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Climeworks is building a second commercial-sized plant in Iceland that will capture and store 36,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide
Link information
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- Title
- From milligrams to gigatons: Start-up that sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is building a big new plant in Iceland
- Authors
- Catherine Clifford
- Published
- Jun 28 2022
- Word count
- 1363 words
Interesting, I’d love to read more about their technology. Their website doesn’t have much in the way of detail (at least that I found). Anyone have some papers?
Not a paper, but I remember reading about them in Bloomberg back when Bill Gates invested in them:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-05/bill-gates-investment-in-carbon-removal-tech
And there are a few other topics on Climeworks too, which probably have more details:
https://tildes.net/~enviro?tag=climeworks
p.s. Google Scholar brings up some results, if papers are what you're really after:
https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22climeworks%22&btnG=
Heh, so the papers are like a slightly more technical version of their website. I was trying to find something that gave an idea of the weight of CO2 removed vs area of the module, the power required, the lifetime of the sorbant, etc. but it looks like they don’t really discuss it publicly. 🤷♂️
With all these carbon capture processes all I ever wonder as a layperson is how they compare to hiring one guy to plant trees as a full time job.
Funny you should say that... Just spotted this little offbeat jem!
A man in Zagreb has planted 1000 trees
DW – 30th June 2022
I assume the reason for something like that is to keep improving until one day it's so cheap an efficient that it actually is better than a dude planting trees.
And trees take time to grow, right?
Which is how they capture CO2. So net possitive essentially from the get go, whereas projects like this have at least some initial environmental cost.
A Vox video popped up in my YouTube feed that talked about this. An interesting watch for anyone interested in the process.
What if there were 1 trillion more trees?
Vox – Jean-François Bastin – 27th October 2020
To add to it: How China Turned the Desert Green (and why it went wrong) by Mossy Earth, a non-profit focused on habitat restoration. It talks a good bit about the ways that planting trees can work, and also how it can fail to work.
Trees have the benefit of being cheap and the 'technology' being ready now. They don't require a hookup to an existing power grid, and don't really require much human oversight or upkeep. I don't think it's a magic bullet, but it's something.
As for time, so what? They capture some carbon as they breathe, and I fail to see how that's an argument against starting ASAP because the alternative is... twiddling our thumbs while waiting for a bunch of businesspeople to sell us an engineered solution.
And I do think it is worth keeping in mind that these people are selling a product, even if ostensibly it could be a social good. Everything they say about themselves publicly is going to be a sales pitch. They want to make money and there is absolutely baggage associated with that - many people will exaggerate, lie, and cheat when profit is at stake. (A frustrating and embarrassing 'green energy' con has happened once in my province already - I'll edit with a link when I have the time.)
EDIT: My government scammed (or in corrupt collusion with) green energy conmen in 2019:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/nb-power-gaetan-thomas-1.5131620
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/joi-scientific-technology-update-1.5340245
I'm basically steelmanning this thing, that's all. It's a useful recourse for speculation. Of course it's a good idea to keep planting trees, but it may prove worthy to also invest in carbon sequestering technology. Maybe it makes sense to invest in both in the long run.
Well Bill Gates is involved so I guess it is evil /s.