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.
》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.
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.