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Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions
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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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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.
Source
Mind you, that $1 billion covers the cost of building the facility, not the cost of operating it.
Not at all. At $500/t the 1.4million people would not emit $262.5million worth of carbon.
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.