High Hopes claims stratospheric breakthrough in direct air CO2 capture | Hacker News Reader

High Hopes claims stratospheric breakthrough in direct air CO2 capture

newatlas.com

>The trouble right now is the extremely high cost of pulling carbon directly out of the air. Switzerland's Climeworks operates at 14 locations presently, with large factories processing ambient air and separating out the carbon, but its costs are currently somewhere in the range of US$600-1000 per ton, and its own future projections graph doesn't show this price dropping much below US$250/ton by 2035.

Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. In this case, just because we can build a technologically advanced solution to capture carbon doesn't mean we actually should be investing so many resources in that when we already have something that does the job incredibly well: Trees. They do one heck of a job capturing carbon and cost nothing.

Trees take decades to start capturing serious amount of carbon and it levels off when trees mature. Unless you cut them and plant new, of course. And don't burn the resulting wood.

Also, trees cost at minimum the value of property that they are growing on. If we had infinite amount of land that we could use for just trees, we would never have to talk about climate change, but that's not the case.

Bamboo and pawlonia empress make usable wood quickly for construction. Carbon taxes on fuel should be feeding tree farming.

I wonder if it's possible to vertically farm trees. Raised box beds where you can basically "wash out" the dirt at the end to get just the wood and the stumps, and then the "washed out dirt" is placed in the next box bed.

The even simpler solution is just to impose a $250/ton carbon tax, worldwide (using tariffs for countries that don't comply).

This would suggest for example a $2.20 carbon tax per gallon of petrol fuel:

https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-vario...

Coal would also become immediately uneconomical.

Algae would probably be better.

This appears to be inspired by an idea published years ago which suggested building industrial refridgeration in Antarctica to achieve the same goals.

https://judithcurry.com/2012/08/24/a-modest-proposal-for-seq...

Carbon capture by tree method is better. But it does not work well enough in urban areas.

As co2 is heavy, it settles to the ground quickly in cool areas. Like jungles and forests with lots of shade. High co2 density in such areas contributes to tree growth. That’s probably the better location for co2 capture.

Do it in Tibet, and you get 5000ft (out of 35000) for free!

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