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.
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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.
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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.
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“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?