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                    Climate Changing Air Contaminants           KEEPING YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE           Where The CO2 Can Be Stored Underground Forever

These are currently commercialized prototype technologies for removing the legacy 500 Billion Tons of CO2 from the air that's causing the Climate Change you are feeling today.

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A New, More Promising, Direct Air Capture Of CO2 Using Minerals
Farming and Harvesting Air's Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Using Magnesium Carbonate Pebbles
https://www.heirloomcarbon.com/#product-intro

This website discusses the SCALING UP of a scientific paper proposal that has the potential of restoring Planet Earth's original 280 ppm CO2 Level
(DISCLAIMER NOTE: While this website has absolutely nothing to do with any of the other people involved with weathering of magnesium oxide technology, all rights to detail changes from the original published paper appearing on this website belong to the original authors. - JPH) 

The Scientific Paper: "Ambient weathering of magnesium oxide for CO2 removal from air".  Link:  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16510-3
 (The above paper goes into detail about the basic ideas and chemistry studies related to this idea. Please Visit and Download your own free pdf Creative Commons copy of this paper for your personal understanding and reference.)

This Website's Major Direct Air CO2 Capturing Farm constraints include:
1, Building near a large source of cheap magnesium oxide.
2, Building over geostrata acceptable for massive CO2 disposal via Class VI disposal wells.
3, Building where it almost never snows.
4, Building on flat waste land that does not compete for human food. 

To capture and sequester all the CO2 mankind is dumping into the air in near real-time, we could be talking a total of 90,000 square miles (about the area of Minnesota) covered with a 4 inch thick layer of magnesite, perhaps divided into 11 to 1,000 CO2 capture farms in bad lands spread around the world.

"We show this process could cost approximately $46–159 tCO₂⁻¹ net removed from the atmosphere, considering grid and solar electricity without post-processing costs*. This technology may achieve lower costs than projections for more extensively engineered Direct Air Capture methods. It has the scalable potential to remove at least 2–3 GtCO₂ year⁻¹, [per installation] and may make a meaningful contribution to mitigating climate change,"

*(This approach does not drain energy from biomass or any other renewable energy source. Remote installations could easily and inexpensively be powered by carbon captured natural gas generators or micro nuclear reactors.)
(This website's suggested 11 - 3 Giga-tonne CO2 capture (DAC) farms project scales up the cited published study of a 1 to 3 Gt CO2 capture station. This will enable the world to sequester an amount of CO2 equal to almost ALL fresh fossil CO2 emissions being made everywhere in the world.)
(As current fossil CO2 emissions disappear or are rendered carbon-neutral thru this decarbonization project, the spare capacity of these project sites will begin to capture and sequester the world's remaining legacy 500 billion ton cloud of CO2, eventually taking the world from it's current 420 ppm of CO2 back to it's original 280 ppm of CO2 over a period of perhaps 50 years.)
 

youtube talks by paper co-author Jennifer Wilcox:
https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_wilcox_a_new_way_to_remove_co2_from_the_atmosphere       
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXNT5E6AvSM Jen Wilcox

Direct Air CO2 Capturing (DAC) Pebble Farms have the potential to restore the world to it's original 280 ppm CO2 level.
It is possible for Planet Earth to have hundreds of small Direct Air CO2 Capture farms all over the world that, along with decarbonization, could completely halt Climate Change.  (Click to Enlarge.)

Climate-Changing CO2 can be captured from the air (see below), liquefied, mixed with 'CarbFix', then pumped into permanent underground storage strata all over the world to become limestone.

"To meet our climate goals, 10 billion metric tons (referred to as tonnes from herein) per year (GtCO2yr−1 ) must be removed globally by 2050. After 2050 and thereafter, 20 GtCO2 yr−1 must be removed [2]. These reductions do not include emissions avoided by decarbonization, rather CO2 directly removed from the atmosphere." - Noah McQueen, "A review of direct air capture (DAC): scaling up commercial technologies and innovating for the future". 16 April 2021.

The above is Climate Change mitigation orthodoxy. What follows is what might be possible if the IPCC followed a path of maintaining the climate's health that resembled what the medical world does for human health - isolation and containment.

What is being proposed below are sewage-like CO2 treatment plants for the air for removing and isolating the excessive amounts of the toxic air contaminant carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide emitted into the air from anywhere on Earth wafts around the planet, so the gas can be captured and disposed of wherever it’s convenient. Wind-circulated gas diffusion will quickly sweep excess amounts of CO2 created anywhere in the world's air to any location on the surface of the earth that is causing reduced diffused carbon dioxide gas pressure by removing local carbon dioxide from the air - i.e., a virtual CO2 'funnel'.  U.S. 'Class VI' CO2 disposal wells (or equals) at that location, in combination with the liquefied CO2 additive "CarbFix", will safely turn this CO2 that has been injected deep into the earth into limestone. This will lock the air's captured CO2 very deep underground forever.

Roughly speaking, the above 12 billion tons of available magnesite limits the world to extracting 12 billion tons or so of Non-Biomass carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere each year.
Possibly a more frequent harvesting interval is possible, say, 3 times per year to yield 36 billion tons of CO2 per year?
Also, since magnesite deposits and CO2 disposal strata are spread around the world in many different countries in varying amounts, breaking apart the Direct Air CO2 Capture industry to reflect these circumstances might prove more efficient.
Most importantly, once the task of reversing Climate Change has been achieved, the world will still face the task of also removing that invisible cloud of about 500 billion tons of CO2 still hanging over us before Planet Earth becomes cool again.

https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/critical-metals-investing/magnesium-investing/top-magnesite-producing-countries/ 

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The Scientific Paper's Basic Concept Sketch

A Calciner is an air-tight oven.

The Basic Concepts Sketch (above) With The Additional Processing Machinery Added

Above: The site's author added some engineering details to show what might be done to/with the magnesite if it were used in the context of this website.

How Large Might Direct Air CO2 Capturing Farms Be?

Dozens of Direct Air CO2 Capture farms and Class VI CO2 Disposal Wells all over the world.
         

Thinking Big, Building Bigger.  Automated spreading, stirring, and harvesting massive amounts of magnesium oxide pebbles inexpensively is the key to making this idea viable.
In total, it's the area of Minnesota, which is ~86,943 mile², - cheap if spread over Planet Earth's deserts.  For comparison, Planet Earth's total area is 510 million mile², 196 million of it land. 
Broken into ten 94 x 94 mile CO2 capturing (DAC) farms (8,836 mile² area each), creating a total air contacting surface of 88,360 sq. miles of 4 inches thick magnesium oxide pebbles.
Or, broken into 1,000 farms, 9.4 miles square each - 88  mile² area each - to enable mass production costs for the harvesting machines and farms. Disposal wells could serve farm clusters. 
Deserts actually make up 1/3rd of Planet Earth's land surface area - about 7 times the 88,360 mile² needed. CO2 capture farms should do best on dry, flat, warm desert land.
The above figures are early estimates of scaling Direct Air CO2 Capture up sufficiently to take both current CO2 emissions and their historic CO2 backlog down to zero.  They are not the final word.  Check back for both revisions and corrections.

Warning! When fresh, these CO2-capturing pebbles are caustic magnesium.    Once they have absorbed their fill of air's CO2, they are no longer caustic.

Farming and Harvesting Carbon Dioxide From The Air As A Cash Crop

What Will the Pebble Handling, Tilling, and Harvesting Machinery Look Like?
This sweeper demo idea to recover weathered magnesite pebbles for calciner reprocessing:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEXxtVRzXxg       (Please Visit)
It would certainly be much more efficient for mobile harvesting machinery to go to the CO2 rather than hauling a 90 mile square of loose pebbles to a central processing plant.
Many smaller harvesting machines going over smaller fields of pebbles.
Asian farm machinery builders are likely to come up with the best early field machinery designs for this application.
A large powered magnesium carbonate harvester might be smaller than a semi trailer and it could do a linear sweep. Gasoline-sized tank trucks could bring propane and liquid oxygen and carry away the liquefied CO2.
Or perhaps a chemical processing site on a 100 foot wide 1/4 mile long bridge mounted on railroad tracks or a huge crawler like that machine used at Cape Canaveral to haul large rockets from the assembly building to the major Launch Pads.