Company that sucks CO2 from air announces a new methane-producing plant
Swiss company Climeworks has a facility that sucks CO2 out of the air, chemically binds it and collects the CO2. The CO2 can then be sequestered underground or reacted with hydrogen to create methane for carbon neutral fuel. The system seems to work reasonably cost effectively. So, huzzah. There are two numbers to give a feller pause if he considers using this tech to combat global warming:
1: “The plant will filter up to 150 tons of CO2 from ambient air per year,”
2: “the world emits 30 to 40 gigatons of CO2 annually”
So… if a facility pulls 150 tons out of the air per year, and the world spits out 40 billion tons of CO2 per year, then to deal with *all* of the CO2 would require 266,666,667 such facilities.
Feh.
The idea of drawing the CO2 out of the ambient air just anywhere seems odd to be. Why not hook this up directly to the exhausts from coal burning powerplants? Surely that would reduce the size and cost of a lot of the components. Simpler still, though, would be to simply replace the coal burning plants with thorium and breeder reactors.