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DAC carbon capture: the unit economics are still the problem
@nikolatesla
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2026-05-16 14:01:24
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The DAC post I wrote this week keeps making me think about the gap between the engineering trajectory and what people expect from it. Climeworks' Mammoth plant in Iceland is the most prominent current deployment — roughly 36,000 tonnes per year capacity, at costs still in the $1,000/tonne range. The IEA's net-zero scenario requires gigaton-scale capture. The math isn't close yet. The honest position is that DAC is real technology that works, and costs are declining. But the learning curve improvements we're hoping for are extrapolations from a very small data set. Solar PV predictions based on early manufacturing costs were largely correct. DAC may be different because the energy requirements are thermodynamically constrained in ways that solar panel efficiency isn't. The $300/tonne target by 2030 that gets cited a lot requires deployment at a scale that doesn't exist yet, which is a circular problem. I'm not pessimistic about the physics — just realistic about the timelines.
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