Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Green mechanical climate salvation schemes have killed whales, paralysed crabs, murdered entire forests and incinerated and smashed who knows how many birds from the sky. Now its time to finish the job, by sucking all the life giving CO2 from the atmosphere.
Direct air capture machines suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Are they part of the solution to climate change?
ABC Science / By technology reporter James Purtill
Posted Yesterday at 4:30amFri 28 Jan 2022 at 4:30am, updated Yesterday at 9:56amOn a barren lava plateau in Iceland stands an entirely new kind of industrial facility that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and traps it in stone.
The world’s first commercial direct air capture (DAC) plant is designed to remove thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gas every year and then inject it deep underground.
Technology like this has been mooted for years but faced huge engineering challenges and, until recently, was dismissed as a costly fantasy.
Now the first plants are coming online, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognising that, even if the world reduces its ongoing emissions as quickly as possible, there will still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming.
In short, the IPCC says, the world needs to both reduce future emissions and remove historical ones to reach a safe climate.
Experts say DAC could become a trillion-dollar global industry — if it can be deployed at scale.
…
Why not just plant more trees?
When Deanna D’Alessandro, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney, encountered the idea of mechanical carbon removal, she wondered if there wasn’t a simpler solution.
…
DAC could do the same with 99.7 per cent less space, she said.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-01-28/direct-air-capture-dac-machines-carbon-dioxide-climate-change/100777966
Sucking CO2 from the air at the level of efficiency being suggested in my opinion could create dead zones where no plants will grow.
But given their track record of promoting ecologically disastrous “solutions”, greens would in my opinion happily write off such “dead zones” as necessary collateral damage, in their never ending quest to save nature by bulldozing every last wilderness, and covering the planet with their ugly machines.
It; a good job it will fail to have any impact.
But it is true. More CO2 causes more heat on earth. We cannot have that?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/28/scientists-and-media-outlets-increasingly-scolded-and-pressured-to-blame-extreme-weather-on-humans/#comment-3441417
But the heat is not complying with increasing CO2 levels.
It does actually, but it does not go as expected. Follow the link that I gave in my first comment.
It actually doesn’t, I’m guessing you didn’t read the comments to your first post.
MarkW
I did not see any evidence of what you have measured that would counter what I measured.
Heat isnt a problem, it is cold that kills. We are 7 C below the comfortable temp for humans.
We are also, even more importantly, at levels of CO2 that are starving plants, massively reducing their productivity!
“We are 7 C below the comfortable temp for humans.”
Where on earth is that ???
Are you talking day or night ??
Average, twit. And below the long term average temp. for planet Earth.
Since humans lack the ability to store heat, averages don’t matter.
It doesn’t matter how warm it’s going to get when the sun comes up if you freeze to death in the dark.
So, the real problem isn’t the actual temperature, it is the variance in temperature. Obviously, all humans should live on small tropical islands to keep the average and variance within comfortable limits.
Average temp is a useless figure. The maximums and minimums are what kill and what people care about.
The average adult human has one boob and one testicle.
Actually, slightly less than 1. Almost everyone is above average 🙂
Don’t you have that backwards?
If one person in a million is lacking one boob (woman) or one testicle (man), the average is 1.999999 and the other 999999 are at 2.000000, above average.
HenryP, you have the effect backwards (despite Al Gore’s graph.) Any increased heating at Earth’s surface is cause by changes in natural forces. Increased heating causes more CO2 to be released from the oceans. That is, CO2 release follows heating. (CO2 is less soluble in warmer water than in cooler.)
NO IT DOES NOT !!!! CO2 is the gas of LIFE !
Complete insanity. Humanity is showing serious signs of collective suicide. There is barely enough CO2 right now for plant life to survive. The absolute minimum is 150ppm and we’re now at 400ppm. These idiots will destroy everything with their dangerous nonsense. The sun controls climate not us. Such stupidity.
Climate change policies are going to destroy your livelihood long before climate change does.
Robert J. O’Neill wrote this on Twitter!!
Is Human Extinction supposed to be a self-fulfilling prophesy?
A suggestion to anyone who feels there is too much CO2 in our atmosphere:
Just Stop Breathing
The sun controls climate not CO2 emissions. Totally agree.
And CO2 storage will never work because it requires too much energy to remove and store the CO2.
This scam is one of a dozen of other scams.. Including hydrogen storage, transportation, and so on … All of the scams… …. assume that energy (itself) will become super cheap because of the wind and sun gathering.
In reality, sun and wind gathering, have made electrical grid energy so expensive, in the EU, that companies that make high energy products like fertilizer have been forced to shutdown. There is an energy crisis in the EU.
Countries run on energy. If the energy input stops the countries quickly become third world countries with large disaster zones.
From the article….
“What does it cost? (William: To remove CO2 from the air and then to transport and ‘store’ the CO2.)DAC is currently prohibitively expensive, mainly due to the cost of energy.
Climeworks has priced its DAC offsets at about $US775 ($1,094) a tonne and says this will fall as low as $US250 ($353) by the end of the decade.
The US Department of Energy recently announced a goal of slashing the cost to $US100 per tonne ($141) by the end of the decade.
That’s still a lot more expensive than offsetting CO2 by planting trees, which costs as little as $US20 ($28) per tonne.
DAC – Dumb and Crazy.
I’m sure that no CO2 will be used in the manufacture of these machines.
They will require plenty of electricity to run, helping encourage more subsidies for more wind machines.
“The DAC plant in Iceland, which is the world’s biggest, can capture and remove 4,000 metric tonnes of CO2 a year.
That’s about 10 million times less than annual global emissions.
At our current level of emissions, humanity is cancelling out the plant’s yearly efforts every three seconds.”
…great work guys.
“At our current level of emissions, humanity is cancelling out the plant’s yearly efforts every three seconds.”
As I wrote somewhere else, good planning is too much arithmetics for green brans (I gess in needs less green and some more gray matter…)
Since we humans add more CO2 to the atmosphere every time we breathe, what we need is another big world war to significantly reduce our population.
Not only that, but note:
One mole CO2 = 44.0g (CO2 = 12.0g + 32.0g = 44.0g)
One metric ton contains 22730 moles of CO2 (1,000,000g / 44.0g/mole)
One mole is 24.47L (Boyle’s law at 25°C and 1 atmosphere pressure)
Volume of one metric ton CO2 = 22730moles × 24.47L/mole = 556200L = 556.2m³
So unless you pressurize the captured CO2 to liquify it, you will run out of underground storage space rather quickly.
Where does the power required to pressurize CO2 and build the leak free containment caves come from? They are never mentioned in these capture schemes.
Good evidence that alarmists are innumerate.
Is there no limit to the stupidity of the Greenies?
Raises hand
No
Don’t let the window dressing distract you:
You don’t this this latest get rich scheme will pull in many public funds?
Yup. It doesn’t matter what the project is or if it even makes sense. The politicians just need projects. That way, they have money to spend because… project. Some of the money sticks to their fingers and the rest goes to family and cronies.
And, the politicians can point to the projects they supported to convince their constituents that they should be re-elected — even if the projects are unmitigated boondoggles!
It seems to share some things in common with ‘mining’ for virtual digital money.
Not stupid. Watermelons.
I’ll remember that. The IQ of a watermelon.
Absolute insanity but just supposing they could build enough of these stupid things and they worked as advertised. What I would like to know who decides when to turn them off and at what level of atmospheric CO2.
The IPCC will set up a committee representing every nation on Earth, all ethnics, all genders, some very tall people, some very short people, some quadriplegics, all religions, etc., etc.
…who will then proceed to come up with the wrong answer.
Then they will proceed to write the design specifications for a camel.
” supposing they could build enough of these stupid things and they worked as advertised ”
As usual, they don’t need to work as advertised: they just need to be sold because their only objective is to milk money from governments cows.
Exactly my thought! Once the CO2 “capture” investments have been made who is going to tell them to stop processing and at what CO2 level? Will the government subsidize when they must stop? One could argue we should let CO2 rise to 800 to 1000 ppm for plant growth. We know CO2 saturation occurs around 100 ppm and has little added effect on doubling.
and how much energy does this use more than comes out of burning the carbon in the first place i bet
The caustic solutions strong enough yet cheap enough to react with CO2 out of the air have their own issues. CaOH is made from heating limestone until the CO2 is driven off, so not really good at all, except as an attractant for green investment capital at a lab scale….. and NaOH is produced by electrolysis of Salt water, but produces chlorine at a rate proportional to the CO2 collected, and well, and chlorine levels of a few ppm aren’t really good either except at a lab scale where the HP of your fume hood is irrelevant…and the technical problems just carry on and on….regenerate the caustic solution or use regenerative solutions like amines ? Takes a lot of heat at temperature over 120 C, not really a solar panel range, or use a lot of PV electricity that would be better used on the grid somewhere…..so really collecting CO2 from high CO2 sources is a lot more economical idea…but dang, its so hard to compete with grass and trees.
Has any green asked the question of how much carbon emission is required to build each of these, and how much CO2 emission to power them, or build the green systems to power them without CO2 emission?
Basically, what is the overall efficiency of what they are designed to do?
Has any green asked the question of how much carbon emission is required to build each of these
Most assuredly not.
But given their track record of promoting ecologically disastrous “solutions”, greens would in my opinion happily write off such “dead zones” as necessary collateral damage, in their never ending quest to save nature by bulldozing every last wilderness, and covering the planet with their ugly machines.
Have patience, i due course, the sea will release enough CO2 to reestablish the balance of CO2- pressure between the sea and the atmosphere.
And keep in mind that volcanos are great emitters of CO2.
Actually, they aren’t, except locally.
Including all of the undersea volcanos? (See, for example, the mid-Atlantic ridge., of which Iceland is merely an above-sea extension.)
“DAC could become a trillion-dollar global industry”
As fast as such nonsense might remove CO2 from the atmosphere, nature will put it right back in.
https://scc.klimarealistene.com/produkt/the-impact-of-human-co2-on-atmospheric-co2/
https://scc.klimarealistene.com/2021/10/new-papers-on-control-of-atmospheric-co2/
Solyndra anyone? After all, who do you think will eventually have to pick up the tab.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Given a big enough green slush fund there is no limit. They must be stopped . Pitchforks and yellow jackets anyone?
“When the gods wish to punish us, they grant us our wishes.”
I believe that future generations will look back on these times with bemusement. They will note that society went mad believing that a moderate increase of CO2 was going to incinerate the planet and destroy life, whereas we now know that the reality is almost the complete opposite.
They failed (thank God), but not without almost entirely destroying the economic basis of their civilization, leaving their descendents poorer than themselves while tearing up the surface of the planet to strip mine for minerals to build their follies. So insane had they become towards the end that all evidence to the contrary was dismissed as “misinformation” and ever more contorted efforts were made to explain away the fact that actual warming was not happening as the doomsday models predicted.
Doubtful.
Everything they’re suggesting and everything they’re doing is, in effect, creating desert.
There won’t be any future generations – or not as we think of them
Plant Australia with trees, after first repairing the soil with a (haha) liberal sprinkling of Basalt.
Even at the modest rate that Douglas Fir (growing in Oregon) pulls down CO2, that will get you well over 8 billion tonnes per year
Repair the brown parts of the USA and Mexico (as seen on any map) gets you another 4 billion tonnes of CO2 drawdown
Repairing the Sahara and the (now less than fertile) ‘Fertile Crescent’ gets you 27 Billion tonnes per year
There is no shortage of water on this Earth and the energy used powering these contraptions will be more than sufficient to make all the freshwater needed
Nor any shortage of Basalt
Try not to let your new forest/jungle catch fire, do not ‘harvest’ anything from it – apart from stuff you might use to make Biochar – which you then put back into the forest.
If your new forests turn into a nice dense forests such as you see in SE Asia, double or triple the annual drawdown
Stop using ploughs and tillage equipment that leaves bare soil lying around under clear skies and you save over 60 billion tonnes of CO2 from being released in the first place.
Suggest that the farmers involved plant perennial grasses and start keeping cows, buffalo, elf, reindeer or whatever but NOT sheep or goats.
iow; Stop eating sugar and save the 80% of everybody who lives sad, painful and expensive lives riddled by ‘Modern Disease’ from living those depressing lives and from meeting slow lingering deaths.
Eat cow instead. In fact, that one simple measure will end the mental derangement that is: Climate Change. It’ll fix the Ozone Hole also – there was never anything wrong with in the first place.
Suggest to folks who farm with sheep and goats that they grow cows instead saves you another 30 billion tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere annually.
Then the Global Climate will change – considerably for the better and NOT because you removed or stopped producing CO2
Strangely, it will get warmer.
It will happen because of all the water you will be storing in the soil/dirt under your new forests and perennial grasslands
Water traps heat and Convection controls the atmosphere – not radiation.
And be sure to eat LOTS of MEAT, since animals emit CO2 when they breathe.
Much sound advice, Peta. regeneration of the soil is the main goal of modern (?) agricultural science as more and more producers are going no till, cover cropping, and less chemical inputs. Not sure why you pick on sheep and goats in favor of the other grazing/browsing critters? Personally I keep both goats and cattle no real competition between them as their favorite snacks are different for the most part.
I’ve been thinking that by looking at the geologic history of the planet, and picking those times that life on the planet flourished the best, see what the % of CO2 was at that time and set that as the goal. Seems to me the later Mesozoic would be a good candidate.
Obviously, the real ploy is to save space for more wind projects to suck more funds out of pockets.
These people are plain silly
“a safe climate”
Mad
CO2 at 1000ppm would be a safe climate. Sadly there are insufficient fossil fuels to achieve this.
Maybe replace all occurences of “green” with “gruesome green”, for accuracy.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is as stupid and dangerous as removing oxygen.
Or adding cyanide.
Nuremburg awaits these criminals.
Tree planting is carbon dioxide neutral. Pity I’m too old to witness the inexorable sawtooth rise at Moana Loa to a level when the whole CAGW case collapses. Do please note the idiosyncratic shape of the sawteeth and how the COVID experiment didn’t affect them
Indeed the zero effect of covid on CO2 in air is something real scientists find to be noteworthy.
For everyone else, the cat(astrophe) killed curiosity.
I suspect that the asymmetric shape of the seasonal CO2 cycles are a result of the asymmetry in northern and southern hemisphere land/water distribution.
“remove thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gas every year”.
The actual figure is 4,000 tonnes per year. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-01-28/direct-air-capture-dac-machines-carbon-dioxide-climate-change/100777966 Global man-made CO2 is something like 40 billion tonnes per year. Only ten million or so plants like the Iceland one are needed. And only ten million times the money of course. At the projected $353 per tonne, that’s 14 trillion dollars per annum, or a paltry $1,500 for every person on the planet. Except that I can think of plenty of people for whom $1,500 is an awful lot of money.
“The world’s first commercial direct air capture (DAC) plant…”
Commercial? That suggests it’s profitable. That suggests it pays for itself. Who is going to purchase its product, CO2?
Fizzy drinks makers?
The “product” is actually “saving the planet”, and everyone gets to pay for it, whether they want to or not, or even realize they are buying it. That’s the beauty of all the “carbon” scams and schemes.
Yeah, and if you do a life cycle analysis on the DAC you’ll find it results in a net increase in ACO2 output…another part of the beauty of the scam.
Frackers ;->
Rube Goldberg would have been very proud of the greenies and their industry to milk the sheeple of their treasures. Each and every time these kinds of machines and machinations to “solve” the climate non-problem is exhibited there needs to be a warning label exposing the lunacy behind it. The greenies, of all varieties, need to be laughed at, ridiculed, and shown to the public at large for what they are…nutjobs with letters behind their names who have lost their critical thinking ability to laurels and accolades from their fellow inmates in the asylum they have chosen to occupy.
The circus moves on and the clowns continue their antics, to the betterment of absolutely no one except those in on the grift.
They need to be treated as such, everywhere.
grift? Did you mean to type “griff”?
Probably only on this blog and the AARP website will you find many people familiar with “Rube Goldberg.” 🙂
They not only hate humans but they hate beauty and nature.
It sure seems that way, bluecat57 – all of the proposed solutions I see are spreading technology, machines, concrete, etc. everywhere, encroaching on fields and forests. But hey, it’s “for the environment” right?
Rube Goldberg is alive and well!
Well I guess the air around those things will be fine! Maybe bit lower in CO2, but not deadly for plants.
My question is one of the overall efficiency. Let´s assume you have one of those machines saturated with carbon and want to reset it. Doesn´t that cost energy and thus produce CO2?
Unless the so produces carbon has special applications or the original absorber is a waste product from some process, I fear this whole concept might not only be energy and cost inefficeint, but also result in more CO2 than an energy cycle without it.
Is there a study anywhere looking into that aspect?
Inject deep underground. Like they do in fracking?
“When Deanna D’Alessandro, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney, encountered the idea of mechanical carbon removal, she wondered if there wasn’t a simpler solution.” – quote
Yes, there IS a simpler solution, Deanna. Get your mouth and nose sewn shut and wear O2 rebreather equipment. And stop coming up with drivel.
I’m still mystified re: what REALLY scares these people. I hope that someone will take pity on me an explain it to me, while I pound down a very large bowl of popcorn (w/butter) and a cold soda.
Oh, yeah, five cardinals (boys & girls both) and two red-bellied woodpeckers came to my feeding station yesterday. It’s just the railing on my porch, but they seem to appreciate my largesse. Lots of sparrows and some house finches (English sparrows), and of course, a squirrel.
At my feeder: 1 bluebird, 1 red shafted northern flicker, 1 starling, 4 Eurasian collared doves, a bunch each of sparrows, juncos, and house finches. All at once while I was at my feeder…er…breakfast table. The surprise was the bluebird because I only put seeds out.
We already have the Dead Zone. The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is from hypoxia due to fertilizer runoff from corn production to make ethanol. This will increase as more land is converted to soy bean oil production to produce the vast quantities of soy oil needed for the production of renewable diesel in all those refineries that are being converted to biofuels plants.
How many T of CO2 will be required to generate the energy needed to separate 1T of CO2 from air?
In my experience when a headline ends in a question you can reliably answer NO and move on.
Betteridge’s law of headlines
People who live in Iceland are trying to keep the atmosphere from warming?
If humans keeping increasing the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere each year, why has the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere only been increasing in a linear way?
No one can ever explain this.
I hope to have an article soon that addresses this conundrum. I think the answer is a matter of scale.
Imagine all the fossil fuels and C02 required to build all those things.
“Experts say DAC could become a trillion-dollar global industry”
More like a trillion-dollar economic sinkhole.
How much power do these CO2 suckers consume?
Perhaps they could pump the output of these things into the nearest greenhouse.
“A trillion dollar global industry” to me means “a trillion dollars wasted” for no productive purpose.
Think “opportunity cost”, but don’t let governments control the alternative spending.
The International Energy Agency published a brief report into DAC of CO2 in November 2021.
There are currently 19 small scale plants operating world wide capturing 0.01Mt of CO2 a year. The captured CO2 is largely sold for carbonating drinks. A 1Mt CO2/year plant is being developed in the US. A partnership of Carbon Engineering and Occidental Petroleum is building this plant which may be operational by 2024.
The plant in Iceland came online in Sept 2021 and is capturing 4kt CO2/year for storage in basalt formations.
Already companies like Microsoft and Swiss Re are purchasing future DAC removal to offset their CO2 emissions.
“DAC needs to be demonstrated at scale, sooner rather than later, to reduce the uncertainties regarding future deployment and costs” says the report
https://www.iea.org/reports/direct-air-capture
True believers of climate change should just cut out the middle man and wear such a device on their face, so that their own personal CO2 exhaust is scrubbed.
no comments at that site = propaganda
The photo reminds me of the sirens coming out of the ground in the original “Time Machine” movie with Yvette Mimieux as “Weena.” The sirens emerged and wailed, and all the Eloi would zombie-like go underground into the shelters to become food for the Morlocks.
Over and over, I see headlines in WUWT that basically echo the alarmism, pretending that cooler temperatures are “good news” when actual geology of the 20th century found the “climate optimum” (temperature optimum) was 1-6 degrees Celsius WARMER than today, or pretending that CO2 was bad news.
CO2 is the foundation of photosynthesis which is where everything on land and most of the sea gets all its food. Those fighting against CO2 are trying to kill all humans and every other living thing on earth.
Sequestering CO2 into the soil as humus increases soil fertility and that is a good thing. Otherwise, this climate nonsense is death, death, death.
Many WUWTers have figured that out. The rest had better wake up or we’ll have no planet to live on.
But only with guarantees of many trillions of taxpayer money.
The Geoengineering Moratorium under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity effectively banned this misguided technology twelve years ago. While small-scale experimentation in the lab would be permitted, deployment in the open is effectively banned – see ocean fertilisation projects for comparison. Where are the MSM headlines calling for the proponents of this technology to be incarcerated, or do they have a green pass (get out of jail free card)?
You could not make this lunacy up ?!!! 90% of the CO2 in our atmosphere is dissolved in the OCEANS but is released when the temperature is right !! If they ever succeed in this stupid idea of “sucking” CO2 out of the atmosphere it will result in MORE DESERTS (CO2 is plant food and therefore helps increase the “greening” of our deserts) but if they succeed in reducing it (debateable?) it will help KILL plants which stabilise the sand and therefore reduces barren areas !
Am I wrong to think that reducing the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in increased outgassing from the oceans? or at least reduce the amount of of natural sequestration in plants and solution in the ocean resulting in little net change?
Am I wrong to think that most physicists and certainly all climate scientists are unaware of Le Châtelier’s Principle which states that a system reacts to resist changes imposed on it, thereby resulting in a reduced effect (chemical engineers use it to enhance chemical production outputs and quality). The atmosphere is a perfect example system for the action of this principle. Basically, to say that net effects are a negative feedback to imposed changes is simply a restatement of the Le Châtelier P
I guess this CO2 extracting plant is powered by coal plant.
“Direct air capture machines suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”
They talk about the “existential threat” of “climate change” then propose solutions that are far more of an existential threat. What CO2 ppm is the target? What if they overshoot and we end up under 200?
Idiots! Do they think they know what the optimum level of CO2 in the atmosphere should be? Optimum for what? Do they think they know what the optimum temperature for the Earth should be? Further, how much energy does this contraption use?