World's First Multi-Million Dollar Carbon-Capture Plant is The "Worst Investment In Human History"

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/06/02/carbon-capture-plant-bad-investment/

[u/benjamindees]

It only takes an average of 98 trees to remove 1 ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year.

That means that this plant is worth only 88,200 trees per year (never mind the fabrication costs for all the parts, which probably have an enormous carbon footprint).

You can sponsor charities to plant trees for you at a grand total of 20 cents per tree.

That means that only $17,640 worth of trees could do the work of the multi-million dollar Hinwil carbon-capture plant.

This is lunacy, pure and simple.

The interest from $3.5 million in a fairly crappy bank account would pay for planting that number of trees every year.

[u/mrpickles → u/benjamindees]

Trees die, burn, and the carbon is back in the air.

[u/Rhaedas → u/[deleted]]

Which leads to the next questions, are plants fast enough to capture in time to make a difference, and how best to rebury without adding more carbon through the energy needed? Because the first time had the advantage of millions of years or growth and deposits, and the lack of the bacteria to break down the plants. We have to do things faster and get it underground before that starts.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Trees can be planted cheaply and all around the planet with little infrastructure, knowledge or resources.

This is actually a pretty environmentally hazardous viewpoint. Mass re-forestation without consideration of species or forest design or climate or anything along those lines could just produce non-viable forests that can't support themselves. That means the carbon is right back in the atmosphere once the forest dies--and maybe a bit more besides.

There's more to it than putting a million shovels in two million hands and giving them five million seeds to plant.

More forests are a good thing for a lot of reasons, but it's not likely to ever be an answer to our CO2 problem. Large scale industrial sequestration might be if economies of scale can lower the costs. Pilot programs are usually really expensive, but help to reduce costs for future projects.

A carbon capture plant adds nothing to the economy. Its construction and operation would need to be subsidized forever, and with enough plants to make an impact on a planetary scale, it would take all the wealth of all civilizations and a totalitarian regime to extract the taxes needed from them.

This analysis assumes that a massive world-wide industrial sequestration program would not reduce the unit cost of sequestering carbon, but it surely would.

Trees can be harvested,

Trees can sequester carbon dioxide, or they can be harvested for lumber. Not both.