"Direct Air Carbon Capture" Facility Face-Plants; Captured 1/5 Of Company Claims, Can't Offset Its Own Energy Use

[hatrack]

Climeworks in Iceland has only captured just over 2,400 carbon units since it began operations in the country in 2021, out of the twelve thousand units that company officials have repeatedly claimed the company’s machines can capture. This is confirmed by figures from the Finnish company Puro.Earth on the one hand and from the company’s annual accounts on the other. Climeworks has made international news for capturing carbon directly from the atmosphere. For this, the company uses large machines located in Hellisheiði, in South Iceland. They are said to have the capacity to collect four thousand tons of CO2 each year directly from the atmosphere.

According to data available to Heimildin, it is clear that this goal has never been achieved and that Climeworks does not capture enough carbon units to offset its own operations, emissions amounting to 1,700 tons of CO2 in 2023. The emissions that occur due to Climeworks' activities are therefore more than it captures. Since the company began capturing in Iceland, it has captured a maximum of one thousand tons of CO2 in one year.

The company's operations in Iceland rely entirely on funding from its Swiss parent company, Climeworks AG, but the Icelandic subsidiary's equity position was negative by almost $30 million in 2023. Poor performance in direct CO2 capture has caused a depreciation of the Orca capture machine of $1.4 million in 2023 as the capture plant did not meet expectations, according to the company's annual accounts.

Last year, Climeworks partially commissioned the Mammoth capture plant, which is expected to capture nine times more than what had been done since 2021, or 36,000 tons. That plant has only managed to capture 105 tons of CO2 in its first ten months of operation, according to information from Puro.Earth. It is responsible for verifying the Swiss company's capture and is paid for that work by Climeworks.

EDIT

https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/climeworks-capture-fails-to-cover-its-own-emissions/

[NNadir]

1. The article features none other than "I'll sue you if you say I'm wrong," Mark Z. Jacobson who calls it a scam.

He's the world famous asshole who sued PNAS and scientists publishing an article there when they questioned his belief that the entire world could be run on so called "renewable energy."

Stanford prof who sued critics loses appeal against $500,000 in legal fees

I'm not questioning the point of whether the DAC plant in Iceland works. It probably doesn't. Nevertheless it's pretty laughable for a high priest of the antinuke "renewable energy will save us" cults to be commenting on what might and might not be a scam.

It's well known that the removal of carbon dioxide from any matrix, from flue gas, to natural gas to air, is an energy intensive process. The more dilute the concentration, the more energy required. It's simple physics, involving overcoming the entropy of mixing. If one seeks to reduce the carbon chemically say to a useful form, one must add all of the energy released to put it there, and then some. It certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. I certainly am aware of this, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it frequently, for instance, exploiting the use of air Brayton Cycles driven by nuclear heat to achieve this result. We pump air in all kinds of industrial devices, although most are powered by dangerous fossil fuels. If we pull the fossil fuels out of the line, it may be possible, even economically viable - although this is highly speculative - to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Just as we knew that flight is possible because birds fly, we should be aware that DAC is possible from the existence of photosynthetic plants. Ripping up the planetary surface area to build wind farms and solar farms will and does have the effect of destroying plants, even without the vast mineral mining exercises required for the effort.

Frankly I have far more respect for one of the prominent scientists in the field of DAC, Christopher Jones of Georgia Tech, than I do for Mark Z. Jacobson. (Jones consulted on Climeworks.) That this project failed does not imply that all such projects will fail. It was using dedicated energy in a renewable energy heaven, Iceland, where the main CO₂ releases are connected with geothermal energy.

I obviously have no use for Mark Z. Jacobson, who despite his h-index, I regard as a fool but I am impressed by Dr. Jones (who has a higher h index) who is working to solve a very difficult problem, and who has been cited by other scientists 43389 times without generating any lawsuits being initiated by him.

Difficult problems are not solved without being littered with lots of failures in the effort. We damned well better figure it out because otherwise we're screwed.