Guest post by Willis Eschenbach (@WEschenbach on eX-Twitter)
Perspective is everything.
The world's largest carbon dioxide capture plant has just come into operation in Iceland, built by a company called Climeworks. You can read about it on their website.
Here is a description:
“According to Climeworks estimates, Mammoth has the ability to capture an impressive 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. To put that in perspective, that’s the equivalent of neutralizing the emissions of approximately 7,800 gasoline-powered cars.
Sounds impressive, right? Is that equivalent to taking 7,800 cars off the road? Wow!
However, back to the point of view, how many giant factories of this size would we need to neutralize annual global CO2 emissions (currently around 38 gigatons of CO2)?
Why, just a million plants of the same size can do it…it should be no problem, right?
I mean, if we could build a fool like this every week, it would just require us to…wait a minute, let's see…carry over the numbers that sum greater than 9, divide by pi, take the square root, consider Cook Coefficients, this math is hard…that would just require us 19,231 years to complete the project.
How much energy does it require? Builders are tight-lipped about this, but typically such plants require about 2 megawatt hours of electricity per ton of carbon dioxide captured. Conservatively, we call it 1.5 MWh per ton.
So to capture all our emissions would require about 50 petawatt hours of electricity per year…
…to end the cycle and return to the question of perspective, this is This is twice the current global annual electricity consumption.
This CO2 capture project is nothing more than pathetic climate virtue signaling.
w.
PS—As always, I ask that you quote the exact words you are discussing when commenting. I'd love to defend my words…but I can't defend your interpretation of mine. Thanks.
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