I'll note the chart at the bottom of the sidebar: CDR may be a very big deal in future decades, but right now, it's a small and expensive part of what needs to be happening
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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I think CDR today is pretty much where solar panels were in the 1980s - something in University labs and on NASA probes. But if we did not take an active interest in developing the technology back then (and of course a lot of people did not), then it would not have developed into the world-changing industry of today. People need to understand CDR because it can be cheap eventually, and because without it we have no chance to avoid disastrous climate change this century. We do not want to wait 40 years for CDR to develop like solar has - it needs to happen a lot faster. Just my two cents . . .
It's completely reasonable to look it as an R&D project. Unfortunately, the fossil fuels industry is using the existence of that R&D project to create social permission to keep on emitting in the meantime, even though the high inherent energy requirements of CDR mean that it's almost always a better choice to not burn stuff in the first place.
Direct air capture (cited for high energy requirements) is only one of dozens of CDR approaches. For example CDR approaches include a variety of biomass conversion paths. While it may be true that those processes require high energy, the plants obtain it all from the sun. In natural systems of the carbon cycle, the change of carbon from one form to another is incidental to the natural energy transformations that would naturally occur - so if we can find ways to shift the balances of some natural systems, maybe we can cause a lot more carbon to move from air to the crust in various ways. It is at least an interesting puzzle.
I hope we do not use the machinations of the fossil fuel industry to navigate the course. We would not abandon lung cancer research because tobacco companies might use the progress to sell more cigarettes.
Yes BECCS is a thing on paper. There's even one contract that Microsoft has signed for a small amount of it. It's going to be limited in scale though: the quantity of biofuels that can be sustainably produced is limited.
You need to get fossil fuel use to near zero for these to do what we need.
DAC and BECCS are just two of many options. A lot of CDR choices will be based on location - what resources are available for moving CO2 from air to concentrated forms, and what means are available for keeping it in that form a long time. Silicate rock, crushed to dust, can "weather" to carbonate minerals relatively fast. There are a whole range of biomass conversion options - depending on what ecosystems are in a place, or can be established with local benefit. And for sequestering, there are also various ways to go.
And absolutely all of the CDR in the world will be wasted if we keep burning fossil fuels. But there are some fossil fuel uses that will be very difficult to eliminate, and there is all that legacy CO2 already in circulation - we have to do both; we have to achieve negative CO2.
I might be preaching to the choir on this but at the very least, long term, we need to find a solution to remove carbon from the atmosphere. We have focused our climate report on the relative near term, which is important, but I don't know if the broader public realizes that even if we stopped emitting today the temperature would continue to climb for at least a few centuries to millenia. We've know since the 1800's that a doubling of CO² corresponds to about a 4°C increase in temperature in the long run.
CDR is a fundamentally necessary technology to meet our goals.
Nothing wrong with the idea of removing...but actually getting to the point where we're not adding CO2 to the atmosphere means not burning fossil fuels in the first place is necessary for it to make the kind of difference we need it for. And the way that CDR is getting pushed (and funded) is in large part as a means of creating social permission to keep on burning. That's a problem.
I agree completely. But I am used to talking to skeptics and I tend toward arguments that are simple to drive home without needing to point to this as human caused because media.