By Susan Stephenson, Executive Director
Carbon Dioxide Removal is one of the most intriguing strategies we have to mitigate the climate crisis. It is just what it says – taking carbon dioxide out of the air and putting it into permanent storage or use.
I visited a new adaptation of this technology during SF Climate Week: at the Almanac Brewery in Alameda. Almanac is now producing the world’s first beer using carbonation from Direct Air Capture. The air capture machine is on site, right behind the building. I can personally attest to the quality of the beer being excellent!
So how much does it take out of the air? Each unit (about the size of a shoebox) absorbs one ton per year, and there are 100 units in AirCapture’s system at Almanac. So they are removing 100 tons per year. This does not include additional emissions savings from not having to purchase the CO2 elsewhere and transport it by truck to the brewery.
That’s a lot – about the equivalent of 4,000 street trees.
To reach the California Air Resources Board’s goal of 7 million tons of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) per year, we would need 70,000 such facilities. There are only about 1,000 breweries in CA, so we’d need many more types of facilities taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. Perhaps large soda manufacturing companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola will get on board.
To reach the goal through trees alone, we’d need to plant about 280 million new trees or to plant a new redwood forest.
Redwoods can remove about 12 metric tons of CO2 per acre per year for a young redwood forest, a 50-acre forest would remove about 600 metric tons of CO2 per year.
To reach 7 million metric tons per year by 2030, California would need about 11,700 new 50-acre young redwood forests. So the target would require about 585,000 acres, or about 914 square miles, of new young redwood forest.
For perspective, that’s a little larger than the size of Los Angeles in land area, though still far smaller than a major California county.
Personally, I think a redwood forest is more attractive.
Perhaps a combination of the two – breweries and soda factories with DAC for their carbonation needs, and a big tree planting effort will get us where we need to be in just four years.
Then, we can start worrying about CARB’s 2045 goal of 75 million tons….
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