photo from phys.org/news, reported in 1440 Daily News, 5/10/24 - the “Mammoth” carbon capture plant built by Swiss start-up Climeworks
It’s in Iceland, near a geothermal energy source. It takes a lot of energy to power 72 industrial size fans to pull CO2 out of the air and "heat chemical filters to extract CO2 with water vapor. CO2 is then separated from the steam and compressed in a hangar where huge pipes crisscross. Finally, the gas is dissolved in water and pumped underground with a "sort of giant SodaStream", said Bergur Sigfusson, chief system development officer for Carbfix which developed the process…A well, drilled under a futuristic-looking dome, injects the water 700 meters (2,300 feet) down into volcanic basalt that makes up 90 percent of Iceland's subsoil where it reacts with the magnesium, calcium and iron in the rock to form crystals—solid reservoirs of CO2”
I’ve excerpted pieces of the news article. where you see 3 dots (…) it indicates a gap where I’ve skipped down to what I felt was the next interesting paragraph.
“Three years after opening Orca (their pilot project, same location), Climeworks will increase capacity from 4,000 to 40,000 tonnes of CO2 captured once Mammoth is at full capacity—but that represents just seconds of the world's actual emissions…The role of direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) remains minor in the various climate models due to its high price and its deployment at a large scale depends on the availability of renewable energy. Climeworks is a pioneer with the two first plants in the world to have surpassed the pilot stage at a cost around $1,000 per tonne captured. Wurzbacher expects the cost to decline to just $300 in 2030.”
He doesn’t say why he thinks the cost will decline.
Fortunately, I won’t live long enough to see what life is like after they’ve sucked all the CO2 out of the air. On the other hand, startup businesses usually fail, and especially companies that have crazy ideas like ridding the air of CO2. To get a good perspective on an idea, it helps to follow it all the way to its logical conclusion - if successful, removal of CO2 from our atmosphere would kill all plant life and thus all life. So I’m sure Climeworks will go under as soon as there’s no more money left to subsidize them.
These schemes and companies will go down the tubes like the EV players Rivian, Lucid, Nikola and others
Expensive way to suffocate plants