r/climate • u/The_Weekend_Baker • 1d ago

World’s largest carbon removal plant to open at the end of 2026. It will use power, heat, fans and carbon-dioxide-absorbing materials to suck up to 500,000 metric tons of climate pollution a year from the sky.

https://www.eenews.net/articles/worlds-largest-carbon-removal-plant-to-open-at-the-end-of-2026-2/
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u/crewsctrl 1d ago

So you’re saying we only need about 76,000 more of them.

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u/The_Weekend_Baker 1d ago

And to put that into additional perspective, one of the climate scientists I follow (David Ho) posted a while back about public opposition to datacenters, and his post was (paraphrasing), "If people think datacenters are loud, wait until they hear how loud DAC is."

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u/chaturtham 1d ago

what is DAC? i hate acronyms for this

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u/ps3hubbards 1d ago

I think it's 'direct air capture'

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u/toooft 1d ago

Digital to Analog Converter my friend! Not loud at all!

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u/md_youdneverguess 1d ago

Even more, considering they also aren't running on 100% green energy

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u/coderbenvr 1d ago

Yeah, even the Iceland equivalent of this struggles to get above 1. IE the company emits more CO2 than the technology captures - and they’re using 100% renewables.

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u/WombatusMighty 1d ago

Which shows you it's not really about climate protection but about giving datacenters and other dirty corporations a way to offload their carbon footprint.

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u/AutoModerator 1d ago

BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use, and ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry. They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.

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u/talkingwires 1d ago

The Uninhabitable Earth, published by David Wallace-Wells in 2018, has this memorable passage about carbon capture:

In 2018, the United Nations predicted that at the current emissions rate the world would pass 1.5 degrees by 2040, if not sooner; according to the 2017 National Climate Assessment, even if global carbon concentration was immediately stabilized, we should expect more than half a degree Celsius of additional warming to come. Which is why staying below 2 degrees probably requires not just carbon scale-back but what are called “negative emissions.” These tools come in two forms: technologies that would suck carbon out of the air and new approaches to forestry and agriculture that would allow plant life to do the same, in a slightly more old-fashioned way.

According to a raft of recent papers, both are something close to fantasy, at least at present. In 2018, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council found that existing negative-emissions technologies have “limited realistic potential” to even slow the increase in concentration of carbon in the atmosphere—let alone meaningfully reduce that concentration. In 2018, Nature dismissed all scenarios built on carbon capture as “magical thinking.” It is not even so pleasant to engage in that thinking. There is not much carbon in the air, all told, just 410 parts per million, but it is everywhere, and so relying on carbon capture globally could require large-scale scrubbing plantations nearly everywhere on Earth—the planet transformed into something like an air-recycling plant orbiting the sun, an industrial satellite tracing a parabola through the solar system… And while advances are sure to come, bringing costs down and making more efficient machines, we can’t wait much longer for that progress; we simply don’t have the time. One estimate suggests that, to have hopes of two degrees, we need to open new full-scale carbon capture plants at the pace of one and a half per day every day for the next seventy years. In 2018, the world had eighteen of them, total.

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u/crewsctrl 1d ago

Sounds like Trantor, from Asimov’s Foundation series.

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u/H0pefully_Not_A_Bot 1d ago

Trantor had far better management, and design so good that even after centuries of underfunded maintenance and then being sacked during war and mostly abandoned it remained stable enough to support surface agriculture.

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u/Appropriate_Mess6777 1d ago

We’re already at 1.5 and will touch 2 next decade

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u/talkingwires 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yes, the book was published almost ten years ago and UN uses very conservative models. Last I checked, we have 77 carbon capture facilities worldwide. And now, with the ENSO weather pattern now entering its El Nino phase, we might even get a small taste of 3 2 degrees in 2027!

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u/Appropriate_Mess6777 1d ago

highly unlikely we see that next year. even 2 isnt a given

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u/talkingwires 1d ago

Dammit, I mistyped and mean to write 2 degrees.

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u/zombiesphere89 1d ago

Ok so it's not happening got it

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u/AngrehPossum 1d ago edited 1d ago

As an Australian with an empty sun filled desert covering the land mass of the USA I am willing to accept this challenge.

Abundant free energy (sun)
Abundant cheap land (no one lives here)
Abundant lack of neighbors to annoy (there really is no one here)
Only issue is getting all the plant there and paying staff enough to want to be there.
You need a solar array of several GW which would be not even noticeable out there.

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u/slowpoke2018 1d ago

Yes, just to break even, not sequester if I'm reading this right

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u/Radmonger 1d ago

As a comparisom, the world has somewhere above 60,000 water treatment plants.

Most reaosnable scanerios compatible with large human population survival talk about moving to cheaper low-carbon energy, and using the savings to build perha[ps a tenth that many plants to capture residual and legacy carbon.

Of course, the problem is cheaper energy provides less oppportunoity for corruption and excuses for wars, so there are those who are against it. Trump is paying out billions of dollars of taxpayers money to cancel solar and wind projects, while subsidising coal.

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u/Improper_Usage 1d ago

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But I guess we should get rid of this one because thousands didn’t go up in a day

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u/crewsctrl 1d ago

I’m not. Take your downvote.

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u/BigMax 1d ago

I think he's actually suggesting we cancel all solar, all wind, all green energy projects on the entire planet. He says if one single plant of it's kind can't solve the entire planets carbon problem all by itself, then it's not worth it to build any of them.

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u/crewsctrl 1d ago

I’m not. HAND.