Thread by @Peters_Glen

THREAD

Will Direct Air Capture grow from a few small facilities to an automotive style industry removing billions of tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year?

@jongertner explores at @nytclimate, & in this thread I pick up on a few nice quotes...
nytimes.com/2019/02/12/mag…

Most readers will think of Direct Air Capture (DAC) as (permanent) CO₂ Removal from the atmosphere (with underground storage), but most commercial pathways are in agriculture, food, or synthetic fields (which is CO₂ neutral not CO₂ negative). 2/

Wise words @hal_harvey, “The only way that direct air capture becomes meaningful is if we do all the other things we need to do promptly”.

Unfortunately, many think that CO₂ removal is a technology to clean the mess, no, it is only meaningful if the house is already clean. 3/

“All of negative emission is hard — even afforestation or reforestation,” Sally Benson, a professor of energy-resources engineering at Stanford, explains. “It’s not about saying, ‘I want to plant a tree.’ It’s about saying, ‘We want to plant a billion trees.’ ” 4/

Howard Herzog of @mitenergy thinks costs will remain $600-1000/tCO₂. “I think there has been a lot of hype about this, & it’s not going to revolutionize anything,” other technologies will prove cheaper. “At best it’s going to be a bit player.” 5/

“Basically, we have a road map — $600, down to $400, down to $300 and $200 a ton,” say the founders. “This is over the next five years. Down to $200 we know quite well what we’re doing.” And beyond $200, Wurzbacher suggested, things get murkier. 6/

Even though @DKeithClimate is “crazy jealous. It’s because they’re using a modular design, and we’re not”, he thinks his firm is closer to building a big plant that could capture carbon at a more reasonable cost and produce substantial amounts of fuel. 7/

To capture 1% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025 would require that Climeworks build 250,000 carbon-capture plants, or about 4.5 million carbon collectors. For a company that has only built 100 collectors (and has 14 small plants around Europe), 8/

“No one owns a crystal ball, but we think — and we’re quite confident — that by something like 2030 we’ll have a global average price on carbon in the range of $100 to $150 a ton”, says Wurzbacher.

Here's hoping... 9/

“The idea of bringing direct air capture up to 10 billion tons by the middle or later part of the century is such a herculean task it would require an industrial scale-up the likes of which the world has never seen,” says Princeton’s Stephen Pacala. 10/

“If you can do one carbon-capture facility, ..., great. You need to do that 5,000 times [&] you need a small power plant just to run [each] facility." You need to build a new DAC & power plant "every day for the next 30 yrs to get to some of these [2°C] scenarios”, says me 11/

“To reach 1.5°C, we need to halve emissions every decade”, precisely the same time that we make immense investments in negative-emission technologies. This would need to be done even as governments choose among competing priorities: like health care, education and so on. 12/

“We have to come to grips with the fact that we waited too long & that we took some options off the table,” says @ClimateOpp.

As a result, NETs no longer seem to be just interesting ideas; they look like necessities.

/end

PS: Those beautiful subscripts on CO₂, were courtesy of @kevpluck symbolsalad.com