$6.7M Available for Tech That Turns Captured Carbon into Useful Products | Hacker News Reader

$6.7M Available for Tech That Turns Captured Carbon into Useful Products

environmentalleader.com

23 pointsendswapper12 comments

My background is in chemical engineering, but I'm now the co-founder of a cleantech software company. Carbon capture is a shim that will never be efficient because of chemical and thermodynamic limitations that cannot be shortcut, though possibly it will still be required to meet carbon emission goals. Fossil fuel is literally carbon captured CO2 that has been buried in the ground for millions of years, which we pull up and burn for a positive yield, so reversing that process is physically a negative yield.

Carbon capture is basically the equivalent of running nested virtual machines. Say you're running Ubuntu 16.04 inside VMware, which is running on Windows 10, which itself is running inside VirtualBox on a Ubuntu 16.04 host. You still can do the things you need inside that inner Ubuntu system, but there's a ton of overhead, and you already have Ubuntu running as the top host. The only reason you'd do that is if the Windows VM was your starting point, you were still running many native apps in Windows, and you need to get the Ubuntu app working yesterday.

This is basically the equivalent to carbon capture. We've built a ton of infrastructure off of pulling it out and burning it for energy, so until we port all of that infrastructure over to non-carbon sources (internal combustion-->EVs, coal-->nuclear/solar/wind, etc.), we're basically stuck inside an intermediate system. Unfortunately, the planet is warming so quickly that we have to consider booting another VM to shim some fixes now while we port everything over.

> reversing that process is physically a negative yield.

How energetically costly is direct atmospheric gas capture? Does sequestering flue gases look much better?

Well, from an engineering point of view, energetic cost of capture is one the inputs, not the end goal. Overall cost per unit capture is the end goal. So high energetic costs can be offset by low manufacturing costs if it results in a net overall lower cost.

Anyway, yes, direct atmospheric capture is much much more energetically costly than flue gas capture. CO2 in air is 0.04% and in flue gas is 8-15%. Depending on the capture technology and the storage medium, you don't have to build nearly as much infrastructure if you tap into the 8-15% CO2 flue gas stream. Atmospheric carbon capture is literally what plants do, and the manufacturing costs for them is basically plant seeds...done. Or hell, they do that naturally anyway, so it's really just stop-clearing-forests and you've gotten your carbon capture for free.

So even though atmospheric carbon capture is way more energetically costly, the manufacturing costs are basically zero, and plants are currently the cheapest solution. That doesn't stop lots of research going into trying to find something better. We found cheaper solar energy with silicon over plants (cost per watt on the grid from photovoltaics is less than biomass), so we may find something cheaper than plants for carbon capture, too.

Here is an example of a current, commercial technology: newlight.com

"At Newlight, we believe that the most sustainable way to reduce the amount of carbon in the air is to use greenhouse gas emissions as a resource for the production of commercially useful materials that out-compete oil-based materials."

I wonder what advantages captured carbon as a raw material would have over the numerous other sources of carbon?

Mostly that it removes carbon from the atmosphere, I would think.

Exactly, and technology that is inexpensive enough to compete with other sources of carbon would have a massive economic, environment and social impact.

Meanwhile, £6bn a year in subsidies available for oil and gas production in the UK.

It's like we just don't care.

Economic growth: it's the altar we're sacrificing the world on.

Here's a plan, off the top of my head: capture the CO2 in the exhaust, use some of the power from the plant to freeze it into dry ice. Feed the heat back into the power plant somehow so it's not wasted. Take the dry ice and ship it to the poles, and bury it. If there's enough, and it's packed under dense snow and water ice, it won't sublimate as quickly and will help keep the snow and water ice frozen.

$6.7M is probably not enough to even attempt this, even if it could actually make a difference. Which it probably couldn't.

Agriculture?

I recall 15-20 years ago some people were experimenting with capturing the tractor's exhaust and applying it into the soil that it was working, but it didn't seem to go anywhere.

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