Carbon and other greenhouse gasses are making our planet too warm and we are quickly reaching a point of no return. Can giant vacuums help save The Earth?
Orca is the first carbon sucking vacuum prototype currently operating as we speak. Its located in Iceland and can remove 10 tons of carbon from the air everyday. Mammoth is the second vacuum and is 10 times larger than Orca. These machines are called Direct Air Capturing Plants (DAC). Here is the process. The enormous vacuum sucks in air, traps the carbon, heats it, mineralized it (turns it to stone) and stores it deep in the ground, theoretically forever. The original company behind this endeavor is Climeworks and is using green geothermal energy to get the job done. Experts in the field of climate change/global warming see technological solutions such as these vacuums, as a crucial piece of the puzzle to help solve our climate emergency. Yet they agree that the amount of carbon that can be sucked out of the atmosphere will only be a drop in the bucket.
Nature also has ways to extract and lock up carbon from the atmosphere, namely in forests and oceans. The problem is of scale. There is too much carbon and other pollutants for nature to do her job. We would need more space than Earth has to offer in order to plant enough trees to filter out current pollution/carbon levels. Unfortunately humans are busier cutting down forest than planting new ones. To make matters worse, we continue to increase the amount of pollution we are putting into our air each year. This is a loosing battle for sure.
Other companies are currently working on similar DAC “vacuums” in several parts of the world such as Occidental, an oil company, that is building in Texas. This vacuum promises to extract 500,000 tons of carbon per year. 1pointfive is building facilities in Texas and Louisiana as well that will start operating in 2025. These companies are planning to scale up the efficiency of these plants and are projecting to be able to suck out 1 billion tons of pollutants a year by 2050. This sounds like a huge number until you consider that humans are emitting 37,500,000,000 metric tons a year (that is 37.5 billion tons). (https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/)
Imagine how many of these vacuums it would take to solve the problem of global warming caused by man? It is a good step, with complicated results depending on your perspective, since it takes enormous amounts of energy/electricity to run these plants. They will get more efficient as time goes on, but are not a magic solution. A better idea would be to stop polluting our atmosphere in the first place.
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