The "One Entire World" Energy Bill Behind Direct Air Capture

Direct air capture sounds like a simple fix: build enough machines, pull the carbon back out. However, the energy maths says otherwise.

With the best DAC technology available today, removing just 1–2ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere would take roughly the entire world's annual electricity output, that's around 31,000 TWh.

For context, we're currently adding about 2.3ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. So a full year of global electricity dedicated purely to DAC would not quite keep pace with what we're emitting right now - let alone touch the 420+ ppm already up there.

Not a reason to write DAC off, but a reason to be honest about what it can realistically do at today's technology level.

Sources: Ember, Global Electricity Review 2025 | Stanford, Energy Consumption of Direct Air Capture | NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory