Will There Be Enough Power to Remove Carbon From the Sky? | The direct air capture industry has ambitious plans to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it’s vying for limited renewable power
Will There Be Enough Power to Remove Carbon From the Sky? | The direct air capture industry has ambitious plans to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it’s vying for limited renewable power
Title & subtitle from the article version of this newsletter
You're viewing a single thread.
When power is finite and your competitors are crypto and AI farms
Carbon capture was always a scam, so the answer is no.
yeah I have never seen anything that could seem to claim greater co2 capture than the co2 spent for the power. It always relies on, whelp if we have unlimited clean power. Which of course if we had the reduction down to zero co2 emissions would be the first big thing. I highly doubt this will ever be worth it unless we can get down to zero emissions due to some super power source.
solar is gonna get us pretty damn close to unlimited clean power for at least part of the day
It will if the energy from solar can be used to produce all the solar and battery and such that we use in the process. The mining, the smelting, the shipping around, everything. As far as I know we are not very close to that yet but one thing that got me very hopeful was an eletric smelter which I was not sure if it was going to be feasible. I have not heard of thos titanic minining rigs running on electric yet though.
Well it's not meant to be the solution, but part of the net zero mix and to deal with unavoidable and historic emissions, once all other venues have been doing their part, lowering emissions and green energy and renewable and whatnot, to develop the technology to mop up the remaining CO2. But at the current trajectory its akin to arranging deck chairs on the titanic.
It just pure is worse to do if it produces more carbon than it captures and if we are producing any power that produces carbon it will be the case as long as we are getting any electricity from sources that produce carbon even if its using clean electricity as it would be better for it to offset it and at the least it would be better to just make more batteries or such to capture it and use elsewhere. It literally is useless unless we are not producing any electricity that puts out greenhouse gases and further have excess to use for carbon capture.