Why Big Tech Is Pouring Money Into Carbon Removal

The market for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is expanding rapidly, as major tech companies are funneling nearly a billion dollars to early-stage startups that are experimenting with various methods of carbon capture and sequestration to fight climate change. While government incentives like carbon pricing will ultimately be necessary to make carbon removal profitable, this influx of early funding could help nascent carbon removal companies scale up their tech and bring costs down.

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1:56 -- Chapter 1
5:00 -- Chapter 2
12:15 -- Chapter 3

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Why Big Tech Is Pouring Money Into Carbon Removal

[Diode]

As long as carbon capture is used to reduce emissions and not used as an offset technology to allow companies to increase their emissions. Many carbon capture technologies are being funded by fossil fuel companies for this reason, to get a green tick to save a bit, but produce more.

[jjmaia]

If only there were some kind of organism that could capture carbon while using renewable energy (like solar), and at the same time produce oxygen, shade and food... Oh wait...

[IReapZz]

you can tell a company makes too much money when a payment processing company has a "head of climate"

[roxycauldwell]

Why do I feel like it's not a great idea to dump tons upon tins of baking soda into the ocean at the rate that we create carbon? Honestly I feel like the focus should be on building materials

[dee-jay]

I do wonder if this push into carbon remvoal is just about making these companies feel better about having their employees fly around the world for the most trivial reasons.

[mr.munger]

Awesome companies and technology all around but CarbonCure seems like the best bet. Not only are they removing carbon from the air, but they are using it in an industry that produces a lot of carbon to both help improve their product and reduce their own carbon footprint. I also believe there has been a growing concern of a sand shortage which is also used heavily in concrete, so if adding carbon to concrete means less concrete is needed for equal strength, that seems like a win all around.

[SeleckPlays]

"3x-5x larger than the global petrochemical market" = THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN

[sebastianmuller]

Somebody heard of this ultra hight tech solution to remove carbon from the atmosphere? It is super energy efficient, it just needs light, soil and water. I think they call it plant or if you want the bigger version tree. The development is still in progress and i heard it will go on, but first results are very promissing. I think i will get a kickstarter going to raise the funds to develope the next iteration. After we raised the trees we could charcoal them and burry them somewhere. Perhaps we can burry that in an old pitt.

[kdegraa]

How much energy and resources do these carbon capture operations need?

If it costs $1000 to remove a tonne of carbon from the atmosphere, why not plant a fast growing trees like eucalyptus trees? In ten years they will be 20 meters tall and will weigh many tonnes. They can be milked into timber for construction.

[dlewis]

I can imagine a coal burning power plant paired with a carbon removal system that would be “net zero”. It would produce net zero energy and be completely useless.

[The_General_Meme_Outlet]

I don't know about trying this hard to permanently remove CO2. To me, I've always learned that oxygen gets turned into CO2 and CO2 gets turned into oxygen. Also, what about plants and food? Why not just take the captured CO2 to places that need food and use the CO2 to help boost the soil so that crops can grow better or something?

[NashHinton]

Hopefully these people realize producing hydroxides produces co2 by itself.

So you're basically producing co2 in order to absorb co2. Kind of defeats the purpose.

Hopefully, when they make the hydroxides needed to absorb co2, they are capturing the co2 in the process.

If they're not, they would be doing more harm than good and they wouldn't be removing co2 from the atmosphere.

[intreoo]

This is very promising, but the most effective way to limit climate change is to simply stop emitting greenhouse gasses. If emissions decline and then mass carbon removal projects are used to remove the co2 already in the atmosphere then I'd be very optimistic for the future. Keep your eyes on co2 programs!

[johnwolfram]

The question is, do they remove more carbon than they produce? Have to power the machines or technology to remove the carbon, so how much energy is used to power them, and is it a net gain or net loss process?

[graham]

Canada's carbon taxes are currently at $50/ton and will continue to rise so the prediction of "before the end of the decade" lines up pretty well with the cost reduction estimates. I had no idea that carbon removal had progressed so quickly. This is awesome.

[CollinDavis]

They would have been better served building the infrastructure for public transport and make it accessible for all at a lower cost and that would have put more cars off the roads and reduce the core problem of carbon emission in the first place. The entire system is so broken.

[rahulmatondkar]

Nature has already provided humans with the best possible machine to remove Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere and store it neatly in the ground and also within itself. I believe they are called trees.

[hmbro]

Using the co2 for construction seems like the best option of these ones presented. Simply storing it underground or in the ocean seems like it could have a lot of potential problems and bad consequences. Maybe the basalt storage isn't bad since it could give us solid carbon to use but I really don't know. It also just feels like a waste to not use the carbon when it can be incredibly useful in a variety of applications from electronics to metallurgy to agriculture and much more. I guess they are good stop gaps but the future needs to make use of this carbon not just permanently store it.

[ledpup]

All we have to do is scale it up 25 millions times over current DAC facilities, with no emissions involved in building, operating, maintenance and decommissioning.
Easy

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