What is carbon capture? Some say it will help save the world, for others it\u2019s a dangerous distraction<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Next-gen climate solutions like DAC are gaining more attention from governments and private industry as humans continue to burn fossil fuels. Concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2023. <\/p>\n
As the planet continues to heat up \u2014 with devastating consequences for humans and nature \u2014 many scientists say the world needs to find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere in addition to rapidly cutting fossil fuels. <\/p>\n
But carbon removal technologies such as DAC are still controversial. They have been criticized as expensive, energy-hungry and unproven at scale. Some climate advocates are also concerned they could distract from policies to cut fossil fuels. <\/p>\n
This technology \u201cis fraught with uncertainties and ecological risks,\u201d said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, speaking about carbon capture generally. <\/p>\n
Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company says it is the world\u2019s largest such plant. It has a modular design with space for 72 \u201ccollector containers\u201d \u2014 the vacuum <\/strong>parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air \u2014 which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily. There are currently 12 of these in place with more due to be added over the next few months. <\/p>\n Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere <\/strong>a year <\/strong>at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That\u2019s equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year. <\/p>\n Climeworks did not give an exact cost for each ton of carbon removed, but said it was closer to $1,000 a ton than $100 a ton \u2013 the latter of which is widely seen as a key threshold for making the technology affordable and viable. <\/p>\n
As the company scales up the size of its plants and bring costs down, the aim is to reach $300 to $350 a ton by 2030 before hitting $100 a ton around 2050, said Jan Wurzbacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Climeworks, on a call with reporters. <\/p>\n
The new plant is \u201can important step in the fight against climate change,\u201d said Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh. It will increase the size of equipment to capture carbon pollution. <\/p>\n
But, he cautioned, it\u2019s still a tiny fraction of what\u2019s needed. <\/p>\n
All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency. <\/p>\n
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Related article<\/span> These 4 charts show the world just passed a major clean energy milestone<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are already much bigger DAC plants in the works from other companies. Stratos, currently under construction in Texas, for example, is designed to remove 500,000 tons of carbon a year, according to Occidental, the oil company behind the plant. <\/p>\n
But there may be a catch. Occidental says the captured carbon will be stored in rock deep underground, but its website also refers to the company\u2019s use of captured carbon in a process called \u201cenhanced oil recovery.\u201d This involves pushing carbon into wells to force out the hard-to-reach remnants of oil \u2014 allowing fossil fuel companies to extract even more from aging oil fields. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s this kind of process that makes some critics concerned carbon removal technologies could be used to prolong production of fossil fuels. <\/p>\n
But for Climeworks, which is not connected to fossil fuel companies, the technology has huge potential, and the company says it has big ambitions. <\/p>\n
Jan Wurzbacher, the company\u2019s co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest stage in Climeworks\u2019 plan to scale up to 1 million tons of carbon removal a year by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050. <\/p>\n
Plans include potential DAC plants in Kenya and the United States. <\/p>\n
This story has been updated with additional information.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\nThis post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cworld\u2019s largest\u201d plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday. \u201cMammoth\u201d is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021. Direct <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2949,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}