Carbon Capture Facility in World Creates 25x More CO2 from Use of Product | Hacker News Reader

Carbon Capture Facility in World Creates 25x More CO2 from Use of Product

cleantechnica.com

52 pointsrobomartin69 comments

Caption on the illustration:

> ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic cutaway illustration you requested, showing the system that extracts natural gas from beneath the North Sea, the CO2 removal process, and the CO2 injection into a subsea salt brine cavern.

How useful is this illustration?

It’s anti-information really. It distracts the brain and prevents us from better imagining the real facility, or let’s the author imagine they’ve done work instead of actually finding a suitable photo of the facility.

Reminds me of the images on this article from last year, which when they were first posted didn’t even have the clarifying captions they have now: https://newatlas.com/lifestyle/powdered-beer/

AI is just the next step of the worthless newspaper illustration, before that they used stock images. They know people are more likely to stay on an article which has images so they invent some even if it doesn't make sense.

Not useful, but artistic in nature. A number of magazines used to have illustrators do something similar in cases where there was no appropriate imagery.

Carbon capture is about sequestration of public funding through subsidies and burying it deep, deep inside the bank accounts of big polluting companies, where tax collectors will never find them.

I was very involved in this field about three years ago.

Almost everything (>95%) is a fraud and the people running the show know it. They should be in jail.

I'm part of an org that is trying to ensure that Gov money doesn't go towards it. Do you have anything you can safely share?

i'm also curious about your org now :)

Carbon capture could theoretically work. With VERY heavy use of nuclear power, which the advocates for carbon capture, in my experience, almost always advocate against. And even then, the energy is much better used on other stuff.

The whole thing is a fraud to capture (no pun intended) markets...and put meters on what was once free.

Carbon capture is for fossil fuel industry what recycling is for plastic industry. Everyone knows it doesn’t work and we still keep trying.

you absolutely can recycle some plastics. hdpe, ldpe, eps to name a few. doesnt mean they are good, or we should keep using them. but you are wrong in general

There is a difference between can theoretically and can practically. That’s why we landfill or burn >90% of plastics.

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

you said it doesnt work- so i pointed out it does in fact work, in the literal sense. if you were implying that it doesnt work economically, then its more complicated. look at some of the eu, they successfully recycle a lot more thanks to more regulation and perhaps subsidies. so, it could work better here in america, if there were more laws as well as incentives. i run a eps (styrofoam) recycling facility btw.

Do you mean direct air capture (DAC) or carbon capture and storage from burning fossil fuels?

How are we going to deal with already emitted carbon after we transition to a post carbon world? I haven't looked at the latest UN climate change reports but I recall previous ones indicating that carbon capture needs to be part of the mix of solutions to limit us to ~2 degrees warming (now probably 2.3 degrees :/)

Or we can just face reality and start actively controlling the climate (meaning reduce temperature directly without doing what's essentially outlawed by the second law of thermodynamics. Ie. unmixing gases)

Ironically, solar panels do exactly what. Especially on water. Water absorbs 93% of solar radiation. Solar panels aborb 30% to 70%. Global warming (all of it, all 150 years) is about a 0.7% change in albedo, so "bad" (30% absorption 70% reflection) solar planels on water (or concrete, or grass) undo ALL global warming on 90 times their surface area. And you can do better than that. You can just paint 3% of the land area of the planet of 1% of the ocean, and undo global warming.

If the UN climate change panel is not talking about this I assume its probably nonsense. They have been at this for decades before "saving the environment" was even in vogue. Do you have any studies to back this up?

Reflecting sunlight back from space (bubbles in L2 (?) stable orbit), and reflecting sunlight back from high atmosphere (aerosol injection) have both been studied and atmospheric geoengineering has already begun at a tiny tiny scale by independant VC types.

Reflection from ground based surfaces not so much - I suspect the issue is reflection isn't absolute and transfers heat - the oceans reflect back light while warming the ocean surface layer is already part of the dynamic, solar panels and other reflective objects will also heat up and transfer that heat to the lower atmosphere land|sea layer.

That aside, there's some merit in the notion, it should have been looked at and there's likely a paper or three on the subject.

I think you will find the UN position on geo-engineering is quite simple:

1) It will work. Not just the technique suggested above, but a lot of of them.

2) That's bad: it will "normalise" dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and take away power from the climate organisations of the UN, including UNEP.

3) They want it outlawed. Why? Because geoengineering can be so effective that a single decent-size city can counteract all or a significant portion of all global warming.

4) They warn that this will produce large scale unintended consequences. Such as stopping water supplies that depend on glacial melting (and for the first X years (decades?) will actually almost entirely stop glacial melting, which "may" make places like California, the Indus valley and most of inner Mongolia, maybe all of inner China, unliveable. Also it will probably start expanding the sahara again (due to climate change it's shrinking now), which will also destroy communities)

(why? It is not possible to pump large amounts water either upwards, or along long distances. We don't have the power for that. So even if you collect the water desalinated, it can't be used to make those places liveable for anywhere the amounts of people currently living there)

Recent example of UN position of the matter: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/02/15/switzerland-pro...

The majority of members advising the UN want it regulated, sure, and that's a sensible position due to unforeseen risks and the fossil fuel industry using a small amount of geoengineering that counters a portion of the problem as an excuse to double down on activity that continues to cause most of the problem.

As you link notes:

    In 2019, its attempt to get countries to agree to the development of a governance framework failed as a result of opposition from Donald Trump’s USA and Saudi Arabia – who didn’t want restrictions on geoengineering.

I think we can all agree that nothing could possibly go wrong with Trump and the Saudi's at the throttle caring for the well being of humans across the globe. /s

You can joke about Trump, but he may get elected again. Which means this position won't change, at least for 9 months + let's say 1 year, potentially for 5 years, and we don't know where we'll be then.

> The majority of members advising the UN want it regulated, sure, and that's a sensible position due to unforeseen risks and the fossil fuel industry using a small amount of geoengineering that counters a portion of the problem as an excuse to double down on activity that continues to cause most of the problem.

Yeah, but read between the lines: they don't want it regulated, they want it outlawed, and, at least to a significant extent. They want it outlawed, firstly because if it isn't outlawed their power will disappear. And secondly, because no matter how you change the climate, it'll have the same problem any large infrastructure seems to have. Geoengineering WILL be incredibly good for some regions (who therefore may choose the lone wolf approach), AND will have devastating consequences for other regions. Someone will benefit greatly, someone will suffer.

And, frankly, if we're being honest ... "the West" (Europe/America/Russia/China/Northern Africa... even India) will benefit greatly, if we're honest. Africa and South America, and Indonesia will suffer.

But of course there's the identified problem. A decent-sized city could undo global warming (amplifying it is actually harder) BY ITSELF. Something like London or Paris or New York definitely could do it with the city's budget and land, and maybe even something like Milan would be big enough. Which brings the question: countries like Congo will greatly benefit from stopping global warming. They can, if they want to. What do we do then? Because, ironically, if they stop global warming through geoengineering, it will be a huge problem for "the West".

This article desperately needs an editor. Non sequiturs, sentence fragments, and a lack of citations all make this difficult to read and believe.

I’m skeptical of many carbon capture solutions, but this presentation isn’t doing itself any favors. It shouldn’t cite generalized articles, or articles from the same website. It should be citing facts and studies.

Sorry, I don't get the point about Equinor. It (a) extracts gas and (b) captures CO2. The reasoning goes like, since using the gas obtained by (a) releases much more CO2 than how much is saved by (b), then it's not worth doing (b). Am I the only one to see the fallacy in this way of thinking?

"Capturing" carbon into fuel to be released back is not exactly capturing, maybe it could be called buffering. A lot of the Net Zero proposal "compensates" to keep extracting oil/coal/gas with generating new fuels in this way, but it is not about reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at all. If it were to stop extracting fossil fuel at least it could had some meaning, but with this kind of environmental policies the fossil fuel will stop to be extracted by the time the wells run dry.

Same goes with using planting trees as carbon capture, in a world where climate is going haywire (so drought, heat waves and other things that promotes massive forest fires becomes increasingly more common) that is carbon that could be released back any time.

The most effective carbon capture energy is to keep buried fossil carbon that way. It has been in that form for hundreds of millions of years, at least until some not so smart apes decided to destabilize with it the ecosystem where they live in just a century.

Thanks for your comment.

You seem to assume that they capture CO2 from atmosphere and somehow inject it into the fuel (gas) that they sell. It's not what TFA talks about, though. It's exactly the opposite:

> Carbon dioxide is stripped from natural gas with amine solvents and is deposited in a saline formation.

@dang Can you please fix the title, this one makes me head hurt, thx <3

@elric tagging people doesn't do anything on HN.

I think you would have to use email, strangely enough. Try hn@ycombinator.com

Hank green discussed this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dRgCsZ1q7g

It's actually good that the natural gas operator sequesters carbon.

But not nearly as good as leaving the gas in the ground.

It's actually good that the arsonist put some of the matches back.

Is it? Would it be better that the demand for gas was satisfied by exploring and drilling new gas fields rather than using the ones we already have more efficiently?

Or by burning coal instead of NG.

Apparently that one isn't quite so clear cut. At least in the case of LNG, its greenhouse gas emmissions are pretty awful when you look at how much methane leaks out into the atmosphere (e.g. during processing and transport). At least with coal, it's unlikely to end up in the atmosphere unless its burnt.

Liquefying and transporting natural gas across an ocean by ship seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. But here we are, doing just that.

Methane from coal mines is actually a problem:

"Methane (CH4) emissions from coal mining and abandoned coal mines accounted for about 8% of total U.S. methane emissions in 2019. It was the fifth-largest methane-emitting sector"

https://www.epa.gov/cmop/about-coal-mine-methane

Thanks for pointing that out. Even if it is depressing that even abandoned coal mines are still contributing to greenhouse gas emmissions. There are thousands of operational coal mines. Probably hundreds of thousands of abandoned ones. How we are ever going to curb climate change is beyond me.

> "How we are ever going to curb climate change is beyond me."

At this point, we're simply not going to "curb climate change", sadly. We've left the lunatics in charge of the asylum for entirely too long, and they've set the place ablaze. All that's left to do now is stand back and watch it burn while the lunatics blame all of us for the fire they started.

It would be better to put less C02 into the atmosphere.

Currently exploration for new fields and exploitation of current fields takes place in parallel, and extraction is continuously increasing.

Global C02 output is still increasing.

It would be better to reduce | stabilise consumption while bringing other renewable resources to peak rather than "greenwashing" LNG fields with falsehoods about carbon capture and offsets.

Yes, I understand the numbers, I have ~ 4 decades in exploration geophysics about the globe.

Your framing suggests that only a solution that does the same thing, i.e. produce X amounts of power is valid. This the core of the climate crisis. As long as we cling to our ways of life this will only get worse. Physics doesn't care about our arguments. As long as we keep using finite resources, it will make the problems worse.

Other humans exist and crying about how they don't get it like you do and won't do the radical solutions like you recommend will get you nowhere

Exhausted of your type. Other people care too. Just not to the point we're delusional

Natural gas producer capture carbon good. Sorry that breaks you.

I'd love to hear what exactly I said that you classify as delusional.

It's actually good that natural gas displaces coal and it's actually good that this natural gas producer captures CO2. Full stop.

The delusional part is wishing we'd forgo gas and coal and just explain to people the power is out for the planet.

Please carefully re-read what I've written in the parent comment. I do not talk about wishing, nor suggesting we should change. My point was, if we add more CO2, we make the situation worse. Maybe natural gas and carbon capture make the situation worse less fast than before. But they are still making the situation worse. There is no bargaining with physics. These "solutions" also involve mining and manufacturing, which in itself are extractive practices, further advancing the use of limited resources.

As an example, take a serial murderer. Now they say they plan to reduce their murdering from 3 people a month to 1. You argue that is good, full stop. I say it's less bad, but I wouldn't call the new situation good.

Until they are fitting the carbon capture machinery over the end of coal/gas fired power plant chimney stacks, it’s bullshit.

A good way is to put in on bio powered power plants. So you grow trees etc in dedicated areas, which remove co2 from the air. You harvest it for centrally burning for energy and co2 capture. In the meantime you grow new trees etc at the harvest locations. Do this at scale. It makes money, energy and results in a net co2 loss.

Obviously you can also make systems to do direct air capture, but that is much more expensive, you'll need wind turbines because of low co2 density in air, and it won't make money. So just using trees on large areas is probably hard to beat.

Where is the land going to come from? You either use wilderness or agricultural land. The latter will need to be replaced so will end up taking wilderness anyway. No net win and probably a huge net loss.

On top of that wood burning is highly polluting in other ways.

"You have become the very thing you swore to destroy."

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