A massive machine which sucks carbon dioxide from the air has been unveiled in California, making it America’s first commercial direct air capture facility.

“They’re big vacuums that suck air in and separate the individual components of air, so they take the carbon dioxide out,” Paul Bennett, a clean technologies expert at Crown Research Institute Scion tells Newsable this morning.

On the eve of this week’s United Nations’ COP 28 summit – the latest effort to get world governments to tackle climate change – the plant’s opening was described by media outlet Reuters as a milestone in the efforts to further climate technologies and hit global temperature targets.

However, due to their sheer size, questions are being raised over whether the facilities and machines are sustainable long-term.

“The amount of energy [and] the amount of capital required to invest in these sorts of plants will be huge,” Bennett says. “The energy obviously has to be 100 per cent renewable, otherwise why do it? So the big question marks for me are the overall costs. And let’s not forget we do have alternatives, and we’ve been using them for millennia – they’re called trees!”

Bennett also says such technologies evolve over time and there is a high chance they could become more cost-effective down the track.

Listen to the full interview here.

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