Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions
Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions
Separating carbon dioxide from air, while technically straightforward, is outrageously expensive.
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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.
Mind you, that $1 billion covers the cost of building the facility, not the cost of operating it.
Yes, upkeep is cheap at an estimated $250k/year. However, it's negligible compared to the upfront costs which are far more important since there is urgency to reduce emissions as soon as possible
Or use $1 billion to buy ebikes for 300,000 people. No operating costs, and in 5 years you've replaced what would have been replaced in one year.
How much in emissions for building the facility? How much for operating costs? How much for repairs and unexpected disasters? How much in emissions from the workers driving to and from? All that money could just buy more people ebikes.
Not at all. At $500/t the 1.4million people would not emit $262.5million worth of carbon.
That $500/t figure is a minimum to keep it running and not accounting for $1B upfront costs which are what is important here when considering solutions. We need to reduce carbon emissions now, not 20 years from now.
Let's say it we run it for 10 years which is being generous.
$1B upfront costs + $250k/year x 10 years = $1,002,500,000 total Divided by 10 years, that's a real cost of $100,250,000 per year.
That's $100.25MM to operate each year for 10 years.
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.
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.