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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

Alright HN domain experts. I’m prepared. What’s the rub?

It’s only practical on mixtures with high co2 gas concentrations

Would inside a chimney work?

From the abstract it seems to be very applicable to combustion exhausts (coal/gas plants) and consuming 5-10% of the combustion energy to recapture the CO2.

Hard to tell what is the required CO2 concentration without the full article. Typical combustion exhaust seems to be ~10% of CO2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue_gas

Edit: spelling.

I wonder how research is doing to concentrate CO2 from the PPM amounts we have "in regular air"

There are at least two low-hanging fruits that make it "easier": CO2 is heavier than other important gases and mildly polar.

Plant lots of trees or similar, then burn them for electricity and capture the CO2 from the smoke.

Compared to a lot of the other proposals out there it almost sounds plausible.

Or skip a step. Turn the trees into lumber and build something with it. Long-lived wooden structures sequester carbon until they are abandoned and rot.

Why not just do a partial burn and reduce the remainder to charcoal? It would be much cheaper, require no chemicals, and the end product is pure carbon, which would be easier to store. You could literally dump it in a pile and deal with it later.

Making charcoal is not energy-positive and still only results in about 50% carbon capture, best case scenario. Burning it in a biomass plant with good carbon capture does better and displaces carbon-emitting generation processes at the same time. As an added bonus biomass plants are excellent 'baseload' type plants, a feature that wind, solar, etc are missing without expensive storage and complex management schemes.

Such as flue gases from fertiliser, cement, steel and power plants ... which make up a sizeable chunk of our emissions.

We should be targeting CO2 capture at point-sources wherever possible. Why wait until it's diffused into the atmosphere before trying to capture it?

Like with every other solution, under the current political and economic systems, there's no incentive to scale it up quickly enough to make a dent in global warming and it will just live in small local prototypes and in the dreams of techno-solutionists.

That too

That's not a techno solution worth to dream about, the real techno solution is a fine grained control of weather (like https://viento.ai) and in that case the extra CO2 in atmosphere will be naturally sequestered in fields and farms in Sahara.

That "leadership team" doesn't seem qualified to be working in this area.

Aubrey de Grey, heh? IDK... now I like it more.

What he is qualified for is running this sort of effort. I just don't know what to call this sort of effort.

Viento is a ‘moonshot’ nonprofit pioneering targeted weather security... by combining big data, forecasting breakthroughs and AI directed weather interventions... framed as "break glass in case of climate emergency."

So... I don't like the idea. I do however, like the way he puts together moonshot projects, generally. Maybe this will evolve into something better. It's useful to have 0.X% of people working on tech, to be doing it in an environment that isn't standard academia or big tech.

Elon musk wasn't qualified to build a rocket company. Still pretty succesful though.

He had Ivy-league degrees in physics and economics and two billion dollars. More importantly, he wasn't the whole leadership team: the CTO was a rocket engineer and the COO had other experience.

thanks but no thanks

To be honest, the layout of that site does not exactly inspire confidence.

But the team is interesting indeed. Incidentally, there's an online SSC meetup with Jaan Tallinn as guest, _today_: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jQQYCdtiH5d3CtrNC/jaan-tall...

I think the bigger gotcha with carbon capture is it sustains the quid pro quo that climate change is the biggest threat to unchecked energy consumption growth. Behind climate change, there's also biodiversity collapse, ocean fish depletion, and that's gonna ruin the food system billions of people depend on, way before they see the benefits of globalisation.

Consumption is the underlying driver but emissions is definitely the biggest 'base' threat.

Acidification (from CO2) and temperature (from CO2) rise would continue to lead to collapses of fish stocks even if we stopped trawling the oceans.

True, but if it's really good, it probably could be brought into the political/economic system at some point. Just mandate zero emissions for certain classes of carbon fuel burners... like power new stations.

Replacing the first 30% of fossil fuel usage is hard/slow. At some point, it will become much easier/quicker... because the economics will be favourable.

The last 30% of fossil fuel will be hard/slow. Fossil fuel burning use cases that for different reasons are hard to replace. For these, exhaust capture makes sense.

lot of wishful thinking here. There's clearly not enough time for this

Enough time for what?

All I'm predicting is that carbon reduction will follow a path. Slow, then fast, then slow again. At that late point, exhaust capture may be mandatory... I would even say probably.

Enough time to prevent systemic collapse that will inevitably make intervetions to such a scale possible.

I see.

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