Always a possibility. Now we know that won’t work.
Edit: might have to prosecute grifters selling things they cannot deliver.
Lots of technologies were deemed not viable initially until they were improved enough that they became viable.
These guys just failed to develop the technology enough before starting to sell stuff they couldn’t deliver and banked too much on government grants that are now drying up, and now they’ve starting to sack swathes of their staff because they’re running out of cash.
Yes. Their small scale versions should have proven that it would work before expanding. I strongly suspect the small scale versions either did not work well, or were never built.
Yeah doh, been saying this for years. A highschooler can figure this out.
Every chemical reaction has losses. A typical gas car has an efficiency of only about 30-ish %, for example. Converting fuel to energy has losses and it generates CO2 (mostly)
Similarly, capturing CO2 costs energy but also has losses. Storing the CO2 takes energy, or alternatively converting it, takes energy, all with losses.
While capturing and processing CO2, you need energy that also creates CO2 . Because of the losses, you generate more CO2 than you actually capture and process.
Okay, so you switch to solar/wind/nuclear or some other semi CO2 free source. Now you take CO2 free energy away from someone that now will have to use co2 generating energy instead. That too generates more CO2 than you are capturing.
The only way that CO2 capturing will finally be useful is when all energy producers are CO2 free. Until then, you’re just a drain that keeps generating more CO2 than you capture
Otherwise unusable wind and solar exist seasonally in some places, and the same goes for geothermal in Iceland where climeworks operated.
This kind of thing makes sense as a research operation, not as a commercial endeavor right now.
Research, of course, is fine but as I understand it, this is supposed to be a commercial operation
Yep. The idea has been to provide greenwashing services to major emitters
Okay, so you switch to solar/wind/nuclear or some other semi CO2 free source. Now you take CO2 free energy away from someone that now will have to use co2 generating energy instead.
Not sure if this makes climate capture any less baloney, but energy, especially renewables isn’t a 0 sum thing. A country with good renewables often generates more elecricity then it can handle and there’s a negative price for electricity at those times.
If you can choose when you use elecricity, you definitely aren’t forcing someone else to use CO2 intensive energy.
I don’t think that makes a big change to your overall point, but it’s an interesting feature of renewable energy so I figured it was worth saying.
That was my point. Until renewables power 100% of your country (or better, the world) it is actively a waste to be CO2 capturt as you will be generating more CO2 than you capture with that same amount or energy. It’s better to route that renewable energy to something that would have been using “CO2 generating energy” instead.
I guess what I mean is, renewable doesn’t need tibe 100% all the time to lead to that case. The UK is about 50% renewable overall, but if it’s sunny and windy (or windy and nobody is using electricity) then that ratio jumps over 90% fast.
I think I’m just geeking out on electricity though, not making a meaningful point.
The key part about it being in Iceland is their energy mix is really green as it’s all geothermal. So I get why they focused less on energy efficiency.
Would be good to see some analysis on the tech. They scaled up, does that mean it works, but needed to be bigger, or were they just doing it because they had the money and no other ideas?
I only found out about Climeworks recently and was watching a fluffy news segment about what they were doing.
My overriding thought at the time was, like, plant some trees, maybe?
I guess the pitch is that stuff like making concrete and steel generate crazy loads of carbon, so capturing it at source in theory sounds viable and pretty effective?
That “in theory” is doing a bunch of heavy lifting though, because so far climate capture hasn’t achieved anything other than being an excuse not to actually do anything about CO2 emmisions because “maybe some magic technology in 5 years will solve everything for us”
