Why is it irony? It's serendipitous and a rather beautiful accidental analogy. Of course real plants are amazing; we can counter desertification by planting trees, making swales and reducing grazing on average through more intensive herding (mega-herds). And of course it's devastating that we cut down primal jungle forest for quick profits instead of the deep ecological and economical services they can provide with sustainable stewardship. But how does artificial CO2 removal degrade or add from those things? Often innovation is based on what nature already discovered and this is nothing new; we just sort of replicated trees. On Iceland there is not the environment to grow trees like in the Jungle, but they can use geothermal and solar energy to capture CO2. It's a green solution to reduce emissions for companies that really won't unless someone else started; the fossil fuel industry which itself is not only cause of CO2 emissions (the consumer ultimately chooses, but they sure do 'lobby'), but also of direct environmental impact. This technological solution for capture does not solve those other issues by other human activities, but it does help with CO2 pollution (more CO2 is great for plants, but not when the change is greater than species can handle in their natural migrations, for instance away from more invasive species given the new parameters - that's a big reason why plants go extinct or are endemic in the first place). In combination with sustainable stewardship for natural spaces, technology like this can lead to a societal change where we can actually demand from big industries and nations that they become more and more sustainable. Finally the capture capacity of these devices is far greater than nature, at least at first (so for most emerging ecologies). Imagine putting these in the middle of the Sahara, not many trees will grow there, but these devices would capture CO2 nevertheless. Point is, wherever you can invest in nature recovery to capture CO2 that's a great first step, but wherever the potential of this technology outweighs that of nature itself, it sure can help a lot!
Isn't it just incredibly insane that we allow companies to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for free and then we pay other companies hundreds of dollars per tonne to remove it?
what a dum, ignorant take, companies wont pay for it, you will pay. costs are always forwarded to the customer. Whats actually insane is that we care about 'carbon dioxide footprint' instead of actually using that money to produce something useful or help the poor etc.
If you consider what it took to build (steel concreate etc.) and what it takes to run (electricity from coal), what is your net carbon footprint as of today? I get that it will get better but like perpetual motion, my gut feeling is your best case scenario is break even.
@@lloyd7273 it actually doesn't , if you scale up the production and distribution infrastructure. The absolute carbon cost is concerning. Also think about the wider social implications of the market signals in this approach.
@@Bigobe244When you scale up it isn’t just the carbon costs of shipping and installing that goes up,the rate that you remove carbon goes up exponentially. Its just a matter of how fast it can cancel out the carbon it made to set it up, then after it reaches that milestone anything after is pure reduction in carbon.
I would also like to know how LOUD the system is. Is it practical to build in cities like Los Angeles or Pittsburgh where there are homes as well as factories/cars emitting CO2?
Since there are lots of fans for the high air stream needed, I think you would rather run it remotely. And also since the air is quite well mixed up, you do not need any proximity to the location of emission. But maybe it would be nice to have some sort of CO2 gathering directly from factories without something in between. I wonder why that is not discussed.
Excellent engineering! Ultimately however, the problem is the prevalence of human activity. Approximately 60% of a human organism consists of water, which becomes increasingly unsustainable when deviating from that core value. The same may be suggested of the planetary organism, which is veritably drowning in human activity.
I recall during the covid pandemic, when world traffic had diminished. The ozone had repaired itself. I remember watching a news story about it. The problem isn't expensive solutions such as this, it's reducing our output so that the planet can repair itself.
Back in my day we just used trees. Maybe if we had grown hemp like so many asked for and the population was t lazy and ignorant and allowed laws to be made against a plant then we would be in a different situation. Now even with no correlation people are still driving us in this direction. Unreal that it's 2023 and people still have not looked into this themselves.
Solving problems with technology always results in a different problem. In this case it is plain dumb since drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere is not the correct solution to mitigate climate change. Costs alone make this a non solution, but we could also just use what worked for 700 million years - plants. But that would mean we have to pay farmers adequate money for their work and actually educate both farmers and politics...
It is not dumb, because it is not meant for that. It is not an alternative to reduce emissions, like it has been explained in the video. It is meant to reabsorb emitted CO2, which will be needed after we go net-zero emissions. Plants cannot do that, there is not enough space for what is required, they require a lot of time, and trees themselves just die, as you need to have a living forest to sustain new generations of tree and keep the carbon stored. Many planting trees projects have failed because monocultures of trees planted in the middle of nowhere just die.
Would it be better to build these plants near bigger sources of carbon production? Create a grid with optimized placement so that it maximizes the collection from the air?
Different tools for different goals. Capturing CO2 from a chimney is a good way to prevent emissions, but we will also need to reabsorb previously emitted CO2 in the future.
These are stupid because the build process and the energy use also emits CO2, so at the end of the day it emits more carbon than it captures. Carbon capture machines are the pinnacle of greenwashing
BiBo - Brain in Brain out Howmuch C emission does it take to take the same out ? Do we need to build more solar, wind, wave, leg-peddle-generators to feed those C capture systems - why not plant more grass - like bamboo . . DEAD-GIVE-AWAY : give me 1% yield - and i be rich..
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@@shlnglls i think if that renewable energy which is used to power this massive machinery can be used to replace other polluting energy generation, we can still save a lot of carbon going into atmosphere
@@akash4043 Yes and no. This does not have to be a zero sum thing. It would be better to have such technology than not. You can perhaps install new renewable plants right next to it and run it remotely somewhere. There are always way more options than appear at first. Most problems are in part a framing problem.
@@akash4043 While that might be true, it's a matter of getting companies to accept the change in technology. For the biggest offenders, they would have to be compelled by law and/or someone else would have to pay for it. Either way, not the easiest thing to accomplish on a large scale.
The simplest and most effective way to store carbon has been around since the beginning of times: TREES Trees store carbon, retain water, keep soil in place esp. on slopes, provide shade == cool the ground down, provide food, provide building materials for humans and animals; It is extremely low-maintenance etc. Instead of building machines to 'fix' the carbon problem, plant trees 1.000.000 trees; Choose 'local varieties', mix them up. Plant them wherever you can. Look after them for ~5 years. After that they can look after themselves for the next 200 years. If after 1.000.000 trees planted, we humans are still around... plant another 1.000.000 trees. If you want to 'build machines', build machines that can plant 1.00.00 trees; They need to be simple, cheap and available for free... KISS: let mother nature do what she does best: Look after us all.
Thank you!!! I'm sitting here thinking about how they are trying to store carbon, and losing my mind a little bit. I get that this is a great effort in trying to reduce CO2 emissions, but Good Old mother nature has always proven time and time again that she works best. Preserving Forests, planting trees, and cleaning up the ocean in my mind should be the number one most important thing. We will curtail the climate crisis pretty quick by just allowing nature to naturally restore balance. I'm always trying to find the most natural way to restore our Earth.
Trees grown in the global south actual create more CO2 and warm the climate faster. CO2 removal isn't the answer, cooling the planet is. Look into the MEER Reflection technology. It is cheap, scales, and works very fast.
It would be cool if they could downsize the filters and place them over exhaust pipes for commercial producers of CO2, or even cars. That way the CO2 would be more concentrated and they wouldn't require filtration of so much air.
Interesting, we’ve had these machines for millions of years. They are called plants seems like it would be much cheaper just to stop chopping down all the trees.
Seems like it, but they have been trying to prevent that unsuccessfully for years, because money. How do you reckon it's cheaper when any attempt to suade people from stopping sustenance farming is causing poverty, or how is it cheaper when you have to fight illegal timber companies that employ violence to continue their evil trade, how easy is it for a country that relies on cutting down the forest for income to quit doing that? Cheaper maybe, but not easier. The best solution is land renewal nearby logging and farming operations so that you can actually stop the activities, but it's probably neither the cheapest nor the easiest.
He barely mentions forests - simply says planting alone will not be enough. Conserving existing forests is more important than planting them. Also, grassland (not lawns) is very efficient at carbon capture if memory serves. How about redesigning our tech for energy efficiency and durability? The amount of gadgets that now need batteries is astounding - even those who a couple of decades ago did not have batteries. We have largely stopped using mechanical tech (like scales, thermometers) and now use battery driven instead. The car and energy industry is developing without any consideration of what to do with the batteries at the end of service life (you must plan for that in the design phase). The service life of tech/gadgets/appliances is now remarkably short. Much shorter than before. Just look up 'planned obsolescence'. The industry purposefully makes things hard/impossible to repair, thus maximising ewaste. *Tech will not save us. We must reign it in if we wish to live in any kind of modernized lifestyle.* There is a guy called Andrew Millison (botanist) who through his videos is teaching how we can support or destroy our planet's ability to thrive naturally (and actually HAVE freshwater. He shows how to *work with nature, support it* with methods, some of which have been known for centuries (Native Americans were good at this for example). I love trees. We should plant more, agreed. I also think we should tech less. We don't need to - and we shouldn't - wait for any tech to save the day.
Let's pose some questions; how much energy would it take to operate this plant? You said it "could" be powered by renewables, Is it now powered by rewnewables? Is that sustainable? I have hard time believing we don't have the land to plants trees, the best carbon capture. We have millions of hectares of savannas and deserts that can be reforested. Some TED talks have had speakers discuss this. So what is more cost effective solution? Reforestation or making machines that would be powered by large land areas of solar panels covering the very soil that would have plants to capture the carbon?
Only a research plant would be powered by the grid, which in Iceland is mostly thermal. "We have millions of hectares of savannas and deserts that can be reforested.". But do YOU have those, or do other people live there or own those? Are you and others really OK spending money somewhere it doesn't make you money in return, or are you far more comfortable spending it near you, where your local ecology and economy can blossom? On Earth there is plenty for "all", but who gets to define who is part of this "all"? "So what is more cost effective solution? Reforestation or making machines that would be powered by large land areas of solar panels covering the very soil that would have plants to capture the carbon?" False dichotomy. You can place these over the ocean. Both options are not completely mutually exclusive at the very least. Moreover, since some levels of sunlight permit solar arrays to be interspersed with agriculture or plants that can help regrade the soil.
Planting trees is not a solution. It's just another way to pawn the problem off on something. No amount of trees can undo 100 yrs of unbalanced C02 emissions.
It would probably net neutral in a few years, being it can sequester 10,000 units of CO2 per day. Plus it sounds like they can be ran by biofuels or even solar power. Trees take a long time to be able to pull large amounts of carbon. So this in general is a net win and really exciting, as the technology will only get better.
@@902DawgS in what sense? i would agree that it is still only very little. But it achieves more effectivly what carbon capture is about. Its not a solution, just more cost efficient.
We would need 10 million of these machines that cost $10 million each in order to remove the CO2 that we make per year :). Here is a crazy idea instead, stop making so much CO2 in the first place.
As a country uk does not produce the amount of co2 that they go on about, instead they crippled uk industry and now China etc produce the goods and co2
@@theone-jn4zq No, we add every year 40 billion tons more. Lets remove some of those by not adding them instead of removing 10 tons per day for 10 million dollars :D
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So many here in the comments complaining about "why not just plant trees?" and such. The issue with that is that you need both a lot of time and a lot of space to plant a forest and get results. These is pretty much a technological forest that can be up and running in a much shorter time with a much smaller footprint. While they have all of them clustered around the same building here, imagine a city where every building has one of these running on the roof. Each one might not pull a lot of CO2 each, but having so many would be a massive force multiplier. And like he said, the more you build the cheaper the whole thing becomes and the more the technology develops the more efficient the system will become. He talked about turning the captured CO2 into stone underground, there's already a company who has figured out how to turn captured CO2 into bricks for buildings. Just imagine where combining these two technologies together can lead.
An 18.6% increase in permaculture (responsible land management) would sequester 9.3 gigatons of carbon by 2050; the sequestration these machines do is microscopic by comparison.
If you plant trees: Wood for living Wood for selling Plants for food Solving problems related to population through turning deserts green Balancing "CO2 disasters' Giving more life for animals/people overall Constant production of supplies which can be monetized and further re-invest in the same process
What a horrendously bad idea. Trees do this job. Become dependent on machines to do this job, chop down all of the trees and you have the recipe for a catastrophy.
i wonder how i didin´t know about these machines until now. Furthermore, this TedTalk only has 100k even though he is talking about an incredible improvement for the whole society. People are slept.
Im guessing its ok now to cut down all the trees and put a bigger tax on carbon coz of the machines rather than planting more trees and stopping deforestation Edit, these machines are an atrocity to humanity
It is *not*. And this project as well needs carbon taxes to be economically sustainable. We do not have enough space to plant all the trees that have been promised. Planting trees in some areas could even worsen climate change, because of the change of albedo. Much money have been spent in planting monocultures of trees that then died from diseases or fire, because forest cannot survive. We need to stop deforestation, and plant trees where it makes sense, to preserve species and restore environments that have been disrupted, but plants are not meant for carbon storage. They also require a lot of time to absorb CO2, and there is no guarantee that over tens of years they would have effectively locked CO2 permanently. We need carbon capture done efficiently and correctly. It is part of the solution, not a substitute.
@@davidj2473 I'm afraid... Because, I'm 100% sure there Will be people with a lot of money with the idea to build one of this massive plants to replace an entire forest with monocultures just because of the cost efficiency
@@davidj2473 Nah, these machines need energy which also needs a lot of space. Also space for making solar & the machines, transport everything, maintain, controlling, ..
Reforestation requires land that is not already forested. Trees emit all the CO2 they ever captured when they die; some of it as methane. Unless you volunteer to have trees instead of a backyard or trees instead of food; you can only do this in places where trees are a main source of fuel and there is land that could be forested. Just planting trees is not even helpful.
Probably not that much or close to zero especially the direct air capture in Iceland is powered solely on geothermal and hydroelectric from nearby dams
@@samuelzev4076 that’s one country , the rest of the world relies heavily on gas and coal as the primary source of energy . Iceland is a small country with a small population, it’s easy for them . if we were to adopt the technology in the US to offset our CO2 it will be gas and coal operating these facilities
@@joejoey7272 its not necessary anymore to use gas and coal as an excuse to power these things any longer especially since there was a recent breakthrough in nuclear fission, we can utilize that as a power source.
BREAKING NEWS: There is already a CO2 collector that is totally free, and that does not even cost anything to run. It's called trees. All we have to do is stop cutting them down at the appalling rate that we do now.
I'm maybe wondering the same thing to other people, but why don't we put these "solvents" at the dead source of CO2? The source must have higher CO2 density too, so I expect it'll be more effective.
CO2 concentration is more or less the same across the planet. It is higher only on the chimneys of coal plants, incinerators etc. There are different plants for that. This is meant on direct-air capture, so to remove what has been already emitted. It does not compete with the systems trying to prevent further emissions by absorb CO2-rich air. It is one of the tools which will be useful on large scale when we get close to zero net emissions and afterwards.
Far less than it can capture during it lifetime operations. As a comparison, solar panels emit about 25 times less carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt hour than coal-powered electricity. If the production energy mix was fully green that would be even less, however, solar panels still get made using fossil fuel energy.
A single redwood, planted, for $1. will remove 1,500 tons of CO2 from the air and build soil, reduce erosion, moderate temperature volatility, provide shade, and eventually useful building materials in 1000 years. For only $200. you can hire people to do much less than that. Naturally, we are ignoring our cheaper partner and spending lots of CO2 mining and making machines, as well as extracting oil.
Companies will use carbon capture for greenwashing. Why not use the green energy to replace the energy from fossil fuels and stop carbon emission in the first place, that would be much better use of the green energy. Investment in carbon capture makes sense after we have replaced all the fossil fuel energy by renewables.. we are far from that today.
I have invented a solution to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Use the exhaust funnel from smoke stacks as an intake to cool down the exhaust. Redirect the exhaust via heat exchanger and then use the Coiled cooling pipe to change the exhaust smoke back into a solid. The coiled cooling pipe was invented in 1100 and relies on the theories of enthalpy and entropy of evaporation. I believe that cars have close to zero emmisions now? Thanks Catherine Crouse.
Unfortunately the worst CO2 emissions are in developing countries 🇨🇳 🇷🇼 🇮🇳…they can’t afford these ! It’s great to try and clean the air, but isn’t it possibly more important to stop creating new CO2 in the first place. Fabrication of these huge filters will create more emissions anyway! 🤦♂️
9:24, Is it posible to dig hole 100m underground without emmiting more carbon to envirnment "to put CO2 stone" there. this feels so wrong, I feel like, we will save more carbon if we don't perform any action suggested by this video. As everybody suggesting, we should just focus on planting more tree
Carbon Dioxide consists of 1 Carbon atom and 2 Oxygen atoms. This system is removing 2 oxygen atoms for every carbon atom, unlike nature, through plants, remove 1 carbon atom and release 2 oxygen atoms into the atmosphere; not storing it away underground we we cannot use it. [breathing]. I worry about some of these "solutions".
Stop tilling fields would capture as much CO2 as millions of these ORCA together. And it is feasible here and now, with the existent technology, without affecting agricultural output... well, stop tilling would increase agricultural output in the medium and long term.
Plants need CO2 (carbon dioxide) for photosynthesis, remember that when they start eliminating CO2 out of the atmosphere and then wondering why the plants start dying. Trees and native grasslands is the best way to combat this "problem."
Carbon capture is such a joke. The speed of development of carbon capture vs emissions is so terrible. He says we need to be quite fast, and that the costs don't make sense, even after 15 years. Meanwhile solar panels cost 10% of what they did 15 years ago
Trees have this function and also absorb water into themselves. Why cars? Explain? Let's plant trees! Urgently! What kind of power field these machines create around themselves. ? Moderator, you can go to the cemetery, because you are now saying that a live system is not needed, we will create an artificial one. And you, the presenter, are a living system. Why pull, instead of himself, it was necessary to upload the report to the robot and he would tell and it would be clear. You're not needed.
Quick math, it would cost like 100 trillion to get all CO2 emissions/year. So If they can get the cost down 10 times then it would become a good solution.
There’s something unclear hear. If the CO2 density in the air is 420pp. There’s not a huge needs for this kind of machine right ? Furthermore, if we use that huge investment for tree planting, it will have more impact on the earth.
These are a ridiculously inefficient means to reduce CO2. The overall energy and thermodynamics balances involved make this sort of venture a foolish endeavour. Far more effective to reduce energy use or improvement efficiency.
If we didn’t waste space on animal agriculture related agriculture including deforestation and crop production then we could have a lot more space…. 6:20
This can only be a viable option if cost goes way, way down and volume goes way, way up. I hope you can do it. For the moment I'm quite sceptical since all other attempts (mainly by fossil fuel giants) have failed miserably.
At .04% of the air we breathe, how disastrous is it to be there? He is creating a problem in order to have a solution to sell. In other words he's selling a solution in need of a problem.
The best and safest carbon removing machines are trees! So eat less meat and let us reforest 50% of our world…what would mean we could emit continue emit all the co2 we want………
Trees emit all the CO2 they ever captured; some of it as methane. Reforestation ends when there is no more land that can be reforested and you can then only make any gains by turning it into char or something and burrying it and in that effort you will burning oil to collect trees and process them.
@@soylentgreenb no they don’t , go back to biology class , trees use carbon to create wood , they do release the excess CO2 they don’t need at night but the net total is they store CO2
