*This is a quite astonishingly misinformed piece by Preston. If he had been following Climeworks own announcements, he would have found that their $600 / tonCO2 figure is not an estimate, it is the current cost arising from their commercial CO2 plant. Their "estimate" is as follows, from their site-*
http://www.climeworks.com/carbon-brief-the-swiss-company-hoping-to-capture-1-of-global-co2-emissions-by-2025/ *Climeworks says that its direct air capture (DAC) process – a form of negative emissions often considered too expensive to be taken seriously – costs $600 per tonne of CO2 today. This is partly covered by selling the CO2 to a nearby fruit and vegetable grower for use in its greenhouse.* *Climeworks hopes to get this down to $100/tCO2 by 2025 or 2030. It aims to be capturing 1% of global CO2 emissions each year by 2025.* *So the so called "announcement "of cheap CO2 capture has already been trailed by Climeworks some time ago.* *Further, Preston says the following about the use of the captured CO2-* *The capture facilities would also demand resolving still unsettled questions about appropriate methods of disposing of the extracted carbon. (One of the suggested uses for captured carbon dioxide is, ironically, to inject it into wells for enhanced oil recovery! A better one is Carbon Engineering’s proposal to create a carbon neutral fuel). Funding, regulating, and permitting the operation of these facilities would raise questions about moral and political responsibility that are already proving difficult to resolve in other climate contexts.* *While EOR is clearly never going to be a proper solution, permanent sequestration involves the complete removal of the carbon from the atmosphere - so called carbon neutral fuels simply return the carbon captured from the atmosphere back to where it came. Preston may also not be aware that the CE technique involves burning natural gas to free the CO2 from its binding agent. Even though the extra CO2 arising from this is captured, that, together with CEs long stated intention to use CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, should surely be a matter of greater concern to those speculating on one single rather flawed engineering proposal for the future of the synthetic age.* *LDM* On Thursday, June 14, 2018 at 10:10:54 PM UTC+1, Christopher Preston wrote: > > A few thoughts on last week's good news about the potential for much > cheaper DAC..... > > > https://plastocene.com/2018/06/14/catching-carbon-why-cheap-still-comes-with-a-cost > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
