Africa’s first carbon-removal plant
Africa’s first carbon-removal plant
A joint venture between Swiss company Climeworks and Kenya-based Great Carbon Valley has been billed as a springboard for creating a new, green economy in Africa.
The article puts it up as a question about whether this practice is worthwhile since the only logical solution to climate change is to de-carbonize. Personally I think that question isn't very nuanced, certainly de-carbonizing 100'a of tons from the atmosphere from just this one plant is a small net positive. Can't let it be an excuse to keep rolling coal in your F750'a but I'm still in favor of sucking as much carbon out of the air as we can.
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Ah, ClimeWorks. They also operate a plant in Iceland, which I used to offset a few minor car journeys. If I'd ever use a plane, I'd do the same.
That being said, the overall approach is very questionable. Even if the plants are run 100% by renewable energy, the question of opportunity costs remains. Is the whole grid already 100% renewable energy, or do we 'steal' low-carbon electricity from other appliances? Even if the whole grid was fully green, is DAC really the best use for the excess, or should we rather use it to produce green hydrogen, to prevent emissions elsewhere?
Direct Air Capture will be needed to stabilize our climate (or to reach neutrality by 2050 in the first place), which means we need to gain experience with it. But first and foremost we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground! Capture is economically and physically so expensive, it just isn't feasible to see it (regardless how, wether it's trees or fans) as an escape. It never will be. Keep fossil fuels it in the ground.
If you had a magical machine that was powered at 100% efficiency by thermal fluctuations in the air that could suck carbon from the atmosphere at whatever speed you wanted, you would change the climate by the thermal differential you've created before you would seriously impact the amount of carbon being thrown into the air each year.
Exactly as you said, there's no other option than to simply stop burning this stuff.
The developing world isn't going to tolerate a reduced standard of living because Western Europeans got the industrial revolution party started first.
Fossil Fuel Austerity is the thoughts and prayers of the climate change crisis. It's not gonna happen, people. There will not be a global come to Gaia moment before everything goes to hell. So we best start figuring out how to capture carbon and actively manage the climate or our species is doomed.
Capture is needed, but futile if we don't stop with fossil fuels. The math does not check out. We would need to dedicate like 5% of global electricity production to run DAC plants, unrealistically assuming they run at 100% efficiency at the physically possible optimum, just to keep emissions from rising. However expensive and unpractical it might be to stop using fossil fuels, relying on DAC is probably worse.
We need to act on all fronts simultaneously. Reduce fossil fuels, build more tried and tested renewable energy generators, invest in new and emerging renewable technologies, AND direct air capture simultaneously and we have a chance to take ourselves off the current path to destruction. Doing only one or two of these in isolation just won’t be enough.
A lot of things need to happen fast to reduce the impacts of climate change. Amongst them it's gaining the knowledge of how to do all of the things that will need doing sooner or later. Lots of ideas will fail for various reasons. The more tools we work on the better off we'll be.
The other thing is it really coming at the expense of other decarbonization efforts? Or is it happening in parallel with other things.
It doesn't stop the other work well need to do, and I'm not convinced it's a net negative. I think there's room to experiment at this scale and make adjustments as we progress. Hydrogen for instance is its own can of worms and it's not clear it's the best solution, but maybe it will be. We should work on it.
Generally agreed. Though in a finite world, things happening in parallel can easily come at the expense of other things.
Money spent here cannot be spent there. More construction projects mean more concrete being used, another major source of emissions. Some people also worry some approaches can give false hopes, thereby politically preventing less comfortable but more impactful measures.
I'm also not fully sold why DAC, and not CCS. Both are very similar (they filter CO2 out of gas, and store it), but the concentration of the target gas makes all the difference. The process becomes much more efficient when the concentration is higher. So physically and economically, it makes much more sense to capture these molecules in the exhaust fumes of large industrial facilities like power plants, instead of waiting until they disperse in the atmosphere, to then tediously catch them again.
I think it's a challenge to settle for the right portfolio. Too few pillars and our foundation could crumble. Too many and we could end up wasting our efforts on approaches which ultimately did not work. Which matters, because time is short and tipping points allow no going back. Though in the political reality of our world, we can probably be happy about anything which avoids or removes any single atom. Or not, because maybe we could have avoided and removed twice that amount for the same effort with an obviously better approach!