To earn revenue, the company is selling carbon removal credits to companies paying a premium to offset their own emissions. Microsoft has already signed a deal with Heirloom to remove 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
And this is why direct air capture is a farce right now - any progress they make is literally counter acted by large corporations who will increase their carbon output because they have a contract with a company like this.
Carbon air capture technology paired with 100% clean energy can save the world from a lot of hardship in the near future, but not like this.
DigitalFrank@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Trees do it much cheaper.
jeffw@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah, I mean I think carbon capture is kinda stupid on one level. It’s like an excuse for us to not change our behavior
jasondj@ttrpg.network 11 months ago
No. Carbon neutral isn’t enough. We are going to have to go carbon neutral.
We can’t just take hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon and dump it into the atmosphere and leave it there to re-sequester itself. That’s going to take a long time to reverse enough to even buck the current trend of global warming, if we were able to just go carbon neutral today.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Don’t worry, we replaced all the forests with CarbVac™️ facilities. Ensuring a brighter tomorrow, but only if we’re the ones doing it.
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 11 months ago
You are right.
But it’s less certain.
There’s a decent amount of carbon emissions associated with management of land, however, and if you want the land to continue to be optimised for carbon sequestration you’ll need to manage it and, besides, in most areas you can’t just buy land, plant some trees on and leave it - it’ll need active management to stay a forest and to comply with local regulation.
But let’s say you’re doing that and planting for carbon sequestration, then you’d probably choose something like pine (fast growing, absorbs a lot of carbon, stays green through the year so tends to prevent competition on the floor). A tree that like will absorb roughly a tonne (1000-1100 kg of carbon) in its life. Then it does and you’ll need to remove it to ensure a new tree can grow (otherwise it’ll be taken over by other species slowly).
A hectare of dense pine trees can probably hold 3000 trees (if we are being generous) so a hectare (100x100 metres of land) can hold 3000 tonnes of carbon. On average in Europe we emit about 9 tonnes of carbon per year and live for 80 years so a hectare can hold about 4 people’s worth of life time emissions.
In the U.K. you’ll end up spending about £25,000 for a hectare of woodland (give or take), but then you’ll need public liability insurance and management fees (let’s just say £20/year for for a hectare of insurance and £750/year for management of a hectare) … so let’s assume £800/year for a hectare or £200/year to manage the size of woodland required to absorb a person’s life time emissions (remember, 4 people per hectare). Now you need a trust manager who runs, permanently forevermore, to manage it all. Let’s say £40,000/year and assume that they manage 1000 people’s life time emissions (this obviously could scale down to almost zero as the scheme grew) or £40/year per person.
But don’t forget additionally: This has to be NEW woodland, so you need to buy non-woodland and then plant the woodland. Otherwise you’re not absorbing more carbon. Typical quotes for a hectare of pine planting will be about £4000.
And this cost needs paying forevermore: £6000 to buy the space for a person’s emission £4000 to plant it £250/year to manage it (insurance, management)
To deliver £250/year you’ll need an investment of 250/0.04=£6250. Let’s just say £7000 to leave some buffer for bad years and to pay for the additional carbon that’s emitted from the management. So:
£6000 to buy the space for a person’s emissions. £4000 to plant it.
£7000 to manage it forevermore.
So all in you’ll need to spend £17000 to absorb your lifetime’s worth of emissions.
Now let’s compare that to geological sequestration. Climeworks, the only publically available scheme to suck carbon out of the air and sequester it into rock, permanently, quotes £1100/ton of carbon. So to extra the 720 tones you’ll emit in your lifetime it would be £792,000.
So yeah, trees do it a LOT cheaper (2% of the cost), but it requires active management and it’s not guaranteed to be on geological scale.
And I’m not aware of a scheme that enables this to happen. Are you?
essteeyou@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Is this one of those situations like solar panels where the tech will get cheaper over time?
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I feel like you could do both? carbon capture facility underground with trees ontop and intakes poking through the soil?
famousringo@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
If you build enough solar and wind to kick fossils off the grid, they’re going to overproduce at times of peak operation. Rather than wasting that peak production, use it to process CO2.
Also, Canada’s forests burned so hard, they were a net emitter this year. I’m not sure how reliable a carbon sink trees really are as the warming gets worse…
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You need nuclear, too. There isn’t enough solar and wind manufacturing and deployment capacity for the foreseeable future to eliminate fossil use. There is no solution to climate change which does not involve significant numbers of new nuclear builds.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 11 months ago
They pull it out of the atmosphere, and release it when burned (or rotting etc.).
CoderKat@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Sure is a shame there’s so many scams related to that area. In theory, planting or protecting forests is one of the best things we can do. But in practice? A lot of organizations that claim to protect some area from industrialization are actually protecting an area that was never at risk in the first place. That is, if they didn’t exist, the forest would be unchanged. Others are only protected for short periods of time. youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY?si=56uG8zf1iAeJM31H
Discotheque@kbin.social 11 months ago
I got so confused by the title. I was thinking, bro, most plants remove carbon from the air it’s called photosynthesis wtf.