I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
Don't they sell the CO2 to fracking companies?
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Greenwashing is an issue, but so is avoiding complicated nuance by simply laughing at an idea without understanding it.
The country I live in is mostly powered by renewables, they focus on reducing emissions, then capture at source, but they are currently having a healthy nuanced debate on whether to implement something like this.
The original set of these were built without reguard to their specific carbon offset as they were built to be exerpimental and to experiment with the technology. As with almost anything on engineering.
Modern ones have to go through a Life Cycle Assement (LCA) where they figure out when the break-even point will be before they are built and they are typically built where there is renewable energy sources. They must be net carbon negative for government subsidy.
Arizona and Texas are mostly desert where trees may not be a viable option but they have solar and wind farms. Deforestation is awful and reforestation can be a great option but these two climates in particular have not had forrests for thousands of years.
The largest one in Texas is owned and operated by an oil company, likely powered by oil, and the CO2 is used to frack more oil. For them it needs to be net profit rather then net carbon negative. Protest and ridicule away.
Iceland has the most successful powered by geothermal and is over 90% net carbon negative already and likely to increase the longer it runs.
Other places inject the CO2 into concrete building blocks making them stronger and a viable non destructive form of storage.
Others turn them into burnable fuels effectively "recycling" the CO2.
Others use them for industrial production of urea, methanol, fire exstinguishers, or even for drink carbonation or food preservation. Scrubbing the air for CO2 instead of the traditional method of capturing off-gases.
Happy to see that nobody in the comment section seems to fall for this. I'm sure that's representative for the global human race
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I'm a little fuzzy on the part where it "turns into rock."
Carbon is an amazingly flexible element that gets bound up with lots of other elements. Oxygen is also incredibly reactive and makes up almost half the mass of the Earth's crust. Add in all the heat down there for activation energy, and it starts to make sense. I'm no expert though.
You know, in a few hundred thousand years.
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It would probably take decades to offset its own carbon footprint, let alone making it negative. And then it would need to actually be significant.
Just plant trees and restore carbon sinks you fucking techno fascists.
I'm not a huge fan of this approach.
Nice, now the techbros can finally achieve their lifelong dream of paving all the forests and selling tickets for the tree museums.
After that they can plant trees on Mars.
Now reunite Mythbusters and stack like 30 seconds of freeway traffic worth of cars facing it. Go.
My first act as president would be to create a cabinet-level Department of Myth Busting, headed by Adam savage and headquartered at the James Randi Laboratories.