Beyond Insane - Someone Finally Did The Arithmetic On The Absurdity Of Powering Direct Air Capture Of Carbon Dioxide

[hatrack]

EDIT

But as I explain in my new report, these technologies, and all potential DAC technologies, have an Achilles Heel: The laws of thermodynamics. Regardless of the technology employed, extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere is inherently energy-intensive. Because burning fossil fuels to power DAC facilities would reduce, or even negate, the carbon-reduction goal, DAC technologies have focused on using electricity generated from zero-emissions sources.

For example, the theoretical minimum of energy needed to meet a one billion metric ton objective would require the equivalent of 10% of all electricity generated in the U.S. in 2024. The practical energy required would be at least 30%, as no technology can be 100% efficient. Producing that much electricity would require building hundreds of new nuclear plants. If wind and solar power were relied on, it would require an area larger than the state of Florida, and hundreds of thousands of megawatts of battery storage facilities to compensate for wind’s and solar’s inherent intermittency. The cost to build the required generating capacity alone would be trillions of dollars. Building additional transmission lines and the DAC facilities themselves would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more. In total, the cost is likely to be over $400 per metric ton of CO2 removed. That’s far higher than even the most recent estimates of the social cost of carbon, which supposedly measures the damages to the climate from each additional ton of CO2 emitted.

Despite the huge energy requirements, the impacts on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperatures would be minuscule. The current atmospheric CO2 concentration is approximately 425 parts per million (ppm). Removing one billion metric tons of CO2 would reduce the concentration by only 1/10 of 1 ppm and, based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate sensitivity estimates, by 0.003 °C. That’s about 40 times less than the assumed margin of error in measuring global temperatures. Even if billions of metric tons of CO2 were captured and sequestered annually, the impact on world temperatures by the year 2100 would be too small to have any noticeable impact on the climate.

Finally, storing CO2 underground poses environmental and health risks because it could escape, as in Cameroon in the 1980s, when Lake Nyos “burped” several hundred thousand tons of CO2, leading to the deaths of 1,700 people and thousands of cattle. It would be unreasonable to assume that, after sequestering billions of tonnes of CO2 underground, similar events could not take place.

EDIT

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2026/02/12/another_climate_pipe_dream_capturing_carbon_out_of_thin_air_1164302.html

[UpInArms]

1. Ergo

The rollback of environmental protections and regulations