Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
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@madsenandersc @davidho But that would require surplus green energy in the grid to begin with
Like I'm not knocking the idea straight off the bat, but I do think this would need to NOT be a standalone plant, but something that could be implemented as a standard feature in every single factory, to function on the factory's manufacturing heat or exhaust pressure as opposed to electricity on the grid
True, surplus green electricity is not a given, but at least the electricity (surplus or not) CAN be CO2 neutral - that is not necessarily the case with other CCS-technologies.
That said, this technology is still a decade or more away from really large scale deployment, so a lot can - and will - happen to the electricity production in the meantime.
I'm not sure that I completely follow your last part - do you suggest that the electricity for the carbon capture system should come from waste heat from the industrial production in front of it, and the carbon capture should happen on site?
My understanding of the article is that this process is for atmospheric air, not exhaust from an industrial production, but I may have gotten that wrong.
Also, I really don't think that producing electricity on site is financially viable. There is a reason why the majority of wind power in Denmark is offshore- those turbines are gigantic, but they are efficient like nothing else. Bigger really do mean better in this case, at least up to a point.
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No, planting trees would not be useful for two reasons.
1) Trees are a relatively short term storage solution. Yes, we do have trees here in Denmark that are several hundred years old, but many types of pine dies after 100 years or so. Once they die, they rot and release the stored CO2 again. Unless they have been caught in a forest fire. Or was in the way of a property development plan. Or...
2) The article mentions that they are looking to provide the CO2 for e-fuel production. We can't realistically replace all fossil fuel processes with electric ones in a useful time frame, and in those cases you can either go with pure hydrogen (which is a bloody bastard to work with in so many ways), or you can add some carbon molecules and have hydrocarbons, which probably is compatible with everything running on natural gas today.
@madsenandersc @s_d_brath @davidho A short term storage system that self-propagates and that can serve as a low/no maintenance bulwark to buy us time we desperately need while we work on longer term solutions.
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Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).
https://power-to-x.swiss/2026/07/15/ucaneo-germanys-largest-direct-air-capture-plant/
@davidho It's crazy, isn't it. A single small-scale LEILAC lime kiln can avoid 30,000 tonnes a year of CO2 emissions (and 100,000 to 500,000+ for a full scale plant), but somehow that doesn't make the news...).
Oh, and it's also cost competitive with the fossil alternative too.
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@madsenandersc @s_d_brath @davidho A short term storage system that self-propagates and that can serve as a low/no maintenance bulwark to buy us time we desperately need while we work on longer term solutions.
@WhiteCatTamer @s_d_brath @davidho
You conveniently skipped part two of my answer.
I'm not saying that planting trees is a bad idea, it's just not the solution for the problem they're trying to solve here. They want to capture CO2 in order to be able to either use it for e-fuel production or to store it in the ground permanently.
Storing CO2 in trees will accomplish neither of those goals.
But, as you said, as a short term solution for simply removing CO2 from the air, planting trees is a no-brainer that might buy us another couple of decades to find more permanent solutions.
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@WhiteCatTamer @s_d_brath @davidho
You conveniently skipped part two of my answer.
I'm not saying that planting trees is a bad idea, it's just not the solution for the problem they're trying to solve here. They want to capture CO2 in order to be able to either use it for e-fuel production or to store it in the ground permanently.
Storing CO2 in trees will accomplish neither of those goals.
But, as you said, as a short term solution for simply removing CO2 from the air, planting trees is a no-brainer that might buy us another couple of decades to find more permanent solutions.
@madsenandersc @s_d_brath @davidho So your point is not that tree planting isn’t useful, which is what you said, but that it isn’t part of the plan for this organization, which sells itself by highlighting the carbon it has captured instead of the fuel it has produced, the amount of which is far, far smaller than what a small forest can capture at a fraction of the startup cost.
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@madsenandersc @s_d_brath @davidho So your point is not that tree planting isn’t useful, which is what you said, but that it isn’t part of the plan for this organization, which sells itself by highlighting the carbon it has captured instead of the fuel it has produced, the amount of which is far, far smaller than what a small forest can capture at a fraction of the startup cost.
@WhiteCatTamer @madsenandersc @davidho additionally they will probably sell the CO2 quotas for what has been captured to someone like Microsoft so they can freely polute more. At least that is the way these companies does it in Denmark.
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Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).
https://power-to-x.swiss/2026/07/15/ucaneo-germanys-largest-direct-air-capture-plant/
@davidho 150 tonnes ..... I thought that was a typo at first.
That's like me claiming I won 10€ in the lottery as a "proof-of-concept" for winning 10.000.000€
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I take it that you did not bother to read the article, but just started the snark-generator right away?
From the article:
"But the plant is not built to move tonnage. It is built to prove a process."
Seriously, being able to run a carbon capture on electricity alone is significant if it can be done at scale, and the way I understand the article, that is what they are trying to prove.
Yes, the amount of carbon captured is - again, according to the article - a mere rounding error in the grand scheme of things, but the future ramifications of a functioning electrical carbon capture are huge.
The process can be scaled up or down, depending on the amount of surplus green electricity in the grid, making it truly "green", compared to other methods that includes chemical reagents in the capture process.
"But the plant is not built to move tonnage. It is built to prove a process."
It's not there to prove a process. It's there to distract from the fact that coal-fired power generation -- essentially the same process in reverse -- still emits BILLIONS OF TONNES of CO2 each year.
Unless you see a path to negative energy prices, there's no realistic way to burn a traded commodity (electricity) to generate a common good (DACCS) while private companies are doing the opposite at a massive scale. You must brake and come to a stop before you can reverse.
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@madsenandersc @s_d_brath @davidho So your point is not that tree planting isn’t useful, which is what you said, but that it isn’t part of the plan for this organization, which sells itself by highlighting the carbon it has captured instead of the fuel it has produced, the amount of which is far, far smaller than what a small forest can capture at a fraction of the startup cost.
@WhiteCatTamer @s_d_brath @davidho
Jay, would you stop quotefucking me? It's really annoying, and anybody can read exactly what I said a few posts higher, so you'll get absolutely nothing out of it.
But, okay, let's put it all in one post for you. Here is what Brath said:
"or they could just plant some trees instead."
- notice the "instead" at the end of the paragraph, indicating that planting trees would be more useful than creating a new carbon capture process (at least that is how I read it).
I then answered:
"No, planting trees would not be useful for two reasons."
- and followed it by two reasons why planting trees instead of testing a new carbon capture process would not accomplish what the researchers were trying to do.
I know that you read the first part of my answer because you answered it, but probably skipped the last part of my answer.
At no point did I say that planting trees was not useful or a bad idea, actually I explicitly said the opposite - you just ignored it.
And, just to finish it off, you demonstrate that you have either not read the article, or at least that you didn't understand it. They don't produce fuel, they capture carbon in order to be able to sell it to someone who produce carbon neutral hydrocarbons that can be used as a replacement for fossil fuel. And it's a TEST.
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Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).
https://power-to-x.swiss/2026/07/15/ucaneo-germanys-largest-direct-air-capture-plant/
@davidho How much carbon does a healthy mature tree take out of the atmosphere each year? How many trees would be needed to sequester the same amount of CO2?
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"But the plant is not built to move tonnage. It is built to prove a process."
It's not there to prove a process. It's there to distract from the fact that coal-fired power generation -- essentially the same process in reverse -- still emits BILLIONS OF TONNES of CO2 each year.
Unless you see a path to negative energy prices, there's no realistic way to burn a traded commodity (electricity) to generate a common good (DACCS) while private companies are doing the opposite at a massive scale. You must brake and come to a stop before you can reverse.
It is there to prove a process. They explicitly said so.
You may not like that for some reason, but I can't understand why you would attack the people trying to come up with ways to clean up our mess and accuse them of being a part of a cover-up by the coal industry? It makes no sense.
Why would you need negative electricity prices in order to do carbon capture?
If legislation forces the use of carbon neutral fuel, captured carbon is suddenly an essential part of producing that fuel, giving it a monetary value.
Right now carbon neutral fuel cannot compete with fossil fuel because the price is to high, but once legislation takes the fossil fuel out of the equation companies will find themselves playing with a totally different deck of cards.
I don't know enough about the CC business as such, but I have a feeling that a process that only requires electricity will probably be cheaper than a process that relies on chemical reagents.
The latter will require that the entire production chain is carbon neutral, from obtaining the raw material for the chemical reagents, the production and transportation of them, as well as the removal of the final waste products. That is a lot more convoluted than buying green electricity and be done with it.
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It is there to prove a process. They explicitly said so.
You may not like that for some reason, but I can't understand why you would attack the people trying to come up with ways to clean up our mess and accuse them of being a part of a cover-up by the coal industry? It makes no sense.
Why would you need negative electricity prices in order to do carbon capture?
If legislation forces the use of carbon neutral fuel, captured carbon is suddenly an essential part of producing that fuel, giving it a monetary value.
Right now carbon neutral fuel cannot compete with fossil fuel because the price is to high, but once legislation takes the fossil fuel out of the equation companies will find themselves playing with a totally different deck of cards.
I don't know enough about the CC business as such, but I have a feeling that a process that only requires electricity will probably be cheaper than a process that relies on chemical reagents.
The latter will require that the entire production chain is carbon neutral, from obtaining the raw material for the chemical reagents, the production and transportation of them, as well as the removal of the final waste products. That is a lot more convoluted than buying green electricity and be done with it.
"If legislation forces the use of carbon neutral fuel [...]"
The numbers are available. Do the math. Giving their (very optimistic) estimates the benefit of the doubt, 1500kWh/tCO2 would require every coal-fired power station to plug directly into a DACC system 40000 times larger than their pilot plant sucking essentially all the generated electricity. We can skip the expensive attempt at a perpetual motion machine and just phase out the most polluting generation methods, starting with coal and oil.
Carbon capture is a red herring until we stop burning so much hydrocarbons. Legislators shoud focus on energy transition first. The industry should focus on electrification. As I said earlier, we need to slow down before we talk about reversing course.
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Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).
https://power-to-x.swiss/2026/07/15/ucaneo-germanys-largest-direct-air-capture-plant/
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Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).
https://power-to-x.swiss/2026/07/15/ucaneo-germanys-largest-direct-air-capture-plant/
@davidho and to run it probably uses more CO2.
Just the building and materials produced more CO2 thannthey can remove during the lifetime of the machine.
A forest would have been better. -
Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).
https://power-to-x.swiss/2026/07/15/ucaneo-germanys-largest-direct-air-capture-plant/
"Runs on electricity" - from a coal plant by any chance?
"From thin air" - like the upper atmosphere? How does it work at lower altitudes or with "thick air"
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Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air!
That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).
https://power-to-x.swiss/2026/07/15/ucaneo-germanys-largest-direct-air-capture-plant/
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"If legislation forces the use of carbon neutral fuel [...]"
The numbers are available. Do the math. Giving their (very optimistic) estimates the benefit of the doubt, 1500kWh/tCO2 would require every coal-fired power station to plug directly into a DACC system 40000 times larger than their pilot plant sucking essentially all the generated electricity. We can skip the expensive attempt at a perpetual motion machine and just phase out the most polluting generation methods, starting with coal and oil.
Carbon capture is a red herring until we stop burning so much hydrocarbons. Legislators shoud focus on energy transition first. The industry should focus on electrification. As I said earlier, we need to slow down before we talk about reversing course.
I don't disagree with regards to the use of fossil fuel - that needs to come down, and come down fast.
However, I don't agree that we need to get rid of fossil fuel before we start developing CC technologies for real. Yes, the CO2 level will still go up as long as CO2 pollution is taking place, but we still need to be working on better and more efficient solutions for CC.
The way I see it, we cannot replace the current fossil fuel use with hydrogen - that is not really feasible. If we want to replace it with something else that is not electricity (and again, some industries have no solutions that let them do that at the moment), we need to be able to start supplying e-fuel in some form to them.
Producing that e-fuel requires high-grade CO2 to be available, and from what I have read in the article and on their website, this type of plant should have the potential to do just that.
But, again, I agree with you that CO2 capture should never be an excuse to NOT phase out fossil fuel wherever it is possible.
