I was wondering who pays the initial high costs per tonne to scale things up and get the price down.
even the band Coldplay (which hired Climeworks to cancel out some of the emissions from its upcoming world tour).
That's an interesting model. On the one hand, unlike say a hotel or airline where all the customers are traveling, most of the carbon footprint for a concert is in band/staff/gear travel and in whatever happens at the venue. All of that gets split among thousands of fans who are buying a discretionary luxury good already. And, of course, now that Johnny Winter is dead, no band has a better name to associate with carbon capture :-)
At $600 a ton, Microsoft would need to pay almost $6.7 billion to remove just one year of its pollution.
MS has $168b/yr in revenue. So if you think about just paying that rate, you would only increase prices by less than 4% even at that high cost. That's a simplistic model, obviously. But imagine they get the cost of capture down to $60/ton and the supply chain gets rid of half of its carbon through switching to renewables, efficiency and so forth. In that case, you're looking at adding 0.2% to the cost of everything MS sells and being able to be carbon neutral.
It surprises me the cost could be close to that low. Obviously that is a simplistic model. Obviously the price change for United airlines is going to be much greater. But still, it does not seem out of the question that we could see a 10X fall in the cost of carbon capture and a 50% fall in the carbon inputs in 15 years.
That's roughly how much the cost of solar panels fell over the *first* 15 years of commercialization (1975-1990) even without any strong imperative to get it done.
