this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
101 points (92.4% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5392 readers
360 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's lots of industrial uses for CO2 -- this style of DAC plant can be viewed as a green producer. That said, it's really easy to outpace industrial demands and we can expect any facility like this will need to be sequestering most of their "production". It's hard to overstate how much excess CO2 there is in the atmosphere compared to the sum total of all industrial carbon dioxide needs. Since CO2 is thermodynamicly very stable, splitting it up to get pure carbon would be quite inefficient.
It's part of the business model of every single DAC project pretty much without exception. Any way you can make back a bit of money selling that CO2 rather than sequestering it is an opportunity to offset costs. And no matter what you think of market economics, they're very effective at reducing costs.
One of the most interesting uses is with projects like e.g. CarbonCure, where they dope cement production with CO2 which has known effects to strengthen (or at least not weaken) concrete. They don't produce their own CO2 for their plants and so need to align themselves with renewable CO2 production facilities (which they do Heirloom Carbon).
Big issue is they it's hard to compete with fossil-based CO2 production. So the next step once tech like this is proven is to start regulating/banning fossil-based CO2 production.