We lock atmospheric carbon into stone for good | Hacker News Reader

We lock atmospheric carbon into stone for good

carbontostone.com

19 pointsPaulHoule19 comments

How has this even made it here? There is not a single hard fact to be found, e.g. how many kWh of energy do they need to capture 1kg of CO2?

Only a flashy page with absolutely no explanation of how or what they do, how effective it is, what it costs, whether they have an actual product etc. etc.

What I see is a webpage that could be made by anyone in a few hours.

One thing that's always bothered me about the olivine methods (MgSiO3 + CO2 >> MgCO3 + SiO2) is that this is the same mechanism that is postulated to destroy the biosphere (via carbon deprivation) in a few hundred million years. I'm not sure what the expectation is for re-release of the carbon on geological timescales, but it should certainly be investigated before these schemes are actually deployed.

It seems that, currently, this is an acceptable tradeoff.

Maybe the story of humanity is just a cycle of jumping from frying pans into progressively bigger fires?

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/12/cornell-startup-car...

How about not extracting it from stone in the first place? I bet that would be a lot cheaper.

Around $100 a ton people will have a strong incentive to not release CO₂ and also some of these schemes for capturing and storing it will be feasible for industrial processes which are fixed and not easily retrofitted to not involve CO₂.

That would have been nice. Now the CO2 level is high enough to do serious damage, so if we could bring it back down we'd have a healthier planet and save ourselves a lot of pain.

Fine, as long as alternatives - no, not wind and solar without storage, those are not suitable - are available. Nuclear is probably the best option with natural gas second. Start building and installing already, why wait?

Many developing nations never got around to install an extensive wired phone network and leaped directly to mobile, maybe small modular reactors can be used to make the same jump for electricity production. They need to a) become available b) at competitive prices first. So, natural gas as a good start.

A gradually increasing tax until we get out of extinction territory should allow other solutions to take over. But so far the US has only seen subsidies.

Extinction territory... please. Hyperbole like that does not help but hinder in getting alternatives to fossil fuels adopted. Neither do taxes by the way unless the proceeds of those taxes are directly used to develop or stimulate development of really feasible alternatives. By that I do not mean pie-in-the-sky solutions, no endless series of reports on how bad we all are and how we should do penance, no politician's pet or pork barrel projects (Solyndra et al). Nope, use the proceeds to develop and initiate manufacture or small modular reactors, gravity storage where the geography allows such, etc. Funnelling the proceeds directly into the state coffers to be lapped up by politicos will have the opposite effect as it makes clear that the additional tax is nothing but a money grab just like all the others, a source to be milked until it runs dry. The state will grow due to the increased amount of "food" (i.e. tax money), careers and budgets will start to depend on those taxes and before you know it they are deemed essential to keep the state running and any incentive there was to really stop using these taxed sources will be watered down by the reality of the next budget round.

> Hyperbole

Humans have appeared roughly 300k years ago. During PETM, the Earth warmed roughly 4 degrees Celsius in 10 million years. We have warmed it 1 degree in roughly 100 years.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_sensitivity_...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temperature_reconstr...

> unless the proceeds of those taxes are directly used to develop or stimulate development of really feasible alternatives.

Those taxes can be used instead of everything else being taxed more for the same total tax burden. The Laffer curve shows the optimal taxation ratio, and taxing more than that will cause people to stop working or emigrate.

And earmarking it for developing alternatives won't reduce corruption in those alternatives. What will work is leaving alternative energy solutions relatively untaxed, because people will still need energy.

Human beings survived through the last glaciation which saw temperatures much lower than current as well as through the Holocene climatic optimum which saw higher temperatures than what is expected now. We're also quite adaptable which makes us one of the few species to be found everywhere on the planet. Whatever the climate will throw at us will be solved using the same technology which is currently used (and has been used for more than 400 years) by e.g. the Dutch to keep the sea out, by those living in warmer regions to keep the temperature down, by the Israelis to create fertile land from what was a desert and more. We'll lose a few percent in GDP growth which means we'll only be 300% richer instead of 320%. With 'we' I do not mean we here in Sweden or the west but we as a species.

On your tax theory I'd suggest to have a look at reality instead of Laffer curves. Reality shows that new taxes tend to stick around, even when they are first presented as being temporary measures. The Dutch will remember "het kwartje van Kok" - prime minister Kok's quarter - which was a "temporary" 25 cents extra tax on fuel. Kok is long gone but the tax is still there. Income tax in the USA was a temporary measure put in place by Lincoln in 1862 and was supposed to terminate in 1866. As fas as I know USofAmericans still pay this tax more than 150 years after it was supposed to be abolished. If that isn't long enough what about the UK income tax? Introduced by William Pitt the Younger as a temporary measure to meet the cost of the Napoleonic Wars it was abolished for a year in 1802 and then for longer in 1816, a year after the Battle of Waterloo after which it was reintroduced, temporarily, in 1842 by Sir Robert Peel. It still has to be renewed by parliament every year. 220 years after it was supposed to be abolished this tax is still being paid.

Also, leaving "alternative" energy sources relatively untaxed only works when those sources are available. It surely does not help to know sun and wind power are relatively untaxed when the wind and sun don't cooperate. Have a look at energy prices in Europe to get an idea of what I mean. My mother just sent me her energy (natural gas and electricity) bill, it eats up almost ⅔ of her state pension - just for natural gas and electricity. This is not just "Putin's fault", it is a direct consequence of years of utopian policies enacted by "green" politicos who insisted on closing down nuclear power in Germany without thinking of the consequences. Germany now burns Lignite ("brown coal", one of the dirtiest types of coal) again due to the lack of natural gas and the closure of their nuclear power plants.

So my answer stands, please drop the silly hyperbole around 'extinction', it does not make any sense whatsoever. The same goes for those taxes, they need to be targeted and the proceeds need to be directly used for related purposed or they'll end up like so many others, just a way to extract some money from the populace.

100 million barrels of oil are extracted each day. And to that you should add coal, and natural gas (not sure about the volumes), that was pretty much safe underground.

And most carbon capture proposals are meant to keep extracting as much as now or even more buried carbon, while somewhat "compensating" by some long term capture, that always end on not being for so long (i.e. trees, that release it back following the carbon cycle) or taking too long or require a lot of energy or whatever that will not be paid anyway. What matters is to keep making profit releasing new carbon to the cycle.

And it is getting too late for doing something meaningful. The carbon we already released today will be in up there for another century at least. And feedback loops are starting to catch up with their own new emissions (like permafrost thawing or more emissions from wetlands and similar), and adding more heating (i.e. less ice=> less albedo => more heat absorption)

Feels almost too good to be true, but I like the potential synergies.

Here is a blog post by the founder

https://medium.com/@sgadikota/building-a-circular-carbon-eco...

with the line "there will be continuous downward pressure on the price of a ton of captured carbon" which is the #1 problem in this field which is that carbon capture is dominated by nature-based solutions which appear to be low cost, but aren't verifiable and often violate common sense (you spend 4 hours on a flight, a patch of forest has to be preserved forever)

The focus on reuse of alkaline waste is shared with other areas of green materials such as geopolymers.

Ah, the old classic "we have amazing tech, but no we won't tell you how it works or show you it working".

What is the deal with the huge banner that says "In Partnership with Shopify and Stripe"?

Didn't they do that with Han Solo a long time ago?

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