It Could Be a $250 Billion Market, But Almost No One Is Interested 49
Carbon removal technologies, potentially a $250 billion market, are failing to gain traction as buyers remain scarce. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a need for 10 billion metric tons of carbon removals annually by 2050, yet only 175 million tons have been sold to date -- less than 2% of requirements.
Microsoft dominates the market, accounting for 35% of all purchases and 76% of engineered removal solutions specifically. The market suffers from significant barriers: unproven technologies, vast price disparities ($80 per ton for forest projects versus $1,000 for direct air capture), and lack of standardization. Industry experts at a recent London gathering concluded that without more buyers willing to accept early adoption risks, the market cannot meaningfully grow.
Microsoft dominates the market, accounting for 35% of all purchases and 76% of engineered removal solutions specifically. The market suffers from significant barriers: unproven technologies, vast price disparities ($80 per ton for forest projects versus $1,000 for direct air capture), and lack of standardization. Industry experts at a recent London gathering concluded that without more buyers willing to accept early adoption risks, the market cannot meaningfully grow.
Pricing tickets to heaven is indeed tricky (Score:5, Insightful)
The Catholic Church couldn't make it work sustainably either.
Maybe they can throw some AI magic at it and step 3 profit?
Re: Pricing tickets to heaven is indeed tricky (Score:1)
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The real problem is that there is not an assigned cost to releasing CO2
Elon Musk was able to make a fortune off of electric vehicles because government regulations had created a cost for NOT making EV's, which Tesla was able to capitalize on and... the rest is history (love or hate musk, tesla has pushed EV market growth)
Why do you suppose there is no recognized cost of CO2 emissions to base a similar market on?
Mandate carbon neutrality (Score:2)
Or don't get carbon neutrality.
Carbon sequestration is (currently) stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
The energy you put into sequestering carbon would be better utilized replacing energy being generated with fossil fuels. Every process has heat losses, so sequestering carbon you've released is just adding an extra layer of waste.
Once we have enough renewable energy to have excess, that's when sequestration makes sense.
Re:Carbon sequestration is (currently) stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends - energy production can be localized with transmission proving problematic. It could be that some locations could have abundant renewables that aren't easily transmitted to where they're needed, but if you're sequestering carbon they could potentially do that on-site without having to transmit the power elsewhere.
EG you could put solar panels in deserts - plenty of sunshine is available with few cloudy days, but they're typically sparsely populated and you might not want to do the infrastructure to get that power to population centers. It could be fine to be powering sequestering equipment though.
Plus research here is needed is invariably all fossil fuels will eventually be dumped into the atmosphere either way. Whether you stretch it to 300 years or 5000 years they'll all get burned, and when the natural cleanup process of the planet to get it back out of the atmosphere is 100k to 150k years, both scenarios are a blip.
We either have to be prepared to eventually just deal with the warmer climate or develop technologies to artificially syphon that carbon back out faster than nature can.
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Depends - energy production can be localized with transmission proving problematic. It could be that some locations could have abundant renewables that aren't easily transmitted to where they're needed, but if you're sequestering carbon they could potentially do that on-site without having to transmit the power elsewhere.
If you can get the renewable equipment in, you can get things out. Even if something prevents transmission lines, you can obviously get trucks in and out. So it would be even more practical to use the power to produce something. You could split the difference on carbon sequestration and produce fuel from CO2 in the air and water, then use that net carbon neutral fuel to offset non-carbon neutral fuel in the marketplace.
Otherwise, the basic argument from the GP is completely correct. Pretty much all methods
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> Basically until we stop extracting fossil fuels for burning
Now there's a thing I like - pick on something you can control, and mandate it ONLY use synthetic fuel made using renewable energy and atmospheric CO2. Maybe airplanes would be a good target, since batteries still have nowhere near the energy density for commercial aviation.
It'll be more expensive, but that is the cost of using that energy without adding CO2 to the atmosphere, the cost we've been ignoring as we pump carbon out of the ground.
Re: Carbon sequestration is (currently) stupid (Score:2)
No-one is interested... (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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TFS literally points out trees are $80/ton vs $1,000/ton for direct air capture.
Re: They are called.... (Score:2)
Trees are cheaper but they cannot do the whole job. Also, trees can BE part of selling carbon offsets.
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Not true. Carbon comes to earth and leaves the earth every day.
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Trees are the answer here.
How many successions of trees would we have to grow and then cut and bury to fix the excess CO2 from the atmosphere?
Some things can be lucrative... (Score:2)
Combine a nuclear reactor or geothermal with something that what Audi has in Chile, where they are able to make gasoline from CO2, and that can help with supply line issues, and even provide a price ceiling should something happen to oil production.
Similar with other fuels. Hydrogen is awesome, but takes so much innate technology to make, store, and transport. However, something like propane or ethanol would be something that one could synthesize from CO2 and have a usable fuel.
Overall, the people who can
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Yeah we have to admit nuclear is the clear choice for this type of thing; it's very dense in terms of land usage per MW, they put out a lot of power, they run 24/7 and their ideal working mode is running pretty much flat out so they slot in nicely with wind and solar. Feed the grid when demand is high and renewables cannot keep up, capture carbon when demand drops and the plant can always be running at maximum effort.
But nuclear and carbon capture share the same issue in that there isn't really a driving p
Re: Some things can be lucrative... (Score:2)
"Yeah we have to admit nuclear is the clear choice for this type of thing"
No, we don't, because no, it isn't.
You can get more for your money with some other generation solution, and it doesn't matter where you locate carbon capture because atmospheric carbon is fungible, so you can site it where power is available.
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Agree to disagree, I think most of every W of solar and wind is going to be fed into the grid, as it should be and if we do end up with pockets of excess generation I wouldn't expect it to be enough to make a dent as the thing all carbon capture tech still has is that it is quite power hungry and lossy as a process on top of that and combine with the inconsistent nature of those sources and to me it makes a lot more sense for those to feed the grid and batteries.
Whereas if we have nuclear then you're only "
Go ahead with the cheap stuff, then (Score:2)
vast price disparities ($80 per ton for forest projects versus $1,000 for direct air capture)
Plant fast-growing trees on West Virginia mountains
Harvest them
Bury them in local abandoned coal mines
Repeat every 5-10 years
Jobs to replace lost coal mining jobs.
New uses for old coal mines (well, probably not the mountain top removal mines...).
I'm not sure you could grow and bury two tons of wood for $80, but you could definitely do it for $1000.
All that's needed for this to work is a guaranteed price for real not
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I'm not sure that would work. Larger trees absorb more CO2 than smaller trees.
Also, be careful about taking too much at once. Soil can release carbon if left bare.
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That's very easy to do for them because everyone is terrified of change because for the last 50 years pretty much everyone's lives have gotten a little bit worse every single year.
Who is this everyone?
https://ourworldindata.org/his... [ourworldindata.org]
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The concept of carbon capture itself isn't a scam. A scam implies that something doesn't do what it says on the side of the box. The issue with carbon capture is that it's not economically viable unless you throw lots of other people's money at it (taxes and fees), since the end result is not something the free market will willingly purchase at a price that is profitable. You'd need government intervention to make the numbers work, but it would be quite politically unpopular when, say, the price of gas d
No it's still a scam (Score:2)
The reason there's no profit in it is because there's no government subsidies for it. But that doesn't mean you can't bribe a few politicians to get those subsidies. It doesn't even have to be a direct subsidy.
Remember when I call it a s
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Brakes don't change a car's velocity, they only change its acceleration. *GASP* Car companies have been lying for years!
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Re: Because it's a scam (Score:1)
It is an entirely made-up market (Score:2)
Some promising removal mechanisms (Score:2)
https://www.xprize.org/prizes/... [xprize.org]
The contest winner "demonstrated a highly durable approach to CDR, by applying finely crushed basalt over agricultural lands in India to accelerate a natural weathering process that permanently draws down atmospheric CO. Beyond carbon removal, Mati Carbon’s process delivers significant benefits to smallholder farmers."
Also there was biochar; "XPRIZE named additional runner-up teams for their compelling carbon removal demonstrations in the final year of the competition.
Do we not calculate on envelopes anymore? (Score:2)
So to solve the problem with trees at the 10 billion ton per year target (less than a third of emissions) you need to plant 300 billion trees per year at a cost of 800 billion dollars per year and also reforest the world at a rate of 10% annual increase.
To "solve" it with direct capture (Capture one third of emissions) you need 10 trillion dollars per year. Or 10
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Don't forget the fraud (Score:2)
Some carbon capture/sequestration projects have been bogus. [time.com] That will keep a lot of potential buyers out of the market, especially those publicly held.
Sitting in Shit Because You Don't Want to Shovel (Score:5, Interesting)
Carbon sequestration is a general need of our society (societies). Anyone working toward that end will be expected to do so with minimal margin and funded by centralized public organizations (governments). The problem is that the MOST RELIABLE form of carbon sequestration is so simple that decision-makers feel
1. Farm high-growth-speed trees in restricted areas around disused coal mines.
2. Trees take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it in to tree mass (wood).
3. Chop trees down once they meet the point of diminishing growth returns.
4. Heat up the wood to remove the oxygen (pyrolysis) leaving behind a carbon-rich "char".
5. Deposit the char into the disused coal mines, literally reversing the process of coal mining.
It's cheaper, quicker, and more reliably effective than ANY high tech carbon sequestration method which is why no one's doing it. It's so common sense that no one's wants to invest in it.
It's like having a room full of shit and a shovel. You KNOW you can start to shovel all the shit out of the room and be done by a predictable time, but that sure seems like a lot of work, so you'll wait until a salesman comes to your room with a magical high-tech solution. Yep... that's you... sitting in shit up to your belly-button because you don't want to use a shovel.
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skip to the last bit and reverse the conveyor belts at coal mines /thread
Holy hells, that headline. (Score:3)
It Could Be a $250 Billion Market, But Almost No One Is Interested
Uh, no. That's not how it works. Making up a number is not the same as "could be." "Could be" implies there's a possibility it could actually happen. Missing by a little is a "could be." Making up a fantasy and saying "could be" is called fiction. And while we all enjoy some speculative fiction from time to time, it's not a $250 Billion Market if no one is interested. The two clauses here are not just diametrically opposed, they are in fact statements from separate universes.
At some point, we have to get over this idea that whatever you dreamt up is anywhere within the same realm as "could be." No, it couldn't be. It couldn't be, because nobody in their right mind is gonna toss that much bank at a daydream that has plausible scientific principals behind it, but wastes so much energy that it creates more issues than it solves. GTFO with that headline and try again.
"Potentially" a $250 billion market? (Score:2)
If I could sell 30 pencils at $1 each to every person on the planet, it would be a $250 billion market. Does that math make this idea actually a $250 billion market? Hardly. This is a completely made-up number.
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Not to mention if it cost you $2 a pencil... that is a way to make negative profits!
I bet nobody is interested as it's not profitable.
Goes against government policy (Score:1)
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There's Zero Chance... (Score:2)
There is zero chance that a $250billion market goes unexploited. ZERO CHANCE.
So, no. You're premise is clearly horseshit.