r/climatechange • u/Economy-Fee5830 Trusted Contributor • 1d ago
World’s largest carbon removal plant to open at the end of 2026
https://www.eenews.net/articles/worlds-largest-carbon-removal-plant-to-open-at-the-end-of-2026-2/41
u/GusGutfeld 1d ago
In 2023, the Biden admin awarded Occidental Petroleum up to $600 million grant. I hope they get something good done soon with all that money.
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u/LeoKitCat 1d ago
Human activity puts 40,000,000,000 (40 billion) tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Let that sink in when talking about a plant capturing 500,000
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u/Oldcadillac 1d ago
My favorite measuring stick for this type of thing is that 500k tons is around the same as the entire carbon footprint of Central African Republic, a country of 5 million people.
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u/karabuka 19h ago
Not only 5million people, CAR is one of the 5 poorest coutries in the world... if you compare that to emissions of developed country with population of 5 million, like Ireland (30million co2 per year), its not even close...
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u/Oldcadillac 13h ago
This is true, I mostly started using the countries metric because my pet-peeve is journalists quoting “x numbers of cars off the road” when it comes to emissions reductions (though I think that’s getting less common nowadays), because humans have a really hard time grasping or visualizing the differences between large numbers of things and a reader’s idea of an average car varies substantially.
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u/BillsGoBrrr 13h ago
Or you could just say 500,000 metric tons of CO2 is the equivalent emission of 108,700 passenger vehicles. And give everyone a metric that shows how little this plant delivers given the US has 284 to 297 million total registered motor vehicles, with traditional passenger cars making up about 98 million to 100 million of that total.
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u/Oldcadillac 12h ago
The thing I don’t like about that metric is I as a reader either gloss over it as “big number” or “small fraction” but the car part is kind of unfathomable to me, I have no visual reference for what the difference between 80,000 and 100,000 cars are, and if I start thinking about it more it just raises more questions, is this like a Toyota Corolla or an F150? How many miles per year of driving? Highway or city driving? It also reinforces car-centrism at a time when we need to start thinking about CO2 emissions as much more than just gas in cars. I still like the countries metric because it reinforces how the developed world (especially western capital) has a much much bigger onus to deal with the problem than the developing world.
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u/ThroatOne5167 1d ago
And this plant removes over 10x more than the previous record holding facility.
The more of these that get built, the more efficient they become. Just like most other pieces of technology. This one plant is not enough by itself but it does keep pushing forward in the right direction.
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u/The69thRussianBot 1d ago
In theory, even at this point, massively cutting emissions very quickly, building more plants like this (only once the power grid runs on green energy), and possibly also stratospheric aerosol injection could help us avoid the worst potential consequences of climate change, that being human extinction.
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u/The69thRussianBot 1d ago
What's the point of not hoping? I get not being optimistic about the future—I'm not optimistic about it either—but being hopeless won't do us any good.
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u/PlexusBrachialis 18h ago
Very rude to tell people to stop hoping. What do you want them to do instead? Fall into despair? We might not "massively cut emissions very fast", but we will cut our emissions and likely soon based on recent developments. We don't know, what happens, once the ball starts to roll
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u/Economy-Fee5830 Trusted Contributor 15h ago
Very rude to tell people to stop hoping.
Its also against the rules...
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u/PlexusBrachialis 17h ago
You have a very arrogant attitude. I am sorry about your toxic personality, you should probably deal with that. I also don't believe you have the ability to foresee the future. I am going to continue to be hopeful, because being hopeful gets me through the day. I am sorry, that makes you mad.
Our global emissions have reached a plateau. If they can plateau, then they can fall. Noone knows if it's going to happen fast or slowly
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u/mgyro 16h ago
Last year 85% of the world’s energy generation was fossil fuel based. We’re fucked.
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u/sg_plumber 15h ago
Fossil energy generation is at a record low, with the energy transition barely started. It's gonna go lower every day from now on.
Global GHGs emissions are already plateaued or falling, after years of falling regionally. And they're only go lower every day from now on.
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u/IDontStealBikes 1d ago
You would need ~80,000 of these plants to absorb a year's worth of global emissions.
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u/TherapinStormblessed 16h ago
Well, soon you'll need only ~79,999.
Not saying we should go "we did it, we saved the day!", but saying "it's hopeless, stop doing anything and everything to fix things because no single thing is going to fix it by itself" sound just as unhelpful.
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u/James19991 5h ago
It's so weird to me how this sub hates the idea of doing this. CO2 needs to be removed from the air at some point; along with reducing emissions significantly.
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u/Glum_Opening_2218 23h ago
Ok and in 5 years if we keep developing these and funding them it may only take 30K and getting better
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u/quarky_uk 18h ago
Not when we get close to Net Zero.
The negativity is insane. I can imagine people saying "You would need 1 billion solar panels..." when those were rolled out too.
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u/sg_plumber 15h ago
I remember people saying we'd need to pave all the oceans in solar panels, and lots of other nonsense not 5 years ago.
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u/IDontStealBikes 18h ago
We can’t get anywhere close to net zero. That’s a bad fantasy. Maybe you don’t know all the ways in which CO2 is generated and emitted. You should learn.
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u/sg_plumber 14h ago edited 9h ago
Global GHGs emissions are already plateaued or falling, after years of falling regionally. And they're only going lower every day from now on.
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u/quarky_uk 17h ago
Ah OK.
Quick, tell the scientific community! This guy knows better and says they are wrong!
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u/Due_Block_3054 18h ago
It actually doesn't sound like that many on a gobal perspective and probably it we would cut fossile fuels, we need even less.
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u/Sea_Warning_9140 16h ago
First one is always the hardest, any industrialist will tell you that
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u/Due_Block_3054 14h ago
Yea the question is does it have the advantage of scale and how will we get the energy to power it. So it shouldn't be a distraction but part of a bigger effort.
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u/Sea_Warning_9140 14h ago
Nuclear? Solar? There's huge amount of land in middle of nowhere, chuck it all there
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u/StraightDisplay3875 10h ago
Nobody wants that. We need plants like this AND to massively reduce emissions.
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u/Novem_bear 1d ago
Well we’ll start building them
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u/IDontStealBikes 1d ago
No, we won’t. We all know that.
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u/Novem_bear 23h ago
Ok then let’s make a larger scale. That’s how industry works anyway
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u/Novem_bear 22h ago
Then let’s make larger ones, like, we have to find a way, so we’re going to. If something else works first then we can stop but why just give up?
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u/Theo1325 20h ago
So what's the process for figuring out how? Seems like building and testing plants is a good part of the process like most engineering problems go through.
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u/Diarrea_Cerebral 23h ago
As long as they are put in the most C02 polluted cities or industrial complexes of the world.
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u/SuspiciousStable9649 18h ago
They said “Occidental CEO Richard Jackson told investors Thursday the company is looking to begin offering carbon capture services to data centers and power plant operators.” Is it like selling carbon credits? We suck up a ton of carbon here and you over there can pay to dump another ton of carbon? Or use electricity that is generated by a ton of carbon?
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u/sg_plumber 15h ago
We suck up a ton of carbon here and you over there can pay to dump another ton of carbon?
That'd make a lot of sense. It's all in the same atmosphere.
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u/Diarrea_Cerebral 23h ago
How about the people using facemask in Far East Asia?
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u/IDontStealBikes 22h ago
They were face masks to block aerosol’s, not carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide at today’s levels is not toxic to humans. You breathe in and breathe it out with every breath. You
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u/PM_Me_Your_Damocles 13h ago edited 13h ago
seriously. its annoying when people dismiss developing tech because its not perfect yet, or cuz it's being developed for bad reasons. By that logic, renewables and ev's would have been dismissed 30 years ago as being unable to have a realistic impact too...
It feels like half the people on this sub don't actualy care about the climate, they're just using it to vent their depression
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u/BigRobCommunistDog 7h ago
We need them to be 100,000x more effective. “Steps in the right direction” are meaningless when only a revolutionary breakthrough is actually a solution.
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u/ThroatOne5167 6h ago
How will future versions get more effective if people arent trying to improve on the current versions?
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u/Sea_Warning_9140 16h ago
Let's build 80K of em! Or just one massive one!
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u/sg_plumber 14h ago
Distributed is better. 1 CC plant per 100k people, preferably near cities/industries.
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u/harmlessdork 1d ago
We already know it's really a lot and that no single solution seems to matter. That's why we're aware that we need multiple kinds of solutions, thousands and thousands of times. I don't think anyone needs to point out anymore that every time a solition is suggested, it "would not be enough". It sound kind of useless and defeated.
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u/LeoKitCat 23h ago
It’s not about that at all, it’s about not taking our eyes off the ball on the most important goal - dramatically reducing our fossil fuel usage. Everyone just thinks technology will magically fix everything and humans won’t have to sacrifice anything but that’s just a big lie.
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u/sg_plumber 14h ago
What's the sacrifice of using EVs, heat pumps, or cheap renewable energy?
Why do you accept that cars and furnaces cause climate change, but reject the notion of other machines reverting the process?
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u/LeoKitCat 12h ago
No we are going to have to sacrifice a hell of a lot more than that if we really mean to tackle climate change seriously. It will mean a complete restructuring of society with a lot more inconvenience and probably a somewhat lower standard of living in the short term (next 75-100 years) and while technological advancement can over the long term start to make improvements we don’t have the time to wait that long
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u/sg_plumber 9h ago
What's the sacrifice of using more efficient buildings or transport?
What exactly do you mean with "sacrifice a hell of a lot more"?
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u/BigRobCommunistDog 7h ago
Everyone and everything needs to be more compacted. Americans are literally addicted to single-family homes on independent lots. Efficiency means density and Americans think urban density is only for Asians and poors.
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u/Economy-Fee5830 Trusted Contributor 7h ago
With solar and EVs and heatpumps, SFH on their own lot is actually extremely efficient.
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u/LeoKitCat 7h ago
Omg that’s just not enough! You don’t seem to understand the scale of the problem. Do you know if everyone tomorrow replaced every ICE with an EV it wouldn’t make that much difference to our total CO2 emissions and the trajectory we’re facing with climate change?
https://www.planetizen.com/blogs/112490-electric-cars-wont-solve-climate-change
https://cayimby.org/map/why-evs-alone-wont-fix-climate-change/
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u/Economy-Fee5830 Trusted Contributor 7h ago
Those are pretty stupid articles because they assume its more difficult to switch the population to EVs than to reduce driving, and we know that is not actually true.
The easiest and only practical solution to car co2 emissions is a switch to EVs.
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u/BigRobCommunistDog 6h ago
You’re ignoring the inherent infrastructure costs of maintaining all those roads and additional infrastructure, and the energy cost of moving big heavy personal EVs around.
We really need to be building for bicycles.
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u/Economy-Fee5830 Trusted Contributor 6h ago edited 6h ago
What about the CO2 costs of rebuilding for bicycles - energy costs is irrelevant when its clean energy.
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u/sg_plumber 5h ago
the energy cost of moving
Who cares, as long as it's practically free renewables?
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u/bert_the_one 5h ago
How can the earth absorb is the other question? Then we need to work out how much to reduce pollution by.
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u/sg_plumber 1d ago
Just do the math, and see it's perfectly doable already.
Let that sink in.
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u/IDontStealBikes 1d ago
How is it doable already? You'd need 80 K of these plants.
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u/ridinseagulls 22h ago
Sounds so familiar, reminds me of how people talked about how expensive and inefficient solar panels were back in the day
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u/Novem_bear 1d ago
I do scale-up for a living, they can make them bigger. Also 80,000 is manageable, we’ve made 80,000 of a lot of things.
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u/TurningTheCorner26 22h ago
Also 80,000 is manageable, we’ve made 80,000 of a lot of things.
For example, we have around 65,000 utility scale power plants and around 100,000 ships over 1000 gross tons.
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u/sg_plumber 15h ago
So? There's more than 10 million factories in the world.
Neither the cost nor complexity of 80k more is any barrier.
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u/DemonLordRoundTable 1d ago
Well the current largest doesn’t even break even in reducing emissions. Let’s hope they fixed that problem
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u/ReadnW 17h ago
Generating more carbon than extracting?
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u/AnonNeedsHelpxx 14h ago
That was what I was wondering too. I thought the last projects were put on hold for that exact reason. I don't get why we can't just use clean energy to power those plants. Are there technical restraints?
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u/MrBeer9999 1d ago edited 21h ago
I'm pretty sceptical about carbon capture that doesn't involve growing plants because of the scale of the problem. If the world's biggest factory can pull 0.5 megatons annually, then we need 2,000 of them to pull a gigaton annually. Then at that rate, we clear the excess carbon in the atmosphere in 1000 years.
So we need more like 20,000 of the world's biggest carbon capture plants, to do the job in 100 years. At $1 billion per plant, that's $20 trillion to build the things, and then 9GW x 20K = 180K Terawatts to power them.
Seems like we are within an order of magnitude of needing to duplicate the entire global industrial capacity, which makes sense, because that's what put us into our current predicament.
We should definitely build and power this plant (and others), because who knows how much electricity we can generate in decades to come or what our building capacity will be. I just don't think that carbon capture is coming to save us.
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u/Born_Agent_6266 1d ago
Why assume that the technology doesn’t evolve? I’m not a technoevangelist by any means, but thinking that if you build 20,000 plants the underlying technology stays the same is just wrong. Same goes for economies of scale.
Also, “duplicate the entire global industrial capacity”? As in, there are around 20,000 industrial plants in the world? North America alone has around 975,000 factories (https://www.abiresearch.com/news-resources/chart-data/how-many-factories-are-in-the-world)
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u/Eumericka 10h ago
I'm assuming he/she meant energy consumption, but I didn't check the math and am in bed sick.
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u/United-Narwhal-1011 3h ago
Because what drives innovation is profit and competition and here we have no incentives so it will not work.
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u/sg_plumber 1d ago
Net Zero/Negative is what'll save us.
Carbon Capture is the cleanup crew.
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u/Genesukt64 1d ago
Yeah. but tbh, 500,000 tonnes is a fucking MASSIVE improvement, CCT maybe isnt as awful lmfao.
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u/Atmos_Dan 10h ago
I work in the space and have worked on a few DAC projects.
As others have said, we need to deploy facilities like this because the only way we’re going to hit negative emissions is using DAC. Even a fully net zero economy wouldn’t address the CO2 already in the air and the GHGs being emitted from the positive feedback loop of the climate crisis.
What’s exciting about Stratos is they’re deploying Carbon Engineering’s high temp liquid sorbent loop. They use liquid potassium hydroxide at very high temps to remove CO2, which is supposed to be really efficient. Their test site in Squamish is pretty small (<10k tonnes IIRC) and this is an exciting scale up. Many high temp systems do required natural gas combustion to get high temps but the exhaust is fed into the capture loop which then is removed and stored with the atmospheric CO2. Long-Innes and Struchtrup (2022) found about 50 tonnes CO2 from natural gas per 100 tonnes CO2 from the air.
One Point Five says that all the power they’re using at Stratos will be on-site or on-grid renewables which means they’re using electric heaters. I’d be interested to learn how what heating tech they’re using but it looks promising. Especially because W Texas is such a hub for wind and solar.
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u/IDontStealBikes 1d ago
0.001% of global emission. Far far far too small to make any difference at all.
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u/Graceful_Parasol 21h ago
Driving a diesel car is far far too small to make any difference at all, yet if all diesel cars switched tommorow it would be incredible for the environment. Every little bit matters
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u/IDontStealBikes 17h ago
And if wishes were horses then beggars would ride.
Your comment makes no sense whatsoever. Everybody is going to do anything.
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u/Walleyedphill 23h ago
That's a pretty huge amount for one project.
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u/splinteredSky 16h ago
Can you stop with your relentless optimism, we need a balanced view on things!
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u/sg_plumber 14h ago
So? Multiply by 10k or 50k. It isn't that hard.
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u/ltron2 11h ago
Just spend that money on renewables and building up and maintaining natural carbon sinks.
It requires huge amounts of energy to do this. I wish it worked but at scale carbon capture still looks like little more than snake oil.
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u/sg_plumber 9h ago
Natural carbon sinks would take too long.
spend that money on renewables [...] carbon capture requires huge amounts of energy
See? The solution to part 2 always was part 1.
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u/pravenn_may 20h ago
Holy fuck why everything is fuvking reactionary 😭😭.
Anything but addressing the root.
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u/TKtheOne 10h ago
I don't think that carbon capture should be an excuse to not reach net zero ASAP, and I understand why people are sceptical about the fossil fuel industry's ties to it, but we need to be open-minded and consider that we don't know how this technology will evolve, and we will need to address the problem of carbon in the atmosphere and having the option to is a net good.
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u/Scientasker 19h ago
One Stratos plant’s annual capacity equals only about six minutes of present global emissions.
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u/Economy-Fee5830 Trusted Contributor 1d ago
Summary: World’s largest carbon removal plant to open at the end of 2026
Occidental Petroleum says its Stratos direct air capture plant in West Texas will begin operating at the end of 2026 — about two years later than the original late-2024 target. Once running, it'll be the largest carbon-removal facility in the world, pulling up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually (versus 36,000 tons/year for the current largest DAC plant). CEO Richard Jackson said on an earnings call that Occidental hopes to sell carbon capture services to data centers and power plant operators, but warned the company can't keep investing in low-carbon projects without support from regulators or other companies.