Is Carbon Capture Here? | Hacker News Reader

Is Carbon Capture Here?

nytimes.com

13 pointscaipre9 comments

The answer of course is no, not yet:

> Tarek Soliman, a London-based climate change analyst at HSBC Global Research, says the launch in Reykjavik is not the sort of “quantum leap” that would prove the technology can reach the scale and cost required to have a real impact on climate change.

However, we have only a very short amount of time to operationalize a way to store gigatons of carbon per year, because after 2050 it is necessary to stop the worst effects of climate change.

This Climeworks project is helpful for learning costs of this particular technology. But we had better find something with a really fantastic learning curve, where scaling the industry makes it really cheap, otherwise we will fail at our goals in the future.

It's hard enough to imagine any country paying for their past emissions from 2050 out, in the form of using tech like this to scale. But we must do it. Perhaps there will be a war.

If fusion ever becomes a reality, that can be used to power lots of carbon capture, along with desalination and electrical power plants. Short of that, it will likely require a combination of approaches, including planting more trees, and spreading olivine on beaches.

I suppose major advances in molecular nanotech could perform the carbon capture. That's what Drexler proposed years ago.

Three decades with increasing urgency and likely more government funding can make a lot of progress. I wouldn't be surprised if we do have a major technological breakthrough to mitigate climate change.

It seems extremely unlikely that fusion will be able to compete in any way with solar for the next 30-50 years. It is on a completely exponential cost decrease curve, and we haven't even seen a hint of bottoming out yet.

New technological and manufacturing advances happen nearly daily. We may have panels that last for 60-90 years within a decade, meaning that costs will drop even further.

Solar also has the advantage of being extremely scalable and decentralized, so that a massive installation can be put in cheap land far from any people, without having to run transmission lines to a big centralized power generator. Of the current average cost of $0.13/kWh in the US for electricity, $0.08/kWh is for transmission and distribution costs, and only $0.05 is for power generation. That 8 cents isn't falling in cost, and so halving the cost of generation, or even making it a fifth of the cost, doesn't help a lot unless the power generation can be located closer to where it's needed.

For super cheap energy, it's going to be nearly impossible to beat solar PV.

How do you feel about wind farms?

I have been surprised at how they have been able to continually cut costs as well. 10 years ago, the idea of somehow improving cost efficiency to our current levels seemed like a fantasy. The solution was apparently to just build bigger and bigger and model a lot more. The current limitation to terrestrial wind turbines seems to be transportation of larger and larger parts.

Floating and sea-floor-mounted ocean wind turbines are also getting super cheap.

For regular grid use, iron batteries are really coming along well too, both flow batteries and solid batteries look like they will be economical with current grid costs. So the glue needed to last for a low-wind week seems to be nearly ready.

Probably not, but at least it's an actual solution to climate change. It's often disliked because it removes the control that people want over society that comes with the spectre of climate change. But of course it's the only real way to deal with it.

I wish governments would stop bickering about political goals, all of which literally do nothing to change CO2 levels, and focus on actually technological goals of pulling CO2 out of the air to meet whatever target is decided. That is the practical solution, but it has no political value, so instead we argue about "science" and try and hamfist socialist politics into every climate change solution.

> It's often disliked because it removes the control that people want over society that comes with the spectre of climate change.

What do you mean by this?

I mean that climate change gets used as a boogeyman to try and advance political agendas (often anti-capitalist, more often, capitalism taking advantage of fear). If there was a good solution they zeroed our carbon emissions, climate change couldn't be held over people as a threat to convince them to do stuff anymore

I'm not aware of any policy that gets put forward that could be construed as advancing a political agenda rather than addressing the problem. I run into a lot of self-described anti-capitalists, but they tend to not have any policy prescriptions other than "end capitalism" which is so vague as to be comical.

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