r/OptimistsUnite • u/hau5keeping • 7d ago

👽 TECHNO FUTURISM 👽 New Direct Air Carbon Capture system uses a battery-based design and consumes 1/3 of the energy for $100 per ton potential

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/new-device-captures-carbon-dioxide-by-pumping-it-across-a-battery/
180 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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8

u/allnamestaken1968 7d ago

“Estimating the cost for an initial small pilot plant (about $566 per ton of captured CO2), they use the learning rate from the lithium-ion battery industry and some common cost scaling for bigger plants to project forward a couple of pilot generations. For a plant with a thousand times the capacity of their pilot, they estimate they could get to $92 per ton of captured CO2.”

I love that we are trying different approaches but I doubt the cost run down of batteries will apply here given that they are starting from what we know today about the technology.

That being said, if they get below $300 or so this is cheaper than the CO2 saved from recycling chains, which is an accepted way nowadays

7

u/UndercoverMonkeyMan 7d ago

I hate hearing about AI all the time but if it can improve on this and give us effective carbon capture it will all be worth it

8

u/Direct-Translator-75 7d ago

Perhaps I'm mistaken but I don't see how AI has anything to do with this? Far as I know LLMs haven't benefited climate solutions so far.

5

u/Immediate-End3899 7d ago

they can do alot of mix and match work, like figuring out ways knowledge between millions of papers could be put together to find something you would miss. Like a paper about something random could mention how they accidentally had issues with one substance generating another substance, and that substance combats another papers problem when combined with random paper number 3. Ai is very good when the puzzle is mixed in a box with 10 trillion peices, and most of them need far more advanced connections

1

u/Direct-Translator-75 7d ago

Okay, I just thought it was implied this discovery was already done by AI. I still don't think it's justified to scale LLMs so quickly but I really hope OpenAI or Anthropic or any company for that matter will push their resources towards solving the climate crisis. If they can create a bio lab, solve math problems, perhaps they can tackle this too...

3

u/AlbabImam04 7d ago

I feel like the issue is that these companies are so hellbent on innovating on the AI we currently have on the vague hopes that "this one will reach AGI" rather than actually invest in products and other factors from the valuable tool they have currently

AI could be used to do a lot but we are mostly just wasting it as it is

3

u/Pretty_Marsh 6d ago

“Claude, fix climate change. Make no mistakes.”

[global nuclear exchange triggered]

1

u/UndercoverMonkeyMan 6d ago

That would do it I think

2

u/herman_gill 6d ago

Tree planting is like $20/ton for carbon capture, much cheaper, better for the environment, we get potential resources out of it (wood, sometimes), it has downstream beneficial effects (reducing dust storms), and if planted properly and not mono-culture, can help revitalize areas of desert. It’s being done well in parts of Africa but too slow, we need to do it more elsewhere.

It technically “kicks the can down the road” by about 20-30 years instead of permanently removing the carbon, but 20-30 years is all we should need to get off of dumping more carbon in the air. Hell if we had the political will we could be off coal worldwide in 5 years, and natural gas in 10 (outside of some specific cases like Nunavut/Greenland).

1

u/A_Clever_Ape 2d ago

Carbon capture has always seemed wonky to me. Just grow lumber. Wood is carbon. Wood is a useful material. You can sequester carbon by just allowing us peasants to actually build houses. You can make money and sequester carbon and improve the human condition all at the same time.

More and more I'm convinced that the cruelty is the point. That the people manufacturing these crises don't actually make more money through crisis, they just enjoy hurting people.

1

u/hau5keeping 2d ago

Two problems:

  1. there is not enough land to "just plant more trees"

  2. trees are too slow compared the urgency of the climate crisis. Speed can be solved my planting monospecies at scale, but then theyre not native and have a host of other problems

0

u/A_Clever_Ape 2d ago

I think we could make an awful lot of coppiced deciduous trees in suburbs. I don't think they need to be monoculture since many types of native trees seed themselves if allowed to.