The US Has Big, New Plans To Pull CO2 Out of the Air

[DEAD7]

The US Has Big, New Plans To Pull CO2 Out of the Air


Today, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced a bold new plan to make those technologies, called carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, cost-effective and scalable with the launch of a new "Carbon Negative Shot" initiative. Through this initiative, the agency seeks to bring the cost of CDR down dramatically this decade -- to less than $100 a ton -- so that it can be deployed at a big enough scale to remove "gigatons," or billions of tons, of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

That is a hell of a lot of CO2 pollution. Sequestering one gigaton of carbon dioxide would amount to removing the pollution of about 250 million vehicles -- the US's entire light-duty fleet -- in one year, according to the DOE. With CDR technologies still in pretty early stages of development, there are significant hurdles to overcome before the DOE can do so. CDR is a suite of strategies aimed at drawing down CO2 to keep it from trapping heat in the atmosphere. Nature can do some of that for us -- trees and plants pull CO2 out of the air. There's also "direct air capture" technology that mimics that process using carbon-sucking machines, but it has yet to be deployed at a large scale.

 

[DEAD7]

 

[acri1]

Climate change and positivity...these two things are bad enough on their own but they definitely don't go together



Look, It's very unlikely to be scalable enough to make a difference. With current technology it would take literally millions of climate capture sites to even make a dent in emissions, and there's no reason to think there's going to be some kind of miracle breakthrough in the next decade.

And even if that was possible the program will likely be gutted in 2024 or so by the next Republican administration, so it's a moot point.

 

[Micky Mikey]

How much carbon will be emitted to pull carbon from the air?

 

[DEAD7]

Climate change and positivity...these two things are bad enough on their own but they definitely don't go together



Look, It's very unlikely to be scalable enough to make a difference. With current technology it would take literally millions of climate capture sites to even make a dent in emissions, and there's no reason to think there's going to be some kind of miracle breakthrough in the next decade.

And even if that was possible the program will likely be gutted in 2024 or so by the next Republican administration, so it's a moot point.

Jeez... have some hope.