Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-...
I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into building materials.
The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward.
- Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years).
- Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite well in those markets.
- With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination port with a full tank and its goods delivered.
- With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for fuel.
CO2 -> fuel consumes energy (that is stored in the fuel). Fuel -> CO2 releases it.
I agree in all of the cases I mentioned there would always need to be some energy source.
- It's primarily a tech solution which allows for scale. If you build one Machine you can build a million. It won't actually require very much space, it need access to cheap energy and abilities to store/sequester the CO2 captured.
- Technology have the benefit that can be optimized and optimized and optimized to the point where the cost is not very high. The less tech the less changes for optimization
- There is a big risk many countries won't meet their responsibility. Getting wealthy democracies onboard is hard enough. We need a scalable way to solve this that doesn't require everyone to help because they prob won't after all
- Any negative emission solution that requires a large land-mass will create other problems (dealing with land-owners etc).
Cheap energy seems like the key ingredient. The compressor equipment to do the task seems within reach.
One could reverse the process and feed the air (de)compressor gas to make energy on low wind days. I'd be interested to know what the round trip efficiency could be. You could optionally use the compressed products as feed stock in some other industry. Perhaps use blocks of CO2 to make methane or a room temperature liquid gas.
A mass produced portable compressor unit could also be neat. Something for around the home. A 1kw to 3kw unit could be nice to make dry ice. You practically need to have AC if you want to work in Florida or other tropical climate. There is a big market for AC combined with solar in the U.S. since folks want AC and a good chunk probably also want to use solar. Given that you want cooling at night, a solar powered dry ice maker might be able to compete with solar + battery + AC. The panels can feed directly into the compressor to make the night's dry ice rather than storing the energy in a battery and running the compressor at night.
The bonus is that any efficiency gains in the dry ice maker could be applied to processes further down stream that make methane or heavier hydrocarbons. You get a solar cooling solution and something that could be helpful when bootstrapping synth gas production.
Here are some small high pressure projects / products:
Liquid nitrogen https://makezine.com/2010/06/07/diy-liquid-nitrogen-generato...
Shoebox compressor https://www.shoeboxcompressor.com/
Not sure how you'd separate the CO2 out of the liquid air though.
I wonder if they have considered using concentrated solar as the heat source instead? The temps are pretty high and obviously there is no carbon capture needed so it might be a cheaper way of doing it. Also you already build those plants out in the desert so you probably have a lot of cheap land available to put the units nearby.
Seriously?! If this is actually true, sign me up. I will absolutely pay a 25% fuel tax to make the world a better place and also not have to give oil companies more money
And for that reason I really have to assume that it's standard science reporting, and some wires have been crossed along the way.
They're already working on that too.
Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and terraform Mars.
Shipping petroleum from Earth's surface to Mars is almost certainly prohibitively expensive.
I'm only being half-facetious about shipping the stuff to Mars; eventually, we're going to want to terraform Mars, and creating a greenhouse effect is going to be part of that.
Or you could make lubricants, plastics, vaseline...
It isn't sufficient to punt the cost onto a small group with shared political bent (environmentalists). There simply aren't enough of them to bear the costs, and it creates perverse incentives for carbon consumption for everyone else.
Yes, I think environmentalists have been trying to encourage governments to pay for carbon sequestration etc for quite some time. Mandated emissions reductions and increased fuel efficiency, carbon offset taxes, and funding carbon sequestration (burying) are all sides of the same coin.
> You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation.
Potato, potato. It's still additional funding, and good luck getting a conservative-majority senate to pass funding for anything other than the military and social security.
Yes, there is some use for carbon products, assuming people dispose of them by recycling or burying rather than burning. But I don't think it comes close to the volume needed to really restore pre-20th century atmospheric carbon levels.
Air-To-fuel is not and will never be their moneymaker. The synthesized fuel is not in demand and probably was thought of by a board member who heard of the word "value add" for the first time.
The ONLY in-demand product of CCapture is the CO2 itself - whether it's the gov. who pays for it to be sequestered or an O&G company who pays for it to be used in enhanced recovery. Even the O&G demand is insignificant compared to the amount of money they'll get in sequestration contracts from the government, or by proxy, the FF producers who'll be required to implement them on site.
It's important to note CCS is required to meet emissions targets - so I hope CE doesn't get distracted with less important/profitable goals.
It's not carbon-neutral — just better than gasoline:
> Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said.
So where exactly is the energy coming from? I don't see any mention of renewable sources in that article. Is it somehow combining methane and CO2 to get larger hydrocarbons?