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Comment by jakeinspace | Hacker News Reader

In terms of mass, that’s not a crazy number. It’s probably unrealistic chemically, but 1500 Gizas/year is not an image that would scare me off.

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Air is only about 0.04% CO2. A kg of air is about 820 liters. To get 1kg of CO2 out of that, you need to process about 2M liters of air. Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2. Assuming you can extract all of it of course.

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 found these numbers extremely helpful, but because I'm scientifically illiterate, I still don't really know how much 2bn liters of air is. I mean, for a comparison on roughly the same scale, how much air blows through a wind farm each day?

The point is that the mass of the air has to be moved through the system somehow - the energy required to pump it through would offset any capture

Your claim doesn't appear to be correct.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

Fan energy for this scheme is estimated as 61 kWh per tonne of CO2.

While I'm not saying this whitepaper is wrong, keep in mind that this is done by Carbon Engineering who receive funding from people and organizations like N. Murray Edwards[1], Chevron Corporation, Occidental Petroleum and BHP[2] which either have hands deep in the oil or mining market, among other things. There is financial incentive to provide results that are in-line with what your funders want, and it's nothing new that this kind of thing has been, and still is being done. It's just hard to prove often.

So as with all science, consult multiple whitepapers, including ones that don't have direct or borderline not indirect funding from those who have financial incentive to get a result that increases revenue or similar, to get a clearer idea of the probability that the topic isn't incorrect or what have you.

As an aside, whether it's right or wrong (since it's a heated topic), I feel these videos demonstrate at least the possibility of companies playing with these kinds of things. They're amusing to watch, if nothing else, in my opinion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM and https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw

[1] https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/out-of-thin-air/

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-bcs-carbon-...

You could have given a technical rebuttal, but all you had was disparagement of motives.

While you're correct that whitepapers can mislead, you really should provide an alternative reputable source or give potential methodological critiques rather than mere motive disparagement.

Especially when the original claim, "the energy required to pump it through would offset any capture" is not just wrong, but wrong by a factor of 50 for electricity production from natural gas.

> Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2.

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.

Sequestering billions of tons of carbon every year requires billions of tons of chemical feedstock that we normally produce in the thousands of tons. That industrial capacity would have to be created. Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials.

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.

Not to mention the energy costs of all of that industrial activity!

People talk about climate change as causing a 1m rise in sea levels. Averting that kind of economic and population dislocation makes the kind of energy costs being discussed seem like pissing into the ocean.

1m rise is tiny cost wise compared tk the global economy, just look at the Netherlands, who have calculated[1] they'd need to spend under 0.1% of their GDP to get new barriers and flood control in place to counteract 1m sea level rise.

The effects on agriculture are far more severe than sea level rise.

[1] http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies

Right but you when you can put all the industry and money into not producing that much CO2 in the first place I'd wager that's far more effective way to having less CO2 in atmosphere than trying to capture it post-factum.

Or just slapping the same CO2 sequestering method at the end of industrial chain that creates CO2 rather than trying to catch it later.

> Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials.

Better to resign ourselves to poverty and lower living standards than try to actually solve the problem quickly because it seems hard, right?

Some problems don't just "seem" hard, they are hard, and there simply is no quick solution, and no amount of wishing for it and pretending there is, nor even ingenuity and venture capital, can make a feasible solution manifest.

We won't know until we try.

Cheap reusable rockets seemed hard until SpaceX came along and made them routine.

SpaceX had a huge and long runway, took over from ex-NASA guys who worked on the Shuttle. Thrust vectoring and other key technologies already had been developed in similar companies. John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace worked in the space.

Carbon capture is not exactly picking up where the Shuttle left off.

The most interesting part of carbon capture is the offshoot technologies.

Except there was plenty of trying and a whole lot of nothing.

You don't need to live in poverty to live in a carbon-neutral world. The vast majority of the problem could be tackled by some reduction in the massive over-consumption and over-production of goods currently happening all over the world.

Could it really? The biggest CO2 producer in the world is China (who emits more CO2 than the USA, EU and India combined), a big chunk of that on building buildings, are they massively overconsuming?

I don't see how modern productive agriculture (without which the supportable world population without completely destroying the remaining natural areas of the world goes down to 2-3 billion) would work in a carbon neutral world without using giant solar or wind farms to essentially produce artificial fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2... which sounds like carbon capture tbh.

China is producing the majority of junk the rest of the world consumes. Also, while of course, China needs to be a partner in reducing emissions, but it's also important to remember that they are emitting less per capita then many EU nations, not to mention than the USA.

The ideal here would be for the world's richest countries, whose wealth has been built off of emitting the majority of the CO2 already in the atmosphere, to fund massive green energy projects in countries like China and India. There's no reason why China should be building new coal plants to bring electricity to their population while the already electrified EU and USA twiddle their thumbs and import another hundred million tonnes of plastic doodads.

>modern productive agriculture

Industrial Agriculture is responsible for effectively burning off most of the carbon captured in the soil.

Using no-till, regenerative techniques can capture carbon back into the soil, improve water retention, reduce soil temperatures, reduce the need for chemical feedstocks (fertilizer, herbicides, etc.), and simultaneously produce livestock (and their feed), all while producing comparable amounts of crop.

The only increased input required is active local management, which requires downscaling production, but as an upside allows diversifying the nature of crops produced.

All that consumption drives GDP though. As long as we continue to worship that (both economically and politically), we are unlikely to voluntarily consume less at the national level.

Does your kid you really need that $5 throwaway toy that breaks within 20 minutes of playtime? Do you really need 20 low-quality shirts a year that rip with the third usage because the fabric is so flimsy?

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".

How much CO2 is actually needed to make that toy or T-Shirt though? I expect uts pretty minimal.

It's not. [0] Especially if you consider a) the sheer amount of pieces of clothing produced and b) the expected use one gets from one such T-Shirts (see [1]).

These are examples of systemic waste product that are only useful for consumerism churn. Besides T-Shirts and plastic waste, there are tons of products that are produces with the least concern for long-term usage. Because it not "economic" - only because we allow to externalize all the associated costs.

[0] https://goodfair.com/blogs/nonewthings/did-you-know-that-one...

[1] https://earth.org/statistics-about-fast-fashion-waste/

While I appreciate you providing citations, please link to the original sources in the future.

In the case the original source of the first link is page 10 of this: https://ctprodstorageaccountp.blob.core.windows.net/prod-dru...

The first link has been victim of a game of telephone, where the original source had 15kg per T-Shirt, more than half of that was washing costs, assuming 50 hot washes (and this from over 15 years ago when washing machines were less efficient and electricity much less green). 6kg from T-shirt production being their actual estimate.

Is 6kg "a lot"? Depends what you're comparing it to. Worldwide clothing industry in general seems to be around 1% of total CO2 according to the above link.

I would love it if we had a sensible estimate for what the sum of CO2 externalities is, but my understanding is estimates can differ by over two orders of magnitude.

I wouldn't get hung up on individual products. This - gratuitous consumption of throw-away products - is an societal issue that needs to be addressed in a systemic way.

Imagine how long it actually takes to build one structure like that, even with modern techniques.

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.

I would suggest we bury the carbon instead of building pyramids from it. That seems a lot simpler.

Sure (and that is crucial for various reasons, mostly related to fire hazards). But for the same reasons building roads is cheaper than building tunnels, burying carbon is harder than stockpiling it on the ground. At a minimum, you have to move a similar volume of soil to the carbon you're going to bury, and then move some of it back. And of course, a volume of soil equal to a certain volume of carbon is almost certainly heavier, since carbon isn't all that dense.

So yes, building 1500 great pyramids of Giza is actually a low ball estimate. The right image is burying 1500 great pyramids of Giza - which is much harder and more expensive.

Luckily we have technology like Bagger 288[1] to help us with that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow&pp=ygUKYmFnZ2VyI...

...which runs on fossil fuels, probably generating about as much carbon as it can help bury.

Nope, it's entirely electrically powered, so can be run without generating carbon emissions.

Which brings us to our original point, it is better if you are sincere to spend this money on electricity generation.

In the US, we have over 20% of electricity coming from coal. Any money spent on anything else should first go toward pushing this down to zero.

I don’t think people suggest that carbon sequestration is an alternative to reducing emissions. It’s just that we have already emitted too much for net zero to be enough. We need to unburn a lot of coal to keep the planet comfortable.

Read this thread again. Plenty of people are suggesting it exactly for that purpose. Why do you think the biggest proponents and investors by far in the area are fossil fuel companies?

The intended message, just like for geongnineering, is "keep burning oil, we'll figure it out another way".

Still not much compared to the world industrial capacity. S Bagger 288 costs $100 million and can excavate 10 great pyramids a year.

Excavation capacity is not the bottleneck here.

Burying carbon is a great idea. Similar to the great idea of preventing cells from reproducing without limit (cancer). The important question is, in both cases: how do you do it? With carbon there is an additional question: what is the demand? This is the interface with neoliberal capitalism: what is the demand? For cancer drugs, it's obvious. For carbon sequestration, it's less obvious. Currently we require individual consumers to prefer carboon negative products. But that's clearly not sustainable. Assuming we have a technical solution, what then is the political solution?

Instead of burying carbon, why not just not dig it up in the first place?

Prohibiting fossil fuels seems like a much simper way than trying to somehow let the market regulate that.

You need to prohibit them worldwide, which requires plenty of coercion of other countries.

While carbon capture can be unilateral.

> You need to prohibit them worldwide, which requires plenty of coercion of other countries.

That's easy for economic blocks like the US and the EU. There's plenty of other regulations they have coerced other nations to follow.

> Imagine how long it actually takes to build one structure like that [...] 6M tonnes of the great pyramid.

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.

Your example runs through densely packed coal. No one would be insane enough to dig through random dirt with it in order to dig up 0.01% coal.

But the point of the machine was to move the carbon after it's been produced.

I agree there's a separate question, how much air do we need to suck through carbon extraction machines.

For context, we produce about 2000 great pyramids worth of concrete every year.

What about economically?

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.

Captured carbon isn’t worthless. It represents an amount of damage that wasn’t done to the environment in the future.

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.

Lots of carbon have already been captured, in the form of the fossil fuels that remain underground. What we need to do is to stop releasing it into our atmosphere. Once that is largely done, we can start talking about the much more costly process of recapturing it from the atmosphere.

Sure, carbon capture has a benefit to society. Society doesn't want to pay the bill though, which could be something like $90,000 per American.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I would rather pay that bill by fking not producing orders of magnitude more CO2 in the meanwhile.

Let's see if the private sector agre- oops, they just lobbed a brick through our window with an invoice for $24,300,000,000,000 dollars.

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