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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

This is super cool and I hope the founders are successful.

> Adding our device to one truck is equivalent to planting 6,200 trees. (remoracarbon.com)

How is this physically possible? A mature tree might easily have 200kg of carbon stored in its wood. How can this tailpipe infrastructure store 1,240,000kg of carbon per tailpipe? At first glance it's an incredible claim, so a bit more explanation would be great.

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I think they're basing that calculation on this post (https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-ve...), which points here (https://www.arborday.org/trees/treefacts/#climate), which links to the European Environmental Agency saying an average mature tree sequesters 22kg of carbon every year (https://www.eea.europa.eu/articles/forests-health-and-climat...).

So, one tree is 22kg/year. So they're claiming their device will collect 6200*22=136,400kg of carbon per year from a truck.

This is exactly right. For an average semi truck (6 mpg, 100,000 miles/year), if we capture 80% of its carbon emissions, we'll be capturing ~ 135 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is roughly the same as 6,200 trees * 22 kg/year.

If a truck produces 1kg for every mile driven then 1.2 million miles would need to be driven over the truck's lifetime. It's a lot but certainly possible (some older trucks have driven over 5 million miles)

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