Checkpoint: Carbon Capture is Supplemental at Best, Silicon Valley Doom at Worst
Amit Lahav
As COP30, the conference trying to unite countries to take rapid climate action, met in November, a less-appreciated solution to climate change was offered by Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO claimed that global warming was preventable by using an “AI Satellite Constellation” to control the Earth’s warming temperatures.
While an electric-car producer publicly sidestepping the green transition his company would profit from is strategically novel, the idea that we could ‘tech’ our way out of this emergency is not. For many years, climate denialists would often pivot to technology as a placeholder as they stymied regulation and reform. Ben Shapiro, for example, publicly dismisses decarbonization, saying geoengineering and other technology “is a lot easier to do than anything remotely approaching a global carbon tax”. Nobody tell Mr. Shapiro that dozens of countries have already come together to tax 21.5% of global emissions!
Claiming that unproven future technologies will appear and fix everything has several key advantages. Such hypothetical technology requires neither big changes to ongoing business practices nor disruptions to vested interests, nor requires governments or companies to commit a considerable amount of time, money, and manpower immediately.
Thus, for many companies and their mouthpieces, the mystery box labelled ‘future climate technology’ might as well say ‘spend less money and still take credit’.
For fossil fuel companies, it also means that even if companies do choose to invest in such embryonic technology as carbon capture, they aren’t pushing money into competitors in the green energy and renewable resource sectors.
Even looking at white-collar companies like United Health Group, a major insurance and health administration company, raises concerns. They claim they have put in place plans to be ‘net-zero’ by 2050, yet they list that the last 10 percent of their emissions targets will be met through “purchasing carbon removals”. Excluding restoring peatland and reforesting (which are themselves sometimes criticized for their overambitious claims), carbon removals are a bit of a messy business. This is not helped by shadowy misunderstandings of their role as an important accessory, as one professor noted, ‘Priority number one is emissions reductions, that’s 80 or 90 percent of the solution. Carbon removal fills in the rest.’
In such a mire, few lie more caked in mud than ‘Direct Air Carbon Capture’ (DAC). This technology, unsurprisingly, seeks to take carbon dioxide directly from the air - kind of like a chemical air purifier. While carbon sequestration is listed in the Paris Agreement as a necessary part of the climate solution, DACC is lauded by the private sector far beyond its current potential. A suite of billion-dollar companies, including Meta and Alphabet, have recently committed $925 million to a DACC initiative called ‘Frontier’ to purchase carbon removals from smaller companies.
But the IEA estimates that current direct air carbon removal lies at about 0.01 million tonnes of CO2 per year. For those keeping track at home, the Paris Agreement estimates we need to remove about 7-9,000 million tonnes a year through the coming century (DACC manages around 0.000125% of this).
For a more visual idea of how little that is, imagine someone had set you the task of walking the entire circumference of the Earth, across all its deserts, mountains, ice caps, and, in Jesus-like fashion, its vast oceans. Assuming you started on New York City’s Wall Street on January 1st, and we are currently in late November, you have not yet reached the Empire State Building.
Oh, and you were supposed to make the whole journey every year, and each time you don’t, coastal flooding worsens, farmland degrades and hundreds of animal species go extinct.
Perhaps, this race for the planet should be done using some other means. A method that, one assumes, isn’t the decarbonization equivalent of scouring the streets for snails to lash together into a prototype gastropod-based Zimmer frame?
Even with some back-of-the-envelope math, one can see this tech-solution disaster writ large. Current DACC capture costs bought by Frontier are up to about $1000 per ton of CO2. One MIT brief puts reforestation carbon removal at under $45 a ton (others cite $20 per ton). This means that if the full investment amount went to buying carbon removal at that price, then reforesting would remove twenty-two times more carbon than DACCs, even at the more expensive MIT estimate. This isn’t even thinking of the even more efficient ways to prevent carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere in the first place, nor the ecological benefits of reforestation. What if that money were spent converting the power grid? Or securing a carbon tax? Or was it used for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies?
Even with some notable issues in the carbon offset space, reforestation looks a lot more promising. The IPCC notes that reforestation combined with ecosystem protection could even surpass that magical 9 million tonnes number, potentially reaching 11 million tonnes of yearly removal by 2050, and boy does our planet need that buffer.
Additionally, a scientific review of DACC technology found notable ‘bottlenecks’ regarding the energy usage of these systems. Thus, if a power grid is not yet decarbonized, requiring a fossil-fuel power source to heat your carbon removal technology to the 80 to 100 o C required, will tank net CO2 removal even further.
Frontier pays $1000 per ton for carbon removal to a smaller company, Heirloom, which also received a purchase order from Microsoft for 300,000 tonnes of removal. The hope of some is that once prices drop sufficiently low, market forces will push investment in the same way that green energy has begun to pull in huge amounts of money. Heirloom’s founder claims that its price per ton will drop to $300 by 2030, yet one MIT expert thinks DACCs will stall at between $600-$1000 per ton at that time.
But could the price drop ever be fast?
I would say no.
Solar dropped 90% in price per unit between 2009 and 2019, but that was a decades-proven (if inefficient) technology that needed refinement, not an emergent one. Additionally, DACC also involves finding space for storage for the captured carbon, such as in geological formations or old oil wells, adding logistical, financial, and geographic hurdles. Paradoxically, captured carbon liquid can and has been used to flush out fossil fuels as it stores carbon, with said oil then refined and burned…which isn’t great for a carbon sink technology.
So, Direct Air Carbon Capture is pulling in lots of flashy investment, yielding poor results, and is improving too slowly for the purposes it claims. DACC seems like a lot of Silicon Valley approaches to global problems, where tech that is “disruptive” or “sci-fi” is sexy and interesting and, thus, appeals to people like Musk or Gates. Yet such a situation means dependable technologies whose well-funded implementation and improvement could become transformative are left discarded like yesterday’s playthings.
I fear much like other emerging tech darlings, Direct Air Carbon Capture will absorb tremendous amounts of money and, either decades will pass before it’s worth its salt, or it will fall apart sooner altogether, both leaving ordinary people to pick up the pieces after the collapse.
Only this time it’s our planet.
