Most policies designed to reduce carbon emissions have focused on reducing reliance on fossil fuels, primarily through state and federal mandates, including requirements to increase reliance on wind and solar power, replace oil and gas furnaces and water heaters with electric heat pumps, and force automobile manufacturers to sell electric vehicles that most consumers don’t want. These mandate “sticks” have all been accompanied by subsidy “carrots,” paid for by taxpayers and ratepayers.
Many of the subsidies were increased under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. But the largest subsidy of all was entirely new: A payment of up to $180 per metric ton to capture carbon dioxide, literally out of thin air, and thereby mitigate climate change by reducing the atmospheric concentration of CO2. The carbon dioxide captured by Direct Air Capture (DAC) could then be reused, for example, in enhanced oil recovery, or permanently buried underground.
A U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report issued at the end of the Biden Administration estimated that the U.S. would need to remove between 100 million metric tons and 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide using Direct Air Capture technology to address climate change.
In essence, DAC involves large fans that draw outdoor air through liquid or solid media that capture CO2, remove it via chemical processes, and then compress it for transport and either use or sequester it. There are several dozen small DAC facilities in operation, mostly in Europe. The goal of DAC advocates is to build large-scale facilities, each capable of extracting 1 million metric tons of CO2 each year. Two companies, ClimeWorks and Carbon Engineering, have commercialized different technologies for DAC. Currently, the only large-scale facility is under construction by Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin of Texas. That facility, called Stratos, is designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually, which will be injected into the company’s oil wells to enhance crude oil production.
But as I explain in my new report, these technologies, and all potential DAC technologies, have an Achilles Heel: The laws of thermodynamics. Regardless of the technology employed, extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere is inherently energy-intensive.
Because burning fossil fuels to power DAC facilities would reduce, or even negate, the carbon-reduction goal, DAC technologies have focused on using electricity generated from zero-emissions sources.
For example, the theoretical minimum of energy needed to meet a one billion metric ton objective would require the equivalent of 10% of all electricity generated in the U.S. in 2024. The practical energy required would be at least 30%, as no technology can be 100% efficient. Producing that much electricity would require building hundreds of new nuclear plants. If wind and solar power were relied on, it would require an area larger than the state of Florida, and hundreds of thousands of megawatts of battery storage facilities to compensate for wind’s and solar’s inherent intermittency. The cost to build the required generating capacity alone would be trillions of dollars. Building additional transmission lines and the DAC facilities themselves would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more. In total, the cost is likely to be over $400 per metric ton of CO2 removed. That’s far higher than even the most recent estimates of the social cost of carbon, which supposedly measures the damages to the climate from each additional ton of CO2 emitted.
Despite the huge energy requirements, the impacts on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperatures would be minuscule. The current atmospheric CO2 concentration is approximately 425 parts per million (ppm). Removing one billion metric tons of CO2 would reduce the concentration by only 1/10 of 1 ppm and, based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s climate sensitivity estimates, by 0.003 °C. That’s about 40 times less than the assumed margin of error in measuring global temperatures. Even if billions of metric tons of CO2 were captured and sequestered annually, the impact on world temperatures by the year 2100 would be too small to have any noticeable impact on the climate.
Finally, storing CO2 underground poses environmental and health risks because it could escape, as in Cameroon in the 1980s, when Lake Nyos “burped” several hundred thousand tons of CO2, leading to the deaths of 1,700 people and thousands of cattle. It would be unreasonable to assume that, after sequestering billions of tonnes of CO2 underground, similar events could not take place.
Taken together, these physical, economic, and environmental realities mean that DAC is a technology whose time will never come.
Jonathan Lesser is a Senior Fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics. His report, “A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Using Direct Air Capture to Remove Atmospheric Carbon,” was just published.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Next up: Oxygen!
In the end It eventually is a breathing tax .
Why do I have to pay a tax on that which comes from stolen land?
Easy to missunderstand your comment,
but Ill try as it does not matter who ends up after a process of “redestribution”.
There is always a bigger thief
Might makes Right. The End justifies the Means.
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
-Leon Trotsky
O2 first? Not H2O?
How contrarian of you! 🙂
If I worked for the Carbon Management department, I’d be looking for a job.
explain why we want less plant food?
Because we love The Planet.
Duuuuh.
Why is the natural CO2 sink, precipitation of calcium or magnesium carbonate in warm shallow seas to form limestone, not enhanced as a sequestration tool? Most CO2 is dissolved in the oceans as mineral bi-carbonate ions. These are much more stable in cold water than in warm water. Additionally, the amount of alkaline earth minerals, primarily calcium and magnesium ions, dissolved in sea water is nearly 8x the amount of bicarbonate ions. When warmed or in the presence of certain polyps, the alkaline earth bicarbonates can decompose to CO2 and calcium or magnesium carbonate, effectively sequestering half the CO2 from the alkaline earth bicarbonates. If you look at the limestone vertical walls of the Grand Canyon that formed hundreds of millions of years ago, this is clearly a one-way trip with respect to sequestering CO2 unless you apply a substantial amount of heat as is done when making Portland cement clinker.
I’ve often noted that the growth of coral atolls that has been observed over the last 20 years rather than their disappearance under the waves by sea level rise is an indicator for rising global temperatures via mineral alkali carbonate sequestration. Can these natural processes be enhanced to increase the rate of sequestration?
I realize there may be a good case for not sequestering CO2 at all, but the natural processes always made much more sense than some of the engineering solutions people have come up with.
If the Biden Administration estimated between 100 million and 2 billion then they are saying that they have no idea how much CO2 needs to be removed. They are also saying that they have no idea how much influence CO2 has on changes in average weather and thus climate.
It’s not about climate or CO2 for these people as they admit clearly that they have no idea on any of this. It’s about creating the impression that they do so that they and their large donors can continue to fleece the Treasury, and by extension fleece the general public.
Most policies designed to reduce carbon emissions have…
…yet to discover the untapped potential of the carbonated drink.
Consider the range, from champagne, prosecco, cider through to lagers and beers through to coca cola and soft drinks in general. Think how many are being opened or poured right now, and those bubbles are rising… they should be taxed…
Just to be clear, that was in jest.
and what about termites’ farts?
In addition to the emission of CO2, termites emit copious amounts of CH4. No need to worry. Jet planes with their big jet engines are flying incinerators.
If only they could DAC the Stupid, now that would actually be helpful. Of course, it would make the anti-CO2 ideology vanish, but que sera sera.
Trees sequester CO2 and turn it into useful wood products. But, the crazies want to lock up the forests to do nothing but capture CO2 (look up “proforestation”). Wood products is sinful to them. Meanwhile, the same crazies whine about a housing shortage. A well managed forest will sequester more than an unmanaged forest. And the wood products will help with the housing shortage.
BC plants ca. 200 million trees ever year. Since 1930 BC has planted over 10 billion trees.
Wood is sinful to them unless it is pellets to produce “Carbon Neutral” electricity.
Actually, most enviros in the US northeast utterly detest the use of wood as energy. I’ve been battling them for years. They have prevented the development of a woody biomass/pellet industry in New England. They claim- if you cut a tree and burn it – it’ll take several decades for the environment to recover that CO2, forgetting that the rest of the forest is doing that. The same enviros hate the big pellet industry down in Dixie- whether the pellets are shipped to DRAX or used in America. What they really hate of course is any trees being cut. As the decades roll by they use one excuse or another. Of course they all live in wood homes, have wood furniture and lots of paper products.
Some wood products firms will argue that burning wood is carbon neutral. It is if coming from a well managed forest. It won’t if not coming from such a forest. But, then again, we don’t worry about carbon neutrality one way or the other.
For roughly a hundred billion dollars annually, solar geoengineering using inert reflective particles as the blocking media could reduce the earth’s global mean temperature by 2C or more in the space of five years or less — if one is willing to accept the considerable risk of collateral damage such as worldwide crop failures.
In addition to the risk of unwanted collateral damage, the other major problem with solar geoengineering is that it doesn’t spread enough money around to enough of the right people to keep the climate industrial complex busy selling climate solutions to grifter politicians and to zero emission energy businessmen.
Wait, I’ve got it! If we just drop a nuke into an active volcano or two every so often causing a gigantic eruption, it would inject massive quantities of SO2 into the atmosphere, thus cooling the planet down. Problem solved!
Operation Nukatoa!
The caldera in Yellowstone park for example… a super volcano. Then it’s lights out
for almost everyone.
Yes, too close for comfort. They all are.
Ah, but think of the virtue signalling!
1. More rain is not a problem.
2. Warmer weather is not a problem.
3. More arable land is not a problem.
4. Longer growing seasons is not a problem.
5. CO2 greening of the earth is not a problem.
6 Schemes to sequester CO2 are without merit.
7. There isn’t any Climate Crisis.
Add:
8. CO2 in soda pop, beer, and French champagne is not a problem.
Amendment 28
Congress shall make no law to regulate,
tax, sequester or license atmospheric
carbon dioxide.
The right of the people to freely emit
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from
any source, from any place at any time
in any amount shall not be interfered with.
Nah. Invites Amendment 29
Congress shall make no law to regulate,
tax, sequester or license unicorns.
The right of the people to freely emit
unicorns into the atmosphere from
any source, from any place at any time
in any amount shall not be interfered with.
“Unicorns” would be silly, but I use it as a placeholder for any compound.
“There are over 177 million registered unique organic and inorganic chemical substances, with the total number of theoretical compounds estimated to be as high as (10^60).”
Problem, probably TMI: Sometimes the CO2 in soda pop makes me “farty”.
8 billion people exhaling 2 lb. of CO2 per day, each, is not a problem.
The “climate crisis” is made for the sycophants of regulators, politicians, scientists, NGOs, media, etc that gain power and money from manufacturing crises.
Trillions of dollars in their pockets….
That is the crisis.
And yet another madness …
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/in-depth/how-uk-startup-rivan-is-mining-methane-from-the-sky
See comment 2
These wazucks don’t even understand basic physics or maths, but they know how to scam grants!!
Why they just did not implement the MIT system that ran air (with CO2) across a catalyst that under direct sunlight created methane?
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c00174
This is not the original article I stumbled on some years back.
Why not go all the way and separate the carbon from the oxygen – releasing the oxygen to the air for us to breathe (and help fires burn better) and then bury the carbon (artificial coal?) or use it instead of mining new coal? Sounds OK on paper – before you get into the thermodynamic calculations…..
Imagine the cost of fire insurance in the Oxygen exhaust of such a facility.
That pesky thermodynamics, always getting in the way.
One thing that isn’t talked about very much: Photosynthesis on Earth is currently running under CO2 limiting conditions. The amount of sunlight rarely plays a role. Any increase in CO2 leads to direct increases of plant growth and consumption of CO2. The observed greening of Earth is a direct cause of that.
At what point do we get green oceans? Continent-sized kelp forests?
Bonkers
Pure Scam .
Pure Scam, from Pure Scum.
The whole concept of carbon capture is predicated on the assumption that CO2 is a pollutant. The recission of the endangerment finding should end any government money for these projects and no one is dumb enough to spend their own money on any of this nonsense.
ALL policies designed to reduce carbon emissions have had zero effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. CO2 has continued to rise globally regardless of all mitigation efforts.
The only way to reduce human CO2 emissions is to get rid of humans. I’ve yet to hear this solution offered as a viable one by those who keep clamoring for its reduction.
There is no need to artificially remove CO2 from the atmosphere, the whole idea is absurd.
I guess it is reasonable to say that plants consume CO2 (and H20) to produce sugars via photosynthesis.
But I dislike the “plant food” description. When I think of food I have a choice of many different foods. Plants don’t. For them it is CO2 + H20 and sunlight or nothing.
There must be a better description than “plant food” for the reactants in photosynthesis.
In strict redox terms, CO2 is the oxidizer in photosynthesis while H20 is the reducer; therefore, water is more analogous to “food” in the case of plants, if by food we mean the substance that gets oxidized and provides energy. But CO2 also acts as the carbon source for plants, and plants increase their bulk mainly through the uptake of atmospheric CO2, so CO2 is also somewhat analogous to the role that protein plays in animals, which is probably why the moniker stuck.
However, since the ultimate source of metabolic energy in plants is not CO2 but light, it would be even more accurate to say that plants “breath” light, “eat” water, and “live in” CO2 the same way that a nautilus lives in its shell, because the great bulk of the tree consists of dead cellulose, not metabolically active organic molecules. The tree is actually the historically informed scaffolding for a thin membrane of living material, and plants live in a sea of carbon dioxide the same way that corals and oysters live in a sea of dissolved calcium and carbonate ions, and build themselves therefrom.
I guess it is reasonable to say that plants consume CO2 (and H20) via photosynthesis.
But I dislike the “plant food” description. When I think of food I have a choice of many different foods. Plants don’t. For them it is CO2 + H20 and sunlight or nothing.
There must be a better description than “plant food” for the reactants in photosynthesis.
the complete idiocy of the science cult makes incan peasants look like science geniuses ! they were so efficient it only cost a dozen or so beating human hearts to bring back the sun and they were 100% successful !
Learned this much earlier in life – and now surprised that the Internet has not “disappeared” the stat.
“How many did Aztecs sacrifice per day?
One sacrifice every 10 minutes means 144 per day, 4,320 per month and 51,840 per year.”
Pre-Columbian South/Central America was a f—— bloodbath.
Well, it’s one way of getting to ‘Net Zero’; don’t tell mad Ed Miliband, he’ll go to any lengths to try & achieve impossible goals (:-((
I recall a while back an elected US Congressman proposed making roofs and roads white and mandating white cars to combat global warming.
Perhaps the same or another stated clearly that what we had to do was get all of the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
At the time I wondered aloud if he liked to eat.
The number one deficiency is there is no definition of the optimum climate, stated in metrics that are measurable by anyone.
We do not know if we are approaching the climate optimum or have departed from it.
An analysis of one alternative.
Primary assumption: Mother Nature or Gaia is real, wise, intelligent, and loving.
Of course she occasionally spanks humans, but that is just to get them to pay attention.
Is it not possible that such a kind and loving entity would recognize that the human population growth needed more CO2 to fuel the food pyramid? And if true, then perhaps it is Gaia herself, not humans, that is causing the slow increase in atmospheric CO2.
Try to disprove that conjecture by formulating and conducting null hypotheses.
Cheers.