Carbon dioxide extraction company Carbon Engineering receives $68M investment | Hacker News Reader

Carbon dioxide extraction company Carbon Engineering receives $68M investment

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45 pointsshortlived54 comments

This is actually a very bad idea and a complete waste of money which should have been used for other projects. It reminds me of another bad idea, which just will not die - extracting water from air by cooling it.

Right now, we have several technologies ready to go. Starting with the most cost-effective, and omitting the "use less" scenarios:

1. Replacement of fossil fuel power plants with carbon free electricity such as wind and solar power (also geothermal, where possible and nuclear, where palatable). Cost per tonne of CO2 saved: less than zero for about 30% of current generation, and "very low" for a good portion of the remainder.

2. Sequestration of concentrated CO2 streams, such as those produced in natural gas processing. Cost: $20-$40 per tonne.

3. Biosequestration, ie tree planting. Cost varies greatly, maybe $15-$50 per tonne.

The approaches above are the only ones that are actually used in the industry today, but there is plenty of room to do more. The approaches below are considered to be economically prohibitive, and AFAIK are not in use:

4. Post-combustion carbon capture: Scrubbing the CO2 from exhaust gases of power plants etc, where the CO2 concentration is 10-20%. Cost: $50-100/tonne, PLUS the cost of sequestration, as above.

5. Pre-combustion carbon capture: here, the carbon is removed from the fuel and sequestered, and only the hydrogen is burned. Cost: $80-150/tonne, but sequestration cost is low.

and then we have:

6. Removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. The article says the cost may be "under $100/tonne", but the serious estimates I have seen are circa $500/tonne. Consider that the CO2 concentration in air is around 0.04%, cf post combustion concentrations of 10-20%. Regardless of the advances in technology, this will never be as cheap as post-combustion carbon capture, which is essentially the same process but with 250 times less throughput.

I am with the people who worry that this is a cynical move by the companies to avoid urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions.EDIT: another comment calls this "moral licensing", and I completely agree.

I think the technology is needed because I don’t think we have the capacity as a culture to stop emissions fast enough.

I am concerned that they are so focused on syngas because it just creates a cycle that doesn’t reduce the CO2 we have released..... eventually we will just use a technology like this do pull CO2 out of the environment but there can’t be a financial aspect to it.

I like your point "and nuclear, where palatable".

I think that until marketers can convince Joe Public that nuclear is probably the safest and best tech now we have Gen IV reactors, and that they are the best way to remove by-products of older generations, we will continue to degrade our environment searching for energy.

How much of your valuable land would you like to convert to forest? Unless we start paying people more to keep forests than they otherwise could in real estate, agriculture, etc it is a nice argument that trees can sequester carbon but unrealistic that it can happen on a scale large enough to move the needle.

The thing I like about reforestation is that it's a positive, tangible, symbolic, easily understood concept that is likely relatively easy to get public support for. Conversely, carbon reduction campaigns feel more like being scolded. When I was young, the big environmental push was centered around saving the rainforest. I would like to see a return and expansion of this idea. It has many benefits beyond just global warming such as fighting desertification.

To be clear, I also support renewables and the other things listed by OP.

Sometimes I'm surprised how cheap land is. You can get an acre of grazing land for maybe 5 grand in the right area (if you buy in bulk), in a place conducive to rainfall and reforestation (Ireland).

I've looked at this and there are grants, but they're paltry (maybe a grand a year for 3 acres?) and you give up the right to do whatever you like with the land, like graze it.

I did some back-of-an-envelope calculations on converting beef grazing land (with its high methane emissions) to forest, specifically for Ireland

tl;dr - it's not cheap, but it's doable

A cow produces around 2.3 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year [1] You need 0.184 hectares of grazing land per cow [2] So each hectare of beef-grazing land emits around 12.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year

Irish forests sequester on average 3.36 tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year [3] So converting beef-grazing land to forest offsets around 15.86 tonnes of CO2 per year per hectare. Cost of grazing land is around €25k/hectare [4]

Cost of planting a forest is around EUR3k per hectare [5]

So the cost of offsetting 1 tonne of carbon per year by converting beef-grazing land to forest is around €1750

Ireland's total emissions are around 61 million tonnes per year [6] So to offset it ALL would cost over a hundred billion euro, and a little more grazing land than actually exists in the country (and not all of that is beef anyway)

Or in other words, offsetting carbon by converting beef grazing land to forest would take around 1 billion euro per percent of our total current emissions. To put that in context - Irish govt spending is currently around EUR75 billion per year [7], and under the Paris Agreement we're committed to a 30% reduction of emissions by 2030 [8]

[1] https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m... [2] https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/dairy/statistics-and-links/fr... [3] http://woodenergy.ie/media/coford/content/publications/proje... [4] https://www.agriland.ie/farming-news/2018-agricultural-land-... [5] https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/establishment/r... [6] https://www.rte.ie/news/enviroment/2018/1205/1015300-greenho... [7] https://whereyourmoneygoes.gov.ie/en/2018/ [8] https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/topics/eu-and-...

Thanks for that! Really appreciate it.

It explains why most of the forestry is on land not suited to a lot else.

Plus they just release it when they die.... that’s not a solution for petroleum and coal based carbon since it was environmentally sequestered before we dug it up.

Trees don't release CO2 when they die. They release CO2 when they rot. That might sound like an unimportant distinction, but for example buildings made of wood are a CO2 sink. The wood does not rot, and thus does not release the carbon bound in it. Basically burying trees (or generally biomass) in an oxygen-poor environment will sequester CO2.

Plus, if you do it in bulk, you are creating coal for future people, millions of years from now.

Don’t forget to throw in a few Dinos for the oil!

It might be useful for other readers to explain that on your #1, "less than zero for about 30% current generation", based on my knowledge it means that the "running cost" of building and then operating a renewable plant (e.g. financing it at current rates and then paying interest on the financed sum) is lower than the pure cost of operating existing "polluting" plants.

That's why it's "lower than zero".

Please correct me if that's not what you meant.

I am surprised all of the comments so far are so negative. They can take carbon out of the air and make jet fuel with it. We still need jet fuel. It makes flying carbon neutral.

The CEO argues that even if all carbon emissions stopped today we would still need to remove some of the carbon we've already emitted.

> I am surprised all of the comments so far are so negative. They can take carbon out of the air and make jet fuel with it. We still need jet fuel. It makes flying carbon neutral.

This is either an oversimplification or the technology is not useful, since a naïve method of doing this means that you will have to put in the energy we got from burning the fuel to convert the carbon dioxide.

Gather $renewable energy for $x time (x > 8 hours), convert to high-energy-density fuel required for flight and burn for 8 hours to cross $continent... Seems useful to me!

It would need to be 100% efficient over the whole cycle to make flying carbon neutral.

the process uses energy to create the fuel out of carbon in the atmosphere. the process does not release any carbon. the plane burns the fuel, releasing the same amount of carbon in the fuel back in to the atmosphere.

What part needs to be 100% efficient to make flying carbon neutral?

Further shows that many environmentalists care more about controlling the economy than helping the environment. Being able to utilize fossil fuels without the carbon issues should be great news, but instead people are worried that it won't kill off our means of producing power fast enough.

The main driver of C02 reduction is based around geopolitical forces and national interest, and the west is on the wrong side of history on this one.

We got lucky that China / East Asia / India do not have access to cheap hydrocarbon, aligning their national interest with that of longer term survival of humanity.

Some dude in BC is vacuuming up C02 in his backyard and this becomes news ?

Meanwhile ...

- China continues to shave off millions barrels of global oil consumption due to their initiatives involving electric buses for the masses.

- China dumps so much solar production capacity on the market that it undercuts coal and gas.

The solution to climate change is not going to come from cute startups but from national projects.

When history books are written, the pages will be filled with praises of national initiatives taken by govts of south korea, china, germany, ... ( india ? not sure yet have to wait and see ).

Pretty words are not going to be written about the richest and most carbon intensive nation on earth along with its cronies ( Canada / Australia / UK ) actively undermining efforts to fight climate change ( while continuing to export and use fossil fuels to support the bulk of their GDP ).

But you will always have some dude vacuuming up CO2 in his backyard in BC to provide moral licensing.

China may be on the right side with clean energy, but also on the wrong side with massively increasing their methane output, increasing desertification, etc: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/29/can-the-...

In terms of residence in the atmosphere methane is reported to have a half-life of about 7 years. Carbon dioxide's is much much longer with estimates from 40 -> N years where N might be in the thousands.

So you are saying it could be worse. However, if they raised those cows properly it would even help with fighting climate change. But I'm sure they are going down the animal factory route instead.

The UK has cut emissions more than ANY other country

I found different data. Perhaps the UK cut emissions by a larger % but US by nominal tons?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-...

According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.

By comparison, the second largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China's carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India's grew by 1 billion metric tons.

> annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.

This is deceptive.

The emissions per capita in the US were much larger than in the UK or the EU to start with, which means still many low hanging fruits waiting to be picked. The lower your emissions are from the start, the harder it is to lower them even further...

In other words, UK per capita emissions have fallen 30% more than the US since 2005. And that is from a much lower base.

The UK has outsourced it emission .. since it helps prop up property prices in London to not have industrial waste being dumped into the Thames.

Also the money from pollution in China/Russia/ME ends up leaking to buy up property in London because you know .. nobody wants to live near a coal mine.

The UK provides direct military support to the Kingdom of Brunei - one of the largest exporter of Petroleum.

The UK props up several petro states in ME if you haven't noticed and also sends its own men to die in case their ME cronies are threatened.

UK oil companies help loot the natural resources of Nigeria and then provide banking services to a small group of warloads to hide that wealth.

The UK is the big spider in the middle of the global web that connects oil, blood and money.

Do you think other developed countries do not import manufactured goods from China? Those countries have outsourced their emissions and still increased domestic emissions. UK domestic per capita emissions are half what they were in 1990, which is unprecedented. Other than altering the trade deals, which the UK does not have the power to do anyway, it’s difficult to see what else could be done.

I'm building consumer products using Carbon Engineering's carbon and carbonates. Check it out here: http://bynegative.com

This is huge news. The implications of cheap C02 extraction are immense.

See this paper on what it means.

https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/r...

The key thing is that in 2100 to keep C02 ppm at 450 ppm it would cost 0.6 % of global GDP.

This comment was originally submitted for the first submission of this article at : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566711

The reaction to this development on twitter and other places is fascinating. Many people are clearly upset that C02 capture at scale is likely to become economically viable.

My god, I know we can't qualify absolutely everything we say, but I feel like you need some error bars on those predictions. Actually that is an understatement. It is wildly speculative to talk about GDP proportions and technological solutions in 80 years time.

Fair enough. Double it. 1.2% of GDP.

The cost benefit calculations for global warming are similarly wildly speculative.

But it puts limits on the cost in 2100 which is really interesting.

$68M doesn't seem like much compared to the billions of capital available. Lyft can burn 1 billion per year but a crucial technology like this for climate change can't get even half of that? Society's ability to allocate capital is really ineffective sometimes.

If this technology got more R&D and was refined, it could potentially be the solution for excess solar/wind. Why build expensive large batteries if all that excess solar/wind can suck CO2 from the air and produce fuel? Then cars running on such fuel could effectively be carbon neutral.

Thats not really how investing works though. I agree 100% on importance but in high risk unproven markets you dont just throw 100m over the fence and see what happens. This is a phenomenal outcome.

This technology is fundamentally non-scalable because it relies on potassium hydroxide chemistry to sequester CO2. Let me explain:

Potassium hydroxide (KOH) is manufactured by electrolysis, which is electrical power intensive. The amount of KOH manufactured every year is a microscopic fraction of the total CO2 emitted every year. Scaling this up to the same scale as CO2 production isn't simply a matter of building more KOH factories: the implied vast electrical power generation capacity and infrastructure simply doesn't exist at this scale. You would need to build massive power plants along side your KOH manufacturing. This is the kind of thing that only works when you have access to cheap excess hydropower.

And this ignores the secondary issue of scaling potassium supply sufficient to support throughput at CO2 scales, even with recycling. Potassium is a mined mineral with limited reserves that is critical for agriculture. Reliable access to mined potassium is already a major concern for food security and this would require increasing the rate of mining (and depletion) of potassium reserves many-fold. No one is going to care if we've reduced atmospheric CO2 if billions are starving to death.

tl;dr: This CO2 extraction process has severe practical limits to its industrial scalability. Its feasibility relies on leveraging the excess capacity of existing industrial processes, which is only possible at tiny scales for use as a point solution.

Atmospheric CO2 sequestration is a bitch. The thermodynamics and chemistry rate limiters are extremely unfavorable to an economical engineered solution. Fortunately, the planet has a prodigious background sequestration rate that can be leveraged for free if human CO2 production is reduced sufficiently.

Hence the question is: why can't they use NaOH which is much cheaper and easier to get?

NaOH manufacturing is electrolytic just like KOH, and is similarly limited by power generation.

As to why they can't use NaOH, NaOH being a cheaper material does not imply a cheaper process -- reaction rates matter to amortized unit costs. For example, the reaction rate of KOH is almost certainly much higher than the reaction rate of NaOH, which means it requires much less physical plant/material per unit of sequestration throughput. This plant cost savings could easily offset the lower material costs of NaOH. If it actually made sense to use NaOH, the designers of this process would have used it.

NaOH would at least be scalable though. So if they did manage to reduce the price it could play a part.

NaOH is not scalable either. It doesn't address the core industrial scaling issue at all, which is the same for sodium and potassium, nor where we will find terawatts of available power generation. There is several trillion dollars in hidden CapEx baked into the idea that we can sequester atmospheric CO2 using this method before we even get to the direct costs. It assumes infrastructure that doesn't exist being built at mindboggling scales.

To actively sequester atmospheric CO2 at net negative rate on a time frame of several decades would require $10T per year by their own numbers at their current cost using potassium and assuming the industrial infrastructure already existed. Using sodium would greatly increase this price tag, making it even less probable. There is no getting around those cold hard numbers.

The fundamental thermodynamics makes it impossible, even ignoring the industrial scaling problem, to reduce the cost per ton to a level that is remotely economically plausible.

I don't understand where the energy is coming from to complete the cycle?

They can run on electricity or burn natural gas but then capture the c02 from the combustion so they are still removing c02 from the atmosphere.

Solar, presumably.

Probably a natural gas plant.

Baby seal tallow more likely.

They must really hate plant life. So where is all the energy to run this process (and refine and process the magic chemicals) going to come from? Oh yea, it's going to be clean energy like wind power, taken from that giant surplus when wind scales up to power all homes and factories and municipal treatment plants. So much left over. Many happy energy.

Meanwhile, in the making not using energy department, Kirk Sorensen gets a paltry ~3 million from DOE that isn't even to be put towards development of Weinberg's MSRE concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8&t=44m40s

I fear for the human race.

They could put their plants next to wind farms that have over-capacity of what the local grid infrastructure can handle - ie on a windy day they make more electric than the grid can take. The air capture would only run on windy days. That might be a reasonable way to make jet fuel.

Yes, renewable energy is becoming very cheap per unit but intermittent, likely one of the ways we will tackle that is overbuilding supply, I think it’s likely we will have a class of industries popping up that can use cheap electricity available intermittently.

Mining bitcoins on AWS spot instances.

Nuclear energy

Shh! Can't mention it when wind is being discussed.

Maybe the numbers don't work out but using excess energy created by wind solar etc. to offset the carbon produced by coal burning when we need power but the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining could be a promising idea.

Could be a cheaper alternative to massive battery storage if the desired effect is to always have energy in a way that produces the lowest amount of CO2

At this point you can figure out if a technology to reduce atmospheric carbon level will be effective or not by looking if oil companies are investing in it.

The atmosphere then becomes a kind of carbon reservoir and we tune the CO2 content to match our needs. Either we want to control temperatures, or we want liquid carbon fuels which are, to date, the best aerial platform fuel form. For maximum Carbon availability and use/recycling, we would want to put all the carbon locked in oil/underground into the atmosphere where it is far more available to use. This allows the Earth system to maximize its metabolic rate. Maybe we should see the burning of fossil fuels as the unlocking of Earth's buried carbon repositories so they can be more easily used. Plants concur.

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