Show HN: An API for CO₂ Removal | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An API for CO₂ Removal

docs.cdrplatform.com

94 pointskisamoto96 comments

Hi all,

We're Fabienne and Ewan of Climacrux. Today we're proud to launch our latest project to try and make carbon dioxide removal as accessible as possible: CDR Platform [1].

In short: it’s an API to connect to a portfolio of carbon removers. You can purchase from as low as a single gram and select from both natural and technological removal methods.

Longer: A couple of years ago we launched an alternative to carbon credits, Carbon Removed[2], designed for individuals to buy and subscribe to CDR. But we always had the nagging thought that there was more that could be done.

CDR Platform is our foundation for that - a simple API to get prices and purchase (at the moment). Our plan is to become the Stripe of the carbon removal ecosystem, seamlessly connecting the supply to the demand.

We’d love to hear your feedback. Do you see a use case for this and would you use it? What features have we missed? Do you understand what we’re doing and if not, what’s unclear? We’d love to hear from you.[3]

Many thanks and happy hacking, Climacrux.

P.s. If you are a carbon remover, send us your prices, life cycle analysis and some more information about your removal timeline. Our aim is to bring your services to a wider audience so you can focus on reducing our CO₂ levels. Thanks for your work!

[1] https://docs.cdrplatform.com

[2] https://carbonremoved.com

[3] ewan@climacrux.com

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The more negligent and incompetent methane emissions become, the more carbon credits will be devalued.

Do you consider methane leaks as a 10 year investment plan? There is no tracing where the co2 came from once ch4 turns into co2 (we've had methane leaks for decades). :)

https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/gwp-star-better-way-mea...

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/MethaneMatters

https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/estimates-metha...

The opportunities for fraud have already been proven.

There is no money (gdp) in preventing methane leaks and we get the upside of higher temperatures and carbon credit manipulation.

Carbon credits schemes profit from neglect. The "save the world types" just chased co2......

If I'm reading your comment correctly, you may not be aware that methane abatement is also eligible for carbon crediting programs, which operate under the framework of "global warming potential" (GWP) to translate different gases into "CO2-equivalent tons" (tCO2e).

I put the comment in-between the lines :)

https://apnews.com/article/inflation-science-technology-gove...

I'm actually not a climate change warrior either, I just read a lot ;)

I took a look at the website front page, but I couldn't see how CO2 is removed.

Does the money go to planting trees? Lab diamonds? Coal buyback?

I love the idea of offsetting my intensive compute use. But I'd like to know who is doing the removal and how they're doing it.

Good idea to have it on the front page.

We do have more info on our partners and the relevant removal methods in the other docs[1] but I'll add some info to the homepage to make that clearer, faster. Thanks for the suggestion.

[1] https://docs.cdrplatform.com/docs/removal-partner

this[0] is one of the more interesting approaches I've seen. No idea if it's "safe", but seems logical.

0 - https://charmindustrial.com/

For the "How?" you need to click through to the "Removal partner" page that lists the companies that actually do the sequestration.

https://docs.cdrplatform.com/docs/removal-partner

This is awesome! I can't believe all of the negative comments about lowering the barrier to do something this important. We only have one earth, it is priceless because we cannot live without it, and we are really messing it up with massive amounts of CO2. It really doesn't matter much how expensive, difficult, or inefficient removing the CO2 is... it must be done, we have no other choice. Like any tech, it will get better over time when more and more money goes into it.

"It has to be done" isn't helped by "throwing money at schemes that don't do what they claim to do on the tin." Especially when, by people doing that, they feel that they've "solved the problem" and can go on consuming as they have been.

To a certain group of people, "carbon offsets" are more or less the old church "indulgences" - permission to {sin, emit} with the consequences covered. And if that money is doing nothing but enriching some people in the middle while not actually doing anything useful ("We'll not cut down this forest... that we we weren't planning to cut down anyway", or "Sure, we'll protect this land... and go clearcut the next mile over because we don't care where the ranch goes"), it's worse than nothing - because you've now "granted permission to emit" while not actually offsetting anything.

That's not how it should be, but it's certainly how a lot of people perceive it to be. "Oh, it's fine, it's carbon neutral, I have an offset subscription" vs having to actually face that their carbon emissions aren't being offset.

So I don't think it's fair to say that people asking questions about "Is the money being paid doing what it's supposed to actually do?" are pro-carbon or something. There's a lot of outright fraud in that space, and an API that smooths the friction of larger fraud isn't something useful. If you're going the wrong way to your stated destination, going that wrong way faster isn't helpful.

Now, can I have all your surplus money to put into solar farms somewhere? Don't ask if they're in coal heavy territory or somewhere with a bunch of nuclear /hydro, it doesn't matter, right? We have to do everything we possibly can!

... except the one thing that would make a difference, which is consume radically less.

I don't understand how this criticism applies to OPs service. Why do you think the emissions aren't really truly being offset?

It looks like they provide 5 different CO2 capture services through different partners, and the projects methods and details are widely available. You can choose any desired ratio of the 5. Of these 5, 4 of them seem to be methods that, for a cost, directly and physically remove a known quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere. Only one, Forestation, seems to be potentially prone to the type of ambiguities you mention, where the intended impact never actually occurs, but this depends on if it's actually being done properly. The partner they are using is onetreeplanted, which seems to be endorsed by or partnered with a lot of credible environmental organizations.

Minor correction in that our primary forestation partner is Eden Forestation (although we have used OneTreePlanted in the past) but everything else you mention is accurate - thanks!

Your main website links to OneTreePlanted on the page https://carbonremoved.com/carbon-removal-projects/reforestat...

Unfortunately, it's very likely that those technologies will never be able to remove a significant amount of CO2 from the atmosphere.

It seems to be more and more appearing that the problem is that we consume too much energy. And so the solution is to do less, not more.

Are you saying I can't just log into this API and spend $15 * 34810000000000/25 = $20 * 10^12 (e.g. 20 trillion dollars) each year to get all of the planets annual carbon emissions back into the ground as bio-oil?

I kind-of did that calculation as a joke, but the result is actually fascinating to me... that's only about ~20% of global GDP. I expected it to be an impossibly large number, but it's not, e.g. about 10x as much as is spent currently on warfare and military globally.

You sound like it is obvious to you, but those two points are generally not accepted yet:

* CO2 emissions are linked to GDP. Lowering one means lowering the other. * We can't magically absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.

Neither of those statements relate to what I was saying. My point is that humanity is wealthy enough to remove our current co2 production rate from the atmosphere, with current technology, if it were very important to us. Reducing consumption and improving the technology would likely make this much cheaper, but aren’t strictly necessary.

For example, the calculation above shows globally removing our current rate of CO2 production using one of the more expensive technologies behind this service would still be only about half as expensive as WWII was for the USA in terms of fraction of GDP. Expensive, sure, but clearly not impossible. If we were really "at war" with the climate change problem, it would be still cheaper than an actual war.

Except that it is not just about money. Say you invent a machine that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. How do you build it? With energy, and in the foreseeable future, out of mostly fossil energy, which emits CO2 (you need machines to extract the material needed for that thing, machines to transform those, trucks to move everything around, energy to make the machine run, energy to maintain it, etc). So you emit CO2 to create, run and maintain a machine that will try to pull it out of the atmosphere.

Good luck with that.

What they are selling is the net co2. It’s fine to emit a small amount of co2 to extract a larger amount.

> It’s fine to emit a small amount of co2 to extract a larger amount.

No it is not.

Simple example: if you need 1000 times the remaining fossil fuel on Earth to extract the CO2 needed to "save the climate", then by definition you simply don't have remotely enough energy on Earth to do it, so your system is not only not viable, but it's counter-productive because it is using some of that remaining fossil fuel for almost nothing.

Thanks a lot for your praise. We are early stage and releasing something new (and slightly controversial) but it's really encouraging and motivating to us to see others who share a similar opinion.

We look forward to crossing paths again on the journey to a sustainable future :)

Great idea, wishing you luck!

While carbon removal today is inefficient, it's not set in stone to always be that way. For example, olivine is super interesting - one of the most abundant minerals on earth - it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere passively when ground down into small pieces. The Cascade Mtns in Washington state are full of the stuff and not far from the beach. The ocean grinds rocks into sand all day with zero carbon costs. With the right combination of luck and strategy, I don't see why some forms of carbon removal can't eventually be extremely cheap. It might be the greenest thing we can do to literally turn our beaches green!

This is nice for folks like me who make business SaaS so we can add a nice line item "removes some carbon!" to the checkout list. I know to some, that's probably disgusting and cynical, but I strongly prefer surrounding myself with optimists, so, it works for me!

Thanks a lot - it's really motivating to read comments like this that align perfectly with what we're trying to achieve.

If you'd like to try us out, need help or just want to chat sustainability my direct email is in the OP and I'd be happy to hear from you :)

Hi Ewan, Fabienne. I have been following since a while (Ewan, we exchanged some emails at some points).

This API is great. Somehow I forgot to comment a week ago.

Some feedback.

It's clear it's an API/Github project, but it's not clear how to get an account. It feels like I arrived to Stripe's docs, but without a path to go to the Stripe page where I can get an account.

The fixed fee makes it feel less Stripe-ish, less like an infrastructure that just "works" (like tap water) and then the user needs to time the system, instead of simply use it without friction. (I'm guessing this if because you're starting).

More clarity, maybe a sample on the certificates.

A video, gifs, illustrations on the homepage would be great.

But this is great, and I know how difficult is to push something like this. I will continue to see you grow. Congrats on the launch.

Personally I'd care about the quality of the schemes before learning the exact API. I had to navigate around to find some partial information, it would be nice to see a table of the schemes, their attributes, and their cost.

Personally I don't like the inclusion of tree planting schemes and that greensand scheme because as long as unmeasurable and uncertain schemes like that are selling low cost credits there is not going to be a market for carbon removal, just a lot of corporations running ads congratulating themselves for being "net zero" while the planet burns.

Yup, will make the methods more present on the homepage so you don't have to click around.

I understand your hesitation on tree planting and mineralization however it is optional if you choose to purchase these methods. Others prefer the more nature-based CO2 removal.

We do value the quality of the schemes, only picking removal over dubious credits but we will aim to put more emphasis on this.

I think this is the crux of the argument. API is great in concept but validating and verifying the underlying technology that is claiming CO2e reductions is by far the bigger and harder problem.

Sorry if I'm being harsh here but its similar CO2e platform accounting companies -- theres a million of those and its low cost low effort low return for actual benefits (just putting money in the pockets of the middle men).

I don't see how something like this is beneficial unless its essentially sending hot leads to technologies.

First - we are happy you like the concept and we do agree with you. Validating and verifying is difficult at the moment. Partly because there are a lot of questionable schemes out there and partly because carbon removal as a concept is very much in its infancy. Our approach is to inspect the life cycle analysis of our partners wherever possible and try to provide as much transparency as possible - delivery times, pricing structures, purchases from partners for independent verification etc. Trust has to be earned and we hope transparency can help build trust in us and the CDR market in general.

Second - it was on our original roadmap to try and bring in a standard for removals however as a for-profit this was generally received poorly. We fully support some form of indepedent third party validation for carbon removal that addresses the flaws in the existing credits system but I'm afraid this isn't our primary priority at the moment. Perhaps we could form a non-profit sister to address this in the future though...

There have carbon registries that aren't for profit that have been in existence over a decade. The verification and validation is by far the lion's share of work, the rest of it is a lookup table with broad proxies for valuations.

FWIW the verification and validation requires a lot of onsite work and training of staff to be able to do the work. All the different technologies have slightly different project arrangements making it a head ache and not particularly suited for a capital light software play.

As well you will need a team of analysts to constantly try and find the information and repopulate the database.

That and I'm not sure who your target buyer would be.

I do wish you the best of luck. I assume that there will only be one or two people who will survive and I imagine they will be bought by some other company in the end.

Go look at Genability for electricity pricing as a comparative company.

Yeah sad but true can confirm as a tree planter that has put more than 300,000 trees into the ground the last three years it is a carbon positive endeavour

wow - impressive work!

Curious about the carbon positive aspect of this though? Where to the emissions come from? Are the trees your planting for fuel or something else?

This seems like a really cool idea! Making it easy to do good is almost always a wise choice.

Personally, up until now I've been subscribed to Wren to offset some of my personal CO2 footprint and get a little bit more educated about climate adjacent topics: https://www.wren.co/

It's not really something you'd use in an automated fashion, but rather a yearly subscription, so not comparable against the solution in the post 1:1, but it still might be of interest to some.

Of course, one can also talk about the impact of personal decisions vs those of corporations and the need for legislation and so on, but I'll take what's achievable for me, even if I do a little good.

Thanks for the praise - we appreciate it.

We know Wren and in fact have a similar project for carbon removal called "Carbon Removed"[1]. We love the idea of a subscription to remove your footprint or even just a one-time removal to compensate for a long-distance flight.

On the conversation of personal versus corporations - we agree that a system/societal change is required but believe this will only with all of us beginning to change our ways and have these conversations with our networks. Society is made up of individuals after all :)

Thanks to you for contributing to a sustainable future.

[1] https://carbonremoved.com

Don’t listen to the naysaying, it’s a cool idea, thanks I’ll be looking forward to using it.

Thank you so much!

We know that carbon removal (and climate change in general) is a controversial topic so we really appreciate your kind words.

How do you verify that the removal is done correctly / accurately? Is that based on trust with the partner doing the removal?

The market for carbon offsets isn't really regulated and the partner registries aren't accountable to anyone nor does anything prevent you from making one yourself. Needless to say they aren't exactly what you'd call reliable. Half the time you're paying someone with a golf course to not chop down trees that they weren't going to remove anyway.

There is a fundamental conflict of interest with this as most corporations are trying to buy as many offsets for as little of an investment as possible to present themselves as net zero, so whoever is good at marketing and manages to provide a better (and likely impossible) ratio of offset/pay will get most business. As such it's a feedback loop that rewards competent scammers and cuts out fair parties for being uncompetitive.

Without proof that you can see for yourself as to where the funding is used and what the actual physical results are I wouldn't trust anything. Perhaps that's something that OP can provide.

Reduce energy usage to reduce CO2. That means reduce internet calls, and reduce CPU utilization to do the thing.

Strip the tracking crap out of your app.

Reduce/eliminate all but the absolutely necessary API calls required.

edit: To be honest, anything that causes bloat is what pushes the "get rid of current device and get newer device". And it's not 1 app, but dozens over bad upgrades and bad features, tracking, monetization, etc.

I don't just think of the CO2. I also think of all the industrial e-waste in silicon chip making, and the fact that their cradle-to-grave cycle is a "local landfill".

It's a good point. We want to do a real deep dive into the emissions involved in all our products and do keep an eye on both our personal and service emissions.

Tracking is mostly for fast error identification at this early stage and because we're looking to (dis-)prove this as an opportunity.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Side note: A good read to put the 'value' of carbon dioxide into perspective is 'How Bad are Bananas' by Mike Berners Lee. He tries to give the same 'gut feeling' to carbon as we have with money (e.g. Champagne is more expensive than soda).

I wonder how many tons of CO2 were spent on the mid-term election cycle and associated media production / political tours / rallys / communications / junk mail / spam texts / ad campaigns.

> ...and the fact that their cradle-to-grave cycle is a "local landfill".

If only. :( Open air pits in third world countries where the equipment is burned to recover the trace valuable elements from the ash is, sadly, a lot more likely.

> Reduce energy usage to reduce CO2. That means reduce internet calls, and reduce CPU utilization to do the thing.

This is an interesting way of thinking! On one hand, all of my homelab servers now run on old AMD Athlon 200GE CPUs that would otherwise be considered e-waste in the eyes of some, but now run at 35W TDP and are enough for all of my CI/backup/development needs, in addition to being a cheap x86 option.

To me, it feels like drawing 100W from the wall might be a reasonably energy efficient option, since I don't care as much about uptime (servers can sleep every night when I do), redundancy or failover (apart from additional HDDs for data and backups), cooling (they're all passively cooled with heatsinks, slightly warm up the house in the winter) or other things you'd expect in a data center.

That said, this line of reasoning also implies that many languages would go out the window, if we talk about the back end: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_ef... (or an article: https://medium.com/codex/what-are-the-greenest-programming-l...)

Python would go out the window. Ruby would go out the window. Same for something like Lua and PHP, maybe even TypeScript in the back end.

You'd essentially have to use C, C++ or Rust. Maybe something like Java, C#, Go or JavaScript for your back end (or some of the other more energy efficient languages, just listed some of the more popular options here).

I think that makes sense at larger scales (hundreds or thousands of instances, or more) instead of your small CRUD app, where you just want to iterate quickly and write code that's simple. Then again, Wirth's law should also not be forgotten about and it's hard for me to reason about the CO2 impact of big tech vs the collective impact of small projects.

And then there's something like comparing how much energy crypto used vs data centers.

Bitcoin: approx. 127 TWh/year (source: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/bitc...)

EU data centers: approx. 77 TWh/year (source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/energy-effi...)

If nothing else, it's curious to see the numbers.

>> Reduce energy usage to reduce CO2. That means reduce internet calls, and reduce CPU utilization to do the thing.

> This is an interesting way of thinking! On one hand, all of my homelab servers now run on old AMD Athlon 200GE CPUs that would otherwise be considered e-waste in the eyes of some, but now run at 35W TDP and are enough for all of my CI/backup/development needs, in addition to being a cheap x86 option.

Precisely! You're using them, and following the 4 R's : reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Not sending stuff to the scrapyard or landfill is always laudable.

I'm also wary and careful in not doing the bad environmentalist trope, by blaming the individual for small things when we have massive things that could be greatly scaled down. It's like in California, where people are being heckled in taking too long showers, all the while farmers there are trying to grow wetland foods and trees in the desert! It's literally dozens of gallons vs acre-feet of water.

I recently read that XCode 14 is bloating all iPhone packages compiled with that. It's stuff like that I'm looking at first, since that contributes to manufactured obsolescence due to bloated storage reqt and wasteful uneeded code. Its those things at massive scale I'm looking at.

$5/tonne for forestation? I did the numbers - some time ago so my memory is hazy at best - but I'm pretty sure we ended up at one big tree being roughly one tonne of carbon, and big trees are not five dollars a pop. Have we not included the cost of the land?

Forestation can be quite controversial so we err very heavily on the safe side. Our calculation is on the site[1] but I'll copy it here for clarity as well:

    * We use an average CO₂ sequestration rate of 10.875kg of CO₂/tree/year.
    * We only take the first 5 years of the trees' carbon sequestration into account. What gets sequestered after this is a gift to our planet and we don’t sell that.
    * To mitigate chances of loss due to disease or fires we double plant (meaning we buy double the number of trees that we need to).

Therefore for every two trees we purchase we assign a removal value of 54.375kg (10.875kg * 5 years).

For one tonne of carbon that is (1000kg / 54.375kg) * 2 trees = 37 trees (rounded). At $0.15 per tree that's $5.5.

[1] https://docs.cdrplatform.com/docs/removal-method#forestation

I think there is a place for frontier carbon removals, but I agree with other commenters that it's not as effective as some of the (much much cheaper) solutions that we already have.

There's nothing wrong with incentivising carbon avoidance, deforestation etc while also keeping an eye on burgeoning solutions.

Another caution is that most removals are selling you forwards, not credits. So you can't actually claim you are offsetting your carbon today.

Full disclosure, I work for Fenix Carbon (www.fenixcarbon.com) where we're specifically focusing on high quality offsets and connecting buyers directly to the project developers.

Your docs mention biochar but your main site and pricing don't.

Also, everything seems to be phrased-for/aimed-at the buyer, do you intend to be a marketplace or to only work with some upstream supplier?

[edit: nvm I found the 'removal partner' page. let me put it differently then: if i went and bought 100 acres, grew hemp or something on it, ran it through a giant biochar retort, and buried the resulting biochar >20cm deep... what would you give me for a ton?]

We're in talk with a couple of bio-char partners yet but I'm afraid you can't purchase it yet because we don't have one onboarded.

It's mentioned as we see it as a meaningful removal method (and will hopefully have a partner soon!).

At this stage our vision is primarily buyer focused to spread CDR integrations. We work directly with verified suppliers with the aim to help the buyer bring carbon removal to their business and their customers.

In future this could evolve into a marketplace however we'd need to ensure the quality (permanence, additionality etc.) of the suppliers.

I wonder what the carbon cost of generating the certificates and sending/emailing them is?

We're working on that with the end goal of using our own API to remove the carbon footprint of them.

Plus for customers where it's not relevant we'll offer a fully on-demand model where nothing is sent but available for generation through the customer account.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Remove!

Yup - in that order!

I've grown increasingly skeptical of carbon removal. It strikes me as incredibly inefficient; there are much easier and cheaper gains to be made by no longer removing carbon from the ground in the first place.

Further: The Carbon Removed website claims that carbon is "permanently" removed from the atmosphere, and yet lists some of the carbon removal sources as "reforestation." This doesn't add up. Forests are part of the carbon cycle, and not a way to "permanently remove" carbon from the atmosphere.

Overall, I very much doubt that our society will do enough to stop climate change from drastically changing our planet. I wish that I saw initiatives like this as a source of hope, but don't see much, if any evidence to support such hope.

Given the existing headwinds I am skeptical we can make any progress without removal. The problems are a two hit combo of political will and technical limitations.

Carbon removal is definitely not mututally exclusive to reducing emissions in the first place. Avoiding emissions is cheaper and easier than removing them. But realistically we can't stop emitting tomorrow and even if we could, we have an excess of emissions in the atmosphere to address.

As for hope, it's a mixed message. On one hand we have more emissions than ever. On the other we have more awareness and action than ever. Personally I lean towards hope and want to give it as much of a chance as possible.

We see net-zero as a bridge to a more sustainable future. Reduce emissions and remove the unavoidable.

There is only one way to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, and that's to launch it off the earth and onto a path where it could never make it back. Everything else will store carbon for a while, before eventually releasing it again

A forest stores lots of carbon while it exists - there's cycles of trees dying and releasing carbon, and new trees taking their place absorbing carbon, but there is a steady state change in terms of carbon in the trees that currently exist. The carbon is only released by deforesting the area again

There are many things between forest and space launch. If you inject the CO2 underground at a reasonable rate, you can get it to bind to rock, chemically changing that rock. It might eventually find its way back to the atmosphere, but on geological timescales. If you sink kelp to the bottom of the ocean, that also effectively sequesters it.

It’s been a bit since I did a deep dive on this (thanks AirMiners), but my understanding is that we have to get to net zero and sequester large amounts of carbon currently in the atmosphere to avoid some of the worse climate scenarios. It’s not either/or. We’re past the point where cutting to 0 in a decade or two yields acceptable outcomes. But to your point, sequestration is much more expensive than reduction, so cutting down new emissions is going to have to be the vast majority of the reduction.

And yeah, forestry credits are really fraught with problems, but they’re much, much cheaper than real sequestration, which is why stuff like this always offers them. There is some time-value of sequestration in the short term, though.

Yup, the latest IPCC report relies heavily on carbon capture in a lot of the predicted 'limitation' scenarios.

We do not see carbon removal as an excuse to continue polluting or not reduce emissions. It's a "both" situation and we go even further to say we need many different kinds of removal as there isn't a "silver bullet" that will solve decades of burning fossil fuels.

These will involve natural and technological methods to restore a bit of stability to the climate.

Yeah I don't buy carbon removal as a practical solution. Humanity spent over 100 years pulling concentrated carbon out of the ground as fast as we could and got a bunch of useful energy out of it. Now all that carbon we pulled out of the ground and dumped into the atmosphere is a stable trace gas. The thermodynamic hurdle to reverse what we've done is huge. The thermodynamics is not there, the economics is not there.

To be fair, we have never been more efficient at extracting carbon from the ground than now. The first 150 years we were terrible compared to today.

30 more years at this rate will double our total CO2 emissions.

We've already created a problem, but a small one compared to what will happen if we don't stop soon.

On the flip side, we're just starting the 100 years now trying to extract carbon dioxide out of the air as fast as we can to get a livable planet out of it.

Granted we (as a species) have huge challenges ahead of us, but with collective effort it could be possible.

Our CO2 output is increasing. Under the world's current political/economic regime, we can't keep our CO2 output stable, let alone decrease it. If we lack the seriousness to do that, we definitely lack the ability to do the much harder task of removing what we've already put there.

Keep in mind that the energy expended in C02 sequestration is concentration. It's easily soluble in water when injected and then is reactive to produce mineral precipitates. And that's only the geologic sequestration. There are multiple approaches, both biological, engineered, and geologic. Either way, the hard part is going from dispersed to concentrated in most cases (or for the biologic cases, actually keeping the result in the biosphere and not decaying into the atmosphere).

You don't need to reverse the combustion reaction.

You don't have to spend anywhere near as much energy as you gained from combustion to sequester it. You're not turning it back into bare carbon or into a hydrocarbon.

You're breaking hydrogen - carbon bonds to gain energy during combustion. You're then sequestering C02 -- you don't need to chemically alter the C02. You do need to concentrate it, but in terms of thermodynamics, you get a large amount of energy from combustion and it takes less than that to concentrate the combustion products.

In principle (but often not reality to the practicalities of concentrating a dispersed gas) combustion and then sequestration can be energy positive overall. The thermodynamics isn't quite what folks often assume.

I suspect that the end goal with this carbon credits scheme is almost entirely control and surveillance. The effectiveness of the stated intent doesn't matter from that perspective. Once the system is in place, then it is gradually expanded to the individual level and someone has to keep tabs on everyone's credit balances after all. Think KYC but for everything but a bit worse. Good luck ;)

You may see a tree as an ephemeral carbon storage, but the forest is a much, much long term storage, that can be considered permanent (unless catastrophic fire).

The forest, at each time point, contains many trees, growing ones, dying ones, decomposing ones, seeds, etc. But its overall solid carbon mass is strictly positive and larger than, say, a meadow, and if you have the right conditions it can be slowly growing year after year.

So planting trees is a way to store carbon, just not to be thought at the tree scale, more like at the forest scale.

Edit: a lot of carbon is stored in the soil, too, especially in the thick humus of a healthy forest. Even if each individual component of the humus is decaying, disappearing and replaced by new fallen leaves etc, the humus layer itself is not going anywhere.

Carbon capture isn't real (as advertised). If you take green energy out of the supply to capture carbon, a carbon producing power plant will have to make up for it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJslrTT-Yhc

Yes, we need to decarbonize.

But that doesn't mean we can't also try to accelerate the removal of carbon from our atmosphere.

Eventually, sure - but in the short term, carbon removal is an inefficient way of allocating resources.

But we have to allocate some resources to start the development process now (and hopefully make it more efficient and effective).

You have a machine that if you turn it on, it removes carbon from the air. But, to power it you release a greater amount of carbon into the air.

Should you turn on the machine? No, you should leave it off.

Only when your power sources are green should you turn on the machine.

The machines must result in more capture & storage than they produce - net negative emissions.

For example, using a machine to heat waste biomass with fast pyrolysis turns the biomass into bio-oil. Bio-oil can then be pumped underground resulting in long-term, stable storage. The machine produced far fewer emissions than were captured naturally by the plants.

No, carbon capture powered by fossil fuels releases less carbon than it captures. For direct air capture, it takes somewhere around 2,000 kWh to capture a ton of CO2 [1]. You can generate those 2,000 kWh using natural gas and release about 0.4 tons of CO2 (about 0.8 if you use coal). [2] You can be even more efficient by burning natural gas in the sorbent re-generator (avoiding inefficiencies of power generation and transmission).

[1]: https://www.wri.org/insights/direct-air-capture-resource-con...

[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-...

Out of curiosity, do those figures account for the carbon released during manufacture of the carbon-capture and power-generation equipment you're using? Do they include the carbon emissions of extracting, refining, and delivering the fuels, as well as the emissions from actually using them?

There have been some detalied life-cycle analysis of certain carbon capture methods/plants. As one of the most famous (& funded), Climeworks have had a third party study published to break this down[1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00771-9

They don't, that's just my napkin math.

Why? Carbon is awesome. Life is made out of it. I want more.

This is only potentially true up to the point where you reach 100% energy generation using zero emission sources.

You can run carbon capture by burning natural gas and still capture more carbon than you release because compressed CO2 + H2O is a lower energy state than O2 + hydrocarbon compounds.

Wow, interesting

Is this true? Sounds exciting if so.

It's true in a naive sense but the natural gas must also be extracted, refined, transported and the infrastructure to convert it into electricity and to perform the carbon capture must be built.

So yes carbon capture using fossil fuels isn't outright impossible because of physics, but practically speaking it's not real because the rest of the chain lowers the already marginal efficiency.

It's not really marginal efficiency. It's ~60% efficiency for a natural gas system, higher for a system with point-source capture on that natural gas. I'm not sure how exactly it pans out with the inefficiency of extraction but as I understand it those are fairly minor.

That's not to say that I think DAC is a silver bullet or something - it's obviously not because the CAPEX costs are huge at the moment.

Yeah for sure, you're right that I shouldn't have said marginal as the situation wrt natural gas is decent (though that is the best case fossil fuel). It's important to be accurate about these things.

GWAAS: greenwashing as a service.

Why do you perceive carbon removal as greenwashing?

Carbon capture is not a cost-effecient use of resources. You are using fossil fuels to generate power to capture carbon.

Renewables are used whenever possible.

Even if fossil fuels are used the end result is captured carbon dioxide (net negative).

In any case it is strictly a better use of renewables to directly offset fossil fuel use for electricity, rather than allow greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, then capture it back.

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/the-amount-of...

"Removing CO2 directly from the air requires almost as many joules as those produced by burning the fossil fuel in the first place"

If it were that binary - yes. But we also need to progress the efficiency of carbon capture. As the linked article states, "economies of scale and efficiency improvements would undoubtedly help" and we can only get there by continuing to develop carbon removal methods.

As long as the technology does more harm than good, we should not see it as a solution, nor even a component of the solution.

Funding research for improving efficiency, maybe.

But the main actionable policy NOW is detecting and reducing emissions. The US still subsidizes fossil fuel.

feels like putting a bucket under a waterfall to be honest. For what it's worth, tech behind it looks kind of cool.

We need leaders around the world to move off of cheap energy (ie, oil and gas) and subsidize it for developing countries. We need strict penalties for producers and we need to get off of animal products.

Agreed that there needs to be changes on all fronts. At the moment we're really pushing for the voluntary market. It's not a mandatory regulation but there are companies and individuals who do want to do something but don't have easy access.

We're trying to make CDR as accessible as possible with the hope of the side effect of raising awareness, increasing demand and causing more people to vote for leaders who value sustainable policy.

Pure ideology

But it's worth trying.

I mean, if a consumer wants to round up to the nearest dollar on their online purchase of Tyson Frozen Pork Cutlets 8 Pcs (which most certainly has a calculable carbon footprint caused from deforestation) to plant some trees to offset that deforestation, why not?

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