P.S. The first Google result for carbon recapture is titled "“Direct air capture” of carbon dioxide won't solve climate change"
P.P.S From Wikipedia with a cited source:
capturing and compressing CO2 and other system costs are estimated to increase the cost per watt-hour energy produced by 21–91% for fossil fuel power plants;
That is false! Most of the skepticism about CO2 removal from the air is focused on the difficulty of said removal, compared with the relative ease of removing CO2 from eg power plant exhaust.
You mean something like DME synthesis from CO2 and H2? Isn't atmospheric CO2 capture sort of expensive at 400 ppm? Obe would obtain one kilogram of CO2 from 2500 kgs of air.
Turning atmospheric carbon to building materials is already being done with plant based fiber mixtures such as hempcrete or fiber cement.
I am less concerned about economic efficiency and more about environmental efficiency. The process to set up carbon sequestration facilities will itself produce CO2. If you produce a paltry amount of gasoline because all your energy is going towards that conversion, it might take you years or decades to actually reduce atmospheric CO2.
Even more important is the fact that the gas you produce and sell will go right back into the air as CO2, further reducing your net impact. You would basically need to produce gasoline faster than people can use it. Do you think a private company can do this process and outpace the consumption of Asia and Africa? It’s a catch 22: either your process is so inefficient that you pollute more than you clean up, or it’s efficient enough that you just drop the prices of gasoline, putting CO2 right back into the air. Their option is that you produce so much gasoline that you cannot sell it fast enough. Ironically that will tank your profits.
I think doing something other than gasoline is the answer. Make fertilizer: it will help grow the ecosystem while not immediately winding up as CO2.
We're a long way away from consuming so much energy we thermodynamically scorch the Earth, right?
It seems like they want to know if you can be mostly carbon neutral and generate existing fuels.
If that's the case, then if you have access to a cheap form of renewable energy -- huge amounts of geothermal, tidal, or solar -- you could generate a ton of something-like-gasoline, reduce carbon, and come out nearly neutral when re-burning it.
Theoretically, you can profit if the renewable source of energy is cheaper than the cost of generating and distributing the fuels.
I'm skeptical this is possible. But if it is, I'm optimistic it will actually happen.
Unless your ultimate goal is not just to use energy efficiently, but to recapture carbon dioxide.
And even the U.S. and EU going to 0 carbon emissions wouldn't offset the growth in India, China, and Africa. And those places are a long ways away from electric cars and solar power plants. (Also, where would you put them in say India or Bangladesh?) Carbon recapture can do a very important thing renweables cannot--allow the developed world to suck out the developing world's CO2.
The current cost of carbon capture is about $120 per ton. If it follows the same trend as improvements on solar panel cost, that could be $40 per ton in a decade. At that price it would cost $300 billion annually to remove the extra carbon India will be adding to the atmosphere by then. That will be just 5% of India’s GDP by then.
Huh? What does that mean? You mean there is so space in India or Bangladesh to put solar power plants?
So address each one in turn, or in parallel. You give no reason not to.
Meaning if a proposed solution is partial then we shouldn't do anything. It flies in the face of the reality that most solutions to complex problems involve chipping away at them.
Currently there is a host of technologies which emit to much CO2. Personal transportation is just one of them.
This sounds reasonable to me. Do you believe this will be the way forward most likely?
I don't know where you got this from (citation?), but I am sure this is not the cost of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere via "technology" (trees - arguably yes).
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/06/calgary-company-can-ca...
My comments are as follows:
1. Obviously, this is not the current cost, but an estimate for a hypothetical future plant.
2. You can get wildly differing estimates through a series of small discrepancies in the assumptions. Comparing the provided estimate (Table 2 in above link) to the estimates for other CO2 capture projects the following things stand out immediately: a) 7.5% CRF calculation should be ignored as unrealistic, 12.5% CRF is okay; b) O&M costs are low, for complex plant with caustic chemicals and high temperatures a fair assumption may be 6% of CAPEX per year rather than approx 3% c) 20% contingencies at the conceptual stage are too low, 40% would be perhaps defensible. Also, I don't see a basis for including Row D in the table, the commercial assumption is not justified.
Considering the above, if all goes well, plant number 100 might be able to capture CO2 for $200-300/tonne, better than the current claimed $600/tonne for a plant actually in operation, but nowhere near as good as other options.
Is the first statement just about transport?
A rapid transition would be hellishly expensive, but new installations can certainly be looking at heat pumps.
I wonder if there is a way to structure penalties/incentives so that home builders and landlords end up installing systems with lower lifetime costs (and lower environmental impact), rather than whatever is cheapest upfront.
On the contrary, China is going crazy for electric cars. And the U.S. and EU are starting to turn as well. I wonder where you are getting your ideas.
Again, we need to cut 19 gigatons in the next decade. If “going crazy for electric cars” means that 80% of new cars—forget existing cars, and new trucks, etc.—will still be ICE half a decade from now, emissions reduction is not going to work.
What would that look like? Pipes on top of smoke stacks in China? Big mesh blanket clouds in the sky?
There is a lot of work. I'm not an expert, but it seems like our early attempts are orders of magnitude off in terms of efficiency, but there have been some breakthroughs using nano-tech to create custom structures that are much more efficient, but i'm sure it needs a lot more research and money to become commercially viable.
Because that's essentially what these initiatives are doing. They're seeking to artificially tighten the carbon cycle so that we can maintain the status quo indefinitely.
Is that good enough? I've read that in China, they have some days where there are warnings to stay inside because there are random green substances in the air?