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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear (because I didn't realize this until earlier this year), but Carbon Capture generally refers to capturing CO2 emissions at the source, like coal-fired power plants. It does not generally refer to extracting CO2 from air at large. As such, they are, in all reality, a bullshit boondoggle invented by the fossil fuel industry as a bandaid for business as usual.

I am not surprised that this $1.1B basically bought nothing. It's just more Pollyanna BS that keeps the current freight train barreling along at full speed.

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I find it kind of funny that people are quick to hate on technologies that could enable reduced emissions while continuing to burn fossil fuels. It's as if the goal all along wasn't to actually reduce emissions, but to destroy Oil and Gas. Reactions similar to yours abound, and they are antithetical towards the goal of solving climate change.

Of course, not saying that this technology in particular can achieve net zero emissions by any means, but if it could in a more cost effective manner, it would be more societally beneficial than the alternative of overhauling the entire energy production infrastructure.

> it would be significantly more cost effective (thus societally beneficial) than to overhaul the entire energy production infrastructure.

Citation needed on that cost effectiveness estimate, but regardless, all infrastructure is incrementally rebuilt and replaced over the years. So instead of eventually building replacement coal [1] plants with fancy (and leaky) CC, we could as well build different plants that don't emit any CO2.

[1] or natural gas, which is what's been happening over the past 10-15 years in the US, primarily because natural gas became cheaper. Those natural gas plants produced less CO2 than coal, which has primarily driven any reduction in the US's CO2 output. But natural gas still produces huge amounts of CO2 and will never be carbon neutral.

"Citation" of a hypothetical? Doesn't make any sense.

Thought the spirit of my comment was pretty clear, but the point was that if technology could enable continued use of fossil fuels in a net zero manner, and in a more cost efficient way than replacing energy infrastructure, that it should be welcomed.

But instead you get a lot of commenters hating on the idea because it would allow fossil fuels to live on, even if consumption of those was net zero. Which implies they don't care about solving climate change, but care specifically about destroying the fossil fuel industry.

Yes things get replaced over time and the replacement technology will end up being whatever's most economical (in a free market) or whatever's most economical given legal constraints (in a controlled market).

There's no inherent virtue of generating power from solar versus coal if you could do both in a net zero manner. Though of course, fossil fuels are limited in supply.

Getting net zero or renewables to be more cost effective than fossil fuels is the fastest way to solve the problem. That transition would happen naturally over time as fossil fuels became more scarce, thus more expensive.

> "Citation" of a hypothetical

Yes, the claim that one hypothetical option would be more efficient than another demands support, in the form of evidence, or reasoning from supported theory.

Typical citing the support and stating any necessary connecting reasoning to reach the conclusion from it is the way to provide that.

Just because you are comparing hypotheticals doesn't free the conclusion you claim from that comparison from the need for justification.

Do you understand what a hypothetical is?

> Do you understand what a hypothetical is?

Yes, do you understand that making predictive conclusions about hypothetical alternatives is itself a claim that such conclusions can be justified (which is true, that's pretty much the whole point of science) and invites a call for the justification of the particular predictive conclusion you have offered?

Clearly you don't.

The merits of carbon capture technology, obviously (very much so) have nothing to do with my comment

Shifting goalposts here:

At first, you said that if any CC could achieve net-zero emissions, then it would be significantly more cost-effective than rebuilding infrastructure. Baseless assertion without any specific numbers to cite.

Now, you're saying that if any CC could be net-zero and more cost-effective, then it should be welcomed. Well, yes, obviously.

Not sure what you mean by shifting goal posts.

I posed an entirely hypothetical proposition that, if this technology could achieve net zero emissions in a more efficient manner (obviously implied), that there would still be many people who hate on it because it would enable fossil fuels to live on, despite the fact that, in that scenario, we would have solved climate change and allows fossil fuels to continue to prosper.

The fact that the technology would be more cost effective was obviously implied. Is it logical that I would imply that a less cost effective technology would be cheaper? No, so why interpret it that way? Does the syntax of what somebody writes always 100% accurately convey their thoughts? No, but its pretty easy for humans to interpret the meaning.

Anyway, I edited the comment for clarity. All the replies debating carbon capture technology have pretty obviously nothing to do with my original comment, and I question how somebody could interpret it in that way. The entire preposition and thrust of the comment was about the hypothetical, nothing to do with specific merits of a technology (very clearly, and obviously)

So your desired message was a double hypothetical straw man attack?

You're suggesting that hypothetically if these technologies were viable, then hypothetically people would still oppose them, because you want to suggest they're acting in bad faith and secretly have an ulterior anti-fossil-fuel agenda separate from emissions.

Surely you can see how people are going to counter one or both of those elements though, right? (The technology so far appears to be mostly a distraction from more prudent efforts and 99.999% of people would in fact love and support the technology if it worked).

Consumption of fossil fuels is unsustainable even if it could be consumed as a net zero emitter. Because once used it cannot be reused.

Feels a bit like treating a symptom instead of the root cause.

Yes, and cost of fossil fuels would rise with scarcity leading a free market to slowly transition to renewables as fossil fuels became more scarce/expensive.

In the assumption that we could achieve net zero in a cost effective way with fossil fuels, this would be the most natural transition

I'll just point you to this [1], which describes the situation better than I can. In short, no, capture capture is not going to be net zero, and even if it were, it doesn't actually reduce air pollution.

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/10/25/study-casts-doubt-carbo...

Do you understand what a hypothetical is?

There are far more problems with fossil fuel than just destabilising the climate.

It also acidifies the oceans, it kills by air poisoning and just is generally bad and also nonrenewable.

We do need a paradigm shift in the way we utilise the earth’s resources.

That is why CCS gets a bad rap, it’s like the alcoholic parent saying they can continue drinking because there’s this new hangover drug and also a great skin remedy for your bruises.

I actually really support all the climate mitigation strategies and CCS is definitely an important one, but together with a strict ban on new coal and oil projects. Natural gas seems an OK tradeoff for now if each new plant is tied directly to the shuttering of a coal or oil one.

> It also acidifies the oceans, it kills by air poisoning and just is generally bad and also nonrenewable.

Isn’t ocean acidification caused by increased amounts of dissolved CO2 in the oceans though?

If your capturing CO2 (and larger particles as a side effect), it would seem to address both concerns.

CCS is obviously a stop gap but it seems like it could potentially be a very effective and politically realistic stop gap, if it can be made work at scale.

CCS is not a stopgap it is stage dressing for an illusionist. It’s a sham, a smoke and mirrors trick, a misdirection.

It is far cheaper to simply pay a fossil fuel plant to stop operating than to provide meaningful levels of emissions reduction via CCS.

There is a cheaper option which is to facilitate the establishment of commercial renewables programs which will compete the fossil fuel burners out of the market.

It is hypothetically possible that a some carbon capture technology could be more cost effective than renewables, but we'd need to be clear about what exactly we mean by cost. I mean hypothetically the cost could swing either way if we really accounted for everything-- nonrenewables have tons of costs that get externalized, renewables are a growing market and expertise in dealing with them might be very profitable.

Yes, destroying oil and gas is a good idea for several reasons.

1) these capture demos usually don’t capture ALL the CO2 emitted.

2) gas still has leaks and oil still has spills

3) there’s potentially a finite amount of easy to access carbon capture storage repositories. Using it for more fossil fuel burning is maybe a bad idea.

4) there are still geopolitical problems associated with oil and gas

5) there is still a FINITE AMOUNT of oil and gas.

6) If we keep oil and gas infrastructure in place, what’s to stop a Trumpian populist in the future from just stopping the carbon capture program to save money and reduce costs? Then we’d be back to square one. This has happened in the past when the Bush admin suspended environmental rules because of “oil shortage.” But if we get rid of oil and gas infrastructure, that’ll basically be impossible except with massive reinvestment.

7) There’s reason to believe these programs are just headfakes by oil and gas, cover to keep emitting as much as possible while alsways promising to start carbon capture “next year” or whatever.

Thank you for validating the theory that many appear to have lost the plot and are primarily motivated by destroying oil and gas rather than solving climate change.

I don't think it's an intentional conclusion many reach, just that they've subconsciously mixed up the purpose of what they're advocating to solve.

Also does anybody responding understand what a hypothetical proposition is? Why are you all responding about the technical merits of carbon capture, which has nothing to do with my comment.

I mean, that's like 3-400M a demonstration. It's not like other energy demonstration projects are historically a lot cheaper. TerraPower and X-Scale are getting $3.2B for two nuclear demonstrations. https://www.heraldnet.com/business/terrapower-plans-to-build...

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To be quite clear, I think carbon capture is a scam. That being said, talking about energy investment demonstration projects, this doesn't seem totally out of whack for what projects generally cost; we should attack projects based on the merits, but the particular thing in the headline is not actually crazy. The point of demonstrations is to figure out if things work, and so they should be expected to have failures; what would be stupid is if we kept going.

It's not even that. It was 1.1bn for 11 projects of which only 3 were continued until completion. The rest being shut down because earlier parts of the projects showed there was little chance of success.

The headline is wildly misleading.

Supposedly carbon emissions is a top issue.

One issue with carbon capture in the wild is that carbon is actually a not a major portion of the atmosphere (ie, think 0.0004)

So doing capture near CO2 sources makes some sense.

Secondarily, the private market is throwing money at this as well, current costs per ton captured are on the range of $1,000! That is mind boggling pricy, we don't know if these demos were this bad - they might even have been better.

So, if you have a potential society ending issue, spending $1B to try out some things might not be terrible.

That said, if you look at things like SLS, you can understand how these things are prone to being total boondoggles as well.

Specific to this situation you may be right, but generically the idea of making coal-fired power plants emit less CO2 is not a bad idea, mostly because there's not a feasible way to turn off all such power plants tomorrow, so given that they need to continue to operate for some time, therefore it is helpful to figure out how to minimize their negative impact.

My favorite fossil fuel shenanigan is convincing folks who purport to care about climate that the solution to climate change isn’t reforming corporate pollution policies (e.g., taxing polluters), but convincing Americans to change their lifestyles—if we can just convince Americans to go vegan and trade in their SUV for a Prius then the world wouldn’t be in a climate catastrophe.

There are some industrial processes that emit carbon, for which we don't have good alternatives (e.g. making cement, refining certain chemicals).

Being able to capture their CO2 output will likely be necessary, even in the presence of a 100% renewable electric grid - which makes this a technology worth pursuing.

So instead of investing in this technology where it could make the most difference we're going to throw everything out for mountains of broken solar cells, dead and dying battery fires and strip mining in the far east?

Carbon capture has real potential, but has as long as coal or gas is used for baseline we should probably look into using that there into it's understood if we can push these technologies further or use the CO2 in some productive way imo

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