The World’s Biggest Plant to Suck Carbon Dioxide From the Sky Is Up and Running

The world’s biggest direct air capture (DAC) plant is set to come online in Iceland on Wednesday. The moment is an important one in developing new technologies to help suck carbon dioxide out of the air—but raises a whole host of questions on the future of how we’re going to put those technologies to use.

The Orca plant, located about 20 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of the capital of Reykjavík, uses large industrial vacuums to remove carbon dioxide from the air. The plant’s owners and operators, a Swiss startup called Climeworks, said that the plant can remove 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year...

It doesn’t matter how many trees you plant they do not remove carbon from the biosphere nor surfacial carbon cycle. And they certainly do not store it for geological time scales. Trees when they grow turn CO2 into cellulose aka wood. When a tree does it falls to the forest floor where in a short time it decomposes back into CO2,water and minerals with a small portion becoming organic humus in the soil typically less than 5% of the original mass of the tree is turned to organic soil humus. Only burying the tree in an anoxic environment such as a swamp and then burying it under sediments does one sequester CO2 over geological time scales this is exactly how coal is made in the first place. No amount of forests can pull down CO2 over geological time scales only the oceans and the chemical weathering of igneous rocks also washed into the oceans via rivers can remove carbon from the biosphere and atmospheric carbon cycles.

This is freshmen geology 1301 level stuff people should know this. I happen to teach geology at the undergraduate level from time to time it’s one of the key points of the geological carbon cycle.

You can’t grow enough trees to make up for burning trees(now coal) and marine algae(now oil) that accumulated over millions of years when you burn that accumulated carbon mass in less than 200 years the rate of carbon out vs rate ocean sequestering carbon in is out of balance by a factor of nearly a million. That’s well proven we know how much fossil fuel humans burn every year and the ocean takes up a given amount at the current ppm of the air above it. It’s never been in debate the CO2 levels are rising we can measure it and do with great precision in Hawaii and Russia and European Union. The question for humans is do we adapt to the higher temps and sea levels that are coming when not if we go from 400-ppm to 1000 or 1200+ the planet will be a lot wetter and greener but sea levels will rise and people will have to adapt to that over the next century.

Who taught you geoscience? They failed that day. Water is only a greenhouse gas in the stratosphere well above the troposphere and any atmospheric weather pattern. Water vapor on the surface is and never will be a greenhouse agent. The oceans evaporate cubic miles worth of water per year that does effectively zero to the long term radiation balance of the planet it all rains back down eventually over land is the oceans themselves. Clouds have a short term effect of reflecting sunlight during the day and trapping long wave during the night the net effect is in a planetary scale a wash. The long term radiation balance gasses are all in the stratosphere where they trap heat at night and day. CO2, methane, hydroflorocarbons, and yes water vapor. There is no convective pathway for water vapor released or evaporated at the surface to get high into the stratosphere. Volcanism is one way with high powered eruptions. The largest source currently is aircraft exhaust above 55,000 feet get fuel burns to CO2 and water with high flying usually military jets at FL550+ commercial is nearly all below FL450. A new and growing source is rockets crossing the stratosphere into orbit. SpaceX has been putting up heavy lift once or more per month that burn kerosene and O2 right through the entire stratosphere the effects of thousands of launches per year will add up. It can take over 100 year
s for water vapor in the stratosphere to fall via gravity into the troposphere, a good portion leaks out the other way it gets energized by solar and cosmic radiation to energy levels where it can escape into space directly. Either way the residence time for stratosphere water vapor is decades to centuries.

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