It was designed to capture approximately 4,000 metric tons of carbon from the air per year, which, as one climate scientist, David Ho, put it, is the equivalent of rolling back the clock on just 3 seconds of global emissions.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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first-of-its-kind demonstration plant
The article goes on to say that this plant isn't really intended to have any serious climate impact itself, it's more a small scale testbed to see how the technology works out in real world conditions and to try to improve and develop it further. So while it might be the world's largest plant of the type currently, that's only because nobody has actually built one on a useful scale yet.
Yep. For CDR to make a meaningful difference we need to both scale it up, and get down to near zero fossil fuel use
indeed. this tech is best thought of as being in the R&D stage. we're gonna need enough clean energy to power ourselves and it too before it really makes a difference. we can throw excess renewables at it now, though.
Better 3 seconds than 0. We need everything we can to fight climate change if we are even going to have a chance of mitigating the damage.
Net negative likely. How much CO2 was emitted to create this plant?
Per the article, building the plant generated about 15% of the CO2 it will remove. Operating it and downtime consume another 20% or so. It's still a net benefit...but a tiny one.
JUST PLANT TREES
Also yes - but frankly we're not in the position to just try one thing at a time, we're very much at the point where we need to do anything and everything we can - trees are practical for areas with lots of space, but for areas where space is a premium tech like this could work better once it matures
Best we can do is WW3, sorry 😬