The company’s ambitions for mass production may still seem extreme. To actually capture 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025 would, by Gebald’s calculations, require that Climeworks build 250,000 carbon-capture plants like the ones on the roof at Hinwil. That adds up to about 4.5 million carbon collectors. For a company that has only built 100 collectors (and has 14 small plants around Europe), it’s a staggering number. The Climeworks founders therefore try to think of their product as the automotive industry might — a piece of mass-produced technology and metal, not the carbon they hope to sequester. “What we’re doing is gas separation,” Wurzbacher said, “and that’s traditionally a process-industry business, like oil and gas. But we don’t really see ourselves there.”
The founders note that Toyota makes more than 10 million cars annually. “Every CO₂ collector has about the same weight and dimensions of a car — roughly two tons, and roughly 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters,” Gebald said. “And all the methods used to produce the CO₂ collectors could be well automated. So we have the automotive industry as a model for how to produce things in large quantities for low cost.” The two men have already sought advice from Audi. They are also aware that the automotive industry perfected its methods over the course of 100 years. Climeworks, if it plans to have even a modest impact, doesn’t have nearly as much time.
Part of the goal is to have the technology ready to go, so that when the U.S. finally wakes up and realizes the peril, we'll have a response.
A better question is, is it cost effective? If it can scale up and be somewhere below $20-$40/Ton then it has a bright future.
A big chunk of humanity’s CO2 emissions come from sources that are hard to remove, like farming and concrete production. Getting to net zero or negative carbon will require a lot of sequestration.
I think it would help to further divide cost in to capital cost and energy efficiency. The transition to renewables is going to require a lot of over provisioning.
For example, it would be madness to store excess solar power in the summer to be used to cover the winter shortfall. You just build enough panels to make it through the winter, and have excess energy in the summer. Much cheaper than building storage of any form that's only used for 30 cycles in its lifetime.
A solution that is capital efficient can sit around, waiting to be turned on when there's excess energy. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, it's basically free.
If you need to run the plant even 25% of the time for it to make sense, it's not going to be able to take advantage of these fluctuations and that's going to make it a much tougher sell.
This is why I'm hopeful for hydrogen for storage; over provisioning hydrolysis capacity is not intrinsically difficult, and low efficiency isn't a deal breaker when you don't have anything else to do with the excess.
38,000,000,000/4000 = 9,500,000 plants needed to get to net zero, just for the the carbon we are currently putting out, to say nothing of all the carbon currently causing warming...
Reasonable if you assume that progress of this technology has already plateaued. I'm pretty sure we could be putting a lot more money behind this and we would see substantial improvements to efficiency (i.e. $/kg/year).
We need every tool we can get to fight this thing.
A tree absorbs around 20kg of carbon dioxide a year while growing. To sequester 38 Gigatons you'd need to plant and cut down and bury around 10^12 trees each year, give or take an order of magnitude or two.
Don't forget the positive feeds backs: large scale wild fires (releases CO2, check out how much a great Amazon fire would release), melting permafrost (releases both CO2 and Methane), and desertification (less natural carbon sinks).
