This is infinitely dumb. We’re burning carbon to pull some out of the atmosphere… the energy used to power this plant would be better spent just powering the grid and would have an actual positive impact.<p>People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something.
I keep thinking about why we’re going through this effort rather that using trees, which can also be harvested for lumber and the sequester that carbon in construction.<p>My super rough math, from quick Google searches, this unit 1,000 tons per year. A mature tree is estimated to capture 48 pounds per year. That would be about 42,000 trees. At roughly, 100-200 trees per acre. Let’s just say 150, so that’s 280 acres of forest/trees to roughly match to performance of the system. Granted, it’s on much less land, but still.<p>That doesn’t seem like a lot of land when you consider that large protected parks like Yosemite are 759,620 acres.
Did it cost more in carbon just for the construction workers to drive their pickup trucks to build this plant than what the plant will actually remove?
This reminds me about how they tried to fix the problem in: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation_(short_story)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation_(short_story)</a>
When they say "commercial"... How does this thing make a profit? Carbon permits? Negative electricity costs? Or is it in fact some kind of non profit?
How on earth is this ever going to be economically feasible. Wouldn’t it be more economically viable to literally just bury paper in the ground, or like simply not use the carbon in the first place?
How does carbon capture help? Wouldn't it need to be stored somewhere? What happens if the storage leaks? People say that trees is a bad solution because the carbon is still there. This is even worse than trees. Trees at least looks good.
"The plant is capable of removing 1,000 tons of CO2 a year"<p>So about equivalent to 100 hectares of forest?<p>Anyway, cool, another 50 million more of these facilities and we'll be at break-even.
This comment thread is disappointingly low on valley/porn jokes.<p>With how dumb carbon capture is, the correct response is ridicule and jokes, not serious discussion...
<a href="https://archive.is/bl4XZ" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.is/bl4XZ</a><p>It's too bad these DAC systems don't take it a step further kicking the o2 back into the atmosphere while turning the carbon into something physical and industrially valuable like say spools of carbon fiber fabric or graphene/carbon nanotubes.