. Carbon capture is like plastic recycling, the solution to it isn’t to try to recycle harder, it’s to reduce the use of plastics so we don’t have anything to recycle.
Also, do you know what the majority of the captured Co2 is currently used? To extract oil.