It's unclear how many emissions are required operate it. How much rock is required, and how many emissions does it take to mine/process/transport it to the plant, and then put the processed rock somewhere else?
It doesn't matter what sequestration process you want to use. The volume of material you end up with after removing a couple hundred gigatons out of the atmosphere isn't a pile and isn't a mountain, it's a mountain range. This is a HUGE industrial process that is going to be required, and the volume of material that will come out of that industrial scale sequestration facility is very hard to imagine.
It doesn't matter what form you choose to sink the carbon into. Carbon density per cubic foot just doesn't vary much, even if you go all the way up to exotic targets like diamond. Hundreds of gigatons maps to huge volumes, and always will.
Worse, most things you might choose to sink the carbon into are energetically favorable for burning that carbon back into CO2 should mankind ever realize it could turn that huge pile of whatever into a source of energy. That sets up a situation where even if we solve the problem "now", most approaches would have us creating an attractive nuisance that is very likely to get burned back into the atmosphere 500 or 1000 years from now if we ever forget why it exists. Such an enormous amount of available potential energy will be very valuable financially and VERY difficult for humanity to refrain from burning back into the antmosphere again.
Assuming the answer is yes, do we see the ground level around oil wells sinking by a comparable amount where we pump the oil out? Seems like we’d have to, wouldn’t we?
From Climeworks:
> Once the CO₂ is released from the filters, storage partner Carbfix transports the CO₂ underground, where it reacts with basaltic rock through a natural process, which transforms into stone, and remains permanently stored.
The clickbait headline implies the plant to do this exists, but the article reveals they’ve started to think about how they can maybe do this in the future.
Everything in this article reads like snake oil shilling. I’m all for finding “the brighter side of news” but not if the news is literally imaginary.
But suppose, we do go crazy and build in short order 62500 of these Carbon Capture plants, which provide zero benefit to any individual but have positive externalities. That will amount to offsetting 0.69% of current emission rate. Laughable.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=28392
[2] https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...
It shouldn’t be analyzed (or sold) as a technology that has to solve the whole problem. We need a toolbox of solutions for different geographies, scales and budgets while we also reduce our overall emissions. Having said that, if we reduce emissions by an order of magnitude and improve the efficiency of this process by an order of magnitude then it might enter the ballpark of viability.
Subheadline: "The world’s oceans act as nature’s most significant carbon sink, soaking up roughly 25% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by human activities."
Good news, climate change is solved! Within 1-2 days, this plant will bring CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels!
How do such obvious bullshit "news" make it onto the front page?
Pumping O2 into it isn't really any better. Sea creatures evolved for a certain equilibrium. Adding more of anything will throw off the balance. Some organisms would benefit, but others won't, and so the population levels can shift, throwing off the entire food web.
Those webs are pretty resilient, and it takes an awful lot of emissions to alter them significantly. But we've managed to overcome a huge amount of buffering to increase ocean acidity, and that's potentially very, very dangerous.
Recent research shows that the global warming we are experiencing is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2, not the other way around.[0] Better to spend some money on investigating the actual reason for the warming.
