The differentiating factor of this service is that it's "Permanent: turn CO2 into stone". That benefit is mostly psychological, not pragmatic. Aside from that, the 'small land and water usage' metric is also biased. Yes, rainforest protection projects use land, and you know what else they do? Protect rainforests!
It's also not that promising as a CCS technology. Just like energy, CO2 is most efficiently captured where its concentration is highest - that is in power plants, steelmaking plants, etc.
I know we love revolutionary startups and shiny new things here, but there are scientific bodies and certification standards which have already done the work well in this space, looking at the problem with a holistic approach and with numbers.
I know people mean well here, but for climate change what matters is results, not intentions - so run the numbers before you throw your money out of the window. Cool startup branding is not what makes a project impactful.
Planting tree is nice, but theses solutions you give have limits, which will only make the cost higher. This is a technological solution, sure it has limits too, but its cost will only go down by being done more efficiently and at one point, we will need to do theses things too, thus the sooner we reach lower price, the better we will be.
As you said, it's 100x more expensive, thus no industrial client will consider this solution yet, but you can afford it. Be the first stone that allow them to become 50x more expensive, etc...
Being client to them show also that we are ready to put money where our mouth are. That push toward more investment in theses spheres because there's money in the game. Investing into planting trees at 1/100 the cost... well except exploiting even more cheap labor... there's no money to be made.
Also see what I mentioned about CCS. AFAIK, the most promising CCS technology consist of burning biomass in power plants, and then using geological confinement of the sequestered carbon. The reason it's more effective, as I mentioned, is because the carbon is captured where its concentration is high - less entropy to fight.
It's absolutely true that current offsetting methodologies won't always stay so cheap - and as prices rise, new innovative methodologies will develop. Buying carbon credits is not an impediment to innovation; but it has the advantage of rewarding projects for being efficient, rather than "technologically cool".
The site talks about averages, but averages can be deceiving. Most people don't fly, and those that fly fly a lot. If you fly, you should probably try to overshot the average (by a lot) when you offset.
Carbon offsetting is cheap currently, but won't always stay so, getting more expensive as we exhaust the low-hanging fruits.
https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1234493080583143424?s=20
Bitcoin energy consumption hits a new all time high of nearly 9GW, comparable to Chile, a country with 18M people. Carbon footprint is ~37 Mt CO2 annually, about that of New Zealand. And yet it still does ~4 transactions per second...
My longer comment on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19193938
Was going to reply "name three", but I see you covered that in your other post - well, two out of three; "Ferraris for show-off producers in LA, or Hello Kitty backpacks".
But those other things don't have a superlinear growth in energy consumption baked into the fundamentals of operation. A Hello Kitty backpack doesn't need schoolchildren to keep burning electricity just to secure its contents.
Most things are O(n) - O(n log n) in energy use to general utility provided, and top out at some point. Proof of Work chains need that just to keep the network working, regardless of any utility provided on top (which arguably is near-zero for any legitimate use case).
But I agree with the general point - pricing in full externalities of energy use would go a long way towards fixing things, including Bitcoin's existence.
Mining is pretty centralised, and most players keep secret exactly how efficient their hardware is - and you can bet it'll end up much more efficient than publically available hardware.
Are the efficiencies gained in manufacturing scale or can the actual process / hardware be substantially improved?
This service is like 26 Euros for 46% of average travel. I know some companies use this company to offset their travel. https://pachama.com/. Anyone have advice on others?
Well-certified projects can offset emissions at a price of about 10$/teqCO2. I personally recommend https://www.standfortrees.org.
"i'll do this but i don't want to be the only one." Seeing the scale can be motivating.
It would also be nice to know how this would work at scale. If 100k people sign up, can they support that?
I just gave a presentation on BECCS w/ Brazilian Ethanol which comes out closer to $30. I haven't put it up, but here is one of the papers I based it on
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
However, this is a very different product than BECCS - it direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 which would not occur without your purchase, in the only real permanent operating storage facility we currently have. It is very difficult to know what the marginal impact of changes in sugarcane production are, though we do know that there is potential for either indirect land use change, or mitigation of reduction due to shifts in demand/supply and knock-on effects.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
https://www.terrapass.com/product/productindividuals-familie...
Ethanol plants produce CO2 as a byproduct of fermentation which is nearly pure and easy to purify to the point where it can be compressed to 1200 psi and not have nitrogen phase separate out and not have water vapor mix with the CO2 and make carbonic acid that eats pipe.
So it is a small add-on to existing plants. A larger and more complex add-on would capture CO2 from the bagasse furnace.
This could lead to more land-use changes if it improves the economics and if the ethanol industry can find more markets for fuel and electricity.
Most of the ethanol plants are located near Sao Paulo and Rio because that is where the fuel and electricity are in demand. None of them are in the Amazon basin and few in the area to the south of it that is in risk of "savannafication".
> https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/climeworks-carbon-ca...
A lot of articles about climate change also leave one with an unfortunate sense of helplessness. This is something an average person can do.
https://climeworks.shop/how-it-works/
EG the land area + fresh water cost to support a similar revmoval of C02 through forestation is an untenable strategy
Cut them down and make buildings out of them, land area problem solved. The fresh water cost I don't buy, there's rain man, it's free.
*edited from “neutral”, sorry, typo
What matters with forest-based offsetting is the increase of forest biomass - the deaths of individual trees don't matter. If you grow a forest, the corresponding CO2 is offset for as long as the forest stays there.
It is a viable solution.
Edit: if anyone disagrees look up about the Carboniferous period
Trees are great, but they will not solve the climate issue alone and the notion that they can needs to be put away so that we can plan realistically.
Most solutions to climate change are subtractive, not additive.
How does it compare to what they offer? (as in, metrics please).
Comes with a lot of other benefits too.
People probably prefer if CO2 was removed in their cities and not at some location kilometers away.
CO2 is diffused across the whole world in a matter of months. Its climate-changing effect lasts much longer than that - decades to centuries.
And to scale to a impactful level this will also require a very large amount of new, clean electricity generation...
But how big is the benefit otherwise?
