[thereisnospork]

>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.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

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".

[8note]

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

[sbierwagen]

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

[sa1]

> Self-replicating carbon sequestration units, if you like science fiction

That's just trees.

[adrianN]

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.

[sa1]

And captured back by the next generation of trees. Carbon sequestered remains stable(generally) in forests.

[comboy]

I must say I'm quite impressed with creativity of redefining US dollar as a means of making something cheaper.

[k_sze]

Also, it’s _possible_ that things got “cheaper” simply because the costs have been externalized.