280 Earth is a Big Change, but What Does It Take to Optimize? A Case Study on Google’s Carbon Footprint and the Future of Climate Change

The Earth builds modules to build filters to remove CO2 from the air. Similar to large industrial facilities, it is called direct air capture and was built in recent years. But 280 Earth says it can run more efficiently, allowing it to work in tandem with data centers and draw some power from their waste heat.

For context, Google was responsible for 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution in 2023 alone. That shows how small of a dent this initial carbon removal deal would make in its overall carbon footprint and how expensive it would be to pay to capture a larger chunk of its climate pollution.

Not only does 280 Earth’s technology capture CO2, but it also happens to pull in water vapor that it can extract to provide water for a customer. It can gather two to four tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured, according to Pimentel.

Costs would be brought down if carbon removal was scaled up. It buys time for companies when they are transitioning to cleaner energy. The transition away from fossil fuels is going to happen quickly and as much as we all want to believe it. It is going to take decades, according to Pimentel. “In the meantime, we’re continuing to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, exacerbating the problems that we already have. So I’m a believer in the all of the above solution.”

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Planet Earth: A Conversation with Alex and John Pimentel, CEO of 280 Earth, Frontier, Alphabet, Google, and Apple

Goldman Sachs has researched the expected growth of data centers in the U.S. and estimates they’ll be using 8% of total power in the country by 2030, up from 3% in 2022. The analysts say a surge in power demand the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a generation is going to be the result of the proliferation of artificial intelligence and data centers.

Filtering CO2 out of the air is trending among companies trying to hit sustainability targets but still struggling to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by turning to clean energy. Frontier has also brokered deals between big tech companies and other startups working to capture carbon using rocks, liquid smoke, and even sewage.

“When we started 280 Earth as a moonshot at X, our vision was always to find a radically effective, affordable and scalable way to remove billions of tons of carbon from our atmosphere. Astro Teller, a captain of moonshots at X, said that they are excited about the progress with Frontier buyers.

It’s sort of like the difference between a home oven and a professional pizza oven, says 280 Earth CEO John Pimentel. Each time you turn on and off the oven, you lose heat and energy. The pizza oven, on the other hand, retains heat better and stays at the same temperature.

Alex, the Director of research for the distributedai research institute, says there needs to be a complete material infrastructure for artificial intelligence. She worked for the ethical machine learning team at Google, but left the company due to the way the research paper was handled.

Google said it spent $12 billion on capital expenditures just that quarter, which was “driven overwhelmingly” by investments in data centers to fuel its AI endeavors. The company said it expects to spend the same amount throughout the year.

Major tech companies are ramping up investment in artificial intelligence. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has dubbed Google an “AI-first” company. The company has added tools to its website over the last few months. Meta has added chat features to its products. And Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI last month to bring AI to its Siri digital assistant.

How much electricity are we spending on data centers? A study by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the New York Times ‘Measurement of Infrastructure and Electricity in the 21st Century’

More than 7,000 data centers are currently open around the world. In the year 2015, it was 3,600. The equivalent amount of electricity is consumed by the entire country of Italy.

The thirst for electricity nationwide has become so intense that plans to decommission several coal plants have been delayed, according to another report by the Washington Post.

Data centers need massive amounts of power to meet the demand for data, because of the amount of server space they have.

The report states that infrastructure and electricity needed for the technologies create new challenges for meeting commitments in the tech sector.

“One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes,” he says. “So, you can imagine with millions of people using something like that every day, that adds up to a really large amount of electricity.”

But, starting in 2023, Google wrote in its sustainability report that it was no longer “maintaining operational carbon neutrality.” The company is still pushing for a net-zero goal.