[dominic_cocch]

"Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, that’s equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars).

Now Climeworks is building another facility that makes Orca seem tiny by comparison. The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With a CO₂ capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca."

A lot of negativity in this thread, oddly. This is a 10X improvement over a previous version. Another magnitude or two and this becomes incredible for the environment. Other solutions should also happen, but a problem as big as climate change should have many parallel solutions. We don't have time to put all our eggs in one basket.

[lucb1e]

> A lot of negativity in this thread, oddly.

It's better to reduce emissions than to try and capture a couple of 0.0X% of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's obvious to everyone and so everyone agrees and that gets upvoted.

In reality, good luck having cows and steel (=iron+carbon) and cement on this planet without GHG emissions. Even plane fuel (long-distance flights) is basically going to have to do carbon capture to make 'electrofuels' (or biofuels) that they then burn and put back into the atmosphere, at least with how it's currently looking.

It saddens me to see that people are rambling, and others are voting it to be the current top comment, about teratons (a unit even I hadn't heard being thrown around before) which is of course a ridiculous notion. The point of this technology is to neutralize unavoidable emissions in thirty-odd years. We can't, in thirty years, start to develop this tech and hope it works the next week.

It also allows us to put a direct price point on CO2. You pick: remove CO2 or don't emit it. A smart company will choose the cheaper option. Only a few years ago, planting trees or "preventing emissions" magic accounting was considered offsetting. This sets a new standard.

So long as it's within proportion, I really see no downsides to funding the development of this tech. The roll-out to megaton or gigaton scales, yeah we should see about that when we actually have renewable energy to spare, not when the gas, nay, coal plants are still in full operation. But for now, we're struggling to reach a few dozen kilotons economically, and that's why this is necessary work and good news.

[r00fus]

> It also allows us to put a direct price point on CO2.

The problem is that the price on this will be severely underestimated. Every year we hear our estimates of climate damage are underestimated.

Then the wildfires around the world and in the arctic started becoming to frequent to ignore.

The real problem is that the extraction industries will fight tooth & nail to not have subsidies much less additional cost - and they have won and continue to win to this day.

[lucb1e]

How can the price be underestimated if we can pay commercial providers to build more of those plants? At minimum, it will be the cost price of doing this work, which (at some minimum) is hard to argue about.

I guess you mean the underestimated impact, i.e. "cost" to society (insofar as human lives have a € value), if we don't do anything? Because that's a different discussion. I presume that lawmakers would be in agreement that we need to curb emissions, otherwise it's an entirely different conversation to be having (and flashbacks from 10-20 years ago).

[tito]

Well said. Saw in your bio that you're working on capturing carbon dioxide, can you share more?

[lucb1e]

Thank you. Sadly that's poorly phrased on my part. The bio says that I'm "into" that tech; i.e. it interests me. All I'm doing to capture CO2 at the moment is pay Climeworks monthly. I also took a sneak peek at their Orca plant in Iceland when I was there, but not much to see from the outside aside from a big 'keep out' sign.

I asked them if there would be any sort of tour available, given that the neighboring power plant has an exhibition (which is superb by the way! Easily worth the money, and I spent quite a bit of time geeking out there on.is/en/geothermal-exhibition/). Initially Climeworks responded, we exchanged a few emails, and one of their marketing guys wanted to give me a call, so I sent my number and... got ghosted. No replies to reminder/follow-up emails or anything. Bit bummed but oh well, didn't expect there would be anything available in the first place so I can't complain.

As for the other climate-related part of my bio, reducing emissions, there's a whole host of things but mostly things everyone already knows is an option: I chose to live in a place where I can commute by public transport, I buy and sell second hand instead of new when possible, reduce meat consumption (prioritized by a CO2/kg chart, which unfortunately includes cheese above chicken iirc) and buy veggie/vegan food to vote with my wallet, vote green in elections since imo basically everything else (short of war-like situations) can wait a few years, etc.

[tito]

Well better than nothing! If you have plans to return to Iceland, maybe I can point you to someone helpful on their team. my email is my username @ airminers.org.

And if you do get curious about working on carbon removal, check out the AirMiners Boot Up: https://bootup.airminers.org/

[lucb1e]

Thanks for the pointer! Definitely checking that out. And thanks for the offer, though Iceland was expensive and required... yup... a flight, so I might not be going back too soon to Iceland specifically. Beautiful place though.

I also love how this picture on your website about sums up this discussion about how to solve the climate problem: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602c4ede5fdbd7...

[tito]

memes will save the climate!

[dotnet00]

Wouldn't be HN without letting perfect be the enemy of good. Kind of a given due to the sort of person it takes to be interested in hanging out here (passionate about tech, somewhat cynical etc :p).

[junon]

Yes HN is typically the "it doesn't solve the problem perfectly so it shouldn't attempt to solve it at all" types. It really is a drag :|

[lucb1e]

Common trope everywhere honestly. Technology Connections speaks of it in the "but sometimes!" video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 where LED lighting in traffic lights is meeting resistance¹ because sometimes it freezes/snows over. It's efficient, so no more heat to keep itself snow-free. Oh no, says the general public, we can't install that! Of course a little resistance heater is primitive technology, cheap to add, and it takes about two brain cells to realize that sometimes not being better than incandescent is still better than always using incandescent, yet still it's apparently a thing to work through. Not a problem exclusive to HN

¹ edit: I had not realized the irony here while writing this :-)

[ncmncm]

No. It doesn't solve the problem at all.

Billions of tons of carbon will need to be extracted from the atmosphere. But removing it will do no good as long as even more is released. 100kt/y is like breathing on somebody who is thirsty. Yes, there is moisture in your breath. No, it didn't help.

Creating a carbon tax such that emitting carbon costs as much as they spend extracting it, and then handing that over to extractors, could enable scaling up to the point where it could do some good.

[jeffdn]

It's a 10x improvement by being 10x the size -- it hasn't improved efficiency by 10x or anything remotely like that.

[tito]

Ya this is an aspect I'm curious about as well. Is this all scaling up/copy pasting or are there other improvements?

[throw93232]

Geothermal energy is not infinitely scalable. And I have serious doubts about CO2 emmisions of this thing!

[lucb1e]

> Geothermal energy is not infinitely scalable.

The tech is supposed to be used (at scale) once we exhausted the low-hanging fruit of closing (replacing) gas plants and the like. Once we have days with excess sunlight and wind, for example, this can be used anywhere. And I like that they're using renewable energy during this R&D phase, because indeed it doesn't matter if you remove the CO2 next to a USA freeway or in remote Iceland place that sounds like hell (hellisheiði, "ð" as "th") but has excess electricity and heat and suitable rock.

> And I have serious doubts about CO2 emissions of this thing!

For the previous plant, some third party (iirc KPMG, obviously paid by Climeworks so there's a conflict of interest) says it's 90% efficient, meaning that the associated emissions are about 10% of what it captures.

But since Climeworks only published the claim and not the report, I don't know if that includes construction, or if they picked a nice number that only considers plant operation. And construction might have included a lot of R&D, so then it wouldn't really be a fair comparison because building more of the same would not require those R&D-related emissions.

For what it's worth, I'm optimistic given this 90% claim. Even if you apply the marketing department discount and reality might be 75%, it's still a whole lot better than nothing.

[throw93232]

》The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground, where a chemical reaction converts it to rock.

It uses A LOT of water! Bitcoin mining is propably more ecological than this.

[codefreeordie]

Anything that actually makes progress on removing atmospheric CO2 will be hated -- because it breaks the argument for the intentional economic destruction and mass poverty creation which has always been the goal of the climate catastrophists.