Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky is moving from science fiction to reality
npr.org
npr.org
The answer is that we need to store almost 40B tonnes of CO2, or around 10B tonnes of C if we break that down, every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year.
Unless and until emissions are reduced to a tiny minuscule fraction of current ones, carbon capture will not do even one iota to help with global warming.
He says the same thing, with receipts. All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime. They spend X million on "solving" carbon capture while spending 2*X million telling people how hard they're working on solving carbon capture.
This has been going on for decades with very very minimal progress.
But the fossil fuel companies like to tout how they will increase their carbon capture by 500% by 2030. They do not mention how that increase brings them from 0.01% of their total carbon output to 0.05% in 10 years.
The top comment makes effective carbon capture sound impossible, but to put it in perspective, the Interstate Highway System in the US alone used "enough [aggregates] to make 700 mounds the size of the largest Egyptian pyramids."[1]
If the numbers here are right, carbon capture would be (very) roughly 2x the size of the IHS, compressed into a single year, and repeated every year. An enormous project, but spread out across many willing nations, and perhaps helped by the fact that CO2 diffuses naturally through the atmosphere and doesn't have to be transported like sand and gravel.
Difficult but doable, if the political will existed.
1: https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/interstate-system/5...
That's a good point that is not mentioned enough in these discussions. Basically, we cannot stop other countries from releasing CO2, but we can "steal" their air.
Right after you just wrote off international cooperation to reduce emissions?
OTOH, reducing emissions demands cooperation from everyone.
And the US only accounts for about 15% of total emissions.
Well forcing ultimately ends in forcing violently, so this seems to be a bit tautological.
We (and other wealthy nations) can directly subsidize the replacement of carbon emitting processes to the extent possible with the agreement not to build more. This won't happen of course, but the idea that the only way forward is to force people is ridiculous.
Aren't most of them startups? The point of the article is that this is the first time an oil company is doing it (and they're doing it to inject into fields, not for climate reasons). If Gore is really claiming all carbon capture projects are by oil firms then surely he is lying.
You're probably confusing carbon capture in general (which already exists in some quantities, although still small to what would be meaningful) with DAC. For the latter, Climeworks is kinda the leader, which is an independent startup. But even there, there's also carbon engineering, which is funded and owned by oil corps. (You may still call that a startup in the sense that it's a relatively young company trying something new, but well...)
But for carbon capture in general, all the large players are fossil fuel corps. Equinor in Norway, Shell in Canada, etc., all big oil. The only meaningful player that is not fossil fuel associated is Carbfix in Iceland.
If so, it's the person who posted the Al Gore talk that's confusing it, not the responder who assumed the Gore talk was about DAC, the original post.
IOW, someone did a bait & switch and folks who keep trying to talk about DAC are "confused".
Obviously that means he has no chance in the US.
The Supreme Court decided that didn’t matter.
On the other hand, if you pay Climeworks then they will actually remove the CO2 from the air that you think they're removing, and bury it in deep basalt where it will turn into limestone. It will be quite expensive, and it's a woefully inadequate approach on its own, but it's real and measurable. For most corporations, it's worthless for greenwashing because it costs too much.
(An oil company using captured CO2 to pump more oil out of the ground probably still counts as greenwashing, though.)
I also consider woefully small and unscalable, even if real, contributions to represent greenwashing. For example, the plastic straws craze, that attacked a problem that barely even constitutes a fraction of a fraction of a percent of plastic pollution, was pure greenwashing. And by this definition, literally all carbon capture initiatives, even the most well intentioned, are just greenwashing.
It's expensive but it's scalable. There is a vast supply of suitable basalt formations. In terms of land area, it absorbs a thousand times as much CO2 as planting trees.
I have seen a lot of complaints about the sheer number of devices that would be required, but this is the sort of scale that civilization is accustomed to. We built enough hardware to put that CO2 in the air. We can build enough to take it out. The real question is whether it can be made cheap enough in mass production to make a difference. That will partly depend on clean energy costs, but they are dropping constantly.
It's certain that reducing emissions will be more cost-effective in most cases, but for some applications, like long-distance jet travel, we probably can't get away from hydrocarbon fuels for the foreseeable future.
CO2 + Basalt !== Limestone
Limestone is the fossilized remains of sea creatures.
Wikipedia says:
"Calcium released by basalts binds CO2 from the atmosphere forming CaCO3 acting thus as a CO2 trap."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt#Geochemistry
CaCO3 is indeed the principal component of limestone, but not all Calcium Carbonate is limestone. I have no idea whether the process of basalt binding CO2 is efficient; WP doesn't detail the process. Nor does TFA; and I'm not surprised, because Oxy's goals are completely orthogonal to the production of CaCO3.
The reality is just the opposite: the only option for stopping climate change is to reduce CO2 emissions completely. Now, if we were at a point where we're emitting some few tens of millions of tonnes instead of the 40B we emit today, maybe then carbon capture to help offset the last few trickles would make some sense - but not before then, not in any way shape or form.
If we assume a carbon capture cost of $600 per ton and storage costs of $400 per ton, then the total cost of getting rid of one ton is $1000 just to keep the math simple.
1 kWh of coal power emits 1kg of CO2. This means that your power bill wouldn't double or triple, it would quadruple even in countries like Germany where electricity prices are already high. Even if you believe in capture, you will have to quit coal and go with gas simply because that one only triples the price of electricity. You will also have to get the energy from somewhere. In fact, most of the cost of the carbon capture and storage will be in generating renewable energy to run the capture process to begin with. So what these people are implying isn't that we are going with renewables, no, the power generation of fossil fuels will be a tiny fraction of the total power generation.
This is false on two counts:
1. The already released CO2 is going to happily keep warming the world for the next century even if we stop now.
2.geoengineering via sunshades or particulates would reduce warming.
1. 'Warming' is better then 'incinerating'. Stopping now is better than stopping later.
2. What else would it do? I can't help but feel "pump even more shit into the atmosphere" isn't a wise solution for all the shit in our atmosphere.
For 2, those aren't real options, given the externalities.
Perhaps. But knowing what we know about this issue and:
- our elected officials
- Big Inc and Big Inc leadership
- The momentum from Cronie Capitalism
- The general public's inability to change habits
- Humans fondness for the status quo
- Etc etc etc
How realistic is reduction that extreme? And if we could wouldn't we be leaning in that direction already?
Note: I do agree with you in theory. I wish it were likely. But realistically I know it's not. Things are going to get worse - perhaps much worse - before they get better.
And again, carbon capture is simply not a viable technology. It's almost like using a shovel to take water from a leaking pipe and move it to a nearby puddle: lots of effort for little gain, and there's no guarantee that the puddle won't connect back to the leak.
Not to mention, most of those who peddle it are outright dishonest. Most have 0 plans for storage, and instead plan to "re-use the captured carbon", for example to grow plants mute efficiently in green houses, which is to say, to release it back at a slightly lower rate.
And finally, even if by some magic the effort was somewhat successful, and we built up huge deposits of sequestered carbon, the most likely next step is for some idiot politician to start advocating for burning it as soon as the trend became slightly positive.
> [Galactic Federation President blows his brains out]
If we could agree that carbon capture is a small part of the solution, direct air capture an even smaller part, and the primary goal needs to be phasing down fossil fuel production, that would be fine. But there is no such agreement, and many major players in both the CCS and DAC space explicitly advertise their tech as a replacement for fossil fuel phasedown, not as an addition.
Sadly, I think the situation won’t change until things get a lot worse than they are now. We’re too divided.
The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business. The goal with this is merely delaying that moment. The cynical bit is of course that they are using lots of government subsidies to pretend to capture tiny amounts of carbon. A significant portion of the IRA (1 trillion $) has been earmarked for, once more, fattening the pockets of oil and gas industry.
All the carbon capture in the world to date doesn't add up to anywhere close to more than absolutely irrelevant token amounts of carbon relative to the amount we're continuing to put into the atmosphere. This amount btw. continues to grow year on year. We've merely slowed the pace at which the increase is growing. That growth is showing signs of maybe starting to decrease very soon. We'll still be putting out a larger amount of carbon every year though. We're decades away from turning that growth into actually net removing carbon. And we'll need to keep that up for centuries before it turns around current trends in global warming.
But stopping the burning of oil and gas, which is now very doable, would be a nice start. That's billions of tonnes per year of co2 that we don't have to remove from the atmosphere. Orders of magnitude more than these companies will ever capture. The best way to capture carbon is to leave it in the ground and not burn it.
I'd appreciate an attempt to actually put some numbers on how much it would cost to pull in a billion billion litres of air, because on the face of it this sounds like it might only cost a trillion dollars in equipment, not counting the giant solar farm required to run it.
Many of the emission neutral DAC models I’ve looked at lose 10% — billions of tons — of their industrial chemistry inputs every year even assuming expansive recycling of the input components to the extent possible. The annual loss greatly exceeds current annual production for all purposes.
Better to resign ourselves to poverty and lower living standards than try to actually solve the problem quickly because it seems hard, right?
We've put too much emphasis on consumption of low-quality goods. We are drowning in shitty stuff.
Getting rid of shitty stuff isn't "lower living standard" or "poverty".
You're perhaps thinking of how long it took to build more modern mega-buildings like the Empire State Building or Burj Khalifa. But those are much lighter weight than the great pyramid (365k tonnes and 500k tonnes respectively, compared to the 6M tonnes of the great pyramid).
Building even one such pyramid per year would be a huge project for a wealthy industrial state. And there aren't 1500 wealthy industrial states in the world to help with the others.
This one machine in Germany is already making the equivalent of ~15 great pyramids per year, by tons of material moved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288
Carbon capture is difficult currently, but we'd have to problem dispensing with this amount of material per year on a global scale.
Think of the huge investment required to extract fossil fuels and process them into something useful. Now imagine something similarly huge in scale, but the output product, instead of being incredibly valuable, is actually useless.
There’s no free lunch here. You either pay the cost now or you pay it later. Florida is already paying since their homes are quickly becoming uninsurable, and that’s not going to get better.
Energy curtailment (overproduction) will likely be a common reality in some seasons by 2030 and definitely in the following decade.
Building plants that are the most efficient at using that otherwise wasted energy to 'fix' our past mistakes (plus desalination and other uses) are better than just wasting the energy completely.
Geoengineering seems quite possible on paper.
Reflect 10% of sunlight and you'll be experiencing an ice age.
https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021
IEA Key World Energy Statistics 2021, pg 54:
World CO2 emissions per year:
1973: 15 Gt of CO2
2019: 34 Gt of CO2
One hectare of bamboo captures approximately 50 tons of carbon per year. Seems like we need only 2M square kilometers of bamboo to offset all the carbon emission of humanity. It's a bit more than Alaska or less than a half of Sahara. It seems like a lot, but I think it is doable, given ease of bamboo planting.
Of course we need to gene engineer variety of plants to capture the carbon for different locations. I believe in fast-growing pine or maple for that matter.
Also, you're saying 50 tonnes per year, but bamboo doesn't live for a very long time, and after it dies, it will relatively quickly decompose and release everything it captured back. So, in reality, you'd have to plant the whole of the Sahara with bamboo and then harvest it every year (or, to be fair, maybe every couple of years), storing all of the bamboo somewhere where it can't decompose, forever.
So no, bamboo (nor any other plant) is not even close to a solution, not at the current rate of emissions.
For comparison world uses around 97 000 000 barrels of oil per day, or about 3.5 billion tonnes of oil per year.
Switching to synthetic oil (or any other hydrocarbon - I think methane is the easiest) would make a significant difference (and would make renewables much more viable, by solving the energy storage problem).
It's a completely insane amount of energy and effort, and every fossil fuel we burn makes it harder.
I think it's possible and worthwhile. It isn't really any more cartoonish than the wastefulness of our current material culture.
And we are reaching that point with carbon capture. It does not matter how hard it seems. It still has to be done. There are no other options left.
is 40B including the offset from photosynthesis?
Photosynthesis is cool but there are a lot of fires these days and also decomposition.
It's almost like the entire universe requires compromise and there are no perfect solutions.
But without those details your comment is just a poor quality and lazy attempt to disqualify people who are actually trying something.
The answer is that we need to produce almost 10B tonnes of CO2 every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year.
Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon (hand-waving at thermodynamics here)?
Also, don't all methods of carbon capture produce new emissions again because they need energy, resources etc?
I don't claim to be able to do the hard science here, but the comparison you make seems a lot more far-fetched to me than that of the original comment.
edit: sister comments already make the argument much more clear and I guess the self-doubt of people with responsible intention versus the chuzpe of climate denialists contributes even more to our dire outlook.
If you were being sarcastic: oh well, not helpful.
Quoting a sibling comment here:
> The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business
Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon
To burn coal, we have to dig it up from the ground. Is it possible that we one day find a way to "dig it up from the air" instead which is "less hard" than to dig it up from the ground?
Or that we find some other process which has seperating carbon and oxygen as a byproduct? Like some form of photosynthesis? Trees already do this.
The fastest bird can fly 200 mph.
Apollo 10 flew at 25k mph. A factor of over 100.
Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.
Surely there is a simm type game that can illustrate this super clearly?
37.12 billion metric tons of CO2 currently released per year
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi....
In other words, you have to generate energy to remove CO2 from the air.
Problem is, how do you generate that energy - on the civilizational scale required - in a way which produces less CO2 than you're removing from the air?
Right now we're already failing, globally, to replace dirty energy with clean. India IIRC has an aspirational goal to be off coal by 2070...!
How do we manage to produce a purely green civilizational-level energy supply, doing it all a second time over as well, and now or soon, to start producing the energy to remove CO2 from the air on a scale which will matter?
So you can put them in places where you have the potential for large amounts of cheap renewable energy that would otherwise be unused. Build solar plants in the middle of the desert, build tidal and wind generation on remote islands. There are plenty of places where green energy projects never got off the ground simply because the cost of transmitting it to places with energy demand was cost prohibitive.
The bigger problem is that simply removing CO2 from the atmosphere is not enough, you have to actually store it somewhere and be confident it will stay locked up for centuries, otherwise the effort is wasted.
I can't believe the cosmic irony that probably the biggest "success" of the environmental movement and arguably its motivating raison d'etre might be the one thing that would destroy the earth's environment. Imagine an alternate reality where nuclear uptake continued at rates of 50s/60s and where we'd be today.
Also, among "pro nuclear" advocates there is this tendency to blame the problem on "stupid people" (environmentalists, politicians, Chernobyl watchers, etc) but once you disregard that and let them build their project suddenly you get budget overruns, delayed schedules and failed projects and surprise cleanup costs from decommissioning.
There isn't a cosmic irony. People are against nuclear power because frankly: it sucks.
How the fk is that unique to nuclear powerplants? Also, did you take into account the same shit for coal plants as well, that are multiple orders more numerous?
Issues with commissioning/decommissioning nuclear plants are unique in the magnitudes of sunk costs, both time and money, as well as the somehow still astonishing to many delays and hidden costs that somehow always catch us off guard and somehow are unique to each site and were somehow completely unpredictable that nonetheless somehow happen in every instance.
Those idiots are NEVER disregarded, they've put in place a huge amount of extremely expensive regulation that makes nuclear 10x as expensive as it would be otherwise (compare 1980 nuclear power cost per KW to today), all to prevent the occasional Fukishima which kills one person and makes a couple of square miles uninhabitable (technically theres another 200 you evacuate from for a few weeks and then another 20 for a decade or so but a brief look at Fukishima radiation maps[1] shows nothing that would be over the cancer detection threshold[2]).
[1] examples: Hitler‘s halt before Dunkirk and his various other silly mistakes (resulting in them not being able to develop the bomb first), Vasili Arkhipov‘s abort to launch a nuclear torpedo during Cuban Crisis, Stanislav Petrov not reporting what their systems indicated to be a nuclear attack…
At the top of the list would be strategies that utilize biological processes as the capture component of CCS. Kelp and phytoplankton robotic oceanic aquaculture seem the most obvious. Going GMO to increase yield and reduce needs for micronutrients would probably be helpful. Terrestrial CCS would look like either chemical processes or DACCS. I think the Microsoft approach has legs to it if it can be demonstrated, Omniprocessor-style.
For soil health and to combat desertification, it would be wiser to stop rain forest loss and reintroduce megafauna across the world to improve non-wooden plains / semi-wooded land.
I'm not convinced by that logic, although as I've never yet died, maybe I could convince myself that I'm immortal by employing it.
Even a full nuclear exchange at the height of the cold war wouldn't have bumped off human civilization.
The answer is simple: trees, moors and other biological processes. That would also work out on scale, as it has before humans have ever entered the play.
A lot of the carbon that first goes into the trees eventually ends up in the soil, which if left undisturbed (i.e. not used for farming) is stable and does not leech significant amounts of CO2.
Admittedly the downside of this is that such soil is almost absurdly fertile. This is in large why slash-and-burns are so popular where ever there's old forest. Indonesia, Brazil, etc. Like it's not even about the lumber, the farmland is amazing for a decade or so.
Stable, as in the amount of carbon that is captured is offset by the amount that is released?
That sounds like after a short while forests become carbon neutral, unless we cut the trees down and do something to prevent the wood from burning or decomposing.
I think we are in agreement?
I'm confused, where is this CO2 going? Once the forest reaches its maximum average tree size doesn't it stop carbon capturing and just occupies space?
It's not clear to me if direct carbon capture needs to be distributed.
We’re still burning record amounts of coal for energy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/09/04/global-coal-...
Will these processes need to wait until we can get the proper amount of renewable energy?
The results I got where that if we built a very large solar farm (500 000 km^2) operating at the efficiency of current commercial solar farms and used all its output to power DAC CO2 removal, that would be enough to remove about half as much CO2 as we currently emit each year. In effect it would be as if we had cut emissions back to 1970 levels.
Note that since the solar farm would just be used to power DAC, it would not need electrical infrastructure outside the farm itself. We just need a place where we can put in 500 000 km^2 of solar panels and a bunch of DAC facilities.
The atmosphere does a good job of distributing CO2 so the solar/DAC facility doesn't need to be near any heavy CO2 emitters either.
BTW, the output of a 500 000 km^2 solar farm per year is about equal to the total yearly energy use of humanity, which shows just how insane the amount of solar energy available is. Let's call this one Human Energy Unit (HEU).
Build two HEU's worth of solar/DAC and we are effectively carbon neutral.
Of course you wouldn't have to build these as 500 000 km^2 facilities. 500 facilities of 1000 km^2 would do, or any other combination that gives us 1 HEU total of energy that is all used for DAC.
How far could we take this?
The 5 largest subtropical deserts in the world have enough room to hold 30 HEUs worth of solar farms.
If we built all those and turned them all on at once it would take one year to remove enough CO2 to get us down to 320 ppm, which is around the levels we had in 1960. Two years would take us back to levels last seen around 1800. 6 years would get us down to pre-industrial levels.
That was all using technology that we have today. It would be a huge project, but it does not require any new science or new engineering. Just a lot of money, politics, manufacturing, and construction.
Funny enough, this was done in the SF novel “The Hail Mary Project”, and derided by the scientists in the book for furthering climate problems dramatically by turning a normally heat reflective surface into a heat absorbent surface.
Worth investigating before committing our deserts to power collection.
For reference, cities currently cover 3 500 000 km^2 of the earth. Also, solar density is still improving, and other sources of energy exist.
We are currently emitting ~37B tons of CO2 per year. That's ~0.375 C, so assuming we only store the carbon, that's ~10B tons of C per year.
For reference, the Empire State Building is ~365K tons - so you'd need to build ~30 thousand empire state buildings per year with the captured carbon.
And discovering this factoid didn't lead you to realize how insane the whole idea is?
> Just a lot of money, politics, manufacturing, and construction.
Oh yes. Surely just a matter of that. I understand you're more interested in getting ballpark numbers than actually solving this problem though, so thanks for sharing.
A single 708 km x 708 km would have these corners (Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Milan):https://goo.gl/maps/DTxdVCcK3aYUEirw8 (Rough approximation!)
30 of these: 21,240 km x 21,240 km
I thought, of course, of the always attractive "breakthrough" possibility, but ... in particular, fusion isn't it.* So, deployment of renewables is the obvious solution ... and, solar, in particular, has made massive strides in the past decade+.
What you're talking about is actually much more attractive, though. Sounds like a potentially great implementation / execution. And, all of this - much more rapid deployment for (electric) power generation, or, even better, as you propose, I think - seems like exactly the context in which a new "TVA" (Tennessee Valley Authority) or similar (maybe even "Apollo Project") would be the way to actually get it done with the urgency that seems warranted.
Of course, the US coffers have been so raided, it may take the kinds of "national pain" experienced around a century ago to generate the political "housecleaning" required to, well really, "right the "USS USA". As usual, it's not clear the will is there in the electorate. But, I'd say this much for sure: as old as I am now, the behavior of people older than me has disgusted me in many ways for years, and anyone younger than me should be thoroughly pissed off, I think. I don't want to veer into more of a rant - suffice it to say ... if you look at the benefits a certain generation enjoyed, then consider their voting for policies / tax breaks likely to deny such benefits to future generations (already happening, of course - take a look at college tuitions in the US, for just one example), it's a travesty.
In any case, I think another commenter raised a good point regarding the materials requirement. I'd imagine that would be "paid back" many times over very easily by the scheme overall, but don't know for sure ... I know there have been issues with having enough of the right type of sand to make high (enough) purity silicon wafers for chip manufacture ... but, my knowledge is very limited in these areas in general. If anyone has a real handle on what the materials side of this type of scheme looks like, I'd be interested...
* It was always such an attractive idea ... sounds so perfect ... until you know about neutron generation / flux and realize that something like a "tokamok", in particular, is just not likely to be economical AT ALL (the problem being that without some method to contain neutrons or method for preventing generation, you bombard your materials and end up having to replace / "decontaminate" / etc. far too quickly ... at least, based on my sense of best methods available around 10 years ago ... last time I was involved in any work even marginally related to anything in that field). In any case, even if we have or can determine ways of further reducing neutron generation or ... doing something w/ Higgs or something to deal better w/ the neutron problem, seems like it'd take more like a "miracle" than a breakthrough at this point for it to have any bearing on the climate problem on the timescale relevant.
Edit: realized couple oversights / clarifications (not that it's likely to matter, but, prefer to put in anyway): I have nothing against fission apart from its merits. It's been expensive and track record hasn't been good - plus waste, proliferation, etc. concerns. Practically, it's the cost issue (generally related to the other issues I mentioned, of course). I keep waiting for the advanced / modular / "standard design" reactors we've been promised for years... the track record vis-a-vis AP-1000 (already rather old, but, at least deploying) is not confidence inspiring.
Regarding "certain generation", I've known too many from that generation who sat in taxpayer funded jobs essentially not fulfilling THEIR responsibilities as they RAILED against taxes and the POOR. I have a dim view based on personal experience - too many I knew were spoiled and hypocritical to an unbelievable degree. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty who were decent etc. So, obviously, I don't mean to blanket condemn any generation ... usual qualifications etc. apply.
The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration. This is why people are so angry at NEM 3.0, it's cutting the excess energy production we need as a prerequisite for saving the environment off at the knees.
Compressed CO2 is still a lower energy state than the hydrocarbons, so you can get net energy out.
You couldn't end up with the same hydrocarbon that you started with, of course - that would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Or you build solar and wind plants specifically for carbon sequestration. Then you don't have to worry about coordinating with the needs of the grid. You don't even need the plants to be on the grid. That frees you up to put them places where there is plenty of wind or solar but no infrastructure transporting electricity which would otherwise by useless for solar and wind currently.
China will likely become carbon neutral before the US, current coal plants notwithstanding.
The first is that it could use intermittent renewable energy. Solar PV during the day is already cheaper than coal. Just run CO2 removal when renewables generate surplus.
The second is that coal plants are heat engines. Most of the energy released burning coal is rejected as heat. CO2 removal might in theory be made more efficient than this. So it might not be quite as bad as it appears at first glance.
That being said I still doubt this technology could make a dent in the problem without massively cheap energy. It would require either solar panels that are as cheap as vinyl siding or something like practical high yield fusion.
I haven't seen anyone address how we will pay for carbon capture. By the time we start doing real capture, the CO2 produced should be low so carbon tax will be low.
There are two problems, only one of which is discussed here.
We need to remove the last century's emissions, and yes, that can be, and initially will be an excuse to pollute further. I see that as a transient problem: eventually we will start to structure things against it by internalizing other externalities (e.g. other pollution) and expanding the emissions scope (not just oil). It's reality that we can't decarbonize overnight (we could't replace all the passenger cars by Monday, and how many peoples' pensions depend on oil stocks?), so funding cleanup technology on the backs of oil pollution helps get it going.
The second, bigger problem is that the thermodynamics of these plants that suck the atmosphere through a straw is absurd, a trivial calculation that is obvious upon reflection. The atmosphere is f'ing huge, and you need to attack the problem at scale, which means, like it or not, physical chemistry and biology powered by sunlight.
I think weathering rocks may be the better option. It doesn't require any new technology. It would be similar to mining but with steps to crush the rock and either spread it or dump in ocean. We could use electrified version of existing equipment.
It's a great thing that people started working on wind and solar power a few decades ago!
This paper https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-... two years ago said that it would need solar plants worth less than the COVID stimulus bill, and it would produce H2, soft water and limestone, all of which can be sold and can displace fossil sources.
Terraform is starting out making methane (natural gas) but will move on to kerosene
https://terraformindustries.com/
You could also ban flight but this seems more practical
The whole thing is green washing theater. It doesn't even address how the "sucking CO2 from the air" is going to be ecologically viable, just a hand-waivy "Think giant fans. Chemical reactions suck the carbon out of the sky and then store it underground." lol
Please go google climate town talking about clean coal. Carbon capture is a scam.
I think what you're responding strongly to is capturing emissions from point sources where fossil fuels are being burned. I don't think that's a scam either - I'd characterize it as an unfortunate necessity due to path dependency - but it's a very different thing than direct air capture.
I do
> Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam.
Yes, folks do. points up
Two more examples in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452537
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452761
As a general rule, "nobody thinks that" or "nobody is saying that" are false -- there are always folks who do, sometimes very vocally. We must stop pretending extremists aren't out there.
But there is an actual and notable difference of opinion between point-source carbon capture and direct air capture among people who work in the space.
Are you saying all of these people are scammers? Are you saying that they aren’t smart for working on it because the idea itself is a scam?
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry were 37.12 billion metric tons (GtCO₂) in 2021
So we'd only need about 38,000 of these plants to remove the carbon we release into the atmosphere every year.
Then there's also the over 2 trillion tons of CO2 we've already released that's currently overheating the planet.
They’re displacing liquid oil with an equal volume of compressed CO2 gas, so I’m guessing they are emitting way more carbon than they are capturing.
Their solution doesn't solve the problem, but it's a step on the path towards a solution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37155241
The primary assumption is that solar energy is going to be almost free within a decade because we will massively overprovision it to balance yearly variation.
Then you need to find a cheap industrial process which uses electricty to do something which has a positive climate impact.
We used to call this swamps back when we thought wetlands were useless and were busily filling them in to create "productive" land, like farmland, thereby losing 85 percent of our global wetlands since the 1700s.
I would like to see a wetlands version of Temple Grandin's guidelines for the beef industry that got widely adopted because McDonald's de facto enforced it. They give you a list of goals or standards and don't micromanage how to achieve it.
https://www.grandin.com/RecAnimalHandlingGuidelines.html#:~:....
Excellence requires some flexibility. Top-down dictates tend to set a minimum standard but frequently also de facto undermine the ability to hit a higher bar.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mCnr0HwW28w
Not everyone likes his delivery, but he’s right more often than not.
You start with a strawman: "people dislike him because of his delivery instead of his message". This way you immediately dismiss critics of him as "focussing on the tone instead of the content".
But if that didn't convince the reader, you immediately follow up with an argument against people who dislike the content, by saying that flaws in content also don't really matter as long as he's more than 50% right.
That means you cannot plant yourself out of climate change in any reasonable time frame.
After trying to reduce our emissions as much as possible, what kind of "best" choice to we have next?
Well charcoal is THE "captured carbon" which you wanted to get.
Rather than looking at this as if we are separate from the ecosystem we live in, and try to sequester carbon, I think the better approach is to develop deeper relationships with local ecosystem.
The problem isn’t carbon. The problem is that the carbon is not moving through the ecosystem. Probably one of the more practical things is to separate the local hydrological cycle from the local carbon cycle — that is, plant more stuff; feed onsite composting to the plants; make greater use of greywater, even blackwater; design dwellings and sites with sun and shade and more passive heating and cooling in mind.
On the trajectory we're currently on, a significant fraction of all species on earth could go extinct. There will be life, yes, but significantly less diverse life.
If we want to have better genetic diversity, it’s not going to come from reducing carbon emissions. It will be things like planting wildlife refuges in your front yard, at least poly-cropping not mono-cropping, letting landraces develop for local conditions instead of insisting on standardized produces. It’s participating within the ecology and not trying to take the entire yield and maximizing usefulness to humans. Reducing carbon emissions will not, by itself, get us there.
Soil is alive, dirt is dead. Healthy soils helps with water retention, and changes the local microclimates. So does designing canopy layers — agroforestry and perennial food forests.
Industrial scale monocropping is not adaptive, and kills off soil. It is fragile, and contributes little to regulating temperatures in the local microclimates.
There are solutions beyond simply looking at carbon emissions or industrial scale carbon sequestering.
What would you do with the CO2? Even if home CO2 capture was practical, sequestering CO2 gas is really hard.
A lot of the best chemicals for capturing carbon are very corrosive and dangerous to work with.
Your best bet would probably be making charcoal and burying it.
Shouldn't we use something plant based that is able to grow exponentially?
A.k.a. plants?
It might also be greenwashing if presented as a solution in it self, but as a supplement in the transition it might make sense.
Yeah they might help, but let's ask more why questions and then solve that.
Trees can live for hundreds of years. Guess what happens when there are more live trees.
> Unless we chop it down and store it (and plant a new tree!), the tree doesn't remove much carbon from the atmosphere (long term, on average).
But you in fact can do this. Or chop it down and make furniture or buildings out of it, which themselves can last for hundreds of years.
And even if you don't know some cost effective way to keep the dead trees from decomposing, that process itself takes decades after the tree has already grown and died, which at minimum buys us a decent amount of time to figure something out.
So to run a DAC plant from a grid that has a decent proportion of electricity generation from fossil fuels, you are making it worse overall (producing more carbon to power the plant than it is removing), and conversely, if you are running a DAC plant from 100% clean energy, you'd get better bang for your buck if you used that clean energy to displace fossil fuel use (because every kilowatt hour of fossil fuel energy you can replace with clean energy prevents a larger amount of carbon being emitted than the DAC plant could remove with the same amount of energy).
From a thermodynamic point of view would only make sense to run a DAC plant somewhere that already had a 100% clean grid, and only when it happened to be producing a surplus of clean energy.
Any coal plant - carbon capture plant combination that captures more than it emits would easily be a perpetuum mobile.