Personal CO2 Removal as a Service(climeworks.shop) |
Personal CO2 Removal as a Service(climeworks.shop) |
The differentiating factor of this service is that it's "Permanent: turn CO2 into stone". That benefit is mostly psychological, not pragmatic. Aside from that, the 'small land and water usage' metric is also biased. Yes, rainforest protection projects use land, and you know what else they do? Protect rainforests!
It's also not that promising as a CCS technology. Just like energy, CO2 is most efficiently captured where its concentration is highest - that is in power plants, steelmaking plants, etc.
I know we love revolutionary startups and shiny new things here, but there are scientific bodies and certification standards which have already done the work well in this space, looking at the problem with a holistic approach and with numbers.
I know people mean well here, but for climate change what matters is results, not intentions - so run the numbers before you throw your money out of the window. Cool startup branding is not what makes a project impactful.
Planting tree is nice, but theses solutions you give have limits, which will only make the cost higher. This is a technological solution, sure it has limits too, but its cost will only go down by being done more efficiently and at one point, we will need to do theses things too, thus the sooner we reach lower price, the better we will be.
As you said, it's 100x more expensive, thus no industrial client will consider this solution yet, but you can afford it. Be the first stone that allow them to become 50x more expensive, etc...
Being client to them show also that we are ready to put money where our mouth are. That push toward more investment in theses spheres because there's money in the game. Investing into planting trees at 1/100 the cost... well except exploiting even more cheap labor... there's no money to be made.
Also see what I mentioned about CCS. AFAIK, the most promising CCS technology consist of burning biomass in power plants, and then using geological confinement of the sequestered carbon. The reason it's more effective, as I mentioned, is because the carbon is captured where its concentration is high - less entropy to fight.
It's absolutely true that current offsetting methodologies won't always stay so cheap - and as prices rise, new innovative methodologies will develop. Buying carbon credits is not an impediment to innovation; but it has the advantage of rewarding projects for being efficient, rather than "technologically cool".
The site talks about averages, but averages can be deceiving. Most people don't fly, and those that fly fly a lot. If you fly, you should probably try to overshot the average (by a lot) when you offset.
Carbon offsetting is cheap currently, but won't always stay so, getting more expensive as we exhaust the low-hanging fruits.
https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1234493080583143424?s=20
Bitcoin energy consumption hits a new all time high of nearly 9GW, comparable to Chile, a country with 18M people. Carbon footprint is ~37 Mt CO2 annually, about that of New Zealand. And yet it still does ~4 transactions per second...
Are the efficiencies gained in manufacturing scale or can the actual process / hardware be substantially improved?
This service is like 26 Euros for 46% of average travel. I know some companies use this company to offset their travel. https://pachama.com/. Anyone have advice on others?
Well-certified projects can offset emissions at a price of about 10$/teqCO2. I personally recommend https://www.standfortrees.org.
"i'll do this but i don't want to be the only one." Seeing the scale can be motivating.
It would also be nice to know how this would work at scale. If 100k people sign up, can they support that?
I just gave a presentation on BECCS w/ Brazilian Ethanol which comes out closer to $30. I haven't put it up, but here is one of the papers I based it on
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
A lot of articles about climate change also leave one with an unfortunate sense of helplessness. This is something an average person can do.
People probably prefer if CO2 was removed in their cities and not at some location kilometers away.
CO2 is diffused across the whole world in a matter of months. Its climate-changing effect lasts much longer than that - decades to centuries.
And to scale to a impactful level this will also require a very large amount of new, clean electricity generation...
But how big is the benefit otherwise?
My longer comment on this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19193938
Was going to reply "name three", but I see you covered that in your other post - well, two out of three; "Ferraris for show-off producers in LA, or Hello Kitty backpacks".
But those other things don't have a superlinear growth in energy consumption baked into the fundamentals of operation. A Hello Kitty backpack doesn't need schoolchildren to keep burning electricity just to secure its contents.
Most things are O(n) - O(n log n) in energy use to general utility provided, and top out at some point. Proof of Work chains need that just to keep the network working, regardless of any utility provided on top (which arguably is near-zero for any legitimate use case).
But I agree with the general point - pricing in full externalities of energy use would go a long way towards fixing things, including Bitcoin's existence.
Mining is pretty centralised, and most players keep secret exactly how efficient their hardware is - and you can bet it'll end up much more efficient than publically available hardware.
However, this is a very different product than BECCS - it direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 which would not occur without your purchase, in the only real permanent operating storage facility we currently have. It is very difficult to know what the marginal impact of changes in sugarcane production are, though we do know that there is potential for either indirect land use change, or mitigation of reduction due to shifts in demand/supply and knock-on effects.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
https://www.terrapass.com/product/productindividuals-familie...
Ethanol plants produce CO2 as a byproduct of fermentation which is nearly pure and easy to purify to the point where it can be compressed to 1200 psi and not have nitrogen phase separate out and not have water vapor mix with the CO2 and make carbonic acid that eats pipe.
So it is a small add-on to existing plants. A larger and more complex add-on would capture CO2 from the bagasse furnace.
This could lead to more land-use changes if it improves the economics and if the ethanol industry can find more markets for fuel and electricity.
Most of the ethanol plants are located near Sao Paulo and Rio because that is where the fuel and electricity are in demand. None of them are in the Amazon basin and few in the area to the south of it that is in risk of "savannafication".
> https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/climeworks-carbon-ca...
https://climeworks.shop/how-it-works/
EG the land area + fresh water cost to support a similar revmoval of C02 through forestation is an untenable strategy
Cut them down and make buildings out of them, land area problem solved. The fresh water cost I don't buy, there's rain man, it's free.
*edited from “neutral”, sorry, typo
What matters with forest-based offsetting is the increase of forest biomass - the deaths of individual trees don't matter. If you grow a forest, the corresponding CO2 is offset for as long as the forest stays there.
It is a viable solution.
Edit: if anyone disagrees look up about the Carboniferous period
Trees are great, but they will not solve the climate issue alone and the notion that they can needs to be put away so that we can plan realistically.
Most solutions to climate change are subtractive, not additive.
How does it compare to what they offer? (as in, metrics please).
Comes with a lot of other benefits too.
Edit: I’d be happy to proven wrong, I just can’t imagine how if we increased the today’s biomass by an incredible percent, it would come close to the amount of carbon stored over millions of years.
Edit 2: 1.2 trillion trees would cancel out 10 years of human CO2 emissions. The planet currently has 3 trillion trees https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...
It would indeed be foolish to believe we can halt climate change just by growing trees. But AFOLU is part of the toolkit we need to use (the most important tool in this toolkit is sobriety).
1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...
> The computer model calculates that the “residence times” (how long a tree will take to completely decompose) for conifer species range from 57 to 124 years, while hardwood species are typically around on the forest floor for 46 to 71 years
(I'll stand corrected on the hundreds of years, but it's still a long time)
https://northernwoodlands.org/knots_and_bolts/tree-falls-in-...
Same constraint as planting tree... at one point there's no more forest to protect (or the cost of protecting one just increase). It will just get more expensive.
> energy transition projects
This one is interesting, again, will just get more expensive with time, but that one I never seen any project that allow to buy carbon credit for theses kinds of projects.
> AFAIK, the most promising CCS technology consist of burning biomass in power plants, and then using geological confinement of the sequestered carbon.
Where can I offset my CO2 emission that way?
I don't care about investing in a solution that has no future. If what I pay for it means that it will just make the next ton more expensive, when it's already hard to make people pay for it already, I'm not for that solution.
Sure that one is 100x more expensive, but the cost can only go down with scale, and if it doesn't, well it will just push other technological solution to be developed because it's a proof there's money in sustainable solutions.
And yet Gold Standard reports renewable energy projects are a high share of their pipeline: https://www.goldstandard.org/sites/default/files/documents/m...
> Where can I offset my CO2 emission that way?
That's still at an experimental stage AFAIK (like most CCS technology), so unfortunately not yet available for such purposes.
> I don't care about investing in a solution that has no future. If what I pay for it means that it will just make the next ton more expensive, when it's already hard to make people pay for it already, I'm not for that solution.
A more optimistic way to look at it is as such: if we commit to offsetting our emissions by buying carbon credits, rising prices will pressure us towards reducing our emissions.
That's where we want to be headed, because there is NO future where emissions remain high and are totally offset.
I would encourage you to rethink your approach as follows: invest in the transition, not in the destination.
> Sure that one is 100x more expensive, but the cost can only go down with scale, and if it doesn't, well it will just push other technological solution to be developed because it's a proof there's money in sustainable solutions.
What makes you so sure that ClimeWork's solution can scale better? Their solution requires huge energy expenditures, and its not like we have a lot of geologically favourable sites for their solution.
If you want long-term innovation, why not fund general CCS research instead? It's much more likely to yield impactful and well-thought solutions.
How does renewable energy project have anything to do with athmospheric carbon capture? It's a way to lower carbon emission into the atmosphere sure, but we got 100 years of CO2 to take out of it too. I also already do everything I can to go toward renewable energy.
> That's still at an experimental stage AFAIK
Okay... so not an alternative for me right?
> A more optimistic way to look at it is as such: if we commit to offsetting our emissions by buying carbon credits, rising prices will pressure us towards reducing our emissions.
We aren't all the same person you know? We are currently talking about someone that can afford 100x the price to offset his emission and is ready to do it. I'm not too far from being that person, I'm already trying to reduce my emission, why not both?
I have nothing against planting tree, it's an amazing solution, but its limit are well below what needed right now.
People don't want to pay more right now, it's a HUGE issue. Go look at Canada carbon taxes, most of the provinces are currently fighting it in court, they are putting sticker on gas stations to tell people that they'll have to pay hundred more. 100% of that tax which is MUCH lower than the true environmental cost of that CO2 will be used to refund people. I'm already ready to pay more, 100x even, but planting more tree won't make theses people more likely to offset their emission if it make it more costly, that solution though not only offset my emission, but also invest into a potential solution and show there's a market for atmospheric carbon capture.
> That's where we want to be headed, because there is NO future where emissions remain high and are totally offset.
Which come back to my first answer, why not both. There's no future where we don't take out the CO2 already in the atmosphere either. I have seen multiple article talking about how the current warming is enough already that what get naturally released from glacier melting is more than what we release. Something being too expensive is no longer a reason to not research toward a solution, we need to research them all.
> I would encourage you to rethink your approach as follows: invest in the transition, not in the destination.
I never talked about destination, I talk about what we will need during the transition.
>What makes you so sure that ClimeWork's solution can scale better?
Where did I say their solution will be the right one? Excluding it from being the right one is a much bigger issue. What I'm sure about is that if there's a solution that scale better, but also allow to scrub atmospheric level, but still not viable, seeing any investment into ClimeWork's solution will make them much more likely to go toward that, instead of waiting for tree planting initiative to become costly enough to finally justify researching their costlier solution.
>If you want long-term innovation, why not fund general CCS research instead?
As a private individual earning in the mid 5 figures, that's the best I can do. I can surely pay 100x more carbon capture than I consume, but that's not a viable solution if it will just make it costlier for someone else, and won't actually solve the issue. Instead I vote with my wallet, and that's one that seems viable to me.
Unrestricted social signaling games absolutely have runaway costs and zero net social benefits; if we're going to address those, we're right back to "charge for externalities", which was the solution anyway, and completely unspecific to Bitcoin.
Edit:
>But I agree with the general point - pricing in full externalities of energy use would go a long way towards fixing things, including Bitcoin's existence.
Why do you say that? it would just change the total equilibrium expenditure on mining, not render it pointless, since the blockchain just has too be too expensive to attack, and the same constraints would apply to attackers and miners.
I feel it would significantly slow its growth, perhaps making it not worth the while relative to alternative solutions.
Also, the way I understand it, PoW has its growth limited only by a) how fast can you provision the hardware, and b) how much energy you can throw at it. I worry that we'll never arrive at the point of having clean energy too cheap to meter, if we have a black hole fueled by pure, refined greed, which can suck all the energy surplus pretty much instantly.
If energy becomes more expensive -- say, by pricing in the externalities of some energy sources -- that decreases the equilibrium expenditure, because marginal mining can't pay for itself anymore.
The concept of "pricing out miners" doesn't even make sense to begin with. Miners are competing with other miners (including malicious ones). Any resource constraint affects all of them; it can't make all of them give up. To the extent that other coins become popular, that (again) just prices out marginal miners.
But we couldn't keep this price so low if we scaled this to world emissions - the price of carbon offsetting is low now because we're still picking the low-hanging fruits of carbon offsetting.
The other thing to keep in mind is that we are only looking at low-hanging fruit right now. That's actually one of the really appealing things about this climeworks idea. It can be scaled indefinitely. Carbon capture from mines and manure digesters can only scale so much, because there are only so many abandoned mines and only so much undigested animal manure.
Reducing current C02 levels is more difficult and expensive than just reducing C02 output, and has a greater impact on overall reduction, but both are moves in the right direction.
Right, but we're talking about -1 tonne (reducing emissions) vs -1 tonne (taking carbon out of the atmosphere) and last I checked, -1 tonne is equivalent to -1 tonne.
> Reducing current C02 levels is more difficult and expensive than just reducing C02 output, and has a greater impact on overall reduction
It makes sense to me that it's easier/cheaper to reduce C02 output (at least as long as there is lots of low-hanging fruit), but it doesn't make sense to me that one would have a greater impact than the other.
-1 tonne (active output) is not equivalent to -1 tonne (overall C02 levels)
It's splitting hairs over what we consider to be better. Either is an improvement that I am happy to see.
Pretend we have 5 tonnes of co2 in the air. If I have an emitter, say someone wanting to burn a forest. That would emit 1 tonne. Or I have a sequestration process that would remove 1 tonne.
I can pay $X to either #1 or #2. In #1 case I stop the addition, e.g. 5 tonnes total. In #2 the forest gets burned so I'm up to 6 tonnes, but I've pulled down 1 tonnes so back to 5 tonnes.
As mentioned by other posters, there are a _ton_ of side benefits of the different approaches (burn forest for agriculture) vs other benefits of forests. But it seems like from a pure CO2 in atmosphere the two approaches should be similar?
Back on topic; in one we stop someone making a mess, in another we start cleaning it up.
Eventually it ought to start getting cleaned up. i.e. CO2 has to fall.
Developing technologies for that now is good. Stopping people from making messes is also good, and cheaper.