this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions (thebulletin.org)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Oxy estimates that the project will separate 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and cost about $1 billion to build. Adding in operations and maintenance, we, and others, estimate the total costs will be more than $500 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide.

As a point of reference, if you replace a 10mi/16km drive to work with a bicycle commute, per year you'd save 356kg of CO2. Source

In other words, that's $1 billion to remove as much carbon as 1.4 million people replacing a drive to work with a bike ride to work and $250 million dollars in each subsequent year.

Edit: Another comparison is that running that carbon capture facility is equivalent to offsetting 0.134 coal plants in one year. It is much, much cheaper to invest in renewable energy and reduce car dependency than to spend on carbon capture.

Source

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Mind you, that $1 billion covers the cost of building the facility, not the cost of operating it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not at all. At $500/t the 1.4million people would not emit $262.5million worth of carbon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Sorry, I'm not following what you're disputing with the "Not at all" or where the $262.5M figure is from.

All I was comparing is that for $1B it removes as much carbon as 1.4M people riding a bike to work per year which is expensive when put in perspective. Granted, the upkeep after that is 500k tonnes x $500/t = $250MM/year. However, that's still an absurd amount of money to do what a sliver of the population riding a bike can do.

This is fine as an addition to transitioning to renewables, however the funding and advocacy for carbon capture has come from oil companies from the beginning and it is used as a cost of doing business instead of investing in renewables.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The $500/t is the total cost of building and operating the plant. So it includes the $1billion construction cost. So 1.4million people would not emit $262.5million/year, which is a lot of money, but also it is not insane. It is only $1.14/l of petrol to remove the CO2 from emitted from the atmosphere again. US cost per of petrol it $0.91/l so we would talk about $2.05/l. Price in the Netherlands is at $2.08/l today.