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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

The actual title is "UC reactor makes Martian fuel" and the subtitle is "A gas station on Mars? Engineers envision the possibilities." But the submission title is "UC reactor converts carbon dioxide to fuel to address climate change"?

While it does talk about applications with respect to carbon capture, if we consume the fuel byproduct, presumably we just end up with co2 in the atmosphere?

> “In the future we’ll develop other catalysts that can produce more products,” said Zhang, a doctoral student in chemical engineering.

So I guess if we produce products which sequester carbon then maybe that would be useful, but this is purely speculative.

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> if we consume the fuel byproduct, presumably we just end up with co2 in the atmosphere?

The process would still be great news if true, as it could be a carbon-neutral source of hydrocarbon fuel for applications that are hard to electrify, like aviation.

I just imagine the scramble to get carbon neutral allowing huge carbon-processing factories and then we enter some kind of carbon deficit, back in the same situation we are in—a teetering balance between overconsumption and moderation.

If, some day in the future the oil companies all start pushing hard for carbon capture, then we will know this is a real possibility.

To be clear, the solution to climate change is first to stop burning fossil fuels, and then to start removing carbon from the atmosphere. This technology won’t help long term removal of carbon if we just burn the resulting fuel, but it might help displace fossils as a source for some applications that would otherwise be at the very end of the fossil ramp-down.

With this technology, assuming it can capture large amounts of carbon, couldn't some of it be converted to fuel for current use and some of it sequestered. It would certainly take longer to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, but should still do the job. Instead of introducing new CO2 into the atmosphere by burning newly extracted oil, we would be sequestering some and "recycling" some.

There still must be some input of energy. From what I understand, the Sabatier reaction is really only viable from an environmental perspective if it is powered by some other non-carbon energy, such as solar or wind.

Yes, to convert CO2 to CH4 you need to break the C-O bonds. This takes energy.

And if you have that surplus clean energy, you should spend it powering things that would otherwise be powered with fossil fuels - not trying to offset someone else's emissions. Carbon removal only makes sense in a world where nobody is burning any fossil fuels, and we're trying to lower atmospheric carbon. Lower, not offset.

Which would only make sense if you were trying to initiate the currently deferred glacial epoch.

I accept the argument that offset schemes have difficult practical problems, but at least theoretically “offset” means “lower”. It just means that your application isn’t necessarily reducing carbon. And it kind of makes sense—for an airline to get carbon neutral it would require immense investment in electric flight and decades of research and then more decades of incremental rollout. Instead that money and effort could be spent helping reduce a lot more carbon elsewhere now (e.g., replacing coal power plants with equivalent solar power).

Depends on the cause of emissions. A few are not for purely energy but involved in some kind of chemical reaction. Concrete and Metal extraction are 2 examples. Having a way to offset is important in a cheap manner. Metal extraction esp is a prob as carbon reacts with several metal oxides and reduces it releasing heat. Since it generates heat and creates the final product, it prob more efficient then the alternative electrolysis route.

But yes offsetting CO2 produced due to energy is a waste.

The amount of carbon in solid form on our planet is enormous.

If we get into a deficit, we just get some rocks and convert them.

This is mainstream energy science.

Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future [0]

How to Make Carbon-Neutral Gasoline Out of Thin Air [1]

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja202642y#

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/how-to-make-carbon-n...

From what I know, it's electricity intensive to make the fuels. Now, if only we had a very scalable way to make immense amounts of electricity that didn't depend on weather in a world where the climate is now in disarray. Hmm...

You're being unnecessarily negative IMO.

The biggest challenge with renewables always cited is storage. Cabrin neutral feul like this could potentially be a good storage medium.

There's more than enough solar energy hitting the Earth's surface to supply all our power needs, the challenge is capturing, storing, and distributing this power.

After all, fossil fuels are just captured solar energy.

Right, the operative keyword in my comment being scalable. How many solar panels does it take to generate the same amount of power in a full day that nuclear does in a full day? Now, are you assuming a sunny day? What about cloudy days? What about weeks of wildfire smoke blotting out the sun? Are you including the energy it takes to create your fuel battery? How much fossil fuels do we burn in manufacturing to cover the Earth's surface in enough solar panels to meet our collective needs?

Storage isn't the only problem, and I mentioned this in my comment: weather patterns are changing in unpredicable ways. Building more weather-dependent power sources is stupid when we already have a great solution.

There's more than one actual title. The submitter used the HTML doc title, which is a legit choice, and they probably picked it on the grounds that it was more substantive/less baity.

Since the climate change mention has turned out to be baity in its own right, I took that bit out above.

Huh, makes sense. I didn't realize there could be more than one title. Thanks for the clarification.

The URL matches the submission title, at least. Perhaps the content changed?

I concur, looks like the title changed, slug remained the same.

That's amusing. The change must've occurred in the ~8 minute window between the submission and my comment, which seems odd considering the article is 2 days old. Not casting doubt, but remarking on coincidence.

A/B test caught in action possibly?

Most likely the fact that it appeared here caused someone to look at it, realize that the title didn't match the contents, and hurry to change it.

The old title really was egregiously bad. @dang, can we get it fixed?

if we consume the fuel byproduct, presumably we just end up with co2 in the atmosphere?

It's necessary to compare the two things:

1 - we drill out more fossil fuels and burn it

2 - we convert atmospheric CO2 to fuels and burn it

#2 is theoretically infinite and CO2 levels never increase. #1 is very finite and the longer we do it the higher CO2 levels increase.

> if we consume the fuel byproduct, presumably we just end up with co2 in the atmosphere?

If it replaces some amount of fossil fuel, it could still be useful. I'm guessing the efficiency isn't great, though.

Yea that CO2 is not as easy to pump as sticking a drill in some oil plump wet dirt and pumping away.

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