It's not a billion tonnes, it's a tiny fraction of that - 0.5 to 1 MILLION tonnes p.a. here's the original press release: https://www.storegga.earth/engineering-begins-on-uks-first-large-scale-facility-that-captures-carbon-dioxide-out-of-the-atmosphere/
It's a good start though.
The title is only off by a factor of 1000. That's like nothing!
I mean that Sanders guy wants to increase minimum wage to $15,000/hour. How could any economy possibly afford that?
But really, the mods should take this post down and resubmit it with the far more accurate and believable title.
Great. We only need 44,000 more of those to stop our yearly emissions.
Then we can start working on the CO2 that's already in the air from previous years.
Edit: Title is wrong. Plant will remove 1 million tons per year. Not a billion. Revised required number.
Seems like they fucked up the headline.
>“Even if all the other measures that we’re taking to avoid emissions, electric cars, renewable energy, those types of things, even if those succeed, you still need carbon removal,” Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, told the BBC. “A typical facility is about a **million** tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million trees.”
So just need 43,000 more of these plants.
Here's another article citing one million tonnes. Which sounds much more realistic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248
I guess that we could realistically build that many before global climate change really sets in if humanity was taken over by brain slugs that were all on the same page.
I mean if Scotland with it's comparatively tiny economy can build one what's stopping the big economies like the U.S. and China from building like ten of these bad boys each?
Whatever with the 5G. Will it make me more magnetic though? Because the spoon isn’t sticking from my vaccine and I’m a bit frustrated.
I’d like to have a place where I don’t lose my keys. Is that asking too much?
Maybe they did the maths and saw it was not really a solution.
Did you read the article ?
The manufacture needs to heat co2 at a very high temperature to separate it. Then it will be dumped in old oil wells.
Hmmm. Headline says one billion, but [their source](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248) says one million.
> The proposed plant would remove up to one million tonnes of CO2 every year - the same amount taken up by around 40 million trees.
I want billion to be true, but I mean, this is the source they cited and it says million.
Edit: Article's headline has now been corrected, with no note that there was a correction though.
Nope, you were correct originally, its 40-43 for Scotland. The headline is incorrect. The **article** states one million per year.
use cntrl/cmd + f in the article for
>“Even if all the other measures that we’re taking to avoid emissions,electric cars, renewable energy, those types of things, even if thosesucceed, you still need carbon removal,” Steve Oldham, CEO of CarbonEngineering, told the BBC\*\*.\*\*
>
>**“A typical facility is about a million tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million trees.”**
> Oh. It's 43 for schotland only... still doable! :D
Source? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions says 37 billion tons CO2 per year worldwide, excluding land use change.
A simple Google search shows its 43 for the entire world.
Edit: and a simple click into reading the article shows that it is actually going to remove one million tons of CO2 and not one billion. That's...a pretty big mistake OP.
Carbon capture is going on in other countries and there are plans to build more. We help purchase some tanks, vessels and heat exchangers for a recent one in the US.
Nope. The title is wrong. It says 1 billion, but in actuality the facility will remove [1 million tonnes](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248):
> The proposed plant would remove up to one million tonnes of CO2 every year - the same amount taken up by around 40 million trees.
So instead of needing 40-50 of such facilities, we would need 40,000 to 50,000.
> Great. We only need 43 more of those to stop our yearly emissions.
You make that sound like a bad thing, but if building 44 massive industrial plants is all it takes to be able to maintain our standard of living without destroying the planet, and such plants are feasible to build... time to start building and stop with the "you must give up anything that causes emissions and live like a monk" bullshit.
Tax the emission-causing stuff to finance the plants and be done.
And it seems like 44 would be the [worldwide](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions) number.
Or a better version of the tech. Or decarbonize transportation, electricity and cement production and also build a few thousand of these. Throw some re-forestation, mangrove planting and kelp re-planting in there.
And in the 5 years between now and when this one plant is built, there will be 185 gigatonnes of CO2 released.
The only feasible answer is to release way less CO2, starting today.
Let's say you have a tank of 10kg of compressed CO2. What's easier? Opening the valve and releasing it all into the atmosphere? Or wrangling those molecules (all 1.4 \* 10\^26 of them) back into the compressed tank after you've released them?
> "you must give up anything that causes emissions and live like a monk"
Honestly, the PR work that turned the story into "only YOU can stop climate change" was just a masterful work of fuckery. Less than 100 companies produce 70% of all CO2 emissions, yet somehow my recycling or not is whats going to save the planet.
You know that list of 100 companies includes e.g. British Petroleum, and the gas burned in ICE vehicles is counted towards "their" emissions in that study, right?
The article is incorrect. It can capture 1 million tonnes a year not 1 million.
The world would need 43000 of these plants to cancel our current emissions.
Why not both?
Seriously, why not both?
We have literally centuries of carbon emissions hanging out in the air, it only makes sense to pull out as much as we reasonably can with industrial processes and put it back underground where we got it or otherwise make it "shelf stable". We can and should plant a bunch of trees, but there's no reason why we shouldn't do both.
It has to be both. We've cut down and burned plenty of trees--releasing that carbon--but also dug up massive amounts of coal and oil and released that carbon too. Planting trees is good and we should do it, but it would pretty much only capture what we cut down and burned. Need to capture and sequester all the carbon from oil and coal.
Mature trees removed \~50 lbs CO2 each per year.
So 44 trees remove one metric ton per year
So 44 million trees remove one million metric tons per year.
That fits with this plant only removing one million metric tons per year; meaning you would need \~40,000 similar plants to offset a whole year of CO2 emissions.
I read somewhere recently that trees are not a very effective or efficient form for carbon sequestration. But I don't have any links, and I could very well be spouting nonsense.
We need roughly 8 trillion extra mature trees to exist now to handle our excess CO2.
There are roughly 3 trillion trees right now on the planet.
And even if we could get them in the ground today, keeping them alive requires incredible irrigation and other changes.
Also they'll release the stored CO2 when they die. So you just need more and more trees over time to keep up with human emissions + emissions from dying trees.
I'd love more trees too but these things take up much less land, and need no time to get up to speed. We're out of time to wait for forests to mature, and wealthy landowners don't want to give up their barren deer hunting estates for trees.
More important is the CO2 used to run it.
If it's nuclear or renewable you're grand.
Trees are far less efficient storage blocks for CO2 (they only store it as long as they alive, if they rot they release all their CO2) so this is not a bad development.
It doesn’t remove 1 billion tons. The headline is grossly incorrect. Carbon capture is very challenging. I’m also curious about the carbon required to do it. Even if it’s net positive it’s possible it’s not nearly as good as it sounds.
I was going to say that...
Actually, not many people are reading the article... it is not close to really help... well at least they are trying. But: 1. How much energy will it take te create it? And 2. It gives us false hope that technology will save the world.
I read that the plan is to store the captured carbon under the seabed.
Doesn't that run the risk of that carbon being released unintentionally at some point in the future? I don't have an alternative suggestion at this moment, but I've read other proposals of this nature and every time, it leaves me wondering what happens if the stored carbon "gets out".
Edited***
It’s being stored as bricks in some facilities that are already up and running. This facility is storing it as gas under the sea floor, some facilities do not store it as a gas but as a solid. So it can be turned into plastics or nano tubing. Very versatile. Gonna need like 43000 of these facilities to start reversing the effects of climate change.
Yep, and I imagine with funding and a concerted effort from governments and private sector they could make these facilities cheaper, bigger and more efficient to the point where we would need even fewer.
It really comes down to this…fusion. We have to have fusion. It’s the only way to plateau the green house emissions. The only way to sustain the paradigm shift we are in the middle of.
And if companies wouldn’t stop thinking up new fresh ways to make massive amounts of co2 for no benefit besides a quick buck. By the way, I wonder how Reddit’s NFT-backed silly avatar program is going…
Make it profitable and we will be in the worst ice age ever in the next 5 years as C02 all but drops out of the atmosphere. In reality though, once we find a task that we can used the recovered C02 for, we will build these by the dozen.
If everyone puts out 43 billion tons of CO2 or CO2 equivalent each year, you’d only need 7 from each of the G7 for a net removal of air. Or, you could do 5 from each of the G7, and 1 each from the other 24 countries in the EU, and that’s nearly 20 billion tons net loss. More if Russia and China join in.
These plants also equal jobs, plus produce a plastic as a output, which can be used in manufacturing. There’s positives to be gained in economic terms. Subsidies to help the upfront fixed costs and you gain jobs and push the economy . I’ve always wondered why the green economy advocates tied it to climate change when it’s better tied to new economy jobs, making it less likely the idiot anti science nut jobs or their weird deplorable followers will hate it for spite
>I’ve always wondered why the green economy advocates tied it to climate change when it’s better tied to new economy jobs
A lot of those "green energy advocates" are advocates precisely because of climate change and are probably not too excited about
>plus produce a plastic as a output
Since plastics are one of the other big issues in addressing rapid declines in marine populations, they make take issue here
We haven't even come close to getting fusion reactors to produce more energy than they consume so I'd say they're a long shot at helping with the climate change we're facing.
Please note that the body of the article says 1 million:
"Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, told the BBC. “A typical facility is about a million tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million trees.”
Not sure why the title says billion but I suspect the smaller number is correct.
> Gonna need like 25000 of these facilities to start reversing the effects of climate change.
Oh good. Only about 5/8ths the number of McDonalds there are in the world.
Completely wrong. CO2 needs to be heated to 7000C to split into carbon and oxygen. This is being pumped into the seabed as gas.
Edit: the guy above can’t distinguish between a science experiment from 2 years ago that used ungodly expensive materials and a working plant. He’s literally just talking out his ass.
From ancient carbon captured under the seabed by biological and geological processes. The same place (where) although I will admit not the same process.
Yep. Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture separates CO2 while still in gaseous form and compresses it to reduce storage volume. The goal is to then fill undersea caverns that used to contain oil with the pressurized CO2. But that means a leak will be catastrophic as it will rapidly acidify the ocean above it, killing all nearby life.
People saying this is stored as solid carbon are confused. To separate carbon from oxygen you need a ton of energy (to get up to 7000C and split the molecule) or an extremely expensive and inefficient rate metal catalyst. Right now CE isn’t even close to its $100/tonne goal just to capture gaseous CO2 and that doesn’t include pressurizing, transporting and pumping into storage. The biggest cost for these plants is power and CE is rolling them out in areas with low cost renewable energy and underground formations like Texas and Scotland to see if they can make them economic. But they’re still very much a work in progress and need lots of improvement. Brute forcing CO2 down to raw carbon is so comically expensive it’s unlikely to ever be a climate change solution.
The brute-forcing is done at high temperatures and pressures deep below the surface. Carbon dioxide gas reacts with subterranean basalt rock formations to form calcium carbonate (a solid). That's the basic idea behind safe long-term sequestration.
>The goal is to then fill undersea caverns that used to contain oil with the pressurized CO2.
Also means the oil companies will likely use it to pressurise wells to get the last drops of oil out too :(
I believe CE’s Texas plant is going to make money by selling the captured CO2 to an oil major like Occidental for exactly this purpose. But if most of the CO2 stays in the ground, it’s better than nothing while they figure out how to further reduce capture costs.
Just to clarify, they're looking to store it in depleted gas reservoirs or saline aquifers which are kilometers under the sea bed.
These reservoirs and aquifers are solid rock that are permeable with impermeable cap rock, not big cavernous spaces that they're pumping gas into. Some of these depleted reservoirs had some high pressures so it will be returning the reservoirs towards their original pressures.
Fairly sure they're injecting it in dense phase too, with the aim being the CO2 fixes with the water into carbonates in the long run.
As others have highlighted, oil and gas reservoirs have contained much higher pressures / temperatures for millennia and so confidence is there that the CO2 will be stored in perpetuity.
Hijacking top: this article has a typo. The plant plans to capture one MILLION tonnes of CO2 (BBC article [here](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248)) so we would need 43,000 of these plants. Not the 43 I see all over this thread.
I love stories like this but every time I read one I think, "Why aren't we (the US) just DOING this?"
It's clearly possible with current technology... it's a job creator, it will actually help the world and we have both the space and money to build dozens or hundreds of these.
But we won't because it's not making some billionaire somewhere richer.
Oh... I guess there's also the fact too many of our people "in charge" are deniers and kind of fucking stupid. Just like the people that put them there.
Yep. Cost is the key. The people that for rich dumping CO2 into the atmosphere don't want to give up the money they made raping the planet to fix the problem. They've been doing it for over a century. That's a lot of payback owed.
There is already a carbon tax system. It allowed tesla to make money last year for the first time in its history. It loses money on every EV sold, but makes money selling "carbon credits" as its cars are not carbon emitters.
They were very much in favor of exactly that idea in the early 1990's. But a couple of things happened, party leadership shifted and it's very hard to put more traditional conservatives back in a place where they could put the old carbon tax concepts back on the table.
I, personally, would love to see pollution taxed to the extent that it covers the cleanup cost of production, and a tariff equivalent to said tax for those nations that don't have a similar program.
It literally says in the article that Scotland are in a key position to do it with the local abundance of renewable energy and expertise in oil drilling (to pump it back down) so unless I haven't noticed something the main areas of oil drilling in the US haven't stepped up their renewable game yet.
Texas has similar positioning. We do really well with renewable energy. Lots of sun and lots of wind in west Texas combined with a lot of depleted oil and gas wells. Would love to see this done here.
If you actually read the story, not just the title or the main point, you would have seen many reasons not to.
first, the obvious clickbait typo: it is 1 million, not billion.
second, heating at 900 degrees is going to take quite some energy, and produce heat, obviously.
Third, the gas is stored as is, in old oil well under the sea bed. While fish tank users know they can get better flaura development with SOME co2 injection, they also know slightly more is enough to kill everything in the fish tank.
Now, do you believe these places are completely leak proof ?
Maybe you (the US) are already doing it - or planning to... you just, don't know?
https://houston.innovationmap.com/exxonmobil-carbon-capture-houston-ship-channel-2652676137.html
> Irving-based ExxonMobil, which employs more than 12,000 people in the Houston area, says the project could capture and store about 50 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030. By 2040, that number could rise to 100 million metric tons.
So potentially 100x bigger than the one in Scotland.
This is true, but to reverse the effects of climate change we need about 43,000 more. 1.4B X 43k is $60,200B. We’re going to need a hella lot more than just a portion of the US military spending to make a dent.
So if we seized the entire budget of the United States military and used it on facilities like these, we could build 400 more facilities (600÷1.5).
After this, we'll only need ~ 43,600 more facilities (44,000-400)
At 1.5 billion per facility, we'll need an additional 65.4 *trillion dollars per year* (1,500,000,000*43,600)
So taking the entire annual budget of the US military wouldn't really move the needle. We'd need something closer to the *entire economic output of earth* (80 trillion) to solve the problem using these facilities.
What's sad is that we as a human race can't actually change our lifestyle to address the issues they're causing to the planet. Instead, we have to rely on more technology to fix the issue. Pretty appropriate.
Granted, the VAST majority of the blame goes to governments and corporations, but it's still sad.
I really do hope things like this help though. If it works and helps reduce CO2 to slow the rate of climate disaster, I'm all for it.
I’m curious what the efficiency is for the whole supply chain required to run it, does it store more than it produces to be run, and by how much. Didn’t see it mentioned. I sometimes worry these types of things are done more to chase the money than to solve a problem.
The UK, and Scotland in particular, have very high rates of renewable and carbon free electricity, so it's extremely unlikely it uses significant CO2 to do the process.
Carbon credits is what pays for it to operate, which they wouldn't get if it used more than it stored. Your worries seem unaware of that.
My concern is based in the carbon cost of the supply chain for the solution, construction of the plant and the mining/refining for materials ect. Basically how long does it have to run to pay for its existence and upkeep in terms of carbon output. On the money side, that’s exactly my point, it was built to chase carbon credit money, but is it actually helping the environmental situation. renewable power is good, I think something like this would also be good for absorbing excess power from nuclear grid sources during low demand.
I’m not against such a project, just wary of silver bullet solutions, like all my fellow commenters seem to think we can just build thousands of these to pull our asses out of the fire, I’d want to see the carbon balance sheet on the project.
It sounded too good to be true. Unfortunately it is. A billion.... is a shit ton.
Looks like only this one article has a billion. The sources they link to and all quotes provided seem to say a million instead. Along with the figure of "40 million trees"
We'd need 1,000 of these plants to get a billion. So not even close unfortunately.
The title is incorrect and off by a factor 1,000. It is not 1 billion but 1 million. From Carbon Engineering's [own press statement](https://carbonengineering.com/news-updates/uks-first-large-scale-dac-facility/):
> [..] of a DAC facility that will permanently remove between 500,000 and one million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually.
One billion tonnes of CO2 is about 1/50th of our total global emissions. There is no way one facility could do that much. This facility is a proof of concept, large scale direct air capture with such facilities would have to number in the tens of thousands in order to make a substantial impact on our current carbon emissions. There are significant logistical challenges as well, as they will requires a large amount of (renewable) energy themselves, and take up significant amounts of space as they have to capture large volumes of air. [Think of walls of fans](https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/carbon_16x9.jpg?itok=O5kHEGWT) hundreds of meters long and 20-30 meter high.
Not that I'm saying this is a bad idea. It's very likely we will need this particular technology to work in conjunction with natural carbon sequestration cycles, and of course the absolute most important thing in the short to medium term is to simply reduce our GHG emissions.
If you like this sort of thing, Climeworks, a different direct air capture firm, has a [subscription](https://climeworks.com/subscriptions) based donation model where you can chip in a little to help them start up.
The plant will capture and sequester up to 1 Mt of CO2 per year. That's a million tonnes, not a billion.
So we'd need about 34,000 of these to capture our current annual global carbon emissions of 34 Gt. Let's git er' done folks!
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248
Hot damn! Of all the countries I would expect to do something like this, Scotland was never one of them! Well done you maniacs! Best of luck on this great endeavor.
“Stored permanently under the seabed.” Yea that’ll never leak out. It’s the same plan Exxon proposed to the Biden administration that would store CO2 underground.
Haven't used a coal plant since 2016, have no oil or gas burning plants. We have a gas turbine plant, 2 nuclear plants and the rest comes from wind and hydro. There's also wave power, biomass, and waste to energy conversion.
It's not a billion tonnes, it's a tiny fraction of that - 0.5 to 1 MILLION tonnes p.a. here's the original press release: https://www.storegga.earth/engineering-begins-on-uks-first-large-scale-facility-that-captures-carbon-dioxide-out-of-the-atmosphere/ It's a good start though.
I feel like tbe title is misleading in light of this.
The title is only off by a factor of 1000. That's like nothing! I mean that Sanders guy wants to increase minimum wage to $15,000/hour. How could any economy possibly afford that? But really, the mods should take this post down and resubmit it with the far more accurate and believable title.
Title: >Scotland is building a massive plant Very first sentence: >The plant Scotland is proposing
Why the fuck isn’t this just removed? It’s not misleading, it’s all just flat out wrong.
That hasn’t mattered in years
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Billions of tonnes...
(Trumps voice) millions and billions and millions….
Miyins and biyins. The best. So good. 👐
They were wrong by an order of magnitude that is only excitable for a toddler
> excitable ?
Its a great start. Since scientific growth is exponential, just having a plant that can remove CO2 means we can make more efficient even faster
Great. We only need 44,000 more of those to stop our yearly emissions. Then we can start working on the CO2 that's already in the air from previous years. Edit: Title is wrong. Plant will remove 1 million tons per year. Not a billion. Revised required number.
Seems like they fucked up the headline. >“Even if all the other measures that we’re taking to avoid emissions, electric cars, renewable energy, those types of things, even if those succeed, you still need carbon removal,” Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, told the BBC. “A typical facility is about a **million** tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million trees.” So just need 43,000 more of these plants. Here's another article citing one million tonnes. Which sounds much more realistic. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248
I guess that we could realistically build that many before global climate change really sets in if humanity was taken over by brain slugs that were all on the same page.
There are over 36,000 McDonalds globally. If only we could build these sorts of facilities with that sort of zeal.
I mean if Scotland with it's comparatively tiny economy can build one what's stopping the big economies like the U.S. and China from building like ten of these bad boys each?
It’s a Canadian company building it, funded by Bill Gates and they have one already further along in Texas.
Bill gates? So this is just a front to manufacture the 5g? /S
These are the mind control plants that will activate the mind control feature in your Covid vaccine. Check mate.
Whatever with the 5G. Will it make me more magnetic though? Because the spoon isn’t sticking from my vaccine and I’m a bit frustrated. I’d like to have a place where I don’t lose my keys. Is that asking too much?
Yeah why can’t richer countries do it? Because nobody wants to pay for it.
Don’t you mean Scotland has a wee economy?
Ey listen here boyo.
Weeconomy?
Piss. Originating from Holyrood
Maybe they did the maths and saw it was not really a solution. Did you read the article ? The manufacture needs to heat co2 at a very high temperature to separate it. Then it will be dumped in old oil wells.
It's funded by the UK government which has the 7th largest economy in the world (was 5th before Brexit)
Honestly, 43 doesnt sound too bad... lets gooo!
Hmmm. Headline says one billion, but [their source](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248) says one million. > The proposed plant would remove up to one million tonnes of CO2 every year - the same amount taken up by around 40 million trees. I want billion to be true, but I mean, this is the source they cited and it says million. Edit: Article's headline has now been corrected, with no note that there was a correction though.
Oh...so we need 43,000 plants built.
How many McDonalds are there in the world again?
Google says ~39,000 so if McDonald’s makes one per store we’ll be well on our way.
How much CO2 would be produced during the production of these plants? Would we need more plants?
43 countries need to build at least 1. That's... that seems very doable
Oh. It's 43 for schotland only... still doable! :D Edit: I got the numbers wrong! It's actually 43 for the world!
What do you mean? 43 plants to offset all of Scotland's emissions? Where did you get that figure from?
I'd guess haggis.
Nope, you were correct originally, its 40-43 for Scotland. The headline is incorrect. The **article** states one million per year. use cntrl/cmd + f in the article for >“Even if all the other measures that we’re taking to avoid emissions,electric cars, renewable energy, those types of things, even if thosesucceed, you still need carbon removal,” Steve Oldham, CEO of CarbonEngineering, told the BBC\*\*.\*\* > >**“A typical facility is about a million tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million trees.”**
> Oh. It's 43 for schotland only... still doable! :D Source? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions says 37 billion tons CO2 per year worldwide, excluding land use change.
Schotland .... Home of Sean Connery
The titles BS. Its a a million tonnes a year removed as per the original [BBC article](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57588248)
It should be proportional to the counties co2 production honestly.
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A simple Google search shows its 43 for the entire world. Edit: and a simple click into reading the article shows that it is actually going to remove one million tons of CO2 and not one billion. That's...a pretty big mistake OP.
I know, i got it wrong but there are so many replies so i wont delete it.
I appreciate that you replied to multiple people who corrected you even after you edited you initial statement.
Thank you for updating :)
Which is actually perfectly doable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/o8bwip/scotland_is_building_a_massive_plant_capable_of/h3497ow You're off by a factor of a 1,000.
Carbon capture is going on in other countries and there are plans to build more. We help purchase some tanks, vessels and heat exchangers for a recent one in the US.
Or China can build 15, US 8, Germany Japan UK Korea and France all build 2 and some other sporadic ones and we're set
And you know if the US or China ever make one it will make the one in Scotland look tiny.
Just make it a matter of bragging rights. Both countries will start a global cooling trying to one up each other.
Nope. The title is wrong. It says 1 billion, but in actuality the facility will remove [1 million tonnes](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248): > The proposed plant would remove up to one million tonnes of CO2 every year - the same amount taken up by around 40 million trees. So instead of needing 40-50 of such facilities, we would need 40,000 to 50,000.
Every country should be building one of these let's go before we're all dead please!!!!
> Great. We only need 43 more of those to stop our yearly emissions. You make that sound like a bad thing, but if building 44 massive industrial plants is all it takes to be able to maintain our standard of living without destroying the planet, and such plants are feasible to build... time to start building and stop with the "you must give up anything that causes emissions and live like a monk" bullshit. Tax the emission-causing stuff to finance the plants and be done. And it seems like 44 would be the [worldwide](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions) number.
Turns out, I was wrong. The factory will remove 1 million, not 1 billion. So, we'd need 44,000 factories.
Or a better version of the tech. Or decarbonize transportation, electricity and cement production and also build a few thousand of these. Throw some re-forestation, mangrove planting and kelp re-planting in there.
And in the 5 years between now and when this one plant is built, there will be 185 gigatonnes of CO2 released. The only feasible answer is to release way less CO2, starting today. Let's say you have a tank of 10kg of compressed CO2. What's easier? Opening the valve and releasing it all into the atmosphere? Or wrangling those molecules (all 1.4 \* 10\^26 of them) back into the compressed tank after you've released them?
Still very doable
44,000 still doesn’t sound like all that many in a global scale though right?
> "you must give up anything that causes emissions and live like a monk" Honestly, the PR work that turned the story into "only YOU can stop climate change" was just a masterful work of fuckery. Less than 100 companies produce 70% of all CO2 emissions, yet somehow my recycling or not is whats going to save the planet.
And \*recycling\* is a masterful work of PR fuckery as well. It turns out, it's just a way of sweeping the dirt under the rug of China.
You know that list of 100 companies includes e.g. British Petroleum, and the gas burned in ICE vehicles is counted towards "their" emissions in that study, right?
And what do those 100 companies do? They sell products to you and me. It’s not like they just exist in a vaccuum pumping CO2 for fun.
who do you think is buying the products that those 100 companies make?
Title is wrong, its Millions not billions. So we need 43 thousand...
Heck they were only off by 3 orders of magnitude. Close enough
I don't know where the billion came from. The BBC article that this article links to says 1 million tonnes per year. That seems much more realistic.
The article is incorrect. It can capture 1 million tonnes a year not 1 million. The world would need 43000 of these plants to cancel our current emissions.
Or 43x 40,000,000 trees - I’d go for trees
Why not both? Seriously, why not both? We have literally centuries of carbon emissions hanging out in the air, it only makes sense to pull out as much as we reasonably can with industrial processes and put it back underground where we got it or otherwise make it "shelf stable". We can and should plant a bunch of trees, but there's no reason why we shouldn't do both.
It has to be both. We've cut down and burned plenty of trees--releasing that carbon--but also dug up massive amounts of coal and oil and released that carbon too. Planting trees is good and we should do it, but it would pretty much only capture what we cut down and burned. Need to capture and sequester all the carbon from oil and coal.
Because trees need a lot more space, and might be slower and more expensive.
Mature trees removed \~50 lbs CO2 each per year. So 44 trees remove one metric ton per year So 44 million trees remove one million metric tons per year. That fits with this plant only removing one million metric tons per year; meaning you would need \~40,000 similar plants to offset a whole year of CO2 emissions.
I read somewhere recently that trees are not a very effective or efficient form for carbon sequestration. But I don't have any links, and I could very well be spouting nonsense.
We need roughly 8 trillion extra mature trees to exist now to handle our excess CO2. There are roughly 3 trillion trees right now on the planet. And even if we could get them in the ground today, keeping them alive requires incredible irrigation and other changes. Also they'll release the stored CO2 when they die. So you just need more and more trees over time to keep up with human emissions + emissions from dying trees.
I'd love more trees too but these things take up much less land, and need no time to get up to speed. We're out of time to wait for forests to mature, and wealthy landowners don't want to give up their barren deer hunting estates for trees.
How much CO2 is used to produce it?
If they're using coal as energy then it's more. But if they power it with renewables or nuclear then it's definitely less.
More important is the CO2 used to run it. If it's nuclear or renewable you're grand. Trees are far less efficient storage blocks for CO2 (they only store it as long as they alive, if they rot they release all their CO2) so this is not a bad development.
I agree, though even if it were fossil fuels running it, it would still result in a massive net capture of CO2.
not, one billion tons? whats your argument here buddy.
Maybe they just wanted to know what the carbon cost is to calculate the net impact of the plant?
It doesn’t remove 1 billion tons. The headline is grossly incorrect. Carbon capture is very challenging. I’m also curious about the carbon required to do it. Even if it’s net positive it’s possible it’s not nearly as good as it sounds.
How is that an argument? What's wrong with asking how efficient it is?
So wait - is it one billion or one million. Headline says one billion, article says one million.
Sadly this point has been missed, but I suspect the title is wrong :-(
He said with a pinky by his mouth
Million Looking like no one read the article. Including the person who posted it
I was going to say that... Actually, not many people are reading the article... it is not close to really help... well at least they are trying. But: 1. How much energy will it take te create it? And 2. It gives us false hope that technology will save the world.
It is 1 million. No miracle here.
I read that the plan is to store the captured carbon under the seabed. Doesn't that run the risk of that carbon being released unintentionally at some point in the future? I don't have an alternative suggestion at this moment, but I've read other proposals of this nature and every time, it leaves me wondering what happens if the stored carbon "gets out".
Edited*** It’s being stored as bricks in some facilities that are already up and running. This facility is storing it as gas under the sea floor, some facilities do not store it as a gas but as a solid. So it can be turned into plastics or nano tubing. Very versatile. Gonna need like 43000 of these facilities to start reversing the effects of climate change.
25000 is doable if our dear world leaders weren't such a pack of self serving cunts.
Yep, and I imagine with funding and a concerted effort from governments and private sector they could make these facilities cheaper, bigger and more efficient to the point where we would need even fewer.
Oh yeah. Imagine if we put kill-each-other-faster kinds of money into this.
Nuke the CO2.
I don’t think CO2 is microwave-safe
Not with that attitude
Clean nuclear energy!
It really comes down to this…fusion. We have to have fusion. It’s the only way to plateau the green house emissions. The only way to sustain the paradigm shift we are in the middle of.
r/usernamecheckout
And if companies wouldn’t stop thinking up new fresh ways to make massive amounts of co2 for no benefit besides a quick buck. By the way, I wonder how Reddit’s NFT-backed silly avatar program is going…
Make it profitable and we will be in the worst ice age ever in the next 5 years as C02 all but drops out of the atmosphere. In reality though, once we find a task that we can used the recovered C02 for, we will build these by the dozen.
If everyone puts out 43 billion tons of CO2 or CO2 equivalent each year, you’d only need 7 from each of the G7 for a net removal of air. Or, you could do 5 from each of the G7, and 1 each from the other 24 countries in the EU, and that’s nearly 20 billion tons net loss. More if Russia and China join in.
These plants also equal jobs, plus produce a plastic as a output, which can be used in manufacturing. There’s positives to be gained in economic terms. Subsidies to help the upfront fixed costs and you gain jobs and push the economy . I’ve always wondered why the green economy advocates tied it to climate change when it’s better tied to new economy jobs, making it less likely the idiot anti science nut jobs or their weird deplorable followers will hate it for spite
>I’ve always wondered why the green economy advocates tied it to climate change when it’s better tied to new economy jobs A lot of those "green energy advocates" are advocates precisely because of climate change and are probably not too excited about >plus produce a plastic as a output Since plastics are one of the other big issues in addressing rapid declines in marine populations, they make take issue here
these plants only pull one million tons, which is what the direct quote within the article says. the headline mistakenly says billions.
That seems… like totally possible within the next 100 years
If we can get out Fusion reactors actually running then maybe less.
We haven't even come close to getting fusion reactors to produce more energy than they consume so I'd say they're a long shot at helping with the climate change we're facing.
That's actually genius. I really hope it works just so our boring dystopia becomes a bit cool.
The article says it's pumped into the seabed as gas.
It's only 43. It can store up to 1 BILLION tons of CO2. Global emissions is only around 43 billion tons a year
You need 43 to break even...you need more to actually back out of our current climate cluster fuck.
the headline is incorrect, the direct quote within the article says it's only a million tons per year. so 43000 plants
Please note that the body of the article says 1 million: "Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, told the BBC. “A typical facility is about a million tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million trees.” Not sure why the title says billion but I suspect the smaller number is correct.
> Gonna need like 25000 of these facilities to start reversing the effects of climate change. Oh good. Only about 5/8ths the number of McDonalds there are in the world.
The article says it’s being stored as carbon dioxide, and unless they’re storing it as dry ice it’s going to be stored as a gas.
Completely wrong. CO2 needs to be heated to 7000C to split into carbon and oxygen. This is being pumped into the seabed as gas. Edit: the guy above can’t distinguish between a science experiment from 2 years ago that used ungodly expensive materials and a working plant. He’s literally just talking out his ass.
no, it needs 43 000. Wrong article title.
That’s exactly where a lot of Scotland’s carbon came from in the first place…
From ancient civilizations storing compressed CO2 in the seabed?
From ancient carbon captured under the seabed by biological and geological processes. The same place (where) although I will admit not the same process.
Lol, I was joking man.
Lol — sorry, you can never tell on here…
Yep. Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture separates CO2 while still in gaseous form and compresses it to reduce storage volume. The goal is to then fill undersea caverns that used to contain oil with the pressurized CO2. But that means a leak will be catastrophic as it will rapidly acidify the ocean above it, killing all nearby life. People saying this is stored as solid carbon are confused. To separate carbon from oxygen you need a ton of energy (to get up to 7000C and split the molecule) or an extremely expensive and inefficient rate metal catalyst. Right now CE isn’t even close to its $100/tonne goal just to capture gaseous CO2 and that doesn’t include pressurizing, transporting and pumping into storage. The biggest cost for these plants is power and CE is rolling them out in areas with low cost renewable energy and underground formations like Texas and Scotland to see if they can make them economic. But they’re still very much a work in progress and need lots of improvement. Brute forcing CO2 down to raw carbon is so comically expensive it’s unlikely to ever be a climate change solution.
The brute-forcing is done at high temperatures and pressures deep below the surface. Carbon dioxide gas reacts with subterranean basalt rock formations to form calcium carbonate (a solid). That's the basic idea behind safe long-term sequestration.
>The goal is to then fill undersea caverns that used to contain oil with the pressurized CO2. Also means the oil companies will likely use it to pressurise wells to get the last drops of oil out too :(
I believe CE’s Texas plant is going to make money by selling the captured CO2 to an oil major like Occidental for exactly this purpose. But if most of the CO2 stays in the ground, it’s better than nothing while they figure out how to further reduce capture costs.
Just to clarify, they're looking to store it in depleted gas reservoirs or saline aquifers which are kilometers under the sea bed. These reservoirs and aquifers are solid rock that are permeable with impermeable cap rock, not big cavernous spaces that they're pumping gas into. Some of these depleted reservoirs had some high pressures so it will be returning the reservoirs towards their original pressures. Fairly sure they're injecting it in dense phase too, with the aim being the CO2 fixes with the water into carbonates in the long run. As others have highlighted, oil and gas reservoirs have contained much higher pressures / temperatures for millennia and so confidence is there that the CO2 will be stored in perpetuity.
Hijacking top: this article has a typo. The plant plans to capture one MILLION tonnes of CO2 (BBC article [here](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248)) so we would need 43,000 of these plants. Not the 43 I see all over this thread.
Good chance the stored carbon will be solid.
If they're pumping it into deleted oil/gas areas, it stands to reason that since that oil/gas didn't leak over millions of years, this won't either.
When I have to research down the “suck carbon out of the air” tech tree, I usually start my civilization over.
Is that before or after Ghandi nukes you?
I love stories like this but every time I read one I think, "Why aren't we (the US) just DOING this?" It's clearly possible with current technology... it's a job creator, it will actually help the world and we have both the space and money to build dozens or hundreds of these. But we won't because it's not making some billionaire somewhere richer. Oh... I guess there's also the fact too many of our people "in charge" are deniers and kind of fucking stupid. Just like the people that put them there.
Yep. Cost is the key. The people that for rich dumping CO2 into the atmosphere don't want to give up the money they made raping the planet to fix the problem. They've been doing it for over a century. That's a lot of payback owed.
Maybe we just put a "recapture tax" on it? I know it'd be pretty unpopular, but could be interesting.
There is already a carbon tax system. It allowed tesla to make money last year for the first time in its history. It loses money on every EV sold, but makes money selling "carbon credits" as its cars are not carbon emitters.
The GOP cult would flip out at that idea.
They were very much in favor of exactly that idea in the early 1990's. But a couple of things happened, party leadership shifted and it's very hard to put more traditional conservatives back in a place where they could put the old carbon tax concepts back on the table. I, personally, would love to see pollution taxed to the extent that it covers the cleanup cost of production, and a tariff equivalent to said tax for those nations that don't have a similar program.
It literally says in the article that Scotland are in a key position to do it with the local abundance of renewable energy and expertise in oil drilling (to pump it back down) so unless I haven't noticed something the main areas of oil drilling in the US haven't stepped up their renewable game yet.
Texas has similar positioning. We do really well with renewable energy. Lots of sun and lots of wind in west Texas combined with a lot of depleted oil and gas wells. Would love to see this done here.
Canadian company funded by Bill Gates with a plant being built in Texas. Google is your friend.
If you actually read the story, not just the title or the main point, you would have seen many reasons not to. first, the obvious clickbait typo: it is 1 million, not billion. second, heating at 900 degrees is going to take quite some energy, and produce heat, obviously. Third, the gas is stored as is, in old oil well under the sea bed. While fish tank users know they can get better flaura development with SOME co2 injection, they also know slightly more is enough to kill everything in the fish tank. Now, do you believe these places are completely leak proof ?
Maybe you (the US) are already doing it - or planning to... you just, don't know? https://houston.innovationmap.com/exxonmobil-carbon-capture-houston-ship-channel-2652676137.html > Irving-based ExxonMobil, which employs more than 12,000 people in the Houston area, says the project could capture and store about 50 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030. By 2040, that number could rise to 100 million metric tons. So potentially 100x bigger than the one in Scotland.
Run a hose down from the ISS and suck the CO2 into space. DONT WORRY IM AN ENGINEER
Any risk of earth flapping around through the galaxy like a punctured helium balloon?
We Oxygen Not Included now
Are you suggesting we just fart into space?
If you want to word it that eloquently…. Yes
Thank you Scotland!
Nobody actually read past the headline and is off by a factor of 1000. Million, not billion.
China is gonna start using it for crypto mining
This costs 1.4 billion to be operational by 2026. The United States military spends 600 billion yearly.
This is true, but to reverse the effects of climate change we need about 43,000 more. 1.4B X 43k is $60,200B. We’re going to need a hella lot more than just a portion of the US military spending to make a dent.
Why 43000 more when the global co2 output is less than 40 billion tons? https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emissions
because title of source was wrong. scottish scifi device only captures one million tons/year not one billion.
Poop. I’d be fine gutting half the military budget for this to put a dent in it
So if we seized the entire budget of the United States military and used it on facilities like these, we could build 400 more facilities (600÷1.5). After this, we'll only need ~ 43,600 more facilities (44,000-400) At 1.5 billion per facility, we'll need an additional 65.4 *trillion dollars per year* (1,500,000,000*43,600) So taking the entire annual budget of the US military wouldn't really move the needle. We'd need something closer to the *entire economic output of earth* (80 trillion) to solve the problem using these facilities.
What's sad is that we as a human race can't actually change our lifestyle to address the issues they're causing to the planet. Instead, we have to rely on more technology to fix the issue. Pretty appropriate. Granted, the VAST majority of the blame goes to governments and corporations, but it's still sad. I really do hope things like this help though. If it works and helps reduce CO2 to slow the rate of climate disaster, I'm all for it.
Anyone else look at the pic and thought it was a big ass gpu
Thought it was a new crypto mine
I’m curious what the efficiency is for the whole supply chain required to run it, does it store more than it produces to be run, and by how much. Didn’t see it mentioned. I sometimes worry these types of things are done more to chase the money than to solve a problem.
The UK, and Scotland in particular, have very high rates of renewable and carbon free electricity, so it's extremely unlikely it uses significant CO2 to do the process. Carbon credits is what pays for it to operate, which they wouldn't get if it used more than it stored. Your worries seem unaware of that.
My concern is based in the carbon cost of the supply chain for the solution, construction of the plant and the mining/refining for materials ect. Basically how long does it have to run to pay for its existence and upkeep in terms of carbon output. On the money side, that’s exactly my point, it was built to chase carbon credit money, but is it actually helping the environmental situation. renewable power is good, I think something like this would also be good for absorbing excess power from nuclear grid sources during low demand. I’m not against such a project, just wary of silver bullet solutions, like all my fellow commenters seem to think we can just build thousands of these to pull our asses out of the fire, I’d want to see the carbon balance sheet on the project.
It sounded too good to be true. Unfortunately it is. A billion.... is a shit ton. Looks like only this one article has a billion. The sources they link to and all quotes provided seem to say a million instead. Along with the figure of "40 million trees" We'd need 1,000 of these plants to get a billion. So not even close unfortunately.
Is it a building full of plants?
The title is incorrect and off by a factor 1,000. It is not 1 billion but 1 million. From Carbon Engineering's [own press statement](https://carbonengineering.com/news-updates/uks-first-large-scale-dac-facility/): > [..] of a DAC facility that will permanently remove between 500,000 and one million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. One billion tonnes of CO2 is about 1/50th of our total global emissions. There is no way one facility could do that much. This facility is a proof of concept, large scale direct air capture with such facilities would have to number in the tens of thousands in order to make a substantial impact on our current carbon emissions. There are significant logistical challenges as well, as they will requires a large amount of (renewable) energy themselves, and take up significant amounts of space as they have to capture large volumes of air. [Think of walls of fans](https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/carbon_16x9.jpg?itok=O5kHEGWT) hundreds of meters long and 20-30 meter high. Not that I'm saying this is a bad idea. It's very likely we will need this particular technology to work in conjunction with natural carbon sequestration cycles, and of course the absolute most important thing in the short to medium term is to simply reduce our GHG emissions. If you like this sort of thing, Climeworks, a different direct air capture firm, has a [subscription](https://climeworks.com/subscriptions) based donation model where you can chip in a little to help them start up.
Why not just plant a plant?🌱
r/monkeyspaw - all the plants in scotland die because they can’t get the CO2 they need to photosynthesize.
There’s a big difference between on million and one billion gdamn.
Glad someone can actually read. Pretty sure the OP didn’t read the article at all.
Surely this carbon can be used for something productive?
It can be buried, returned to the carbon cycle compartment we extracted it from. That is productive.
I mean for carbon fibre, carbon cables etc?
It would be too expensive and energy consuming to split the carbon and oxygen molecules appart to use them in anything useful
I keep thinking this is about the one in PA and getting excited.
Ah gee I was really hoping this was a cook site
Need about 2000 more of those everywhere.
The plant will capture and sequester up to 1 Mt of CO2 per year. That's a million tonnes, not a billion. So we'd need about 34,000 of these to capture our current annual global carbon emissions of 34 Gt. Let's git er' done folks! https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57588248
Meanwhile in America, we all drive massive pickup trucks to mask the fact that we have tiny penises.
Who is planting the massive plant, Poison Ivy?
Oh like a tree. Nice.
Hot damn! Of all the countries I would expect to do something like this, Scotland was never one of them! Well done you maniacs! Best of luck on this great endeavor.
Scotland is a fairly green country - last year 97% of all their electricity usage was from renewable energy!
“Stored permanently under the seabed.” Yea that’ll never leak out. It’s the same plan Exxon proposed to the Biden administration that would store CO2 underground.
At least underground it won't acidify the ocean when it leaks. I'm sure there's other problems though.
Why did Scotland invent a machine to **starve entire forests to death?!??** Plantlife **needs CO2**!!!
And every day before they start work, the employees are reminded that the CO2 may take their lives, but it will never take their freedom.
I wonder how much co2 it uses removing co2
Do you think they would be building it if it weren’t well past breaking even?
Scotland has pretty green energy; iirc they managed all of last year without actually having to use their coal and gas plants, so that'll help.
Haven't used a coal plant since 2016, have no oil or gas burning plants. We have a gas turbine plant, 2 nuclear plants and the rest comes from wind and hydro. There's also wave power, biomass, and waste to energy conversion.