We've barely scratched the surface of direct air carbon capture, but we're relying on it to keep climate change in check. Direct Air Capture systems consume a lot of energy and produce toxic by-products.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/scaling-carbon-capture-technology
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Will Direct Air Capture scale in the ways we need it to? Or is it just a dream?
Just imagine all the effort that went into putting the carbon in our atmosphere in the first place. It would take a similar effort to put it all back. It seems impossible or at least not likely.
The article says we currently remove 51 megatons per year, and that the figure is hoped to be 7 times that in a decade. Extrapolate that another 2 decades and we’d be at 17.5 gigatonnes annually, or 787 gigatonnes by 2100 at a constant rate from then (year 2055) on. It doesn’t seem unfeasible to pull it off, I think he bigger problem will be in preventing emissions from growing exponentially as well.
Edit for the math: 51 * 7^3 * 45=787185
Edit again: Actually the article says this includes all CCS not just DAC, which severely reduces the likelihood of pulling off exponential growth at least from that starting point.
So no, I don’t think can happen.