Why is it difficult to develop a large scale and energy efficient carbon capture technology?
In: Earth Science
I feel like this is a matter of *economics* and *incentives*, rather than technological capacity.
I’m not sure exactly how big the carbon capture industry is, but Canada spent on the order of $1.8 bn on it so I speculate that the global size is somewhere in the ballpark of a few dozen billion USD.
Meanwhile, the carbon-based industry is somewhere in the ballpark of $100+ trillion USD. Again, hard for me to to get exact estimates.
There are somewhere between 4 and 6 orders of magnitude difference between the people trying to put carbon into the atmosphere and the people trying to remove it. Frankly, based on this, I would be extremely positively surprised if we were able to remove any amount more than 0.001% of our emissions from the atmosphere. The fact that we seem to be on good track (?) to vastly exceed that fraction means that carbon capture is actually pretty “efficient”, economically speaking. (*Edit*: This makes sense if you consider that carbon capture technologies are trying to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere – the carbon capture *is* the product being sold, rather than a wasteful byproduct to be eliminated)
So if people really *were* motivated to remove carbon from the atmosphere, it would probably be fairly trivial. The hard part is motivating people.
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