
Climeworks lays the foundation to scale up carbon dioxide removal significantly - jseliger
https://climeworks.com/news/climeworks-has-signed-groundbreaking-agreements-with
======
LatteLazy
Having refused to do 1000 other things.

We're now offered a 1001st option.

We will refuse this option too. Because the problem isn't that we can't stop
climate change, it's that we don't want to.

That's not a science, engineering, technology problem. It's a human nature,
leadership problem.

~~~
malux85
But if some technology makes it 1000x easier, cheap, and doesn't require the
involvement or even consent of governments, then that's a win for science
right? And avoids leadership / human nature.

~~~
LatteLazy
If you could find a solution that was a few tens of billions times cheaper
than any current solution, a private individual might be able to fund it. That
might work. But right now, no government will pay even for a solution 1000x
cheaper than current options.

This is why no one is considering Geo Engineering.

Remember, if you don't want to solve a problem, the cost of solving it is
always too high, even if the cost is only 1USD...

~~~
Robin_Message
I think geo engineering is not heartily pursued out of an abundance of
caution: having established we can seriously damage the climate, many of the
solutions that try to put the breaks on look even riskier because we don't
want to overshoot. Or rely on unproven technology when the crisis is here,
now.

(Not to be flippant, but the relevant xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/349/](https://xkcd.com/349/) describes this well: sometimes
things get a lot worse when an engineer tinkers with them.)

~~~
DennisP
Geoengineering by taking excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, using machines that
we can simply switch off, and storing the CO2 in deep basalt formations where
it turns into rock, is almost certainly lower risk than leaving the excess CO2
in the air.

That doesn't mean we should rely on this entirely and not attempt to reduce
emissions. But we're also past the point where we can rely on emission
reductions alone.

~~~
LatteLazy
If we don't have the will (budget) to stop emissions at source, why would be
have it to go out and sequester it from the general atmosphere? Isn't that
harder technically, more expensive and more energy consuming etc?

~~~
Firadeoclus
The people who want to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere may not have the power to
stop emissions at source, while they do have the ability to sequester.

------
tito
Great to see air mining getting featured on HN!

For an index of 100+ companies working on mining carbon dioxide from the air,
check out AirMiners [http://www.airminers.org](http://www.airminers.org)

~~~
fmakunbound
What’s the economics of this? Who buys tons of carbon?

~~~
henearkr
There are surely others, but the ones coming to my mind right now:

\- Agriculture: lots of CO2 are produced on-site under greenhouses by burning
gas, because it speeds up the growing of crops.

\- Sparkling drinks industry.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
A counter top Sodastream that pulled CO2 out of the air would be _novel!_.

~~~
travisporter
[https://what-if.xkcd.com/88/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/88/)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Thank you so much for this!

------
g0rbongler
Another company to watch in this space is Terraformation, using reforestation
to efficiently offset carbon at scale.

See: [https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-
pr...](https://medium.com/@yishan/a-massive-global-reforestation-project-is-
how-we-fix-climate-change-36afc6d4dc2)

~~~
kickout
Cool concept. I think these ideas are where the actual solution lies. Plants
and trees can do a lot of carbon sequestersting--at scale no less.

~~~
ta8908695
I could be majorly misunderstanding how it works, but as far as I'm aware
plants/trees are not really a solution. Plants are part of the carbon cycle
and the issues is that we took sequestered carbon and injected it into the
carbon cycle. To make plants a solution you would need to take all the plant
matter after the plants die and sequester it somewhere where it can't
decompose. I think planting trees helps delay large scale issues, but it
doesn't actually solve the problem. Maybe there's some increased plant to land
area ratio that means a larger percent of the carbon in the carbon cycle is
always spent in solid plant form? Even if that's the case it requires always
maintaining this amount of plants even as populations grow or cutting down
trees after they grow and storing the wood in a vacuum chamber or something
like that.

~~~
notabee
You make a good point, but I'm sure the rate of decay matters a lot in this
situation as well. Properly treated wood used as building materials could last
decades or even centuries without significantly decaying if planned and
managed properly[0], but a dead tree on a forest floor will decay very
quickly. If we start rapidly growing trees en masse, it might work almost as
well to imagine some grand building projects in lieu of giant sealed burial
pits. Likely, we would need to do both. And like each offered solution on this
topic, plants alone will not fix everything. I'm also interested in some of
the novel engineered materials we might be able to make with wood if we
discover efficient processes to do so[1]. It irritates me a lot when people
lazily say, "just plant trees", but they can for sure be part of the solution.

0\. [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-
change-w...](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-
wooden-architecture-concrete-global-warming)

1\. [https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-researchers-create-
supe...](https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-researchers-create-super-wood-
stronger-most-metals)

------
totetsu
Has anyone made a paperclips/cookieclicker-esq game about carbon sequestration
yet?

~~~
keithtom
Underrated comment

------
baskire
The USA does 5903 million metric tons of co2 annually [1]

You’d need 1.5 million of these to remove just the USA’s yearly co2 emissions.

[1] [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-
gas...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-
emissions-and-sinks)

~~~
twoslide
True, for another perspective, one way across the atlantic is about 1 ton, so
this is 2000 one way trips or (roughly) 10 flights of 200 people.

On the other hand, if this amount doubled every year, it would equal total US
CO2 production in 21 years, total global CO2 production in 27 years.

Agree with the other comments that preventing emissions in the first place is
far more efficient. Also, I think that CO2 removal is now included in many
climate change models, so the benefit might not be too great.

~~~
pyrale
> On the other hand [...]

This tells more about the ridiculous progression of exponential functions than
about the efficiency of this process.

~~~
twoslide
Agreed that doubling every year is wildly optimistic, other technological
growth is much slower, e.g. mobile phones were about 36% annually between 1990
and 2018:
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2)

------
andi999
To me this looks all like snake oil currently. The problem is, that carbon is
not a pollutand (like fckw) but the energy carrier-source. So generally to
take it out from the athmosphere you need more energy then you got from
putting it into the athmosphere (backed by the laws of thermodynamics). So it
would only make senso if you have huge (i mean HUGE) amount of renewable
energy which somehow is too far away from the industry to use it directly. We
are not at that stage. The real problem is to generate enough renewables. Then
you can first start to replace your fossil plants by those and then later down
the line maybe this technology starts to make sense. For iceland they could
just build more aluminium plants now and this would probably be better for the
total CO2 reduction.

An analogy: Its like we have a hydroelectric power plant, but people need so
much power the water coming out of it is flooding towards the city to distroy
it and there is an article 'scientists invented the 10 gallon bucket, allowing
to move water back up the dam faster.'. I think this is also harmful, since
these kind of successes might give people the wrong inpression where we
actually stand.

~~~
scatters
You'd be correct if this system was reducing CO2 to elemental carbon, but in
fact it stores CO2 in the earth, not carbon (or hydrocarbon). So it's
equivalent to burning fossil carbon, extracting the CO2 from the exhaust
stream, and storing that waste underground. The enthalpy of combustion of the
fossil fuel that went into the atmospheric CO2 doesn't need to be recovered
for this process, it only needs enough energy to concentrate atmospheric CO2
and pump it below ground into geological storage.

~~~
andi999
I am a bit suspect about storing co2 underground. I mean what is the common
leakage rate? These storages will become the green house source of the future,
or not?

~~~
jacobr1
What if we stored it as a liquid rather than a gas. Hmmm ... I've heard some
things about C8H18 ...

------
kisamoto
Carbon removal is definitely required at this stage.

I read a lot of "Trees are _The_ solution"-esq news whenever Climeworks is
brought up and while they do sequester carbon the reality is they are slow and
cannot solely be used to lower atmospheric CO₂ levels.

Earth, as we know it today, has the potential to plant an additional 0.9
billion ha of canopy cover (~1.2 trillion trees)[0]

Trees will ultimately help in the long run, no doubt, but will need to be
supported by a myriad of other methods such as Climeworks. Ryan Orbuch of
Stripe wrote a great primer on some of the other carbon removal methods[1].

If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air
over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an
excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today.

[0]
[https://carbonremoved.com/learn/forestation/](https://carbonremoved.com/learn/forestation/)
[1] [https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/](https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-
removal/)

~~~
jaggederest
I like the idea of stacking up a lot of 1 meter cubes of carbon into nice
shapes. Each cube is just over 2 metric tons of carbon, or the equivalent of 8
metric tons of carbon dioxide. 20 cubic kilometers per year is enough to get
us back to pre-industrial levels in no time, and build some interesting
monuments while we're at it. A roughly 4-kilometer tall pyramid, anyone? Low
low price of 2 trillion dollars each.

~~~
kisamoto
Interesting concept!

I came across a company making CO₂ negative thermo-plastics the other day[0]
which is the closest so far I think we can come to your idea :-)

[0][https://www.madeofair.com/](https://www.madeofair.com/)

------
diptanu
Random question - At what scale do we need to do this to get back to where the
planet was 50 years back?

~~~
jaggederest
3210 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere (410ppm)

275 ppm (Target PPM, based on pre-industrial levels)

3210 gigatonnes - ((3210 gigatonnes / 410) * 275) = 1057 gigatonnes to remove.

Advertised scale: 4000 tons per year

(1057 gigatonnes / 4000 tons per year) = 264250000 years

reasonable timeline: 30 years

30 years / 264250000 years = 8808333x increase needed. Call it roughly 10^7
times faster.

So, a lot.

~~~
ekianjo
> 275 ppm (Target PPM, based on pre-industrial levels)

Who says this is the ideal level to be at?

~~~
notabee
[https://cdiac.ess-
dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...](https://cdiac.ess-
dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg)

There are dozens, hundreds more studies, graphs, and other data to answer that
question. At this point, due to the overwhelming amount of research data
available, this kind of question should be considered as made in bad faith.

~~~
ekianjo
This graph does not answer the question at all. Why is not the ideal level
100? 200? 300? 500? If you have never been at 500 how would you know if the
outcome is actually detrimental overall? You can't make models when you don't
have historical data outside of your training set, that's a very simple rule
that everyone can understand.

Al Gore made ridiculous claims back in 2008 about how bad it would get in just
10 years (making it seem that the trend was linear, which it isn't) and he was
completely wrong on most of them - so the question I raise is very much valid.

------
baryphonic
I've always wondered if someone could bio-engineer particularly dense wood as
a way to sequester carbon. But I admit, I know next to nothing about how
anyone would go about doing that and what the constraints would be, other than
its extremely tough to make genetic engineering work.

~~~
redisman
There already are some like the Empress tree. A big problem with any super
trees is that they tend to be highly invasive

~~~
civilized
That seems like a _good_ thing if you are serious about scaling up their
use...

~~~
redisman
I mean you could in theory make a plant so good that it would outcompete
almost any other plants. Then you might get a fungus or other disease that
targets that monoculture and can now easily jump through the whole globe since
it's covered in the same super plant. Being invasive is not a good feature.

~~~
civilized
That isn't what invasive means. At all.

~~~
redisman
Can you elaborate? Invasive means many things
[https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/invasives/](https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/invasives/)

------
jesstaa
This seems completely ridiculous. If it was profitable to do then companies
would be doing it directly at the source of emissions more much efficiently.

~~~
hannob
Realistically carbon removal will only happen after we removed most carbon
emission sources. Carbon removal will likely be more expensive than reducing
emissions for decades to come. This is a future technology for the time, for
the "fuck, we already produced far too much emissions, what do we do now?"

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
We're well past that point.

The things are melting.

Stopping all CO2 production tomorrow isn't going to re-freeze the melty bits.

------
hosh
I first heard if this tech from the Netflix series, Down To Earth.

I think sequestering the carbon into the soil through plants is a better idea.
The mineralization will not be bioavailable in the ecosystem. It isn’t as if
carbon itself is a bad thing so much as its excess amount in the atmosphere.
Futhermore, having more plants and fungi and living ecosystems fixes other
problems besides greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Or better yet, fix the underlying thing on our global civilization’s obsession
with technology that emits all of this in the first place. I am not
necessarily talking about the tech so much as why we in our society think we
can’t live without it.

~~~
neurobashing
it's a bit of an intentionally snarky response but any time anyone talks about
machines to do it, I always reply: they already exist, they're called _trees_.

~~~
foobar1962
Respectfully ignoring the snark, we have an immediate problem and tress aren't
fast enough, take up too much land, and the land needs to be suitable.

I've watched the past 30-odd years - and my father for 50-odd years before
that - as fertile farmland with good reliable rain (this is not a common
combination in Australia) has been built-over with housing. Agriculture has
been pushed further out to areas with less fertility and rainfall.

Most of the remaining wide open spaces in Australia can support little more
than bush and patches of grass. All the good land with rainfall has people
living on it.

~~~
ekianjo
> take up too much land,

Most of the land on Earth is not used by humans. Where are we lacking space,
exactly?

~~~
adrianN
Most of the fertile land is in fact used by humans. And planting trees in
remote areas is not good either: you need to cut them down and actually
sequester the carbon if you want to do something about climate change. Just
having stable forests is a far too small carbon sink (and the change in albedo
from dark trees actually works against you in many areas of the world).
Reforestation is good, but trees alone are not enough.

------
exabrial
Are they really going to beat the efficiency of trees or algae? I _highly_
doubt it

~~~
sacred_numbers
It's extremely easy to beat the efficiency of photosynthesis since plants are
so inefficient. The highest estimate I have seen for carbon sequestration by
trees is 7 tons of CO2 per acre, which doesn't include losses from converting
wood to biochar for long term carbon capture. Direct air capture of CO2
requires about 2000 KWh per ton of CO2. An acre of solar panels produces an
average of 357000 KWh of electricity per year. That means that direct air
capture is at least 25x more efficient at converting solar energy to captured
CO2. That efficiency is important considering the scale at which we will need
to sequester carbon in the next few decades. Cost efficiency is a different
matter, but even then I believe direct air capture will beat biochar very soon
if it hasn't already.

~~~
imhoguy
Why we are blindly fixated at CO2 only? The artificial cure may be worse than
disease. Plants sequester other substances and retain water, regulate
temperatures and is home to biodiversity. With artificial solution we will
endup with dead deserts of hard to recycle hardware. Nature did it better for
millions of years.

~~~
exabrial
Until carbon sequestration can make bricks or another useful material as a
carbon sink, it'll sit as a niche own used for virtue signaling by politicians
rather than actual change that moves the meter.

~~~
imhoguy
Not even bricks as by time they will become garbage and yet another recycling
issue. We would need to dump it back deep underground into mineshafts and oil
wells.

------
bozoUser
FAQ on the topic: [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-carbon-sequestration?qt-
news_...](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-carbon-sequestration?qt-
news_science_products)

------
yahyaheee
So if humans are putting 38 billion tons into the atmosphere every year does
this even make a dent?

~~~
danimal88
38,000,000,000/4000 = 9,500,000 plants needed to get to net zero, just for the
the carbon we are currently putting out, to say nothing of all the carbon
currently causing warming...

Seems reasonable to say no.

~~~
totetsu
How much carbon release is needed to make 9,500,000 plants..

------
zaroth
In the distant past we had much higher CO2 levels but the sun was also about
4% weaker.

At this price point, launching a few million tons of solar shades into the L1
Lagrange point is probably more economical.

~~~
jonstewart
What's the price point? I didn't see anything in the article/press release.

~~~
zaroth
Solar shading is on the order of $1 trillion per decade, assuming
SuperHeavy+Starship and full reusability as I recall ($10,000 per ton). As a
bonus, the capability to launch 10s of millions of tons to orbit fundamentally
changes the capability and reach of humanity.

Sucking gigatons of CO2 from the air at the current efficiency is basically
infinite dollars, but it could conceivably be cost competitive with the solar
shade in a few decades. It basically just requires massive amounts of fully
renewable energy, so the benefit is it’s a massive renewable energy generation
subsidy.

But renewables are already more than cost competitive, the problem we have now
is energy storage (batteries).

~~~
jonstewart
I mean, maybe a solar shade is possible, but it still requires a massive
engineering investment and maybe has some accidental risks like “ends
photosynthesis” (which is hyperbole, but still, it’s a big one shot project
with global consequences).

DAC has limitations that likely keep it from being the sole solution to CO2
levels, but it can be developed incrementally without much risk and then
deployed on the margins where it makes sense (e.g., on top of geothermal, in
the Sahara next to a PV array).

~~~
zaroth
The L1 Lagrange point is not perfectly stable. Anything we put there would
drift after about a decade. So it requires constant upkeep but also means
nothing you do there can be catastrophic.

Both technologies are not “one-shot” but rather are things which are deployed
along a spectrum measured in “gigatons of CO2 extracted” or “tons of
diffractive material deployed”.

You don’t put one big mirror in place as a binary thing. You deploy thousands
to millions of tons of “mirrors” overall, ~100 tons at a time. Imagine a
payload of carbon fiber snowflakes which get dropped off, coated in such a way
that they self orient broad-side toward the sun.

I wonder what the _effective carbon offset_ of 100 tons of diffractive
material at L1 buys you. Given that you could draw a direct cost/benefit
comparison.

------
aaron695
Lol, so rather than sending the energy elsewere to stop CO2 being released
(there are many ways to do this, currently Iceland does it through Aluminium
production) we do something useless like putting CO2 into the ground.

If only we could do some sort of bio-tech and create some sort of plant that
could convert solar energy in sequestered CO2. Plants are pretty useless as
well I guess.

Random fact Iceland abundance of energy is from dams and nothing to do with
geothermal, that's just for branding because it's cool and people can't think.

------
asah
Silly q: don't we need to also remove co2 from the upper atmosphere as well?
How much missing is there with the lower atmosphere?

