Inside the hidden carbon plant pulling CO2 from thin air | BBC News

Wouldn't it be better to plant loads of trees and stop cutting down the amazon? CHEAPER TOO

1:44 - I don't understand his answer, "Carbon dioxide tends to disperse in the air"... so yer, why not capture it as close as possible to the source? Like, right next to the industrial exhaust pipes?

I think this is such a large problem it requires a multifaceted approach: reduce emissions, rewilding bogs and planting trees, renewable energy sources, nuclear energy, and, yes, carbon capture None on their own will work. None are a complete solution

Wouldn't it be better to plant trees.

36k tonnes of CO2, thats it? thats not even a fraction of a drop in the bucket, you were right in the beginning, it is Overhyped

Thing is you'd need a facility like this the size of Texas and Navada for it to have an impact.

We release 37 billion tons of CO2 yearly. I don't know how well this will scale.

People are trashing the companies that generate co2 while actually using the product that had caused generating the co2. If you drive, use electricity, live in a building, wear clothes, etc., you are consuming goods whose production causes CO2 emissions.

A small part of the solution, but the focus needs to be on native reforestation (rewilding) and halting deforestation

It’s also a money sink

The energy used is geothermal, so zero carbon. How much energy is being consumed in this process. If that energy was simply USED as energy, it would replace fossil generation, and replace many times more CO2 emission than this thing extracts from the air.

Not bad. If the average smaller vehicle (car, truck) emits 3,6 ton/year and there are 10 billion vehicles, we just need 1,000,000x of this capacity. Edit: 4:28 I was in the ballpark. "We release 40 billion tons of CO2".

Not scalable. Isn't it better to focus on the creation of carbon emissions, not the removal.

I like how they show cooling towers blowing out steam to signify carbon emissions. You can’t actually see carbon dioxide in the air and the stuff coming out of those towers is water. The exhausts for coal, oil, and gas plants is a much narrower tower with no visible vapors or gas coming out

Use that amount of money to stop those cutting the trees and planting new ones where they were destroyed. Nothing we will make in a long time will work better than plants and algae in removing CO2.

Why are civilians expected to go green whilst the oil/gas/fuel compnaies that actually caused this get paid?

36,000 tonnes of CO2… a year???? Ffs. Not really worth the effort. Cheaper to turn off some oil pumps in Texas.

AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: I'm Australian but did my degree in America (late 80s) and one Friday we had a NASA engineer do a special lecture on Terraforming Mars. We were kind of excited as at that time (despite the Challenger accident) we believed we'd be building the next space station in the 90s, back to the moon early on the 2000s and off to Mars in the 2010s. We were shattered when he started with: "Sorry its impossible and here's why!" He then went and explained how you need think when considering an entire planet. You don't need to be an engineer or geologist or atmospheric scientist just BASIC MATH WILL DO. Once you understand the actual scope of dealing with a planetary issue things like this are irrelevant. For example there's currently around 2.5 Trillion tons of excess Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere and by current estimates it will go past 3.5 Trillion tons by the mid 2030s. So to do a quick time estimate you simply divide 3.5 Trillion by 35,000 and get 100,000,000 years. So if you want to get that 3.5 Trillion tons out in something like 10 years you need about 10,000,000 of these plants built. If you want to do it 20 years then its 5,000,000 plants. As to the costs its even easier to estimate At $1,000 per ton 3.5 Trillion tons will cost $3.5 QUADRILLION tons to remove. 1/10th of $3.5 Quadrillion is $0.35 Quadrillion. So at $300 per ton its (3/10ths) which is $1.05 QUADRILLION And at $400 per ton its (4/10ths) which is $1.4 QUADRILLION So its reasonably easy to estimate that this method will cost between $1 and $1.5 QUADRILLION and that's provided we can find 5-10,000,000 SUITABLE locations and get enough materials to build those 5-10,000,000 plants. Then there's the small task of how do we power it, because power might be reasonably cheap in Iceland where they have enormous natural resources but what about the other 9,999 plants where are they going, how are they being powered and who's paying? By the way if every person on the planet planted 1,000 trees (seedlings) at a cost of $5 per tree. That would be 8 Trillion Trees and if each tree is capable on capturing 1-2tons of Carbon and sequestering it in the wood. Then we'd only need about 1 in 4 trees (~2.5 trillion) to reach maturity to capture that 3.5 Trillion of Carbon Dioxide. Yeah that would cost about $40 Trillion on basic costs which is a staggering amount of money until you consider the alternative is $1-$1.5 QUADRILLION, which is 25 times the cost at the low end. Best of all Trees don't need electricity they just need water and sun light and maybe some fertilizer. Once established their maintenance and upkeep costs are almost zero. If you plant trees that produce food and of building materials then even better.

How many tons of CO2 were generated in the building of this factory?

Your 1st question about locating it directly near the CO2 emmiter was spot on. The answer was elusive and not really correct.