Capturing carbon from the air will always be expensive (2020)
rateofchange.substack.com
rateofchange.substack.com
* powdered car carcasses, so the iron stays in the photic zone.
How much energy is required to collect and deliver a million tons of car iron?
How much energy will it take to strip down cars so you don’t dump massive amounts of contaminants into the ocean?
Do paint and coatings have to be stripped off? How much energy, chemicals, water will that take?
Do we have to build processing, staging and distribution plants? How much energy and resources will that take?
Do we have to build specialized ships? Same questions.
How much petroleum will all of the above require and burn in the form of derivatives, lubricants, gasoline and diesel for transportation and related construction projects?
How many million tons of super-dirty bunker fuel will the thousands of ships used for this have to burn?
How much fuel, energy, materials and resources will have to be expended for decades in order to just monitor and manage this?
Oh, wait, we want to powder the iron? How much energy and resources are required to powder a few million tons of metal?
And then, once that accounting is done: How much CO2 and other pollutants will all of the above produce.
This is what I sometimes refer to the self-righteousness of hand-wavy “solutions”. In quotes, because they never are. Yet, they sound great. Politicians and those making money through the insanity climate change has become can use this hand-wavy stuff to great benefit and appear righteous when, in reality, they are in a range between ignorant and scam artists.
At the same time, those who dare question the validity of such claims are vilified. “You don’t want to save the planet? You evil bastard!”
How about: No! I want you to stop and fully support the nonsense you are trying to float with the aid of a little thing called science. The problem is, you can’t. These do-called solutions are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save it.
(a) Iron actually comes in powered form to begin with (the cars were literally a joke), and blows off land, or pours out of rivers, in many places already, seeding the southern eddy, for example.
(b) More-or-less simple and cheap mining operations to “filter” iron out into, for example, the southern eddy.
I’m not making this up. There are academics exploring this and they do actually do the math you’re describing. You’re right that’s it’s more complex than literally dumping powered cars into the sea. But you’re wrong to believe that only stupid people are thinking about OIF.
It's the same things with all of these arguments, isn't it? Physics never matters.
One, six, twelve, one hundred billion tons of powdered iron will magically fly into the oceans and distribute itself --just as magically-- in a uniform patter precisely where it is needed.
It will do this without requiring any energy input whatsoever.
It will do this without requiring any additional materials at all.
It will also do this without having to rip the earth open to mine it. Which is convenient because that would --at that scale-- be incredibly damaging and produce so much CO2 it is hard to begin to calculate it.
Of course, the billions of tons of iron powder will have absolutely no effect on anything else on the planet, life, weather, nothing.
Sorry my friend. You acuse me of a lack of creativity. I think my position is precisely opposite that idea. I have decades of experience actually making things, designing, sourcing, manufacturing, building things destined for earth and space. When you do this for as long as I have creativity and imagination increase, rather than the opposite. The other thing you gain is an intense sense of proportion about what is and is not possible, or reasonable.
The common fallacy of all of these proposals is that they sound great until one considers actually making it happen at a PLANETARY scale, not at the academic level. One of my favorite things to point out about academic, vs. real-world, science is that in academics a cow is a uniform sphere of milk, one meter in diameter.
The issue goes far deeper than this conversation.
If you actually honestly look at the issue of global warming, the only conclusion one can honestly reach is that there isn't a thing we can do about it. We are too small. You need Thor to descend on this planet to fix it.
This is NOT about denying climate change at all. It's real. No doubt about it. This is to say: We need to wake up, stop listening to those using this for personal profit (financial or political) and start talking about how we are going to manage living with a changing planet. We are wasting valuable time and resources chasing nonsense and following those who promote it.
I is particularly egregious when the scam artists among us start talking about fixing it in thirty years, or a few decades. They should be laughed out of the public square, and yet, we don't. You can't fix a problem of this magnitude, of a planetary scale, in a few decades. If you try, you are far more likely to kill all living things on earth rather than save one darn thing.
A semi truck travelling at 60 mph stops in about 300 feet.
If I were to propose we stop it in 1 inch without destroying the thing and shredding everything in it and the driver everyone would think I was crazy as can be. The mildest comment would be: You can't do that because of physics.
And they would be right.
The planet takes about 100K years to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration by 100 ppm. That's if we all left earth tomorrow.
We actually have people claiming we can do the same in 30 years. That is a ratio equivalent to stopping a semi truck travelling at 60 miles per hour in 1 inch rather than 300 feet. Why aren't we calling these people crazy?
This issue will take THOUSANDS of years, and likely tens of thousands, to revert. In other words, it is measured in hundreds of human generations, not three decades and four election cycles.
We need to stop with the nonsense and start talking about reality.
First, re: Stopping the truck: Nice metaphor - er, intuition pump. You’ve seen a runaway truck ramp, right?
Second, a bunch of actual physicists appear to disagree with you: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4018 And they’re not even counting OIF.
Third, no one in this conversation gave a timeline (although I agree that it’s generally implied to be around 2100). Also, no one is talking removing all the CO2, just creating a drain.
Fourth, Re Thor. Well, we have Thor-like technologies in some areas, like nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. It seems like building a bunch of little Thors isn’t that insane.
Fifth, what’s your suggestion? Put a dome over every city an run giant air conditioners? Move to Mars? Lay down and die as the planet turns into Venus? Those all seem way less likely than CC. (Well, I guess lay down and die as the planet turns into Venus is the default, but that’s not really a suggestion, just giving up.)
That's all I drink, but, thanks for the suggestion.
> First, re: Stopping the truck: Nice metaphor - er, intuition pump. You’ve seen a runaway truck ramp, right?
Sure. I drive by one with some frequency. They are in the order of 2000 to 3000 feet long.
Did you miss the small matter of SCALE?
I said stopping a semi truck in ONE INCH of length.
That's the ratio that matches what they are talking about when it comes to "saving the planet". They claim they can do in 30 years what would take an entire planetary-scale system 100K years. Hence the idea that, if they try, they far more likely to kill everything on earth than save the planet.
> a bunch of actual physicists appear to disagree with you
No, they don't. That article is a complete joke. It talks about cost --in dollars-- not about cost in energy, materials and the pollution these non-solutions produce. I am not talking about cost at all.
The only line in that article that superficially touches what I am saying is at the end:
Quoting: “You can emit a CO2 molecule for each one you capture,”
In other words, you produce one molecule of CO2 for each molecule you capture. How is that for crazy? And we are not even accounting for energy, materials, storage and ongoing maintenance and operations.
Everything sounds great, until you start actually looking at reality.
> I agree that it’s generally implied to be around 2100).
Politicians and cult members are talking about 30 years. I have never heard "around 2100". And yet, that is just as ridiculous. Once again, we are talking about planetary scale factors while, at the same time, saying we are going to fix it in 30, 50 or 80 years. It's a complete joke. Absolutely laughable at best.
Here's the math:
30 years means they are claiming they can fix this over 3000 times faster than the normal rate of change.
80 years (your year 2100 claim), is 1250 time faster than the natural rate.
500 years? 200 times faster.
1000 years? 100 times faster.
If someone claimed they can stop a semi truck 100 times faster than normal (3 feet, instead of 300, without damage to the truck, contents and occupants) they would rightly be labelled crazy. And 1000 times or 3000 times? That would, again, rightly, have them laughed out of the room. The semi truck physics absolutely dwarfed by the planetary scale problem we are discussing, and yet people are proposing, promoting and believing snake-oil solutions that should have them laughed and ridiculed out of the conversation. It's truly insane to watch.
> we have Thor-like technologies in some areas, like nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. It seems like building a bunch of little Thors isn’t that insane.
And those things have one very important thing in common: They are based on the physics that rules their operation. Show me a proposed solution that passes the physics test and we have something real to talk about. You can't. Sorry.
> Fifth, what’s your suggestion? Put a dome over every city an run giant air conditioners? Move to Mars? Lay down and die as the planet turns into Venus? Those all seem way less likely than CC. (Well, I guess lay down and die as the planet turns into Venus is the default, but that’s not really a suggestion, just giving up.)
Ah, well, that's the right question to ask. None of the things you add there are realistic at all. And, no, the planet isn't going to turn into Venus, that's a grotesque exaggeration.
The first thing to accept is that we do not have the energy and resources to fix it. We cannot. It's impossible.
Once that becomes the root of the conversation we can have intelligent discussion about what could or should be done.
This isn't about denying what humanity has contributed to the atmosphere (about 100 ppm of CO2 over a very short period of time). This is about understanding that, if I light a pile of wood on fire inside a building it is impossible to go capture every single molecule of material released into the building and coating every single object and surface. The energy, time and resources that would require is impossible to imagine. Now think that, but at a planetary scale.
This also does not means we should not clean-up our act. Not at all. We should do solar and renewables, not to save the planet --we can't-- but to be cleaner locally and enable cleaner growth. Yet, we should not be crazy lunatics about it. It isn't a mission from god, it's about consistently cleaning-up our act over time.
We need to get our collective heads out of our asses and solidly get behind modern nuclear power. That is the only thing that is going to allow us to make a full transition to electric transportation in a serious way. I did say "modern", no need to fear monger about the issues of ancient designs. We can always do better from lessons learned, that's engineering.
We also need to stop making crazy claims aiming to scare the population into getting behind causes (and, most often, politicians). No, we are not going to go up in flames anytime soon.
I invite anyone who can take a moment to apply a modicum of critical thinking to do one simple thing:
Buy a CO2 meter. Carry it around everywhere you go. Take measurements and write them down. And then answer this question:
Are you turning into a pile of amorphous jelly? Are all your plants and animals gasping for air and half dead? Are your children crawling on the ground and not able to walk?
No?
Because, if you do that, if you buy a CO2 meter and get a real sense of what you are breathing every day you will discover that you have been living in a range between 600 and 1400 ppm of CO2 your entire life. In fact, it isn't too far fetched to say that generations of humans, animals and plants have been living in that range. This is certainly true of cities and suburbs. It would be my guess that conditions were not likely to be better in buildings decades ago.
Here are some of my measurements:
Outdoors, on grass 500 ppm:
https://i.imgur.com/srjNIYE.png
Outdoors, on concrete, under my solar panels, 484 ppm:
https://i.imgur.com/ChfVWeD.png
Outdoors, on patio table under my solar panels, 447 ppm:
https://i.imgur.com/doWyYC2.png
Indoor, kitchen, 742 ppm:
https://i.imgur.com/KPfCxRx.png
Indoor, lab, 955 ppm:
https://i.imgur.com/3jEru4d.png
I don't have a picture right now inside one of my cars. It easily hit 1400 ppm.
Most people, kids, pets, indoor plants live inside buildings most of their lives. This means that we all live in environments with way more than 500 ppm of CO2. We live in this pretty much 24/7. And we are not turning into amorphous masses of goo on the floor.
It is important to have a sense of proportion about things. Should indoor CO2 levels be lower than this? Probably? Maybe? Not sure what is easily attainable. Each environment is different. In my town it is so hot (105 F, 41 C), it is impossible to open the windows and create air circulation. You might be able to do it very late at night (after 10 PM, maybe, sometimes). And then you have to consider that you are going to fill the house (and your lungs) with dust. In other words, it's easy to say "just open the windows" while ignoring the realities of the proposal (which is a very common problem when discussing anything related to this subject).
I would say that using a CO2 meter is one of the most eye-opening things someone can do if interested in this subject. After that, understanding first year physics is of critical importance in evaluating what we are being told and separating fact from fiction.
Step one: Calculate what it would take to warm up the oceans a couple of degrees.
Step two: Calculate how close that would get to killing half of all living things on earth, if not 90%.
However I don’t think warming the ocean is necessary for iron fertilisation to promote plankton growth and thereby remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Basically all the GHG-removal techniques I have any faith in (including my own work, not on OIF) are essentially all uv powered.
Unfortunately, at the moment OIF is banned by the London Protocol to the Law of the Sea. Small research projects are OK, but any deployment is not. As it happens there is still a lot of work to be done on deployment (e.g. the upper parts of the pelagic ocean are pretty much dead as we seem to have ruined an important ecosystem by killing too many whales). You probably want to stay away from coastal waters. Also to really do the job properly, the amount of vegetation growth you need to stimulate is far more than we could use as feedstock (which merely defers the problem anyway): we need to make a lot of it and have it die and sink to the ocean floor, and those vertical currents are not well enough understood. And we need to extract the CO2 that the oceans have been aggressively dissolving for us, acidifying themselves in the process.
In any case, you're bringing up the right path.
The shutdown of the economy during Covid-19 provided a case study for the costs of reducing emissions by reducing consumption and production. According to the Rhodium group [1]:
> the emission reductions achieved this year as a result of COVID-19 are incredibly costly. We estimate the US will spend between $3,200 and $5,400 of lost economic output per ton of emissions avoided, depending on the shape of the recovery scenario.
In my opinion, only a market for CO2 emissions can find the least-cost solution for a net-zero society (both terms should be understood within the capabilities of human beings). As long as the revenue is actually used to pay for actual negative emissions (not offsets, or hypothetical social costs), climate change will stop (getting worse) as soon as supply equals demand, and a market clearing price is reached.
Let's say, this turns out to be about US$300 per tonne. If so, the article only demonstrates that there's money to be made using carbon capture from the air.
[1] https://rhg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Taking-Stock-2020...
This isn’t something that is up for discussion. It’s the way the universe works.
> A typical coal power plant emits a tonne of CO₂ for every 1,000 kWh of electricity it generates. Meanwhile, we learned that the energy needed to recapture 1 tonne of CO₂ from the air is at least 1,400 kWh. This means that recapturing the emissions of a coal power plant takes more energy than the coal plant produces!
And those calculations are based on the much harder to filter concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. Anyway, CO2 isn't the only byproduct, nor is it the only source of entropy. So we aren't trying to reverse all of the entropy for free, just part of it.
No. It is. One of many that say all the hand-wavy stuff sounds great until physics.
Main problem I see is it's not just the lump of coal or tonne of methane. It's the mine and the ship, and the fugitive methane and the flaming drinking water and the heavy metals leeching into the ground from the coal pile and the bagger 288 and the barium mine for mining fluid and ... etc.
And we even have the proof of that in nature since trees are carbon negative.
May I suggest a good book on first year physics?
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Sears+%26+Zemansky%27s+University...
I used a much earlier edition almost 40 years ago, when I took my first university physics class. As far as I know, the fundamentals have not changed.
This would be a good investment if you really want to understand.
No need to violate the first law (which is irrelevant) or the second law (which is a much harder criterion than the first and is relevant).
Not that I support CCS as a solution as it has many unchecked externalities. Better to make ammonia or methane or hydrogen or methanol or something from sunlight ajd burn that if you need the energy density and storage needs of fuels.
That's preposterous. Of course it is relevant. Nothing on this planet can happen without answering to the accounting it demands.
I've seen arguments posted such as "the earth has unlimited access to solar energy". This is usually followed by a hand-wavy "and then a miracle occurs" type statement that solves climate change in thirty years.
Nobody --ever-- bothers to explain how, in no particular order:
1- We convert solar energy from from photons to something else without converting, say, 80% of it into heat (solar panels). That is brutally basic conservation of energy.
That doesn't even account for the energy required to make, ship, install and maintain solar panels.
2- How it is that we REMOVE all of that energy we are going to use to save the planet from being utilized by system A to put it to work in system B and not kill all life on earth in the process. We don't get EXTRA solar energy. All life on earth has evolved and functions under this mostly constant beam of photons that hits us every day. You can't muck with that at a planetary scale without consequences.
Simple example: Cover all ecuatorial land with solar panels. Fantastic. Everything under them dies. Not so great. That energy, hitting plants, land, water, etc, was actually doing something for the planet. It isn't some magical thing that has no purpose until we decide to save the planet.
3- How we are going to violate fundamental realities of efficiency (more like inefficiency) in everything we do.
To do ANYTHING you need energy, time and resources (materials). Most of the processes being touted as solutions are horribly inefficient. This means most of the energy --no matter where it might come from-- will be wasted as heat. No material or resource is used with 100% efficiency either.
Everyone conveniently ignores reality when suggesting magical PLANETARY SCALE "solutions". What does "planetary scale" mean? It means more energy materials than one could possibly imagine. It also means manufacturing, moving, installing and maintaining things at a never-before-seen rate and scale. It means producing things OVER AND ABOVE ANYTHING HUMANITY MAKES TODAY at a rate and at a volume that might equal or dwarf the entire industrial output of the planet today. Everyone ignores the --likely-- billions of gallons of bunker fuel, diesel and gasoline we will have to burn just to make, move, install, operate and maintain these magical solutions.
It's easy to think-up magical solutions that sound great. It is impossible to build them if they don't pass basic physics.
There's a simple reason for which none of these things are being done outside of politician's imaginations or laboratories living off grants to conduct research that feeds said politicians so grant money keeps rolling in:
They don't survive the test of deployment at scale because none of them pass physics. Not one. They can't.
It's irrelevant because noone is suggesting creating or destroying energy. The scond law is the only relevant one.
> 2- How it is that we REMOVE all of that energy we are going to use to save the planet from being utilized by system A to put it to work in system B and not kill all life on earth in the process. We don't get EXTRA solar energy. All life on earth has evolved and functions under this mostly constant beam of photons that hits us every day. You can't muck with that at a planetary scale without consequences.
60TW of solar (double the worldwide primary energy) is a 1000km square. You can halve that with next gen panels. Just the rooftops of existing buildings and existing paved areas exceed this by a substantial margin. Silicon PV is about the same albedo as asphalt or concrete.
Solar solves the energy input so long as we end growth. It's cheap, sufficiently land efficient, sufficiently low pollution and 100% modular.
> Simple example: Cover all ecuatorial land with solar panels. Fantastic. Everything under them dies. Not so great. That energy, hitting plants, land, water, etc, was actually doing something for the planet. It isn't some magical thing that has no purpose until we decide to save the planet.
In addition to not needing any uncovered land, partial shade improves yield of many crops. The lettuce farms alone could produce 5% of world energy whilst increasing yield.
> To do ANYTHING you need energy, time and resources (materials). Most of the processes being touted as solutions are horribly inefficient. This means most of the energy --no matter where it might come from-- will be wasted as heat. No material or resource is used with 100% efficiency either.
> Everyone conveniently ignores reality when suggesting magical PLANETARY SCALE "solutions". What does "planetary scale" mean? It means more energy materials than one could possibly imagine. It also means manufacturing, moving, installing and maintaining things at a never-before-seen rate and scale. It means producing things OVER AND ABOVE ANYTHING HUMANITY MAKES TODAY at a rate and at a volume that might equal or dwarf the entire industrial output of the planet today. Everyone ignores the --likely-- billions of gallons of bunker fuel, diesel and gasoline we will have to burn just to make, move, install, operate and maintain these magical solutions.
So that's the thing about modular solutions. You only have to prove it works once in one place where you know the inputs are all abundant and you can do it a million times. Solar is on track to cover current world energy demands by 2035. There is, as yet, no universally cheap and applicable storage method.
Water electrolysis is one such technology. It is at a tipping point in price where it will replace fossil fuel methane derived hydrogen in a few years.
To get it adopted all you have to do is publicly show one ammonia factory in one place how you can sell them a solar panel (or daytime electricity) and an electrolyser made of steel, copper and a little bit of nickel for less than they can buy methane.
Similarly carbon capture is a fairly well known technology. If we had the balls to say "you don't get to emit or export any CO2 after 2030" to coal and gas plants, some of them will switch to ammonia or hydrogen. Others may import mining tailings and make carbonates. Others might make methane (and possibly even run on that next cycle). All of these things are physically doable, we just let them get away with polluting our world at present.
I'd much rather get rid of all the coal plants and run the gas ones on hydrogen (this is physically possible today, but replacing all the coal is that production problem you mention), but real carbon capture (not the scam of pretending you've buried CO2 or using it to mine more oil) is a step forward.
> They don't survive the test of deployment at scale because none of them pass physics. Not one. They can't.
Why not? Sunlight is free and abundant. Once you understand that sunlight -> hydrogen -> fire -> electricity is a viable pathway for having energy in winter, then un-burning concentrated CO2 is in the worst case no different entropy wise. It's just a matter of mass producing a machine that does one of many known reactions.
> Everyone ignores the --likely-- billions of gallons of bunker fuel, diesel and gasoline we will have to burn just to make, move, install, operate and maintain these magical solutions.
ERoEI is the term you are looking for. For solar it takes about 2-5 years depending where it's installed, maybe it will go back up a little as the duck cu4ve gets worse. An electrolyser utilising 30% of solar energy that would otherwise be wasted to make hydrogen burnt in existing plant would have an eroei on the order of a few years as they're much simpler and smaller than the panels feeding them.
A CO2 splitter is cheaper still, and making carbonates from mining tailings is exothermic.
I have a feeling you might not fully grasp this.
A simple way to explain this law is the "no free lunch" idea. You can't get a free lunch. Someone, somewhere, somehow, has to pay for it.
This means that if it took 1 unit of energy to go from point A to point B, returning to point A isn't going to magically happen with less energy. Energy isn't ever created or destroyed, it is transformed. Always.
In a real system, nothing is 100% efficient. Which means some of that energy will be converted (transformed) into some other form of energy. More often than not we end up heat. And, in a really inefficient system (which is what we are talking about with all of these so-called solutions) the amount of waste energy is just massive.
And that's the issue. You can't get a free lunch. You don't get to add a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere using x units of energy and remove using x/2 units, it's more like x * 10 or x * 100.
If someone claims they can fix this with less energy that went into creating the problem in the first place, they are violating conservation of energy because they would have to CREATE massive amounts of energy in order to achieve that. And you cannot do that.
If I claimed I could capture enough CO2 from the atmosphere in one hour with the energy provided by a car battery everyone would laugh at me. People intuitively understand you need much more than that, both time and energy. And yet, what we are being told is not very different in scale to this ridiculous example. It takes about 100K years for the planet to bring down atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. We are talking about doing the same thing in 30 years and with, comparably speaking, an insignificant amount of energy and resources. No different from the obviously ridiculous car battery and one hour joke.
> 60TW of solar (double the worldwide primary energy) is a 1000km square.
Sure. And a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter.
This is the problem with all this hand-wavy stuff.
No amount of solar will EVER stop or reverse atmospheric CO2. Not now, not ever. It has nothing whatsoever to do with solar panel efficiency. It has to do with physics. And the physics says, no, you cannot do it. You could transition the entire world to the most optimal forms of renewable energies --forms we have yet to develop-- and it will do NOTHING to atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, it will continue to rise.
The only force that can affect this is the planet itself. And it does that through a combination of time (tens of thousands of years) and weather (rain, hurricanes, cyclones, etc.).
You don't have to believe me on this. We have known this since at least 2014. Here's the paper that opened my eyes. The researchers, admit going into this fully biased and with the intent to prove, as they put it, once and for all, that a full deployment of renewables was the solution. They ended-up discovering they were very wrong. Kudos for publishing it. These days that takes guts.
The hatred out there any time one dares to question the cult this thing has become is absolutely incredible. Science and knowledge does not advance when hatred is what one gets back for daring to propose something might not be right. It's really sad. Truly. It's a perfect emperor-has-no-clothes type of scenario. Except, if you dare to speak up your life and career could be ruined by the rabid mobs.
> Why not? Sunlight is free and abundant.
That's a hand-wavy argument. You have to account for the reality of solar vs. the fantasy of it.
Building my 13 kW array was an education in more ways than one. I do not regret building it at all. However, as an engineer, it made me understand just how much bullshit is being floated in this domain as well.
A solar power plant that can match the output of a conventional power generation plant (the technology does not matter) has to be built with a capacity equal to at least 7 to 10 times the required steady-state power output.
In simple terms: If you need a 1 GW power plant that can output 1 GW 24/7, you either build a 1 GW nuclear power plan or a 10 GW (or more) solar facility. That's what is required in order for the solar installation to deliver the same power 24/7.
I have written about this before. I won't repeat all of it here. I can show the need for a 3x multiplier with less than high school math.
Here's the output from my solar array on a good day:
https://i.imgur.com/Fl8ARJd.png
If we call that a parabola, the area under the curve (the integral) is 2/3 the area of the enclosing rectangle. The rectangle would represent the output of something like a nuclear or other steady form of power generation.
In order to match the output of a steady power source, we have to build a solar array that is 1.5 times larger than this, and, of course, add a large amount of storage to be able to fill the dead zones.
Simple physics and math. Impossible to dispute.
And yet it doesn't end there. In simple terms, this only covers 12 hours of the day. Now you have to DOUBLE that system in order to be able to have enough energy to maintain that steady peak power output for 24 hours.
We are now at a multiplier of 3.
Here's another --more typical-- image from my solar array:
https://i.imgur.com/SOr30bX.png
What are those massive dips, lasting hours, that cut down output 25% to 50%? That's horrible.
Clouds. Weather.
Yup.
As I said earlier...the reality of solar vs. the fantasy of solar.
I've done the math. I won't bother with the details here. You very quickly approach having to build a system in the 10x range, or more. Look at this daily output chart, again, from my own system, to, again, understand reality:
https://i.imgur.com/bGuCH2F.png
More panels, tons of batteries and, even with that, you have to overbuild and live with the issues. Your 60 TW system is, at best, a 6 TW system. And, when you take into account other factors, failures, maintenance and the 15 to 20 year lifetime of the massive number of panels, electronics, batteries, etc. required to make this go. Well, again, reality vs. fantasy.
I don't have problem with solar. I invested in it and I would do it again. I simply prefer to talk about the reality of things rather than engage in self-defeating cult fantasies that serve no purpose at all.
Solar will help. A lot. Yet, we need nuclear. I don't believe we can go much further without nuclear. We need to double our power generation and delivery capacity in order to transition to electric transportation. That is not going to happen with solar and wind. Nuclear is a must.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
Well worth a careful read. This is the paper that shook me out of blindly accepting what I was being told. From there I decided I needed to know much more, at many levels, in order to understand. This led to about a year of work digging for root-cause understanding, identifying a baseline from which to compare solutions and, in general, being able to have a clear view of where we are and what we can and cannot achieve.
We are being bombarded with false solutions, all of which are hand-wavy in nature, which is to say they do not provide an honest accounting of the energy, resource and materials they will require and pollution they will inject into the ecosystem. They all treat planetary scale projects as though they were miniature no-impact tasks.
For example, digging up five billion tons of something, processing and delivering it all around the world never mentions energy requirements, resources (oil, fuel, chemicals, water, transportation, etc.), ecosystem damage and CO2 (and other pollutants) the process will contribute to the planet --at a planetary scale. Never.
A few quotes from the paper:
"Google’s boldest energy move was an effort known as RE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do."
"In 2011, the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the initiative. The two of us, who worked as engineers on the internal RE<C projects, were then forced to reexamine our assumptions. "
"we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change."
"We now know that to be a false hope"
"even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant today, existing CO2 will continue to warm the planet."
"Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"
"if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability."
"To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies."
We need to focus on the physics-driven reality of the task and stop with the fantasies.
Every single purported solution ought to come with a specifications document that lists requirements, inputs and outputs, at planetary scale. Time to a 100 ppm CO2 reduction at planetary scale. Energy. Materials. Resources. Fuel. Transportation. CO2 and other emissions. Environmental/ecological effects. Etc.
A standard format could be developed. This should not take more than a single page. Something like this would make it brutally easy to separate the nonsense from things we might actually want to focus on.
> A simple way to explain this law is the "no free lunch" idea. You can't get a free lunch. Someone, somewhere, somehow, has to pay for it.
> This means that if it took 1 unit of energy to go from point A to point B, returning to point A isn't going to magically happen with less energy. Energy isn't ever created or destroyed, it is transformed. Always.
Yes, that's the first law. Well done on being condescending and continuing to be wrong.
The second law says you can't destroy entropy. That's the one that matters.
So it's a good thing there are plenty of reactions that take less work than was released by the fossil fuel CaO + CO2 -> CaCO3 as an example is exothermic.
You can even create methanol now with effort commensurable (although still higher) than digging up a fossil fuel and refining it because we live in an energy gradient powered by the sun and we have orders of magnitude more free energy hit us every year than has been released by the sun.
Yes. People know what capacity factors are you utter muppet. It's not some secret knowledge only you have. It's inckuded whenever someone says net energy.
(1000km)^2 Is huge, but vastly smaller than eg. the land currently used for cow feed or a number of deserts. That gives you double the current primary energy.
Sure you're never going to make that many silicon panels, but perovskites are progressing (and they get up to 8-10hrs of peak sun in ideal conditions rather than 5-8), and you don't need to make it back into the exact molecule it was and put it precisely wherd you got it.
If you'd done the math you'd notice that includes capacity factors.
The numbers work with orders of magnitude less energy.
It's hard and expensive. But the main impedements are that it doesn't make anyone rich and idiots blindly asserting it doesn't work with no evidence.
Fossil fuels are a tiny remnant of CO2 that was fixed to solid and liquid form by plants and algae. This proves your thesis wrong immediately, so it becomes a question of quantifying the resources required and seeing if it is feasible.
The answer is we don't know. It is certainly less than the effort and resources we spend on war, but maybe not something achievable.
It isn't condescension. Is it no longer OK these days to suggest someone might not understand something? Must it always be a personal attack when someone disagrees with you?
> you utter muppet
Wow. Questions answered.
My guess is, if we were having this discussion in person you would resort to physical violence.
How sad.
The absolute lack of tolerance and violent nature of today's cult-like attachment to ideas and ideology make me think of the kind of people who threw someone like Galileo in prison (house arrest) for the rest of his life for daring to suggest they were wrong.
This is what we've come to. Full circle. The mobs win. Nobody can dare disagree with them. Because they are right. Always. And they will resort to violence and ruin your life if you dare exist outside the accepted line of thinking. This is a modern tragedy of untold proportions.
And, BTW, after all of this, neither you nor anyone else can point to a a proposed solutions that provides a full honest accounting of timeline, energy and fuel requirements, materials, resources, emissions/pollutants produced, support, maintenance and ecological impact AT A PLANETARY SCALE. These are supernatural claims without any attempt to actually prove or justify what is being claimed. You believe what you believe because you believe what you believe and everyone else be damned.
Bravo.
You talk about building a thousand square kilometers of solar without bothering to do any reality-check calculations, even at the most basic level. For example, you'll have to replace a thousand square kilometers of solar panels every 15 to 20 years. Same goes for the batteries. And the computers. And the electronics. Etc. One wave of the hand, Thanos snaps his fingers and a thousand kilometers of solar panels appear to save the planet with absolutely no negative consequences at all for a hundred years.
Conversation over.
Live long and prosper.
What I'm getting from this is you're just a concern troll with no interest in matching your ideas to reality.
More personal attacks. A typical tool of last resort when people who do not relish the idea of being wrong simply cannot face being challenged.
Someone making supernatural claims has the burden of proof. Reducing atmospheric CO2 faster than about 100 ppm per 100K years (or 1 ppm per thousand years) is a supernatural claim. This is an indisputable matter of evidence borne from nearly a million years of atmospheric ice core sample data. This data is as accurate and reliable as can be. And it says something brutally simple: The natural rate of change is about 1 ppm per thousand years.
Any proposal claiming the ability to affect change at a faster rate is, by definition, supernatural. And, as such, carries the burden of proof.
We have people claiming to be able to drop 100 ppm in 30 years, fully 3000 times faster than the natural rate. If there's anything that is preposterous, that is it.
I am still waiting for you, or anyone else, to publish a link to a peer-reviewed/verified proposal that includes a full accounting of energy, resources and the myriad components that should be accounted for if one were to honestly want to evaluate proposals. And, of course, at a planetary scale, not a laboratory table or simulator.
If such a thing existed it would be published, known and promoted all over the world. We would be talking about that instead of me trying to help you understand how it is the emperor has no clothes and you can't see it.
Still waiting. I can ignore the insults. They mean nothing to me and say volumes about your position. In fact, they say your position has no support at all in reality, otherwise you would present reality instead. It's much easier. If it exists.
The best way to shut me up and put me in my place is to post the kind of information that would do precisely that. The problem is, you can't, because it does not exist. And it does not exist because an honest evaluation of the many so-called solutions would fail the most fundamental of physics tests.
I am truly sorry your only outlet is to post insults. Having facts on your side would be far a more powerful and effective way to show them them they are wrong. It's sad. Really.
Like I said. Still waiting. Anyone?
Good day.
Almost certainly that will already be the optimum solution, or evolution would probably have found a better one by now.
What we need are ocean based limestone creating factories. That's the solution nature uses.
How does limestone form?
There are plenty of easy solutions to climate change, but none of them are fast.
For a simple example, it's usually assumed that installation of 1kW of solar power costs $1000 (of which $200 goes into the panel). Well located, it'll produce at least 5kWh per day over its lifespan of about 20 years. This would produce you power at 1/3 the rate quoted by the article. But, if you were installing thousands of such things, the labour would likely go down a huge amount, and the panels would, too. Imagine the panel costs the same and the labour costs $400 instead of $800. You'd suddenly be at about $0.01-0.02 per kWh.
Let's take this further. Imagine you laid down a 100km/100km area with solar panels - every inch, and somehow you could feed that into your CO2 vacuum cleaner. This would cost you about $50B/year to build and then maintain, but after 20 years you'd have a (average) 2TW power station.
Let's say that sounded like too much work, and you wanted to go nuclear instead. It's claimed a new nuclear power station costs about $5k per kilowatt. That would cost a _lot_ more to build - $160B per year of expenditure to build up over 60 years and not 20 - but the result is the same, you'd have a 2TW power station. Arguably with a nuclear power station, if you were building a really big one, you'd use the same designs and it'd get much cheaper as a consequence.
According to the calculations in the article, that would be enough (with the carbon vacuum cleaner) to suck up about 1.5 megatonnes of CO2 per hour, or roughly the same amount as the US produces each year.
It'd be a frighteningly complex project, but at least the cost in terms of power alone comes out cheaper than covid or the Ukraine war, right?
Won't you -please- have some consideration for Pfizer and Lockeed Martin? :(
Financially the process might create real returns. Thermodynamically, however, it's still a losing game. It's costing you more in energy to remove the carbon than you gain energetically by creating it in the first place.
Isn't this also true of mining gold and everything else? Doesn't it cost you more in energy to work for a living than it does to not work and live in poverty?
Atmospheric carbon is not gold, of course, but neither is intrinsically valuable. But assuming we could somehow identify the source of the carbon and foil carbon counterfeiters that try to pass coal off as atmospheric carbon, if all currency-issuing authorities and all world governments arbitrarily name atmospheric carbon valuable and exchangeable with currency such that the value of the currency trade is more than it costs to extract the carbon, even with thin margins, if the margins are arbitrarily made to exist, that's the ballgame: we have a rush on atmospheric carbon, and everyone and their brother is trying to get rich quick extracting carbon from the atmosphere.
Though it would be simpler all around to tax the living hell out of carbon producers... tax them into extinction. The market and society will adjust to not having concrete, glass, shipping, ice vehicles, etc. But this can't happen in the US until we rescue our country being held hostage by the conservative minority.
Unfortunately we need to settle with debts outstanding.
I read versions of this argument all the time. What I find amazing about it is that proponents dismiss conservation of energy without realizing that without it, there would be nothing to talk about.
CoE is at the CORE of global warming and is THE relevant scientific principle that rules it.
Why?
Earth could be thought of as an isolated system in space. Energy-in, energy-out.
If the planet emits less energy than it receives, it gets hot.
If the planet emits more energy than it receives, it freezes.
Everything we are talking about has to do with the principle of conservation of energy and its application at a planetary level.
If, for example, we somehow capture 20% more of the solar energy we receive on the surface and do not return it to space, we will cook ourselves. In other words, any so-called solution that seeks to transform solar energy into magical beans to precipitate CO2 from the atmosphere has provide solid accounting of how it will affect energy balance. After all, a CO2 reduction solution isn't so unless it can operate at a planetary scale. And, because of that, it will require an astronomical amount of energy and matter to work.
Something --anything-- of that scale that is claimed to work in decades, rather than tens of thousands of years, will require energy and matter at probably an unimaginable scale (is that larger than astronomical?). This places it between impossible and fucking dangerous.
At one end of the scale we just can't pull it off, end-up causing more damage and pollution than we ever imagined and waste decades and resources that could have been put to good use.
At the other end of the scale we deploy something that might kill half (or more) the life on earth, permanently damage ecosystems, food supplies, weather and more.
Do nothing, then?
No.
Just don't do stupid.
Trees and algae did it once. We can do it again with PVs which are 10-20x as efficient as photosynthesis.
Also you're conflating renewable energy and geoengineering. Stopping the output is a much more tractable problem than gathering CO2 and doing something with it at 500ppm. For the former, you only need to pull a few economic levers, make some very rich people very angry, and current technology makes new fossil fuel extraction very difficult.
For the latter, we have the technology, and the costs are even small compared to the amount of public money spent on suppressing prices of fossil fuels (a couple trillion would cover the energy, and a few trillion for sabatier reactors is small compared to just the most recent gulf wars) but the political problem is probably intractable under capitalism.
More realistically geoengineering will likely take a less energy intensive form like high altitude sulfate seeding and have major 'unforseen' consequences that hurt people outside the global north.
Here's one:
Use sunlight for everything, get rid of 90% of private automobiles and reduce the amount of energy the global north uses by about half.
Stop funding fossil fuels and car infrastructure with taxpayer money and it'll happen on its own.
I'm always amazed at literally any city in Australia. Zero focus on bikes. And hell electric skateboards and scooters are against the law in most states.
The proportion of wankers in any other mode is just as high (except maybe transit which is lower and escooters after 10pm which is 100%)
Just like everything else. Sounds great, until the physics test is applied. Then it’s in a range between “good try” and nonsense.
If by some miracle we convinced everyone to be sane and do it, where does it fall down as a solution to GHG?