Hacker News Reader

Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

Those CO2 scrubbers on the car don’t move the needle in an appreciable way. It would be cheaper and better to plant a single tree.

To really move the needle in terms of carbon capture, it needs to be at scale, with a plan to do something with the carbon. It needs to be positive return on investment.

Something like scrubbing the CO2 from a steel plant and reusing the carbon in the furnace. (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/02/15/...). The reason this could succeed is that it makes steel cheaper to make because you don’t need to buy coal anymore. The environment benefits because fewer fossil fuels are burned but that’s not the driving factor for potential widespread adoption. Economics is.

View on HN

> This Zem car has a pair of carbon filters in the front grille that contributes to cleaning the atmosphere by removing about 4.5lb of Carbon-dioxide per 20,000 miles.

Using the US fleet average (26.4 mpg), an average car produces 4.5 lbs CO2 every 6 miles. These filters can absorb .03% of the CO2 emissions of a combustion car.

Many more pounds of CO2 yielded in the production of the device.

Greenwashing is going to end up doing more harm in the long run. Instead of coming up with real solutions, we’re burning even more fuel to pretend to reclaim a fraction of a percent of the production costs.

I wish we had better solutions but I don't see greenwashing as being more harm than good, if we're just talking about replacing ICE vehicles with EVs and such. Some people will think they're doing a good thing for the environment, when in reality it's merely just less bad than their previous means. But I don't get what alternative there is that's actually feasible and still keeps us on a greener trajectory. Make it illegal to promote anything as environmentally friendly unless it's near perfectly environmentally friendly in every aspect?

Nobody is going to market this as a serious proposal. This is an art project.

How are you calculating 4.5 lbs / 6 miles?

I think it's closer to 0.15 pound / mile, or 0.85 pound / 6 miles if you like.

Source: http://co2cars.apps.eea.europa.eu

US cars are bigger. EPA 404g CO2/mile

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

I also didn't realize I was looking at the numbers for a hybrid

I'll have 10!

7! is sufficient to offset a single ICE car; no need to go all the way to 10!.

The aero penalty, weight penalty, and production energy penalty likely outputs an order of magnitude more co2 every 20k miles than they scrub.

Unquestionably correct, at least in the US.

In the US, .855 lbs of CO2 are produced per kWh (in 2021). If that moves the car 5 miles (same as a Model 3), the car gets 26.3 miles per 4.5 lbs CO2. Since the car absorbs 4.5 lbs per 20k miles, it absorbs .132% as much CO2 as was produced by driving it.

If the filters increase the weight (and drag) of the car by .132%, then the extra consumption will cancel out the absorbed CO2. What's .132% of, say, 3500 lbs?

4.6 lbs. If the filters weigh more than 2.3 lbs, the weight of the captured CO2 will cause more CO2 to be emitted than is captured.

This is a student project, the whole car is made from recycled plastic and cooking oil and whatnot. It's not really supposed to save our standard of living by itself.

Otherwise I fully agree, CO2 scrubbing makes the most sense at the point of large scale emissions. Government taxes on emissions are also required so people start doing this before they all find a way to make economic use of the carbon.

Someone explain why we can't capture CO2 into wood and cardboard and paper products.

You can, until they break down or burn. So you’d have to bury them deep underground to keep the carbon trapped. But it would make way more sense to stop digging up the carbon already trapped underground than to be digging it up and burying it at the same time

Seems like building buildings out of the wood would work right? Most of those aren’t going to be burned down.

Also, if we want to reverse global warming carbon sequestration is non-negotiable. We can’t just stop digging up coal and oil cold turkey, and the earth has already warmed enough (and will continue to warm to about 2C) that we will need to go carbon negative, not just neutral.

Exactly! Here are my calculations:

TLDR; We need 2,318 ZEM cars to remove same amount of CO2 as one diesel car produces per year.

- Average diesel car makes 144g CO2 per 1 kilometer (0.62 miles).

- Zem car removes 2,000g of CO2 per 32,200 kilometers or 0.062g of CO2 per kilometer.

- Zem car needs to drive 2,318 km to remove 144g of CO2 that Diesel car produce on 1 kilometer.

- Average person drives around 21,726km per year and produce around 3,128,564g of CO2 (if Diesel).

- If Zem car would theoretically drive the same 21,726km per year, it would remove 1,349g / year.

- That means that we need 2,318 ZEM cars to remove same amount of CO2 as one diesel car produces.

- Makes sense to produce it, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com