By Robert Bradley Jr.
“The economics are even more dismal…. Without the 45Q credit, few if any [Direct Air Capture projects] would be viable. As a reminder, the … Republican House bill working its way through Congress cuts IRA incentives for a raft of technologies, but leaves 45Q for carbon capture alone.” (- Michael Barnard, below)
An article in CleanTechnica by Michael Barnard, “Climeworks DAC & Fiscal Collapse & The Brutal Reality Of Pulling Carbon From The Sky“, documents the failure of another anti-CO2 program. The article begins:
In 2024, Climeworks’ direct air capture (DAC) Mammoth plant in Iceland captured just 105 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s not per day, not per week, that’s total, across the year. For context, that’s less than the annual tailpipe emissions from a dozen long-haul trucks, or roughly one-thousandth of what the company said the plant was built to remove. In mid 2025, the company began laying off a minimum of 10% of its ~500 staff. For a firm that raised over $800 million in equity and subsidies, hailed as a pioneer of direct air capture, the numbers are sobering. But they are not surprising. They are merely the inevitable result of colliding hopeful techno-optimism with the brutal constraints of physics, economics, and scale.
Barnard then revisits the hyperbole that surrounds so many government-enabled projects.
DAC has always promised a seductive narrative: the ability to suck carbon out of the sky, store it underground, and buy ourselves a climate mulligan. It promised to clean up after fossil fuels without requiring too many lifestyle changes. It was a technology that said yes — to oil companies, to airlines, to governments slow-walking their emissions policies….
Private sector greenwashing was instrumental.
Big names like Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify lined up to buy carbon removal credits at $600 a ton or more. Government agencies began pouring in cash. The US 45Q tax credit was sweetened to $180 per ton. Europe and Japan set aside funds. And dozens of startups bloomed. But beneath the marketing sheen, the physics was never on DAC’s side.
‘Thermodynamic Slog‘
“Removing CO₂ from ambient air is a thermodynamic slog,” continues Barnard. “The concentration is a measly 0.04% — less than one molecule in 2,500.” Enter the complications and cost:
Capturing it means moving vast volumes of air across chemically active surfaces, then applying heat, vacuum, or electric fields to regenerate the sorbents. The most mature systems, like Climeworks’ solid sorbent modules or Carbon Engineering’s hydroxide-calcination loop, require on the order of 2,000 to 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per ton of CO₂. Even newer concepts that promise electrochemical capture still hover around 700 to 1,000 kWh per ton. And that’s just to capture it. Compressing, transporting, and injecting it underground adds another layer of complexity and cost.
Barnard has done the calculations.
Back in 2019, I analyzed Carbon Engineering’s system in detail and concluded that it wasn’t ready for prime time. The energy requirements were steep, the system architecture was complex, and the economic case relied heavily on theoretical scale and generous subsidies.
Fast forward to today, and those conclusions still hold. Carbon Engineering’s Squamish pilot captured a few hundred tons over several years. Its first commercial plant, Stratos in Texas, is still under construction. Occidental Petroleum acquired the company in 2023 not because it had a viable climate solution, but because it had a narrative that could buy time for oil and gas. Stratos, too, will run on natural gas. The captured CO₂ will be injected underground and earn 45Q credits, while Occidental continues to sell hydrocarbons. This isn’t carbon removal. It’s corporate theater wrapped in a green ribbon.
Barnard documents the energy-intensive, carbon-intensive processes involved with the leading technologies (Climeworks; Carbon Engineering).
Why the Futility?
Why is there support for a boondoggle-in-progress that few really like? It is magical thinking, a “justification tool”.
Direct air capture, like the broader class of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, has been used less as a mitigation tool and more as a justification tool. Capture projects at the smokestack were supposed to save coal. They didn’t. DAC was supposed to save aviation. It isn’t.
Now it’s being positioned as the backstop for net-zero oil and gas production, a way to square the carbon ledger while the meter keeps running. The problem is that the math never adds up. To remove even one gigaton of CO₂ annually — the lower end of what IPCC pathways suggest we might need by mid-century — we would need thousands of DAC plants the size of the one Climeworks can’t get to work. That would require hundreds of terawatt-hours of energy annually, roughly equivalent to doubling the electricity use of a mid-sized industrial nation.
The Futile Crusade
“Meanwhile, global CO₂ emissions are still hovering around 40 billion tons per year,” Barnard allows.
DAC, across all companies, all technologies, and all years combined, has removed less than 20,000 tons to date. That’s 0.00005% of annual global emissions. It is, for all intents and purposes, noise. And it’s not getting better fast enough to matter. Mammoth’s 105 tons aren’t just a small number — they’re a warning. The technology isn’t scaling. It isn’t stabilizing. And it isn’t getting cheaper at the pace its proponents claim. The laws of thermodynamics are not falling into line. They’re enforcing a cost floor.
The economics are even more dismal. Climeworks’ removal credits have sold for between $600 and $1,000 per ton. Carbon Engineering’s contracts are rumored to be in the $400 range. Heirloom, another promising startup using carbonate looping, hasn’t released cost data, but is operating at similarly high levels. All are subsidized. Without the 45Q credit, few if any would be viable. As a reminder, the fossil fuel and tax cuts for billionaires Republican House bill working its way through Congress cuts IRA incentives for a raft of technologies, but leaves 45Q for carbon capture alone.
Eco-Mirage
Climate activists do not like direct air capture or carbon capture and sequestration more generally. Barnard gives the reasons why.
And yet, policy continues to encourage this fantasy. Climate plans, particularly from oil and gas states, are now riddled with assumptions about large-scale engineered removals beginning in the 2030s. It’s climate budgeting with monopoly money. It postpones the hard choices. It allows emissions to continue today in exchange for a speculative cleanup later.
Even when DAC does remove carbon, permanence is no guarantee. Some companies are experimenting with CO₂ utilization — turning it into synthetic fuels or chemicals. That’s fine if your goal is to recycle carbon. But it’s not removal. It’s delay. Others are pairing DAC with enhanced oil recovery, which is neither climate-aligned nor economically transparent. Only a handful of firms, like Charm Industrial with its bio-oil injection strategy, are actually delivering meaningful volumes of removed and stored carbon. And even Charm is still in the thousands of tons per year — not remotely near what’s needed at scale.
Conclusion
So where does this leave this modern day equivalent of synthetic fuels? “At best,” Barnard concludes, DAC is “a very niche technology with specific use cases:
legacy cleanup in overshoot scenarios after 2050, support for incredibly-expensive-to-decarbonize sectors …. But as a pillar of global decarbonization strategy, it is a fantasy. It’s climate alchemy: an expensive, energy-intensive attempt to undo what never needed to be done in the first place. Every ton of carbon avoided today is worth exponentially more than one captured tomorrow. And yet policy, funding, and media narratives continue to bet on the latter.
He continues as a climate activist who does not realize that false solutions and waste are the flip side of the anti-CO2 coin.
We’ve been here before. Carbon capture was supposed to save coal. It didn’t. DAC is supposed to save oil. It won’t. What will save us is electrification, efficiency, and prevention…. Every watt of clean electricity deployed today reduces the need for exotic techno-fixes tomorrow. Every avoided ton of CO₂ is one we don’t have to chase through the sky with a billion-dollar machine and a bag of subsidies.
To his credit, he is ready to pull the plug on a politically correct, economically/environmentally incorrect technology.
Climeworks’ 105-ton year should be a turning point. Not just for one company, but for an entire class of false solutions. If DAC ever works at scale, it will be as a backup — not as a plan. Until then, we need to stop pretending we can suck our way out of this problem. We need to stop lighting carbon on fire. Because that’s the only removal that truly works.
Better yet, with CO2 mitigation policies and technologies failing, it is time to reverse course on the whole climate crusade, redirecting resources toward adaptation to extreme weather (from any cause). Thirty-five years of misdirection and waste is enough.
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Nobody ever went broke overestimating the ignorance and gullibility of experts.
Part of marketing is to make people feel better about the products they use. Since those companies are full of people with irrational, uninformed fears of climate disaster, this also makes those people feel better about themselves. “We’re not destroying the planet with our massive fossil fuel energy consuming data centers, we’re saving the planet.
The majority of marketing is an attempt to persuade consumers to believe things that aren’t true.
Always a new scam, huh? remember what your Momma said-“If it seems too good to be true, then it’s not”. There’s very, very seldom a new way to steal money; a bit of paint or a catchy slogan will do and the suckers line right up …never fails.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
It’s all about who pockets the subsidies.
In the April 11, 2023 edition of the Wall Street Journal, an article by Benoit Morenne described a plan by Occidental Petroleum to extract massive amounts of CO2 out of the air. Occidental is spending more than $1 billion to build the first of a planned fleet of plants. The plant will remove 500,000 metric tons of CO2 from the air per year. Occidental intends to build up to 135 more of these plants by the year 2035. Occidental claims that its initial cost to remove a metric tonne of CO2 would be between $400 and $500. Using $400 a metric ton, the total cost by 2035 would be $2,400,000,000, excluding possible cost reductions due to efficiencies of scale, for removing 810,000,000 metric tons of CO2. Tax incentives will subsidize 45% of the initial costs, thanks to Bidens’ climate package that was signed into law last year.
Consider how this plan will cut global CO2 levels from now to the year 2035. Assume that all 135 plants are on line and operating today. By 2035, these plants will have removed 810,000,000 metric tons of CO2. The atmosphere weighs 5,500,000,000,000,000 (5.5 quadrillion) metric tons. 810,000,000 metric tons of removed CO2 is 0.0000147% of the atmosphere. CO2 currently constitutes about 0.04 % of the atmosphere. Removing 0.0000147 % of CO2 would reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to 0.03999%, which when rounded to two decimal places yields 0.04%. Ergo, there will be no significant percentage reduction in CO2 levels.
Occidental expects to generate between $400 and $630 in revenue per metric ton, which includes a $180 per metric ton tax credit. So, even without the tax credits, Occidental expects to earn between $220 and $450 a metric ton. It should be noted that cost estimates for untested new technologies tend to escalate. Occidental’s projections of costs and potential revenues may be a bit too rosy in my opinion. Time will tell.
At 2.4 billion dollars, Occidental’s project may or may not be a technical or financial success. But the anticipated removal of 810,000,000 metric tons of CO2 by 2035 from the atmosphere will not measurably change the global percentage of atmospheric CO2.
Give Trump a couple more months and those Biden Era Tax Incentives will likely vanish before they ever see the light of day
Give the US Congress a few more late night committee sessions and they’ll all be back with new names and new lies to justify them.
Unfortunately I can’t deny that as a probability
There is also no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. There is plenty of scientific rationale to supprot the conclusion that the clomate sensivity of CO2 is effectively zero. The AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science. Hence spending money to remove CO2 from our atmosphere is just a big waste of funds.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
“CO2 Does Cause Not Warming Of Air!
Shown in the chart (See below) is a plot of temperatures at the Furnace Creek weather station in Death Valley from 1922 to 2001. In 1922 the concentration of CO2 in dry air was
ca 303 ppmv (0.59 g of CO2/cu. m.) and by 2001, it had increased to ca. 371 ppmv (0.73 g
of CO2/cu. m.), but there was no corresponding significant increase in the air temperature at this remote desert. The reasons there was no increase in air temperature at this arid desert are quite simple: There is too little CO2 in the air to absorb out-going long wave IR radiation from the desert surface to cause warming of the air and very low constant specific humidity.
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry is 428 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has a mass of 1.29 kg and contains a mere 0.841 g of CO2, a 15% increase since 2001. In air at 70 deg. F and with 70% RH, the concentration of H2O is 14,730 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains 11.3 g of H2O, 0.73 g of CO2 and has mass of 1.20 kg. To the first approximation and all things being equal, the amount of the greenhouse effect (GHE) for H2O is given by:
GHE for H2O = moles H2O/moles H2O + moles CO2 = 0.63/0.63+0.019=0.97 or 97%
This calculation assumes that a molecule of CO2 and a molecule of CO2 absorb about the same amount of long wave IR radiation. Actually, H2O absorbs more IR light than CO2.
The reason the concentration of CO2 in air is so low is that most all of it is absorbed by the oceans. This is Mother Nature’s DAC.
The chemical engineers at the DAC companies must be aware of the above empirical temperature data and calculations, yet they proceeded to design and build the DAC plants.
The reason is that they are capturing generous subsidies from governments and funds from clueless investors.
NB: The temperature chart of Death Valley was obtained from the late John Daly’s website:
“Still Waiting For Greenhouse” available at: http://www.john-daly.com. From the home page, scroll down to the end and click on: “Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map” click on region or country (e.g., Australia) to access the temperature charts from over 200 weather stations that showed no warming up to 2002.
PS: If you click on the chart, it will expand and become clear. Click on the “X” to return to text.
And today the CO2 per Mauna Loa is 429.64 and Furnace Creek is still unchanged at between 118°F and 130°F with 128°F on July 16 2023
Where did you obtain the recent temperature data for Death Valley? Does the data base have Tmax, Tmin, Tavg and RH values for everyday of year from 1912 to 2024?
128 deg F is 53.5 deg C. which is considerable higher than any of the summer values in the chart. Is the value for July 16, 2023 a one day “spike” of temperature? Does data base have record of any moves of the weather station and any adjustments to the temperature data?
I would like to complete the plot of the average annual temperature. My idea is to use this data to convince California Gov. Gavin N. that CO2 does not global warming, as claimed by the IPCC, before he wrecks the economy of the state.
Look what this CO2 global warming nonsense has done to the economies of the UK, Germany, and Australia, for example.
Check out the temperature chart for Brisbane. The temperature plots are fairly flat.
BTW: How do you make the superscript degree symbol?
Quick Google search for … Furnace Creek Temperature … returned the figure though it’s still only 2023. Couldn’t find a 2024 figure though both should be available
Thanks for the tip. I’ll try MS Bing. You should do search on
USC00042319. This plot does not look like the plot from John Daly’s chart.
I have been hoping that the EPA would have rescinded the CO2 endangerment by now. When this occurs, this whole green scam will collapse overnight.
Now THAT would be a HUGE step in the right direction
There is also plenty of scientific rationale to support the conclusion that the climate sensivity of CO2 is effectively zero. Besides the AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science. H2O and CO2, the promary greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere act as net coolants helping to move heat energy up into the atmosphere and then radiate it out to space. Adding CO2 or H2O to the atmosphere lowers the lapse rate in the troposphere which cools the surface of the Earth This is all a matter of science..
I can help here. No one has shown that there is a need for Net Zero. Stop making it policy. Wind, solar, hydrogen and storage don’t work stop wasting our time money and resources on them. Hydro, fossil fuel and nuclear do work. Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. Remove all wind and solar from the grid. Withdraw all mandates supporting wind, solar and Net Zero.
Good luck with that! The ELITES are far too invested to ever admit it was all a scam, and most of them are rich on the pickings. Essentially the whole lot is a massive fraud operation at Public expense. Removing CO2 is thermodynamically ridiculous, and technically pretty much impossible anyway, except on a tiny lab scale with a non-recyclable reaction and lots of energy. As an aside, the reason why it is so difficult is the high water vapour concentration, so a plant in Death Valley might help, but the aircon requirements of the workers would probably cancel out any increase in efficiency!
The RH in Death Valley is currently 5% Can’t use Death Valley since it is a nat. park.
I don’t care much for elites, I care even less what they think.
I always prefer to qualify it – I don’t care about the self-appointed “elites.”
There’s actually nothing “elite” about them, based on how monumentally stupid their ideas are.
Yes, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. There is plenty of scientific rational to suport the conclusion that the climate sensivity of CO2 is effectively zero. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is of no benefit.
Even simple, first pass, order of magnitude math and economics knock the whole concept of capture of CO2. There is a small exception, which is .where a market exists, such as oil reservoir pressurisation and making Coca-Cola.
If the biggest relevant companies on the globe got that wrong, should we trust their other work? Microsoft, Occidental, Climeworks are mentioned above. No Are we seeing little more than corporate greed, a readiness to jump on any project that is rich for subsidy extraction?
The biggest fail has to be worn by those bureaucrats who also failed to see failure, then offered incentives. Perhaps part of the solution is to take people out of the bureaucracy of crazy ideas for training and employment in industry that has accountability, responsibility, promotion through work well done, expansion from self-generated profits, free enterprise, etc
Geoff S
Slightly impractical but fair solution would be to create anchored floating islands equal to the global urbanized area (appx 3% of total global land area (57M sq mi) so about 1.7M sq mi) and cover them with natures CO2 scrubbers…Trees.
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system.
I really like this thing where they keep calling it carbon. Let’s adopt that term until it is pervasive.
Then we can form a new company to go get government funding on the premise that we’ve figured out how to get rid of the carbon. We’re going to fuse it with oxygen to make it a non-flammable, odorless, colorless gas that is stable under heat and pressure, very nearly inert.
We will then propose a small fee to have our technology installed in every ICE vehicle produced. The automobile industry will line up to pay the fee to avoid carbon taxes.
I say this tongue in cheek, but then wonder. If someone can get funding to produce machines that generate far more CO2 to run that they can possibly extract from the atmosphere… why not?
It could be “Carbon Capture” … IF … they released the associated O2 back to atmosphere
Why do we burn carbon in the first place? The energy equation is massively biased to fossil fuels being burnt. Un-burning them is a stupid concept unless one has limitless energy from say nuclear. Now there is a good new idea! I must Patent that at once!
/sarc
We don’t actually burn carbon, but rather, carbon compounds. Pure carbon can only burn via nuclear fusion.
Coal is carbon. Hard coal such as anthracite is about 95% carbon and is converted coke for smelting iron ore. Soft coals are about 60-80% carbon and are used thermal power plants.
Graphite is 100% carbon and is very difficult to burn.
Yes, try burning a diamond!
Anthracite, yes, diamond, no.
Nuclear…gets my plus one!
David – I like where you’re going. Just a little more than ten years ago Lake Forest, California (where I lived at the time) almost passed a law banning DHMO. A study showed it was a major contributor to childhood suffocation, although adults died from it also. A colorless, odorless compound that caused corrosion as well as other property damage. If only one child’s life was saved it would be worth the ban.
Someone figured it out just before it came up for a city council floor vote.
Chuckle…
As with all geoengineering schemes and scams, DAC is the modern-day equivalent of tilting at windmills. It is foolish, pointless and dangerous all at the same time.
Here’s how to handle fears of climate change: Adapt. Whatever happens, adapt. Whatever the reason, adapt. We can’t control the weather and we sure as shootin’ can’t control the climate. So learn to roll with the punches.
The best way to prepare for climate change is to create a robust economy. Prosperous nations have the wealth to adapt. Poorer nations will suffer more.
105 tonnes of “captured” CO² in one year is 105,000 kg per year. The average tree can absorb 25 kg of CO² per year. So, this contraption can be replaced by 4,200 trees. Those trees will, of course, provide other benefits.
Plant a whole lot of fruit trees.
But there is no reason to be removitn CO2 from our atmosphere in the first place. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. There is plenty of scientific rational to support the conclusion that the climate sendivity of CO2 is effectively zero. The AGW hypotheis has been faslified by science.
Idiocy at its finest.
Natural gas flaring emitted something like 380 million tons of CO2 in 2023 alone.
I have created a tech that enables conversion of natural gas to oil – if even fraction of the flaring is redirected to oil production, that would reduce carbon emissions by more than all of the carbon capture, solar PV installs and wind installs for probably a decade per year of flaring reduction just by itself.
Flare gas from oil wells usually contains varying amounts of H2S, CH3SH, CH3SCH3 and higher alkyl thiols, sulfides, disulfides. These compounds are foul-smelling and poisonous. They are oxidized to CO2, H2O and SO2.
There is no “crisis.”
We need no “cleaup” of CO2 aka plant food.
We don’t need to control “emissions” because CO2 is *NOT* a “problem.”
The only way to stop using coal, oil and gas is to adopt Stone Age living conditions. Which would be a lot worse (for the few that would survive) than the purely imaginary effects of “emissions” of harmless and in fact net-beneficial CO2.
Deploy the Mega-maid!
Carbon capture utilization and sequestration (CCUS) is the most energetically wasteful concept ever promoted. There is nothing of value in the idea.
Imagine the escape from a salt dome of several billion tons of CO2 and the resulting asphyxiation of a half a state.
We are assured such an event could and would never happen.
Not only that, but all of the energy for such “energy intensive” AND pointless “processes” will inevitably come, whether directly or indirectly, from fossil fuels.
Another circle jerk, just like wind, solar, and hydrogen.
When ideas so moronic are actually built, not once but a number of times, it proves the elite are totally in charge and have learned nothing. The Iceland project is particularly egregious.
There is also no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. Mankind does not even know what the optimal climate actually is let alone how to achieve it.
The reality is there there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. There is plenty of scientific rational to support the concludion that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. The AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science. Hence there is no possible benefit to the efforts to remove CO2 from out atmosphere. This effort has been a big waste of funds.