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Comment by alwayslikethis | Hacker News Reader

Stopped reading at "carbon capture". It does not make sense at this point. There just isn't a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere (currently ~400ppm), and it is a very unreactive molecule. Any method of extracting it from the atmosphere is fighting against entropy and adding energy to molecules would be extremely inefficient. We should use all the renewable energy we have to reduce the emissions from our grid first. For a more near-term possible mitigation of global warming, geoengineering approaches such as reflective aerosol particles make much more sense.

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They are not here to mitigate global warming. They plan to make big money.

There is a market for natural gas, they have a precise estimate of costs (including carbon capture) and their costs are lower than fracking. No new tech. No big upfront investments. Just deploy and get rich.

Given the motivations of most humans, "deploy and get rich" seems like a good way to deal with CO2. The reason we're in this mess is because being CO2 neutral doesn't pay. If someone can find a way to profitably produce fuel while extracting CO2 from the atmosphere CO2 levels will be falling in no time.

I hope this works. I also suspect that the inaccuracies of estimation will completely make or break this concept. If they can't achieve their theoretical efficiencies, or have other losses they didn't account for, the economics will fall apart.

This is the fundamental problem with almost all "green" tech. The economics aren't there. The cost of fossil fuels ignores the cost of cleaning up. If there was serious money to be made in green tech, there would be serious investment. It feels like we're turning a corner in seed investment - but that's probably more because of hype rather than market fundamentals.

Is all the stuff that works no longer "green" tech or something?

Which stuff is that? Obviously there's been massive energy reductions across all sorts of industries - LED lights, hybrid cars, improved building standards - but they've clearly not solved the greenhouse gas problem. Solving that problem means making it more profitable to keep carbon in the ground than removing it.

Their pitch is that there will be so much cheap electrical power available (via cheap solar PV) that they'll be able to supply methane cheaper than fracking or any other fossil source.

Notably, given that assumption, any process that could be electrified, will already be electrified (because super cheap solar PV). And anything that can just use hydrogen will just use cheap hydrogen. So this methane won't be used for anything that could be done with cheap electricity or hydrogen.

So, you are correct, it's not worth doing this instead of rolling out more renewables, since this needs those renewables to both exist and be cheap, but they're planning for the world after the cheap renewables get rolled out, at which point they can provide cheap, carbon-neutral methane (and/or other hydrocarbons), for any use that isn't directly electrifiable (e.g. making plastic, space rocket fuel).

This only further increases demand for renewables, driving them further down the price curve.

From the atmosphere, sure. But, if they can succeed in building a viable conversion system, then hot exhaust from factories or other sources can be used instead of air.

It could be a closed source system too, for example, in industrial applications that need a lot of heat. An almost closed cycle system may be viable. I have no information about the speed of the reaction, but I guess systems can be scaled.

Also, a good amount of heat is produced in the sabatier reaction process itself, which can be used for other systems.

Conversion of atmospheric CO2 to usable fuel can become a cheap battery for solar plants.

Edit: Such a system already exists, even if as an idea.

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/24/exytron-the-...

The article is talking about atmospheric capture even if it doesn’t use those exact words.

Even with cheap Solar, many regions will still need Gas or similar fuel for electricity and heat generation in winter. If that gas can be transported and used with existing infrastructure, that'd be a huge bonus. So there's definitely a market, the question just is how to be cheaper than natural gas.

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