Groundbreaking carbon capture project in Squamish, B.C | Hacker News Reader

Groundbreaking carbon capture project in Squamish, B.C

cbc.ca

42 pointsph0rque17 comments

The "win" here is that if you have a source of "carbon free" energy (on their web site they mention solar, wind, and nuclear) you can pull CO2 out of the air and make it available for other processes (like Fischer-Tropsch) which can combine it with Hydrogen and turn it back into long chain organics.

As far as relevance goes, this is an interesting bridge technology. One could imagine a massive solar plan in the Sahara that was using its output to produce diesel fuel. Transporting diesel long distances is more feasible than transporting electricity and you can use it when you need it and store it when you don't.

If one of the several fusion efforts start generating excess energy this is one way to use that energy productively. You reduce airborne CO2 (good for the climate) and you produce fuel for later.[1]

Compressed CO2 is also used in a number of industrial processes so you can just sell the stuff if you want to make back money.

[1] And yes that re-releases CO2 into the air but if you're pulling it out to make it the result is a net-zero impact on CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

A high-level description of functionality: http://carbonengineering.com/our-technology/

Essentially running an alkaline solution through a structure and simultaneously forcing air through the same structure. Air contact with alkaline solution results in CO2 absorption into the alkaline solution.

So the CEO says "it's the first time that anyone's demonstrated a technology that captures CO2 that has the potential to be scaled up to be large enough to be relevant from an environmental or climate point of view."

How about the Bondary Dam full-scale CCS plant that came online a year ago and is currently removing about a million tons of CO2 annually? Doesn't that count? I don't think anyone is questioning the ability of that technology to be scaled further.

Key passage:

"In CE’s lowest-technical risk ‘baseline’ design, all the input energy required onsite is supplied by natural gas. The carbon dioxide from gas combustion is also captured along with the CO2 extracted from the atmosphere, so that no new CO2 is emitted to the atmosphere by our technology. In the longer term, we expect that carbon-free power will drive air capture. CE is building collaborations to conduct full-scale studies on using solar thermal or nuclear energy as the source of energy for its air capture system."

This makes no thermodynamic sense. CO2 is about the worst "fuel" possible, because it is the end product of combustion.

Then, the call it a "capture project", with the goal of burning what they create.

It can be carbon capture, or it can create fuel, but not both.

Right now people are getting fuel by pulling stored carbon out of the ground and burning it, increasing the net CO2 in the atmosphere.

If a system like this worked, the level of CO2 would stay constant rather than increasing because you're recirculating carbon which was already in the atmosphere.

That's still not as good as actually pulling carbon out but if they can make the numbers work, it's to see how that's not a noteworthy improvement.

I'm by no means an expert in the subject, but what you say sounds suspiciously similar to a perpetual motion machine.

There's no perpetual motion here. It costs energy to create hydrocarbons. The investors backing this project are interested in combating climate change as well as developing energy storage that is carbon neutral (consumes as much CO2 as it releases into the atmosphere).

Not if the process is powered by carbonless energy sources like Solar, Wind, or Nuclear.

Seconding what ac29 said – this obviously only makes sense if you have a power source which doesn't generate new carbon. Solar in particular could make a ton of sense if you had a viable process which could happen out in relatively cheap desert spaces, but I have no idea whether that could work with the water requirements that the article described.

Side topic, how much carbon capture could we achieve by burying crop plants after harvesting? It seems like only a small amount of biomass is harvested. Think of corn. I'm assuming the rest is turned back into co2 by decomposition?

It's sometimes used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stover

It's also probably not sufficient to just bury it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

Cool stuff, certainly. But why take C02 from the air, when there are large stationary sources of CO2 readily available, like any bloody thermal power plant? It... seems very wasteful to me.

EDIT: also, one tonne per day, very wow.

I could imagine that, when you take the CO2 from the air, you could build those plants in remote locations, where it is difficult to get fuel right now. Like, in the desert.

But I guess that would work only in theory, because those plants would probably need quite a lot of infrastructure - right?

It requires a lot of energy to do this, obviously. I don't know the exact details, but my naive assumption is that they require hydrogen as an intermediate, which would also imply they need relatively pure water as a source. Altogether I just don't know why they decided to take this from the air rather than build a plant in any major port with a refinery installed, which would seem to be much cheaper.

Nitpick: solar thermal and nuclear power plants are thermal and CO2 free at the point of power generation.

It's more of a long-term thing. Hopefully we'll get to a point where those stationary power plants are carbon-free renewable or nuclear plants. At that point, to whatever degree we still have to use liquid fuels, it'd be nice if they were carbon-neutral.

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