The dream of carbon air capture edges toward reality
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
> As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up.
This is really the key. Once this is implemented, loads of effort/money/research will flow into this field.
It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays".
But in any case, it seems obvious that DAC is required to avoid bad outcomes. We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. We could just leave it there and deal with the problems, but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago.
Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing.
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To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids?
[Please double-check my math]
I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.
gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000)
cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600)
cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons)
price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon
yeah your math seems great lol
assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving
sources:
[1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-...
[3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/ener...
carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0].
so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV!
[0] https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-pric...
But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that. (Yeah, I know, people who live in the country are married to their cars). If your country really pushes EV charge points and implements tax incentives on EV vehicles, then you are providing people with a way out of high carbon tax. And you need your PR campaign to be clear that people are getting a choice: high price fossil fuel or cheap EV. Because the chicken/egg here is that you won't get a government that'll make those changes until your convince people to vote for it. And people won't vote for poverty, but they will vote for options.
Currently most incentives for buying electric cars benefit the wealthy. For example in the UK, I can get 45% of my tax back through salary sacrifice on an electric car, whereas a person on basic rate only gets 20%. It should arguably be the other way around i.e. a "super deduction" for the poor, capped at basic rate relief for the rich.
The big problem with this, in the UK at least, is that the trains are already full even though they are much more expensive than this. We really need more capacity but the hugely corrupt debacle that is High speed 2 is going to turn people against building better public transport.
So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?
However, and I expect this to be the case in most European high-taxed countries, the taxes are just fed in to the general tax revenue of the government. Not ear marked for e.g capture programs.
These taxes do of course fund some inovation projects etc, but I think it would be a hard sell politically even here to direct all carbon-related taxes directly into buying Co2 capture.
For example, as renewables have grown larger in Sweden, the government has started taxing the production of solar power on larger installations (≈ roof of a warehouse), even if the energy is never sold/transmitted to the grid.
>Directly fucks over the working class
From my experience of the U.S - number 2 is seldom the cause of number 1.
on edit: formatting
But, in USA, it would surely go to military.
However the implementation of such a tax, although conceptually simple, is practically very complicated.
Global warming is only a subset of environmental damage.
There's all kinds of other damage in the wake of over-consumption.
When you kill more trees than you grow back, the devastation comes much quicker than waiting for the whole world to get hotter.
Carbon can be looked at as only one material and IF it can be been made neutral in the face of rising or even curtailed consumption, that seems to be the pricing that can be correctly assessed to compensate.
To raise the ante and try to price in many other forms of environmental damage too, you're going to need a bigger bank.
Plus just to earn all that money to allow all that consumption leaves an additional trail of damage behind, with a departing path of financial acumulation leading off in the opposite direction.
And as we know, different currencies have different toxic footprints themselves, and that was before bitcoin which has gotten into a category of its own.
Gemstones and rare elements too, some are bloodier than others. Deaths here can occur faster and sooner than forests are dying.
To me this tends to indicate that reducing consumption will always be green.
Oh, that’s only net zero. In this fantasy we should also charge fossil fuel industries for past infractions too - maybe they need to pay an extra 20% for extra dac capacity.
Not doing that is like comparing emissions to electric vehicles whilst assuming a carbon cost of 0 for the electricity.
Is there a reason the cost per tonne is so far off? Is terrapass just BS?
They say I think $5 per 1,000 pounds co2
https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped
By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere.
Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton.
Some links for you:
Bloomberg dug a little into the forestation based carbon offsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI
[Disclaimer: I co-founded this] an alternative which aims to support a portfolio of carbon removals: https://carbonremoved.com
That huge removal cost just shows how underpriced oil is given the externalities.
I hope we are successful in some of the ongoing litigation like cigarette companies.
Specifically for energy corporations I am fine with complete Gov. sanctions/high regulation. Similar to electric companies but strip all shareholder profit until it's all spent cleaning up the mess. Not sorry to be the AOC socialist left on this one lol.
It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US.
In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics).
Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.
But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else.
We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee.
But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!
The facility in this article claims it will be able to pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year.
Per the EPA, the average US driver produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's call it 4 for ease of calculation. That's 1000 cars negated.
How much does this facility cost to operate and what is the cost of depreciation each year? $3.6M sounds impossibly low.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
At current prices it's already economically viable to get a Tesla in many places.
Does the government then get to set the winners and losers across broad swaths of industry?
Yes, we have endemic regulatory capture. Yes, we have shitty voting systems that severely restrict the electoral options and, worse, the Overton window.
But also, study the WW2 build-up. This was heavy state managed and did a fantastic job, and certainly our voting system were no better then.
I also hope a combination of UBI and Carbon taxes can work — so the relative prices of things change but the overall cost of living doesn't go up.
But a very easy to understand example of where that is insufficient is that it will be much more efficient to build out public transit than try to make electric cars for everyone cheap.
The history of state management is rife with adverse unintended consequences due to rampant short-sighted application of state power.
As with most things in economics, "demand comes first", so the big importers need to lead the way.
Sorry, that's just impossible in anything even remotely approximating a human time scale. None of these purported solutions pass even the most basic of physics and economics tests. Not sure why people never ask the right questions.
Someone else pointed out that we would have to build some 30,000 of these facilities just to be able to keep up with current CO2 contributions.
Ignoring for a moment the utter fantasy that such a proposal would represent, just one look at what is happening this very moment with the forest fires in California should make everyone who thinks we can control atmospheric CL2 at a planetary scale take pause. These forests are burning at a rate of tens of thousands of acres and we can't control them. Last I heard the fires (there's more than one) were somewhere between 11% and 30% contained. It is likely that, in a single week, these fires emit more CO2 than then entire US ground transport fleet emits in a year.
We do not have planetary-scale control of these matters. We can't fix this. That's the simple reality of the matter.
We have known this for quite some time (that we can't "save the planet"). A recent thread on HN explored yet another aspect of the issue:
Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area.
Regarding the viability of solutions I don't think there will be a one-size-fits-all approach and it will actually take many removal methods combined to make a dent.
Does the necessity to survive even exists at civilization scale ?
Because climate change will probably not put a clear end to humanity as a specie. And, sure, I’m optimistic : we’ll get through this like we happened to survive, world wars, pandemics and a load of other global catastrophic events.
But what will be the cost in human lives ? If, say, 20% of the planet remains inhabitable by the time we succeed to stop climate change, is that an optimistic take ?
Nothing wrong with this. The issue is that, unfortunately, physics cares not one bit about optimism, aspirations or what we might wish for. It just doesn't care.
I have not seen a single purported solution to date that passes the physics test. Not one. Most don't even pass the economics test.
I'll give you a simple example without numbers. One proposal is to seed the oceans with iron powder. Let's ignore the mechanism for now, it's irrelevant.
Anyone who knows anything about manufacturing will immediately zero-in on the hard and cold reality that producing such a material is an incredibly dirty and energy-hungry process. Producing it at a rate of billions, tens of billions or hundreds of billions of tons per year would likely require more energy than most nations can spare.
This would mean that hundreds to thousands of new power plants would have to be built. If they are not nuclear, then they burn something. Wind and solar? They are not clean at scale, but sure. No matter what you do, you will be producing CO2 (and other substances) at an alarming rate just to produce the material. I don't even want to think about the waste product.
Of course, we also have to ask what we would do to the planet in terms of the incremental mining necessary to obtain all of the raw material this would necessitate.
So, after all of that, you now have what you are after, and then you have to transport and deliver it. Transporting billions of tons of iron dust at a planetary scale would engage millions of ground, air and sea vehicles, all burning oil derivatives at a, well, planetary scale rate. Millions to billions of trips would have to be made to "paint the oceans" with this stuff. We might not have enough vehicles to do this, which means we'll have to manufacture them, which comes with environmental consequences.
The CO2 and pollution (because none of these processes are clean) this would produce is far more likely to make matters worse than to actually solve any problem.
And then you have the reality that a planetary-scale problem isn't going to be affected in seven days. Which means that the above-noted hypothetical might require ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred years of constant effort before anything even registers.
We are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to fix the planet.
None of the purported solutions I have ever seen engage in any realistic full-process analysis, not even at a superficial level. If you fire-up Excel and throw some numbers at these things it quickly becomes very obvious that they all exist within a range that lies between nonsense and hubris. What's brilliant is that they are all taking advantage of nice grants and research money, which, from one perspective, makes it genius. I can think of a few other imaginary things on this planet that make tons of money, one of them has a whole city built around it!
Believe it or not, my view isn't pessimistic at all. I am simply trying to make people think and understand that we are being sold a fantasy. Once that is well understood we need to focus on the reality of the matter. Which means we need to develop technology and programs aimed at living with this reality rather than living under the delusion that we can change a planetary scale problem.
I also urge anyone who cares to understand the truth to go out and buy a CO2 meter to then explore their environment. If you do that, what you will discover is that we actually live in an environment ranging between about 650 and 1100 ppm. And this has likely been the case for centuries. The most immediate observation being that humanity has obviously not turned into shapeless blobs of gelatin. In other words, someone needs to explain the "sky is falling" theory given the realities of what we actually experience in our homes, apartments, offices and cars every day of our lives.
My optimism is based on the idea that we will eventually understand we are being lied to due to both political and financial interests. At some point the "emperor has no clothes" scenario has to play out. And, when that happens, we will change our focus to more productive pursuits having to do with making life better while letting the planet do what it has to in order to manage the ecosystem --as it has for billions of years.
We can live with this at the micro level (because, at a planetary scale we are insignificant) while letting the macro level function as it does.
One thing is certain: None of us are going to see any change of note. Changes at a planetary scale are measured in tens of thousands of years, not decades.
Evolution has a maximum speed. A too fast changing environment means the death of most life. Even science have a maximum speed, adapting crops to the new climate may be not fast enought and cause massive famine. To slow down the change is needed to avoid extremely situations.
I firmly believe this is a necessary future of the reality we are facing. I believe this to such an extent that we have been developing various technologies for CEA over the last couple of years, some of which will allow us to grow the same or better crops using 1/3 to 1/2 less energy (and heat) than best-in-class solutions in the market today.
I think this is an important element of humanity adapting to the changes ahead. It does not solve all problems. It solves one.
From the IPCC:
> All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified
(Note: CDR Carbon Dioxide Removal)
On the CO2 budget calculated for 1.5°C:
> budgets applicable to 2100 would be approximately 100 GtCO2 lower than <calculated> to account for permafrost thawing and potential methane release from wetlands in the future, and more thereafter.
The problem with a lot of these things is that everyone forms an opinion without investing any time reading the material (like the agreement) and doing even the most basic math to verify claims. And yet everyone knows we can "save the planet", it would be funny if it weren't so serious.
Must be a miscalculation here, the articles cites 4k tons scrubbed per year for this facility, and 31bn tons emited per year (to which you would have to add 5-6bn for land use change). So that's about 10 millions such facilities we need, only for co2.
I have yet to find a single purported solution that passes what I call the "Excel Test". In other words, running something slightly above a superficial mathematical model of the solution that includes some physics and economics. In my experience the model doesn't have to be deep and complex to quickly reach the conclusion that the so-called solution isn't, in fact, a solution. The problem is that almost nobody does this. Nobody seems to care to take these delusion merchants to task and ask the hard questions. And so we keep talking about a fantasy rather than the hard and cold reality of the matter. We cannot fix a planetary scale problem. We simply can't. We need to focus on living with it.
For starters, we don't build power plants to provide two or three times the power we need. Most power plants run at somewhere around 80% utilization with a margin for peak periods.
In addition to this, if we are serious about a transition to an electric transportation infrastructure by means of electric cars, trucks, boats and planes, well, there is no way the current installed base of power plants can handle this.
Again, easy math. For example, the US has somewhere around 300 million cars and trucks. The power (not energy, power is very important) an electrified version of this fleet would require far outstrips what we have available today.
Aside from this, you have to look at the historical timeline. 62K power plants were not built in 10 years. If we are optimistic and assume a 50 year timeline, well, quite a few of the people reading this will not be alive by the time 30,000 non-trivial anything is built. And the impact from these 30,000 whatever-they-are will not be seen for a long time, more than likely thousands of years. That's on the very benign assumption that they actually do something. The more likely scenario is that they do nothing or make matters worse.
Everyone was convinced that renewable energy was the answer...until someone actually bothered to do the math and physics work to try to understand. And the conclusion? Paraphrasing:
Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of solar and wind energy (forms so efficient they are yet to be invented) at a global scale, not only will this not stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation, it will continue to rise exponentially.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
Physics can be a real heartless monster.
Finding the energy for 30k plants that are 250* more productive than this one (which, the article says, is the most efficient to date) is still kind of a problem.
Way, way more than than mere gigatons. FTA: "Last year, about 31 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere." That's tens of gigatons in one year.
Is there a high resolution CO2 ppm map? Or does it not work like that, in terms of physical visibility?
Perhaps a big red blob marked “Coca Cola” or “Pitsburg” might kick things a bit more into action?
Maybe the more developed countries should build or invest in power plants from renewable sources, or maybe nuclear, in less developed countries.
Ever seen what goes into building a windmill?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc...
We are not even theoretically close to getting off oil, gas or coal.
So you need to address currently polluting countries as well, because they are very much an important part of the problem. This set partly overlaps with the set of developed countries, partly not.
It's only a real concern if you are very insistant about calling China and India "developing" countries.
This doesn't need to be charity either; the maintenance cost of renewables can be much lower than the cost of fossil fuels, so they can end up cheaper over the long-term (obviously dependent on the situation). Hence it can be a straighforward loan/investment to set up this renewable tech. When talking about national policy, there are also factors like reducing dependence on oil imports, which can make renewables even more attractive.
That takes time. Meanwhile coal plants and concrete manufacture will continue as the developing countries grow. Even China has to operate a lot of coal plants to meet its current energy needs. Global C02 emissions likely won't peak for several years, before starting to decline.
We are not getting of fossil fuels anytime soon.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc...
You're just describing a feedback cycle: the more we transition to renewables, the less fossil fuels will go into wind turbines and solar cells.
From your link:
> Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics.
In other words, we should transition our vehicles to renewable power. Electric motors are already preferable when it comes to heavy machinery (bucket-wheel excavators and conveyor bridges, the largest machines ever made, being the most extreme examples). Wind/solar farms generate electricity, so they can start charging batteries or electrolysing water to hydrogen as soon as the first turbines/panels are installed; they'll eventually need hefty grid connections, so installing those early-on can also power the construction.
Managing an electric/hydrogen construction site is mostly logistics rather than engineering: we don't need new battery tech or fuel cell membranes when vehicles are operating on a single site, centrally coordinated, centrally owned/rented, etc. Battery swaps make more sense when a single entity controls all the batteries (no fear of losing a good battery for a worn-out dud). Even if you want to be incredibly pessimistic about battery/hydrogen usage: with a bit more coordination and training, construction vehicles could just be wired!
Similarly, electric trains are a thing; electric and hydrogen trucks are already available and getting better; we can sail cargo ships, for a price (time + money).
The only place which seems to require new science and engineering in all this is steel and concrete production, but (a) there are a bunch of companies bringing improvements to market already, and (b) that's no reason to avoid all the other improvements. Again, worst-case pessimism: we might need to plug excess renewables into some vastly-inefficient air capture system to offset jet aircraft, rockets (except hydrogen burners), concrete and steel; that's still easier than trying to offset all those things plus electricity and land transport and shipping and construction etc.
The only direct barriers are economic; and those are indirectly political.
I'm guessing this would require a change at the WTO level however, making it relatively unlikely.
Carbon credits will be enforced with coercion, just as the petrodollar has been. At the end of the day they are both schemes where technocrats print permission slips to consume energy.
Putting aside the fear mongering rationalizations for both schemes, I hope posters here can appreciate the inherent moral hazards.
OTOH renewable energy sources are getting economically competitive so development doesn't have to mean more carbon. For instance, wind power already accounts for 20% of Brazil's energy generation (and most of it was built recently with private capital, as the government has been broke for a few decades already).
If businesses in developed countries had to simply pay the cost of cleanup when importing from countries without their own laws in place, it would still be a massive improvement.
So that system can work, but don't give out the emission rights for free, have the companies buy them and invest the money earned in removing emissions from the air again.
There must be some sort of optimal strategy in there somewhere, that maximizes the economic incentive to reduce one's emissions.
This can be achieved with a carbon tax. Or even higher gasoline taxes in places like the US where gas is underpriced.
But people do not want this. It is politically infeasible. The current middle class rather preserves their current lifestyle for next 30-40 years they have left before the end of the old age rather than leaving a better planet for their children.
Then there's the issue that most carbon tax proposals try to invest the money in green energy R&D or electric vehicle subsidies.
Making gas 2x as expensive and Teslas 20% cheaper doesn't help these people at all - they simply can't afford a brand new car to begin with.
Unless 100% of carbon taxes are given back directly to the citizens in the form of cash, it will always be perceived as grabbing money from poor rural people to subsidize the fancy lifestyles of "coastal elites" who want to drive shiny new luxury electric SUVs.
According to the Economist's summary of the recent IPCC report, the current forcing effect of methane around 30% of that of CO2.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/30/992545255/do-carbon-offsets-a...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible
I think buying credits from GoldStandard [1] is a safer bet. While I'm sure there's some of the same shadiness occasionally, I think that a lot more work goes into vetting projects. The majority of the projects I fund are small solar, wind or hydro plants. While many of these plants might get built anyway, I think the funding from GoldStandard may make the difference for lots of these small projects.
I hope I'm wrong, but I just absolutely cannot imagine that ever happening.
In order, air is, broadly, made up of the following:
Nitrogen: %78.084
Oxygen: %20.946
Argon: %00.934
C02: %00.042
The stuff is essentially beyond a rounding error - it really gives one an appreciation of the "either don't release it, or capture it at the point of release" sentiment, and for the difficulties in making carbon capture outside of these scenarios be even slightly cost-effective. It's great to see progress on this front.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...
The only use is in removing it from the atmosphere.
The majority of the CO2 in drinks will probably just end up the air again, unless some of it binds to calcium in the body or something?
Wouldn't that just put it back in the atmosphere though? I suppose it's better than using CO2 from some other source, but still.
Each facility will have a goal of scrubbing 1 million tons of CO2/yr.
However, we currently emit 30+ Billion tons of CO2/yr.
Even just cutting the growth rate by half would do a lot, and it would give international bodies like the UN some footing to establish a carbon price. Right now the carbon market is highly illiquid; nowhere near enough people are able to manufacture credits. If you could guarantee that it's always possible to make more credits that changes the political and perhaps even economic dynamic.
Crowd-source it to municipalities and makers.
Don't get me wrong if they build a sink which can be deployed at a household level which is 80% efficient and a huge city one is only 90% efficient it might be worth going this route. But I suspect the numbers would be closer to 50% and 99% based on current technologies (granted I don't work in the sector I just read publications)
Forests also provide local cooling, improve the water cycle, and aid biodiversity. A world with forests is a healthier world.
Planting trees, harvesting them, and turning them by pyrolysis into biochar/charcoal and then burying it can partially restore these soils and sequester carbon at the same time.
That would just leave us where we're at right now, right? Even with emissions not increasing (unlikely...), we'd still need 60k just to decrease CO2 levels at the same rate... meaning it'd take several decades to bring them to acceptable levels. We'd probably need a few times that many facilities to be able to do this at the pace we need...
The cost for most of these technologies right now is over $400 per ton, so that works out to $12 trillion.
Yikes.
Another way to look at it is that the GWP has an average growth rate of over 3%, so economic growth could continue even if the $3 Trillion spent per year was considered economically unproductive.
Still early days. We need to get 2x better at carbon removal every 12 months for the next decade to get to gigaton scale carbon removal.
See my note about AirMiners Boot Up below http://bootup.airminers.org
All this talk about scaling the technology to fully draw down carbon feels like an fantasy if we can't even proven the concept of keeping pace with our year-over-year growth.
major hurdles, including high costs, remain before this technology can be widely deployed and play a key role in tackling climate change.
Major. Major, Major Challenges. CCS, (lets put the capture prt to one side and focus on Storage) is well proven as a gas field injection method to increase yield: Fugitive gas from fracking is a huge problem. Persisting injection, down into olivine or other rocks (basically, encouraging the CO2 to convert to carbonate solid) or into pressure depth as clathrate (I know methane clathrate is a thing, I assume CO2 does similar things but I could be wrong).. this is still really not at-scale simple.
A major Australian CCS project has continually reported failure to meet its goals, such that its had to pay massive fines to the WA government because of un-met Carbon offset benefit... which I bet partly helped 'justify' the investment on the gas field.
I just doubt the seriousness of industry to invest in this in a significant and meaningful way...
Interesting seeing this thread at midnight PST on HN -- assuming this is the Europe crowd, hello!
Curious for people's thoughts about perception of these technologies around the world. Have you heard about carbon removal outside of this article?
No I haven't heard of carbon removal at all.
I guess I'll have to start reading the article, without immediately resorting to comments ;-)
That, and the idea that it's a pipe dream that is sold as an excuse not to make some really tough choices about decarbonising other things seems to be the prevailing thought about from cynical environmentalists.
Personally I can only feel that those arguments make some sense but I don't understand the potential enough.
Also, a more personal thought is that it seems really hard to collect such a diluted chemical from thin air?
As Alan Kay says, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Learn more about building carbon removal solutions at: http://bootup.airminers.org
Like, would a coal power plant combined with carbon capture be more economical viable than a nuclear plant?
Yeah it's an interesting line of thought but is it really possible to ask that? If you scale up one technology you will hopefully find incremental improvements that will turn that initial calculation on its head. My guess is that any such calculation would be so speculative it wouldn't give you any actionable information.
So my guess is that the best we can do is try scaling up all possibilities until we have a clear winner?
(Although in your example nuclear should already be scaled up enough to give us some idea.)
Yes, Carbon sequestering and storage underground is something that brings out all the usual tin-foil hatters from Greenpeace to the alt-right who fantasize about "gassing the population".
What I am wondering is why we are not planting billions of trees, harvest them, make charcoal and stuff it underground. Or grow algae on roofs and use them to harvest carbon.
The solution space is large. Lots to work on.
for (int i = 0; i<= 100000000; i++) { Tree t = new Tree(); t.plant(); }
You need specific types of trees for specific microclimates, otherwise they won't thrive and might die. You need a healthy species mixture, otherwise you are creating monocultures vulnerable to mass pest infestation. You need the right amount of rain. You should not reforest good arable land, because we are almost 8 billion now and everyone wants to eat.
Israelis are very good at reforestation, but it took them over 100 years to recreate some modest forests there.
As far as pure sequestration goes, fast growing plants like hemp are better candidates.
Make charcoal. Use the waste heat. Put the charcoal back in the soil, so you're not depleting it of phosphates, minerals, or nitrogen. Repeat.
Maybe you can even use the waste heat to run the Haber process.
Aside from growing then burying cellulose or cooking it off into carbon, you could also pyrolize it into a liquid form via a self-feeding process if your preferred form of sequestration is to pump it back underground i.e. into previous extraction fields.
Direct air capture is something that makes me doubly wary - Aside from the carbon-density-in-air issue, return-on-energy-invested is a key metric I don't see enough emerging encouraging information about. Incorporating the acres of wind, solar, or hydro required to power a DAC solution, the usual land-use objection to a forestry-based carbon removal approach would seem to evaporate pretty quick.
I would love to have a good clean home biochar solution to increase the carbon content of the soil of my farm. Something I can stuff prunings and grass and brush cuttings and leaves into, flip a switch, and get carbon out of.
But right now it's mostly DIY solutions that look of varying quality and still generate some smoke.
Wouldn't it be great if every suburban neighbourhood had an efficient pyrolysis chamber that processed the organic waste from the surrounding area?
You use plants to concentrate carbon. You make biochar. And then you put it back in the soil, so you're not depleting it of nitrogen, phosphates, and minerals.
The waste heat that you get from making the biochar is useful energy -- solar energy, really -- that you can use to heat homes, make hot water, and run heat engines.
Maybe even the Haber process too?
The chief challenge I see is how to reduce human labor requirements without increasing capital requirements too much.
I'm also a little concerned about eventually diluting the soil with too much biochar. Because you're sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, but the amount of phosphates and such is remaining constant.
Question that Vaclav Smil had raised as a potentially fatal obstacle to large scale carbon capture. All is nice and well when we're trying to sequester 1000 tons of CO2 per year as a pilot project. But once we scale up to ~100Mtons or even ~Gton per year - we'll very quickly run out of places to safely store it. How much is this a real physical constraint vs. Smil's skepticism being cranked up to 11/10?
however I have grave concerns. This facility removes 4000 tons of carbon a year. Great, but how much power does that take?
save for france, iceland and bits of sweden, most places emit >200grams of co2 per kwhr. In the uk 1kw for a year is ~2.5 tons of carbon.
The only real path to avoiding the worst effects of climate change is stopping emissions.
Sucking carbon out of the air while also pumping it up there doesn't make too much sense unless the cost of carbon capture drops well below the cost of de-carbonizing.
I already have an answer to why this reasoning is wrong - CO2 acts like an insulator and traps heat in the atmosphere, and does not generate any heat directly. Just curious if that's right.
Or make it a liquid process to minimize moving parts -- grow bacteria in water solution, filter, and direct underground.
I do like your idea of a custom bacteria in water solution, I think algae has been engineered for biofuel production (not sure how well that turned out though).
An average person produces 5 tons of CO2 a year. So it will be removing the CO2 produced by 800 people.
I think it would be cheaper to pay people not to fly for holidays, etc.
Yes, balancing that equation is going to require energy input. Yes, probably gonna require some pretty smart chemists. But impossible? Well, I don't see why not.
Edit: There's probably not that much utility in this. See comments below.
edit: According to Carbfix's "Current Projects" [2] section, it looks like they actually collaborated with Climeworks on this Project Orca.
And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.
Still maybe other countries could pay iceland to be a world air scrubber? Not sure.
But do we really have a place to pump all of this CO2 laden water?
But I think the way to encourage reducing waste and capturing waste to be in financial competition is that if capture costs $100/ton you charge a $90/ton tax so that your efforts are 90% funded already ($400B of the $500B) if they just paid the tax and changed nothing, while if they dropped their emissions in half they'd save $55/ton relative to a competitor that did nothing. But at least there is still an actual plan for the commons built in.
But I like that it sets a benchmark for what carbon pricing needs to be to provide a real incentive to stop emitting it.
You can also study the materials on your own under the "Resources" menu.
DACS typically can sequester in a couple of years, Olivine can take up to a millennia to fully saturate.
But these are not mutually exclusive. We should deploy a range of both natural and tech solutions as no single method is enough on its own.
If you have clean energy, using it directly to not burn fossil fuels is strictly more efficient than trying to undo the damage done by burning fossil fuels.
If you can create energy in Iceland, which is already nearly 100% renewable for electricity generation, then using it for carbon capture is carbon-negative.
If you're claiming it isn't carbon negative because someone somewhere in the world is burning carbon, then the word is meaningless, because you may as well claim that every activity on Earth is generating the exact same amount of carbon -- the average of all the activities.
It's annoyingly the argument made for covering the surface of the planet in photovoltaic cells, but in this case if the tech is already CO2 negative it can't be that bad to try to test it's longevity or scalability and reliability.
Just need the equivalent got methane and were sorted ;)
Sometimes blue sky thinking helps us as we reach out into the cold lonely cosmos :)
I think there might be ample valid reasons to think 20 years from the starting line could be better for waiting rather than racing to get an inferior Gen 1 plant online in the name of doing something. This is partly a political/social problem, but it’s largely an engineering calculation. “At the end of the useful life of both plants, which leaves the planet and humans better off?” should be the guiding question.
Meanwhile, it's generally true that the more you make of something, the cheaper you learn to make it, and that appears to hold true here:
> “We’re confident our costs will continue to fall,” Oldham, the Carbon Engineering CEO said. “But only if we deploy. If you never deploy, your costs never go down.”
The C02 being released in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels was in the air initially before being tied up by photosynthesis. So as time goes on (since inception of life) more and more C02 is tied up in hydrocarbons and locked away in the ground.
So here's the question. What happens to life on earth if this process keeps going for millions more years? At what point is there insufficient C02 for plants to function?
This is among several substantial changes to the the ecosphere which would make much present life difficult or impossible.
Ultimately all life.
Wouldn't it be better to put treatment where the ratios are higher than 0.042%?
> At Orca, this task is accomplished with a blast of heat, which is sourced from a nearby hydrothermal vent
What do they do if there's no hydrothermal vent ? Is the solution still efficient with other energy sources (for example a wind turbine) ?
Another important factor would be the chemistry needed to separate CO2 from Venus' atmosphere. It may or may not be different from that required for Earth's atmosphere.
or is that just no possible?
But why would you want to get rid of CO2 on Venus? It has tons of benefits. It gives good lift ability for airships so you can stay far above then hot surface. Also no need to worry about Hindenburg disasters as stuff will not burn in CO2 atmosphere.