In the 1980s it cost 100000 dollars to launch a kg low Earth orbit, today it's 1000. [1]
In the 1970s solar cells cost 100 USD/Watt, today 0.2 USD/Watt. [2]
These napkin calculations are fairly meaningless on those time scales with emerging technologies, 30 years is a long time. In fact they don't even hold for this year. They finished delivering 150 tons in January of this year and the rest in march so that'd be 300 tons in 3 months.
>These napkin calculations are fairly meaningless on those time scales with emerging technologies
Not all technologies are subject to the same scaling laws and it is foolish to act as if they are. Carbon removal won't get 1000 times cheaper, because thermodynamics.
I don't find much value in these kind of out of hand dismissals.
Do you have industry knowledge or do you at least care to expand? The experts certainly seem to think they'll be able to get to scale, I think they'll be devastated to have to scrap it all and fire their teams of experts "because thermodynamics".
Carbon dioxide has a low concentration in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is really big, and diffusion is not a particularly fast process.
Adding to that, industrial processes tend to be big and heavy, and also take fossils fuels to make. Even the outputs of these processes are measured in tonnes of carbon
No less, whatever format you're storing the carbon in will be very energy dense, either via compression, or by chemically removing the oxygens.
So, there's limits to how quickly your apparatus can interact with new carbon molecules, on moving it to new carbon molecules, and on making sure the products of you apparatus stay sequestered.
If they're thinking they can scale, it's by setting up on top of carbon emitters, but doing that is net carbon positive(some will leak, and carbon emitters will continue to scale up), rather than negative
It won't get 1000x cheaper in terms of energy inputs, no. There are many different things you could do to make it economically 1000x cheaper, though. Redefine the US dollar in units of sequestered carbon, for instance. Self-replicating carbon sequestration units, if you like science fiction. Etc etc
Technically you need someone to cut the tree down, turn it into a stable form of carbon (say biochar), and bury it. Otherwise most (all?) of the carbon captured will be released fairly quickly after the tree dies.
Not all technologies are subject to the same scaling laws and it is foolish to act as if they are. Carbon removal won't get 1000 times cheaper, because thermodynamics.