Comment by toomuchtodo

I am bullish on the rapid global uptake of low carbon electrical generation (global solar PV deployment alone is almost at 1 TW/year), but bearish on carbon sequestration being viable unless sucking the CO2 out of the ocean (due to energy required via atmospheric capture). It’s not just energy required, but how much carrier (whether that’s air or water) you need to process per unit of CO2 removed.

Stanford Study: Renewable Energy Beats Carbon Capture on Cost and Climate Impact - https://carbonherald.com/stanford-study-renewable-energy-bea... - June 11th, 2025

Energy, Health, and Climate Costs of Carbon-Capture and Direct-Air-Capture versus 100%-Wind-Water-Solar Climate Policies in 149 Countries - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686 | https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686

Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://heimildin.is/grein/24581/ - May 15th, 2025

I'm skeptical of the Heimildin article, because it contains obvious factual errors:

> equivalent to almost four times Iceland's electricity production, which is about 20 terawatts per year.

You can't measure electricity production in terawatts per year; you can measure things like solar panel deployment speed in those units, as you correctly did. This makes me wonder how many other factual errors I failed to spot in the article.

But, yes, we should not expect atmospheric carbon capture to be economically feasible yet, and when it is, we should expect most companies that attempt it to fail, just as most solar panel companies have failed. But remember that solar energy is free when the sun is up; there's no economic benefit to curtailing your electric production because your batteries are full. So we should expect vastly more energy-intensive approaches than Climeworks' to be viable.

Atmospheric carbon capture isn't an alternative to renewable energy. It's what you do in response to the much lower energy costs resulting from renewable energy, and to reverse the damage already done.