Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find
techxplore.com
techxplore.com
All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
We continue to see companies and politicians claiming it's feasible and will help us become "green". We should call them out on their shit. If we had the renewable power budget to use proper carbon capture on a large scale, we would already have a fully green grid.
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Well... There are other methods than reversing c02 back into carbon chains.
Capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas form in underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years with likely upkeep. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)
Ideas to shove c02 air bubbles in concrete are promising but barely enough to offset the c02 generated from creating the concrete itself.
One promising approach is to grow plants and turn them into charcoal. Charcoal is great for keeping fertilizer in the soil so that we can spread it over crop fields for a small increase in yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. Almost feasible. (bamboo, algae, and sunflowers seem to be the highest biomass generators, but perhaps a slower crop that can handle worse climate is preferable)
But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.
I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty, but there's an inaccuracy here:
In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen.
We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak, but it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them in the first place.
This I wasn't quite aware of. Thanks for the correction.
> But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain
This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here...
> We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak,
I also agree with your list. Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP. Liquid fuel for transport is, however, the most difficult and probably the last to be replaced. It's to the point that generating green liquid fuels (that don't use fossil sources of carbon) is still actively researched and used, as air travel or shipping may never become feasible on green energy sources.
> This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here...
In nat. gas this is possible - its called pyrolisis - as an alternative to steam reformation it is generating pure carbon and hydrogen instead of the CO2 and Hydrogen that steam reformation does.
Its main downside is that it takes more energy so you get less usable energy out of the process.
You can do it with other organic fuels as well and the simplest process is making charcoal from wood but its not as clear a way to separate out carbon there.
Sadly I think the only viable route to this is wealthy countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power plants (and presumably replace them with something equivalent).
This has two nice benefits. One, wealthy countries show they act in good faith. Two, this will greatly reduce wealth disparity.
Of course, there's the chance some people will threaten to emit gas to acquire disproportionate power. This is true, but still preferable to the west just roasting the planet and then blaming china. Like grow tf up.
But the way conversation is now we're headed straight towards ecofascism. A healthy globe for me but not for thee (as if this even makes much sense).
It's convenient for the US to blame "developing economies" (especially China) for the problem. Solutions like "buying off other countries" make sense. (And in itself is not a bad idea.) But it's a deflection from the bigger issue which is consumption at home.
But as long as we can make it a "them " problem, our population doesn't have to feel guilt, or understand they are the people who need to change.
And what about wealthy countries, that using those power plants? I mean there aren't many of them now, but have you been communicating with Europeans recently? Not with the privileged elites in the universities, but with the working class Europeans? There are so many complaints about energy prices that I'm afraid even there democracy can't be thwarted anymore and we'll see burners all over Europe in like 10 years from now.
Pakistan, for example, is currently experiencing a massive solar boom. Their electricity grid has been notoriously unreliable in the past, so the moment solar panels and batteries became cheap enough just about everyone chose distributed solar. It is now the world's sixth-largest solar market, despite having the world's 42nd-largest GDP.
The goal in poor countries isn't dismantling fossil fuel plants - those never grew beyond a rounding error. The goal is to avoid building new fossil fuel plants as their economies grow, and that's a lot easier now that solar has become the cheapest source of electricity. Their old power plants will eventually close down, but it's not a priority on a global scale.
If only we had some historical records explaining how pre-industrialized societies navigated the globe without fossil fuels...
https://electrek.co/2024/05/02/fully-electric-10000-ton-cont...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-solar-wind-po...
While the US looks at China as the convenient villan here, the rest of the world sees the US as the villan and China at least aggressively attacking the problem.
And that's before we consider the impact Chinese exports of solar panels and inverters have had on renewable energy production outside of China.
One may not like the system of govt in China, or their human rights policies (personally, I don't, but each to his own), but as far as climate change goes they're getting stuff done while the US govt does nothing. Or actively fights against improvements.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
Decades ago, coal was said to be in terminal decline. Years ago, coal was supposed to be economically dead due to being more expensive than renewables. Today we have yet to hit global peak-coal, China emits more CO2 than all western countries combined now, its emissions per-capita are higher than all but a handful of developed countries, and they are continuing to spike alarmingly. China is also home to some of the cheapest and most abundant renewable energy generation manufacturing in the world. Something isn't quite adding up.
It was maybe "said" ... There seems to have been quite a bit of groupthink (or propaganda) over the decades that new energy sources would supplant old and it's never been really accurate. AIUI, wider use of oil created more demand for coal, wider use of renewables creates more demand for oil and so forth, because amongst other things new energy production puts greater demand on existing sources, plus the new-lanes-on-the-highway tendency of late capitalism to put all of it to work making the rich richer etc.
I think what actually happened is that people with agendas pushed this deception to fool people into acting and voting against their own best interests.
> But oil didn't displace coal, it helped us mine it more effectively and stimulated more technologies that raised energy demand overall. So coal use kept rising too – and oil use in turn kept increasing as cleaner gas, nuclear and hydro came on stream, helping power the digital age, which unlocked more advanced technologies capable of opening up harder-to-read fossil-fuel reserves.
With renewables I agree it isn't the same. What is the same is we're only going to get out of this by turning away from growth-at-all-costs mentality. For instance, this article describes how the Gulf states are making huge investments in renewables _to sell more oil and gas_ (https://www.tni.org/en/article/a-transition-to-where-the-gul...):
> The Gulf states see no contradiction between an embrace of ‘low-carbon solutions’ and pursuing the path of accelerating fossil fuel production ... With very high levels of energy consumption at home, the domestic substitution of oil and gas with alternative energy sources means that more fossil fuels can be made available for export. Indeed, such reasoning is explicitly behind Saudi Arabia’s plan to generate half of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2030 ...
(BTW I agree with you, but the current political climate - and not only in the US - seems to go in the entirely wrong direction)
https://protonh2.com/protonh2-advances-project-apollo-with-s...
It's also theoretically possible to have chemical reactions that bind carbon from the air into solid compounds that aren't themselves combustible without a net energy loss, but then you need a very large volume of reactants and produce a very large volume of industrial waste and it still turns out to be highly uneconomical compared to the cost of replacing fossil fuels for power generation.
That's not true. The reactants must have enough stored potential energy to reduce carbon. You might get that for "free" by using accelerated weathering of rocks (the energy ultimately comes from the radioactive decay in Earth's core).
There are things that will react with CO2 and form something that isn't combustible. That reaction may even generate heat that you could hypothetically use for something, but in practice probably not enough of it to be worth extracting.
Sure. There are plenty of such things. For example, elemental magnesium will happily bind carbon dioxide into pretty inert magnesium carbonate. But to _get_ that elemental magnesium, you need to expend energy, because elemental magnesium can't be found in nature.
There is only one realistic option: rock weathering. Silicate rocks can react with carbon dioxide to produce calcium carbonate and (eventually) silicon dioxide.
Unfortunately their success over the years is showing others like the airline industry how to behave. There's some great "support" getting cloud into the extreme left (who are anti science like the extreme right) who conveniently love talking about chem trail style nonsense... Which is a shame because if we actually made an effort to reduce these clouds we'd make a big step forward to improving things for little effort... (Notice how I'm not saying fix, we're closer to fusion at scale than battery powered commercial flights I suspect)
Is this sentence missing a word or is it a use of the word “cloud” that I don’t know?
That's not quite true.
To add some numbers, the average formula for long-chain hydrocarbons is roughly CH2 (one carbon atom for two hydrogen atoms). The enthalpy of formation of water is -286kJ/mole, and for carbon dioxide it's -394kJ/mole.
Conveniently enough, one mole of long-chain hydrocarbons produces one mole of water and one mole of carbon dioxide.
It's better for pure methane, as with its formula CH4 it produces 2 moles of water for each mole of CO2. So you get 572kJ of energy from hydrogens versus the same 394kJ from carbon.
I did neglect the C-H bond enthalpy, but it's close enough to the C-C bond energy to matter too much.
> capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas from underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber cool and leakproof for 1000 years with yearly maintenance. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)
CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof, since they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years. Yes, there is a maximum limit of how much you can pump down, and yes there is a need to achieve good seal on plugging and abandonment. But that's the same as with any other subsea oil & gas well, it's a solved problem.
Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place.
Now it really annoys me thay researchers are still putting out papers like this, comparing irrelevant strawman scenarios and pretending it's insightful. There is extremely broad consensus that we will need all the good solutions simultaneously. Stop beating a dead horse.
Furthermore, since we've been dragging our heels on climate change, even if we achieve extremely quick shift to 100% renewables by 2040, we will need CO2 removal from the atmosphere to achieve net negative emissions.
To make an analogy, it won't be enough to cut our spending to match our income, we then need to also pay back our old debts.
Leakproof to one substance doesn't necessarily mean leakproof to another. Heavy oil is hydrophobic and a less mobile, volatile molecule than CO2. Methane otoh is lighter.
That said, CO2 capture mostly works in scenarios where you have a highly concentrated stream AND can afford the weight and energy penalty of the capture apparatus. Good on big chemical/industrial plants, refineries and maybe gas power stations, and worth doing for that reason - industrial processes are some of the hardest to replace or avoid of the big emitters. Likely useless for vehicles and aircraft.
It's very hard to feed 8Bn people without a whole lot of Haber-Bosch though, and hard to do that without methane in, CO2 out. All the more reason to cut down on wasteful uses of both food and energy.
This is survivor bias. We only see the sites where it didn't leak too much, and extract from it. The sites that leaked, we don't hear about them (no oil to extract). In fact, a quick search shows that there are many leaking sites (both on land and under the oceans). The argument you present is a case of survivor bias, especially on the time scale of multiple millions years.
…those are the sites we’re pumping the CO2 into.
Strawmanning you a bit but surely you see that this line of reasoning leaves a little to be desired?
When responding to innumerate “napkin maths” and a sourceless speculation, on one hand, and a multibillion-dollar practice done by experts, on the other hand, no, not really.
But yeah I see your point - no multibillion dollar industry filled with experts has ever done anything ill-advised, futile, or environmentally damaging simply for profit. cough corn ethanol Can you imagine how the world would look if that were the case?
https://theicct.org/carbon-capture-and-storage-a-lot-of-eggs...
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2024/09/13/leakage-at-firs...
There are a number of scientific papers that are also skeptical about the long-term viability of underground CCS strategies but they're all paywalled so I didn't link them here, but you should seek them out yourself.
Sure, they’re scandals. Scandals have sourcing. Not supposition. Someone who assumes industry is always evil isn’t a reliable source.
I’ll note that your sources are both credible and the first in this thread.
I simplified it a bit too much. CSS has been in use since the 1980s by the oil industry to push out more oil and natural gas from their wells. However, it is relatively small scale. I've seen proposals and demonstrations of saline aquifer projects, but I know of no currently operational such facility (and can not find it from light googling)
That the chambers could store methane or oil for 100k years is promising, sure, but it doesn't end there. Co2 is a smaller atom that has an easier time moving through small cracks. CO2 mixed with water is also a mild acid that can corrode different rock types.
Even if we had enough stable underground chambers, even if capturing the carbon and compressing it was free. How much could we even offset? We need a green grid first, not instead.
> We need a green grid first, not instead.
We need to do all of the things at once, unfortunately. If we started investing heavily in renewables in the 1960s, maybe we would have had that luxury.
All the serious proposals for carbon capture involve use cases where it's unfeasible to swap in photovoltaics or whatever. For instance, fertilizer production, cement production, and air transport.
You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2.
That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2.
The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it).
Sorry gents, those Kenyan roses for Valentines are over. Get your loved one some tulips instead.
>That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2.
Carbon capture includes direct air capture, which doesn't come with any weight constraints.
>The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it).
Any solution that's predicated on "do it less" is going to be DOA politically. The options available voters aren't "electric planes" or "don't fly", they're "do something" or "do nothing". Telling people they're going to have to make upfront sacrifices for vague future benefits is going to be a losing proposition politically. Any solution to climate change is going to have to come from technological advances, not getting people to consume less. US emissions per capita has dropped more than 25% since 1990[1]. That's not because people ate 25% less meat or drove 25% less.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed.
And the next 35 years - to 2060 - have to be a much steeper reduction than 25%, or the 35 years after that will, one way or another, represent a _forceful_ reduction of a lot more than 25%.
Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption basis? Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends that are likely to continue, again more for political reasons than anything else.
>Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed.
It's $1000/ton today, which works out to a 70% price increase for a new york to london flight. I disagree that would "address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed", because zero chance anyone would vote for it in the first place. That's where technological advancement comes in. Startups claim they can hit $250-$350/ton by 2030[1], which is a much more manageable 21% increase.
>Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption basis? Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends that are likely to continue, again more for political reasons than anything else.
It's around 17% on a trade basis[2], but the point stands. Americans haven't eaten 17% less meat, drove 17% less, or bought 17% less stuff.
It is utter nonsense and simply ensures every conversation on the topic is grounded largely in fantasy.
There are hard choices to be made and we insist on letting people pretend otherwise. It's infuriating
If technology can’t do it, more climate change is inevitable.
There's so much we can convert to renewable and electric power without any meaningful lifestyle changes or even a particularly large amount of money relative to the size of the industries involved.
And for the rest, it would cost money to keep the same lifestyle, but GDP per capita keeps rising and if you hold lifestyle constant then that gives you lots of money to spend on big goals.
What's utter nonsense and fantasy about that?
I agree with your analysis. The problem here is if we're both right society is fucked, end of story. There are no convenient solutions to replacing our species primary mode of energy generation and mobility, that drives an industry that is quite literally the hub around which the entirety of the rest of the global economy revolves. Available credible solutions all require a kind of political will not seen in several generations.
Today renewables produce vastly cheaper energy than fossil fuels and are disrupting every industry that can use electrical input or batteries.
The problem is the use cases where we utilize either the density of fossil fuels or as feedstock in industrial processes.
Which brings the ”Hydrogen ladder”:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hydrogen-ladder-version-50-mi...
What we need to do is to continue scale renewables so they become cheap enough to by merit be the energy input for the hard to decarbonize fossil energy/feedstock use cases.
See fossil fuels like todays version of the piston steam engine used in for example locomotives.
It works but is inefficient and expensive to maintain compared to ICEs or gas turbines.
Did you even read the Hydrogen Ladder?
Fertilizer sits at the top as "must be hydrogen based with no real alternatives". It is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize since we need to get the price of renewable based fertilizer to be equivalent of todays fossil based one.
Then just typical degrowth. Maybe we should cull the top 10% of the world? Starting with you and me?
It can be done but the economics don't look good right now. Possible very cheap solar energy in desert regions can change that a bit. Australia have been trying but they didn't get very far with it yet, granted there is still room for solar to get cheaper again.
That has issues with proving the deployment actually displaces carbon but carbon capture has similar issues proving that the carbon is actually permanently removed.
And once we've eliminated the burning of fossil carbon, the mitigations are unnecessary. Nature will gradually find an equilibrium, and anything we do to speed it up (even removing carbon) is as likely to cause harm as good.
Maybe there is a future where we have so much extra renewables that we can think about trying to undo what we've done. But any effort spent on it now feels like an attempt to decrease the need to eliminate fossil fuels as fast as possible.
Entropy makes one of these much easier. For planes, synthetic jet fuel is the answer.
The sign we’re taking jet emissions seriously will be when someone drops the flygskam and hydrogen shtick and passes a synthetic-fuel mandate on private jets. (Less than 3x the cost in America [1].)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-sustainable-aviati...
Take the engineer's mindset, reach the low-hanging fruit first. Replace coal with nuclear and natural gas, then start replacing natural gas. Cars don't need to run on gasoline anymore, BEVs are a superior technology. The market is doing its work to decarbonize that all by itself. Slowly at first, and then all at once. If you're middle-aged today, you'll likely live to see the end of gasoline cars. We can speed things along by removing subsidies on fossil fuels or offsetting them with green incentives.
Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power".
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
But I suppose delivering reliable electricity for every customers needs every hour the whole year is "unreliable"?
Please do show a study which says that we need to ”strip mine the ocean floor”.
It does sound like typical fossil lobby misinformation.
Then why are companies gearing up to literally do this to satisfy the needs of battery manufacturing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIXbKptKSs4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW7CGTK-1vA
Denmark generates 20% of its energy from renewables which is about on par for what most countries see. Let's see how much those renewables start costing when you need to supplant the 80% of the energy grid which is still is still carbon producing. Which is my point - renewables can't scale past this threshold and trying to make them raises the costs exponentially. Compare this to France which has been >90% decarbonized in its grid since at least the 90s.
Re fossil fuel propaganda, the number 1 supporters of renewables is the fossil fuel companies. It's not because it's the future but because it prolongs to the utmost the transition off of fossil fuels while appealing to the sensibilities of people who style themselves as "environmentalists". No country that has invested in renewables has yet managed to get off fossil fuels while France invested in nuclear & nearly completely decarbonized.
Yes, there has been companies trying to exploit the ocean for mining for as long as we have been traveling the seas. There has yet to be a successful attempt at it.
Then a lovely apples to oranges comparison comparing primary energy of one country to electricity mix of another.
Lets do the real comparison, the one you did not want to do because it does not show France is as a favorable light:
Primary energy mix using the substitution method[1]:
- France: 51% low carbon
- Denmark: 43% low carbon
Then we have electricity mix [2]:
- France: 92% low carbon
- Denmark: 88% low carbon
France is wholly unable to build nuclear power as evidenced by the Flamanville 3 program being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles due to the insane subsidies required, and now "hopefully" will reach an investment decision (i.e. the government decides on the subsidies) in 2026.
We should keep our existing fleet of nuclear power as long as it is safe, needed and economical.
But only someone with vested interest in the outcome of the nuclear industry would suggest wasting trillions of dollars on nuclear subsidies in 2025 given the state of renewables and storage.
> No country that has invested in renewables has yet managed to get off fossil fuels while France invested in nuclear & nearly completely decarbonized.
And the misinformation continues. When is France going to decarbonize the remaining 48% of their economy?
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-source-...
[2]: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/
How do you explain it?
While BEVs have a lot of benefits, they are still objectively inferior to ICE vehicles. They’re (in most cases substantially) more expensive, less energy dense by mass and volume, and require planning for refuelling (especially if used in areas outside of main city centres or for long driving, or if you live in an apartment without access to a charger at home). Not to mention most grids being nowhere near able to support the entire population of car drivers fast-charging their cars during rush hour. Gasoline-powered cars are objectively easier to own and use.
The real solution is public transit, and convincing people for whom public transit is impossible that switching to BEVs is worthwhile, even with their drawbacks. Telling people that BEVs are superior technology is counterproductive though, when there are still very clear problems with them.
The most popular BEVs already cost less than the average new car and the price will continue to decline as long as battery prices do. Ranges of ~300 miles are common, meanwhile the average commute is 42 miles, so charging at home is sufficient for the vast majority of usage and is more convenient than buying gas. Apartments will install chargers as electric vehicles become more common.
For long trips, you begin your day having charged overnight and then add 200 miles of range at a supercharger in 15 minutes. That 500 miles is more than 8 hours of driving at 60MPH and it cost you 15 minutes. For people who make such long trips on a regular basis there will be cars with larger batteries and more range so that "overnight plus once in the middle" gets back to being just overnight.
> Not to mention most grids being nowhere near able to support the entire population of car drivers fast-charging their cars during rush hour.
This is the least interesting problem. Upgrading power grids is a known process involving only widely deployed existing technologies.
> The real solution is public transit
Public transit doesn't work in the suburbs, the majority of the population lives in suburban or rural areas and changing that would take decades of new housing construction which is currently prohibited by law.
The number of cars per hour during most of the day on a suburban street is commonly around one. If a bus runs that frequently it would have one passenger and all you've done is replace one midsized car with one large bus at significant expense. If the bus runs less frequently than that it would have zero passengers because people will buy a car and drive it themselves rather than wait that long for a bus.
This is already being somewhat generous by assuming that people would be willing to wait the balance of an hour for a bus. For mass transit to actually work you want service every five or ten minutes.
Feels a bit like a straw man. Most commuters aren't extending beyond the range of their vehicle for work commutes, and would charge at home or office on solar. I agree they should not be sold as though there are no trade offs, but after extensive research it feels that for a primarily commuter scenario, never having to stop for gas, charging at home, etc, would be not only practical but actually superior. I frequently have to gas up mid week and with a busy job and kids, it is an actual hassle that would be nice to be a nice upgrade.
The range is a non issue 99% of the time when you’re driving around in your city. Charging at home is both cheap and super convenient.
Maintenance is cheaper, the car lasts longer.
I don’t know a single person who buys a BEV and goes back. I know many who go the other direction.
And as adoption rises and technology improves the case will get stronger and stronger.
I don’t - my daily cost $1400USD, I don’t think there’s an EV on the planet that will work out cheaper before its batteries fail. Ignoring that I’d prefer one that could tow at least 5k lbs (which I make use of fairly frequently on my daily), seat 6 adults, cost only ~$300/year in maintenance (including tires and brakes), and go 750km without thinking about refuelling. And ideally would be comfortable and have good ride quality, which the vast majority of modern cars simply don’t (unless you spend far too much money).
> The range is a non issue 99% of the time when you’re driving around in your city. Charging at home is both cheap and super convenient.
I don’t live in the city, and trips to the city are minimum 50km round trip. Doable with most EVs, but that’s assuming I don’t actually go anywhere in the city. I also have to account for winter temperatures going below -30 relatively frequently, so would have to divide advertised range in half to account for regular worst-case conditions. And for used cars, maybe even more, especially if trying to hit anywhere close to the price point I pay for gas cars (and having to buy a car with older batteries).
I don’t go into work frequently, but when I do, it’s over 100km round trip, assuming I make no stops. That rules out pretty much all small “city” EVs when taking into account range loss in the cold.
Charging at home would be convenient, but I live 30 seconds from two gas stations, so I doubt it would be notably more convenient than that.
> Maintenance is cheaper, the car lasts longer.
Which EVs are known to last 3-400k miles without needing new batteries or having substantial range reduction? That’s what I anticipate out of my current car with only a ($1000) transmission rebuild at ~250k miles. The engine should outlast the car. Suspension components last ~200k miles, front brakes last 75k, rears last 150k. Tires last 40-60k and cost $500 for good ones.
> I don’t know a single person who buys a BEV and goes back. I know many who go the other direction.
Offhand I know at least 4. Mostly when they realize that “hey, my range has cut in half during this cold snap and I won’t be able to make it to X” or when they do the math and realize the extra $6-20k they spent they’re not saving in gas and maintenance before they buy another new car in 3-5 years. The ones who keep buying EVs usually do it for the image, or because they’re willing to spend substantially more money and sacrifice some convenience to drive a greener car. Most of both of those types (at least in my experience) also own a new luxury truck for hauling toys and taking kids to hockey, going on camping trips and that sort of thing.
> And as adoption rises and technology improves the case will get stronger and stronger.
I agree! But they’re not there yet. I would really like them to be, so that fewer people are buying gas cars who just want “a car.” I’d be happy to buy one myself if it made sense, but unfortunately it doesn’t.
This hasn't been true for a couple of years. China is an excellent example of that, its market flipped to EVs virtually overnight once the benefits of EVs became clear. Last year, 48% of all the new cars sold in China were EVs, and this year it's projected to be around 60%.
> The real solution is public transit
No, it's not. Public transit is nothing but a distilled misery concentrator. Transit is also _not_ more CO2 effective than small-to-medium EVs when the carbon footprint of their _drivers_ is taken into the account.
And, honestly, I think some number of people would be willing to move into denser areas if there was good transit, so it's a problem that might work to solve itself in time.
(and recommend tooling - PostGIS is likely ok for this kind of thing without too much effort (fingers crossed))
It's a learning curve if you haven't done such things before, perhaps worth it if such questions interest you.
You'll also be doing some seat of the pants Fermi estimations so it's be handy to run your thoughts past others that are into that kind of thing.
Besides, if you care about costs then suburbs/exurbs are fundamentally uneconomical in general - most of the cost of housing comes from the land, of which suburbs are fundamentally wasteful. Literally everything there is (relatively) uneconomical, and is only widespread because the alternative is literally illegal.
Cheaper like cheaper or cheaper like more expensive, but subsidized by taxpayers who don't use it?
There are multiple dimensions in which they differ. Cost, reliability, emissions, safety, convenience, driving enjoyment, etc. To compare them and say one is better overall than the other requires you to define the weight that you place on each of those factors.
Many of those weights are subjective. Some people value convenience a lot. Some people don't. Some people passionately love driving a stick shift, and some people hate driving. Some people believe climate change is the most important issue of our time, and some people don't care if the planet is trashed as long as it doesn't happen within their own lifetimes.
Since the weights are subjective, it is a logical impossibility for one of them to be objectively inferior or superior.
That presupposes leaps of improvements in battery technology and battery recycling. Right now, the maintenance cost of a BEV is roughly $1,000 per year on battery replacement costs alone, and while I'm sure those costs will go down over time, they need to drop by 90% to be cost-competitive with ICE cars. That requires new materials that aren't on the science horizon yet, FAFAIK.
I've done plenty of wrenching in my time, out of necessity and enjoyment alike (used to do a lot of jeeping, then motorcycling), though these days I usually prefer to employ professionals. That's why I prefer older vehicles I can afford to buy outright: I can trade time against money, depending on which I happen to have more of at the moment, instead of being locked in to the fixed monthly expense I'd have with a low-mileage car.
Waterpump is replaced at the same time as the timing belt, and they rarely fail now a days. ~ 300 bucks for one as added part during the timing belt labor
I assume you are talking about brake pads as calipers rarely fail, 5-7 year maintenance interval, easy DIY job ~500 for a set of 4.
Starter motors also very rarely fail I've had the same one for 20 years in my rx8 hpde toy. Even still they are ~200 bucks and literally 2 bolts and 30 minutes of time.
We havent even hit 2000 dollars yet in critical maintenance over 10 years. If you actually knew anything about wrenching you wouldn't be saying newer cars are easier and cheaper to work on either. I dont know how you are doing 1000/ year on maintenance on an ICE but then again you presumably offroad " jeeping " which would make your experience an outlier on what commuter cars actually experience for yearly maintenance.
Someone quoted a figure for electric car maintenance, as a downside to the technology. I remarked that this actually sounded pretty good, relative to my experience with ICE cars. Someone else observed that I could choose to buy cars with a lower maintenance cost. I agreed that this was true but explained why I prefer to do things the way I do. Then you came along with a chip on your shoulder and started griping, for reasons known only to yourself.
It is a downside compared to ICE maintenance which is significantly lower.
>Life is full of trade-offs: if I did that, I'd have to carry a loan
to which I replied there are plenty of cars sub 10K which you wouldnt need a loan for and that you could easily maintain for less than 1000/year
>I remarked that this actually sounded pretty good, relative to my experience with ICE cars
When I broke down the cost of the maintenance items YOU listed as over 1000/year over 10 years I said that those items you listed dont need maintenance every year, and the cost of replacing them is far less than 1000 dollars a year. To which you replied that I was nitpicking
> Then you came along with a chip on your shoulder and started griping, for reasons known only to yourself.
Im not griping I am just telling you that you are wrong when you say that 13k/10 years is cheaper than the maintenance items you listed. Just like the other guy said.
Then again you own a jeep and you know what they say about jeep: Just Empty Every Pocket :P
No, it's just basic extrapolation of the learning curve of EVs compared to ICEs. Even if the battery stays the same price, the fact is that the battery is only ~$5000 in price out of a $30k vehicle. The other 5/6ths of the cost have room to drop. Not to mention, the battery cells might not be new but the battery pack (i.e. the big box that you put all the battery cylinders/rectangles into) is new.
>they need to drop by 90% to be cost-competitive with ICE cars.
lolwut
>the maintenance cost of a BEV is roughly $1,000 per year on battery replacement costs alone
wut
Maybe do some research before proudly displaying your ignorance for everyone to see? A replacement battery for everyone's favourite yardstick costs (from [0], the first search result):
Anywhere around $13,000-$20,000 for Models S
At least $14,000 for a Model X premium SUV
At least $13,000 for a Model 3 entry-level sedan
No matter the model or manufacturer, all EV batteries last for 10-20 years
[0] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-often-do-te...
Saving the world may require some effort and inconvenience.
Because most people still cannot afford flying. If the world gets richer, more people want the privilege of flying. And it is not like we have an excess budget of CO2. Everything we reduce helps, so a carbon tax on jet fuel might be a good start. That is a low hanging fruit.
Spreading nuclear reactors worldwide really is not. That would be a very hard fruit, with lots of potential side effects. Or do you think bangladesh will build to standards you think are safe?
That's basically direct air capture with extra steps. All the carbon in those biofuels is coming from somewhere (the air).
Like you do your flying, release CO2, but that CO2 gets captured again... I mean that doesn't sound bad, right?
It's not going to reduce the level of CO2 in the air right now, but it would stop further increases... which, mathematically, seems to be the same thing as if we kept the status quo and did something else to reduce CO2 output? What am I missing?
Also, any farming done for primary energy is farming not done for food.
Long haul aviation needs high energy density.
You have heard critiques about farming that focus on very specific uses of corn and soybean under conventional American agribusiness, and while these are by no means the best biofuel feed stocks or the best harvesting methods, the low ROE is irrelevant if you are willing to feed in arbitrary quantities of cheap solar power to get precious liquid hydrocarbons out.
Flying contributes only 2.5% to global carbon emissions and it is one of the applications where hydrocarbons are least replaceable - bar hydrogen. It is dramatically easier to shift over anything that doesn't have to fight gravity, so flying will likely decarbonize last.
For many "ordinary" chemicals, the so-called process temperature is the challenge with carbon-free. Not dissimilar from steel or aluminium making (melt the ore first before reducing it).
https://www.c-thru.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Ammonia-Te...
"Generally, in the ammonia synthesis loop there is no need for an external heat source because the ammonia synthesis reaction is exothermic. The produced heat from the reaction is a high-valued source which can be recovered to satisfy the temperature requirements of the converter feed-stream and to generate high pressure steam for use in other plant processes. In modern plants, the compressors of the synthesis loop (the syngas/recycle compressors as well as the ammonia refrigeration compressor) are usually centrifugal ones driven by steam turbines which work with the produced steam from the recovered waste heat available within the plant (European Fertilizer Manufacturers’ Association (EFMA), 2000). Overall, electricity consumption values of ~0.32 to ~0.64 kWh/kg-NH3 have been reported in literature for the synthesis loop, depending on the variations in the syngas production pressure, synthesis loop pressure and compression efficiencies (X. Liu et al., 2020)."
Note that the figure given there is an order of magnitude less than the electrical energy needed to make the necessary hydrogen by electrolysis.
Do check your source on that. Cause I cannot find it. The number I could find is muuuch lower than the extracted oil worth of co2.
For example:
https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasificati...
"each ton [of CO2] can yield 2-3 barrels of oil"
Burning a barrel of oil produces 468 kg of CO2, so 2 barrels would be slightly carbon negative.
That's just not true. While the conclusion may be correct (about it not being feasible), it's something that would depend on more that just this first-principles analysis. Remember, the goal is only that the output is "not atmospheric CO2". So that means it could be CO2 somewhere else, or some lower energy state of the carbon, or even a higher energy state that isn't as high as the fuel that was burned to produce it.
And while, again, those methods might not be feasible, it depends on much more than the (false) premise that the only way involves completely reversing whatever process was originally used to extract the energy.
Someone else pointed out, though, that you can burn hydrocarbon (carbon and hydrogen chains, aka methane and oil) and turn it into coal (carbon-carbon).
Carbon dioxide will bind with just about any reactive metal out there. Yes, there is oxygen involved, but Earth is full of rocks that could absorb it.
And now we have realized, that it is dangerous to continue doing more of that and need to live with reality.
But we don't [only]. A significant amount comes from nuclear power or renewables, especially in specific countries.
Thermodynamics tell the whole story and it's so unfavorable that the actual range of achievable costs for energy input to DAC can vary wildly, and in relation to the prevailing market value of energy in general which is subject to major variation itself.
And still none of the actual dollar amounts really matter and can be effectively canceled so the moving target component can be conveniently overlooked numerically.
It simply requires the cost of the energy input to be a small fraction of the actual market value of that energy.
Whether or not fossil fuels are the primary factor which sets the market value at the time.
DAC only really works with remarkable effectiveness when the cost of the energy input approaches zero relative to its market value.
And once you've got that low cost supply of energy, then the "sustainability" of the process depends on your continued inability to directly sell your unmatched low-cost energy wholesale, and your commitment to forego dramatic multiples which dwarf the expectations of most shareholders of the oil companies themselves.
It boggles my mind that a StarBucks coffee, drank in a few minutes involves a lined paper cup, plastic lid, plastic stopper, corrugated holder ring.
Using disposable plastic utensils in dine-in restaurants also bothers me.
All the energy spent to gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant… Seems massively inefficient for such a short use.
Yeah, a dishwasher isn’t free either but surely heating some water to clean reusable things is got to be much better than disposable trash.
Heck, compared to plastic ware and coffee cups, disposable plastic grocery bags almost seem amazingly better in terms of utility vs waste. (Less material)
They've grown up in a world where everything just yells more! more! at them. It's the dominant paradigm of our times - growth above everything. Conspicuous consumption as a measure of wealth.
It's become so absurd that even the mere suggestion of improving efficiency - at the consumer level - is met with the outcry of "forcing people into poverty". We are rich, so we can afford to be wasteful. Not be wasteful means poverty.
It's insanity.
I would also be careful with the claim that it is cheaper to wash, mugs are heavy and require the same: gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant. Periodically replacement of broken cups as well.
Silverware makes good sense as it is not usually subject to being broken, only lost or stolen.
Hmm. Actually. I don’t think this is quite “back of the napkin math,” which usually involves some figures, if just only very rough ones with lots of rounding.
This seems more like an argument from basic principle in the style of “I’ll reject any proposal of a perpetual motion machine because, however clever, it fundamentally can’t produce power.” And I don’t think your fundamental principle here really is correct actually.
Some ideas around carbon capture are basically to do a chemical process that releases some energy, and then make sure the byproducts don’t escape, and bury them underground, right? There’s no fundamental reason that this should be impossible. I mean it’s obviously possible to take a log, burn it in a very big airtight metal box (very big, so there’s enough oxygen in there to fully burn the thing), the box will heat up, and then the byproducts will all be in the box, so you just don’t open it. This is a silly contraption but there’s obviously no fundamental law of physics being violated, so it must not be physically impossible.
I’m unhappy to write this because I agree with your conclusion. Carbon capture is mostly bullshit. But it is bullshit for complicated reasons, not simple or fundamental ones, I think.
https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/protonh2-launches-project-ap...
Currently the largest global carbon capture project in practice is little more than green washing, it's a large Australasian LNG field that will pump back a tiny percentage of the CO2 released by the projects outputs.
The required scale of carbon capture to offset our current annual consumption is huge, we extract on the order of a cubic mile of oil per annum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cubic_Mile_of_Oil the buildout and the additional energy required to address that is at the scale of the existing oil industry with no profit to be had.
Also the monitoring of said CO2 reservoirs is poor with leaks being a concern enough that would negate the whole project.
The problem is everyone is looking for some solution that is as cheap as burning coal and oil. Maybe there isn't any solution. Maybe if we desire to mitigate climate change that will come at a cost that changes our way of life.
No, we don't.
CO2 in the atmosphere is not the lowest-energy state in the system. If CO2 stopped being added to the atmosphere, it would eventually all be consumed out by chemical weathering of silicate rocks into carbonates, because that's an exothermic reaction that consumes CO2.
All the actually promising carbon capture proposals are essentially ways to speed up chemical weathering. The limiting factor here is surface area; the process is naturally very slow, and only occurs at an appreciable rate on the exposed surfaces of rocks in shallow water. None of them are cost-effective *yet* (and might never be), but there is not some one-sentence gotcha answer that prevents them from eventually being successful. They are not fighting against physics.
What makes these gotcha arguments so infuriating is that you have no clue what you are talking about, and refuse to spend even 15 minutes googling for what projects have been proposed and what is being studied. Instead you dream up an imaginary strawman to rail against. Literally no-one has ever proposed doing any of what you just talked about, because it would very clearly be economically unviable. There are many options that are not that which are being studied.
However, we’re already committed to carbon capture because corrupt politicians decided not to switch to renewables in the 1980’s, and will continue to block them for at least another decade (if we only want to wait another ten years to take action, we’ll need to somehow magically replace Trump with democrats tomorrow).
Either way we still need to capture the CO and CO2 from flue gas which is costly even from point sources and way worse from DAC. Unless we do oxyburning or fosil fuels which is a hack but you need a source of cheap oxygen which we don’t have unless we dramatically scale up electrolysis.
My napkin math last time I did it said that if we took the current annual production of solar panels and used it to built solar farms in the world's subtropical deserts and built carbon direct air capture (DAC) plants in those deserts powered by those solar farms (using the energy requirements per kg of capture that current DAC plants achieve), and continued doing this each year, in around 200 years we'd be removing about 10% more CO2 per year than we'd be emitting assuming that the human population peaks as expected somewhere in the 10-11 billion range and the per capita CO2 emissions do not go much higher than they are now.
Using the entire current annual production of solar panels for this is clearly impractical now, but if production of solar panels continues its current growth trends for several more years we should reach a point where diverting an amount equal to current production might be practical.
The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing, we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly people with power and influence.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-gdp.htm...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-sen...
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/
Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth, which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics. Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the last species alive, or at least your wining will look very sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a petri dish what it thinks.
Problem is, locally, a zero-sum game can look quite non-zero-sum (as opposed to globally). And perhaps vice versa too (in time scales, eg universally)
I'm all in on renewables+albedo driven globally pos-sum games :)
(Until heat death of solar system)
If you think "carbon budget" then it's compelling to grow yours at the expense of others.
To put that into perspective, our civilization could use 20 trillion times more energy than it does now if it harvested the sun's entire output.
A couple of humans can go to space in that they can go up for short stints. The rest of us are confined to earth for the foreseeable future. Even if we weren’t, I’d like the place kept nice.
With advanced launch capabilities we can also build much more livable habitats beyond Earth than the ISS.
And yes, we should keep Earth nice, but we don't need to limit economic development to do that.
1) enable space harvesting of energy and minerals,
2) unleash growth.
Doing 2) first as we are is just planetary-scale suicide.
We should even first concentrate on 0) figure out how to preserve the biosphere liveability, and stick to these rules.
That said, I believe a robust space economy is imminent, not some distant uncertainty. Starship has already had partially successful test launches, and if it follows the same trajectory as the reusable Falcon 9, we will soon have a fully reusable vehicle capable of delivering 150 tons to low-Earth orbit per launch.
If Musk follows through on his ambition to develop a fleet large enough to transport the materials needed for a self-sustaining Martian civilization, we could see an explosion in lift capacity within the next decade or two, radically transforming the scale of human expansion into space.
Musk is a scammer and is dumb as a rock on any technological question.
Also, energy is useless if it's not where you actually want to use it, and transporting it is expensive/lossy.
The cheapest energy is one which doesn't have to be used up to begin with, and we could optimize the existing workflow much more, over some child-dream Martian scam.
Also, getting robbed is a luxury compared to not having air to breathe.
--
The most habitable place in the solar system, outside of Earth, is Mars.
Mars has 50% of the sunlight that Earth. Owing to the lower sunlight level, it is colder than Antarctica.
The atmosphere is equivalent to taking ours, then systematically deleting every molecule that isn't carbon dioxide without replacing it with anything else.
Owing to the combination of low partial pressure and low temperature, half the atmosphere condenses into the polar caps each Martian winter.
The ground is more toxic than an actual, literal, superfund cleanup site.
It is drier than the actual, literal Sahara.
The lack of oxygen in the atmosphere means there's no ozone layer.
The lack of ozone layer, the thin remaining atmosphere, and the lack of magnetosphere, means it's a high-radiation environment.
PV there also gets regularly covered in dust.
Our moon is even less hospitable, owing to no atmosphere at all and being tidally locked with Earth.
Venus has an atmosphere so dense that it has gone beyond the critical point where gas and liquid cease to be distinguishable, so you could reasonably also describe it as an ocean. An ocean of 465°C supercritical CO2 in which lead occasionally condenses onto mountaintops.
--
There's three currently achievable ways to transport power through space at scale. Optical, microwave, or kinetic.
Optical is either a bunch of mirrors or a laser on the sending side, with a normal PV system on the receiving side. Usual caveats apply, Earth spins so it has a relative night, doesn't work through clouds, maximum power density before PV systems overheat etc.
All EM systems, microwave and optical, share a constraint about focussing: minimal size of target depends on the size of the antenna and the wavelength used. Because microwaves are so much longer (no much freedom to choose a different wavelength as there's a limited atmospheric window), the normal suggestion for ground stations is a 10 km diameter receiving rectenna — that's contiguous, you don't get PV's advantage of being able to split it up.
Kinetic currently means an RFG — launch it e.g. electromagnetically towards a similar coil on the ground that decelerates it to extract the energy. This is theoretically possible and would totally work, but to be clear: it's shooting a bullet into the barrel of another gun, and this is not something we have a lot of experience doing, certainly not at scale or for the purposes of power generation.
Defending a settlement where the nearest potential aggressor is 50,000,000 km away is also a much easier task than defending one where the closest adversary is 1,000 km away.
With respect to space-based solar power and EM power transmission: my first thought is that a 10-kilometre diameter receiving antenna is totally doable, especially considering how much energy can be sent from space to this one rectenna. Such a rectenna can also double as a PV station.
First: If it otherwise takes a year to build them, no difference.
Second: If they're useful for you in-situ, they're useful for anyone else in-situ. Don't need to move an object to take control of it, for exactly the same reasons that the British didn't want to physically relocate the Suez Canal during the Suez crisis.
> Defending a settlement where the nearest potential aggressor is 50,000,000 km away is also a much easier task than defending one where the closest adversary is 1,000 km away.
False. Whether attacker or defender has advantage is not distance dependent, it's tech-dependent. Absolute stealth in space is only becomes impossible when you've already got something around a K1.5 civilisation in the vicinity, before that you can fairly easily hide passive IR signatures, deflect/absorb/otherwise minimise active EM scans, and the defender doesn't have the resources to saturate volume with gravity sensors to spot attacker's mass. Even with Starship, the current state of the art passive and active scanning of the entire planet Earth still has trouble — most recent news-worthy item is 2024 YR₄ which we know so little about that it could be anywhere from 40 to 90 metres. Even just painting that rock black would have meant it never got spotted because nobody wants to waste effort on active radar — and even if we did all start using active radar that too could be fairly easily defeated until it was too late, using even just the relatively primitive cross-section stealth reduction tech of the 1980s, because the scale of space itself makes radar less effective (radar bounces have a double inverse square).
On the ground, you absolutely can saturate with CCTV even now, sufficient for banditry; military-quality stealth is much harder to defeat at scale. Close-in surveillance still available in space, but then you're back to a few kilometres, no distance advantage. Actually it's worse than that, because outside an atmosphere you can do a hard-gee deceleration in the last few seconds, but also you can just let go of some plastic ball bearings before decelerating and have your approach preceded by a deadly shower of hypervelocity radar-invisible shrapnel hitting whatever bits you didn't want to keep, e.g. the existing defence systems. Heck, if it's a military action, they can perform the attack years in advance and with almost total plausible deniability.
> With respect to space-based solar power and EM power transmission: my first thought is that a 10-kilometre diameter receiving antenna is totally doable, especially considering how much energy can be sent from space to this one rectenna. Such a rectenna can also double as a PV station.
Contiguous. And that's per ground station, not total, you'd need in the order of 250 for the default proposal just to reach current Terran electrical power usage levels, or 2000 if you add in non-electrical power usage levels. Name an existing artificial 10 km diameter contiguous surface. Closest I can think of is "an entire city", but even those are not usually contiguous. Well, touching, but not fully filled in, not fully wired up. Not even the concrete and tarmac, let alone the plumbing or wiring.
If you're building stuff at this scale, the resources requirements for the ground stations alone, let alone the space elements, are enough to seriously consider a low-resistance high-current DC global planetary grid as an alternative, and then you just put PV plants in antipodal deserts and get 24/7 PV from ground mounted PV without storage. And the political problems which prevent that being built starting today and over the next five years, are trivial in comparison to the political issues from any significant space based beamed power system, even one which is sincerely and openly designed in a peaceful fashion (which is hard to prove).
The overall power density isn't even much different than PV for a bunch of reasons, including safety, it just gives the possibility of getting powered in what is to our eyes darkness. If you could see RF, it would be like a time-averaged equivalent of a slightly cloudy day, 24/7 — lower peak, higher average, than PV in the same place.
Consider the converse: if you were to design a system that is capable of having an arbitrarily high power density, it's no longer just a power source, it's a death ray. Other governments take a dim view of such things, and will likely cause aforementioned years-in-advance attacks with almost total plausible deniability.
But even then, this is the wrong usage. Use power locally in space for things, don't beam it.
If/when humanity gets to a full K2, suborning that much power generation capacity and pointing it at Earth doesn't look like a grape in a microwave, it looks like Alderaan every 14 days or so.
We're not even politically ready for this kind of change, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons as ancient Athens would not have been politically ready for the sudden availability of Tsar Bomba during one of their fights with Sparta — but that only makes it fortunate that Starship is orders of magnitude too small to cause such an industrial change.
For all the reasons I gave in the previous comment, if you consider Apollo to be analogous to a Kon-Tiki raft, Starship is a carrack, an orbital ring is a highway network, and even if we had one of those we're still orders of magnitude short of K1.
This overlooks a couple factors. First, a raid requires building and launching a fleet of vehicles — a massive investment in logistics and capital. Second, most materials targeted for raiding take less than a year to produce. Spending enormous resources to steal something that can be manufactured more cheaply on Earth or in situ is economically unsound. In nearly all practical scenarios, the costs and risks associated with long-distance raids vastly outweigh any marginal benefits. So yes, and colony on Mars would be safer from raids than one on Earth.
>Second: If they're useful for you in-situ, they're useful for anyone else in-situ.
This is totally different than the Suez Canal, because it would require the raiding party to want to completely relocate for those resources to be useful. There's no meaningful trade between Mars and Earth due to logistics, so they cannot economically utilize those resources of Mars on Earth.
> False. Whether attacker or defender has advantage is not distance dependent, it's tech-dependent. Absolute stealth in space only becomes impossible when you've already got something around a K1.5 civilization in the vicinity, before that you can fairly easily hide passive IR signatures, deflect/absorb/otherwise minimize active EM scans, and the defender doesn't have the resources to saturate volume with gravity sensors to spot attacker's mass.
Irrespective of the level of technology available, distance imposes inherent logistical constraints. A nearby attacker can maintain sustained pressure, rapid resupply, and repeated engagements at lower cost, while a distant force must overcome long transit times and a vulnerable supply chain.
As for stealth, sven assuming near-future stealth and tracking advancements, proximity still affords defenders longer reaction times and more thorough surveillance.
>Contiguous. And that's per ground station, not total, you'd need in the order of 250 for the default proposal just to reach current Terran electrical power usage levels, or 2000 if you add in non-electrical power usage levels. Name an existing artificial 10 km diameter contiguous surface.
2,000 city-sized rectennas to power all of Earth seems like a great deal.
This 2002 study models a 5 GW SBSP system with a 12-km rectenna that is transparent enough to allow vegetation to grow underneath. This mitigates land-use concerns while allowing high efficiency for power collection:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3427153_How_Safe_Ar...
K2 is 10 orders of magnitude harder than K1.
Using rockets at all for K2 is a terrible idea, as you are forced to start treating oxygen as a mineral to be extracted from rocks, because there isn't enough in Earth's atmosphere… by 8 orders of magnitude.
Actually, not even that.
15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day isn't nothing, but at the same time, rockets cannot ever scale to K2. Can barely scale to K1, but only if you don't mind catastrophic climate change from burning order-of one percent of Earth's atmospheric oxygen.
K2 requires a VN replicator. If you have one of those, you only need one successful rocket launch. Not one per day, one total. Just so long as the rocket is big enough to fit the replicator, that's it.
Hmm. 15000 tons, so 100 Block 2 Starship+Booster, per day. Accounting for fuel-rich engines and methane's greenhouse factor, launching that with rockets is ~150 million tons of CO₂-equivalent per year.
Seems small, but even all by itself that's 3x the maximum sustainable level of emissions — even if absolutely everything else, everywhere in the planet, was completely and perfectly greenhouse-neutral, it's too much.
Shame, really. Mars missions only work if SpaceX gets a Sabatier plant that fits in a Starship, masses less than 150 tons including power systems (or 200 tons on Block 3), and can produce 330 tons (for Block 2) in two years while on Mars, yet no talk from them about work on this because Musk is too busy Muntzing his government.
Even if rockets can barely scale to a K1 civilization without severe environmental consequences, that doesn’t diminish their value. Affordable, frequent access to space is exactly what we need to build the infrastructure for later breakthroughs — such as Von Neumann replicators — which could then accelerate the expansion of space-based industry exponentially. Without the ability to reliably launch materials into orbit, we wouldn’t even get close to the point where self-replication becomes feasible.
Regarding environmental concerns, while launching 15,000 tons per day might sound like a lot, the estimated 150 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year is only about 0.3% of current global emissions. Moreover, if we shift industry into space, Earth’s overall emissions could eventually drop, making the trade-off much more acceptable. And that's completely putting aside the potential to synthesize rocket fuel using carbon sequestration, which would make the launches carbon neutral.
And on Mars: criticizing SpaceX for not yet having a Sabatier plant misses the point. SpaceX is trying to solve the biggest pain point of Mars colonization: the immense cost of launching mass to orbit. They can solve the other pain points later or leave it to others to do that.
I'm more hopeful about centripetal launchers (can run on electricity). The first prototypes seem promising.
I think the main company operating such tech is SpinLaunch.
(We can't do megastructure-scale electromagnets right now: while they would work and China has a big enough industrial base, nobody on Earth is in the mood for anyone talking about building a 1000km diameter electromagnet significantly stronger than Earth's magnetic field).
So yes, the simpler machines on Earth are mainly useful at first as a bootstrap, and after that it would rather be from the Moon or Mars as a hub, with huge electromagnetic railguns.
Between Earth and low orbit, maybe some version of a space elevator could finally see the light?
If we follow this kind of blueprints, prioritizing electromagnetic tech instead of fossil fuels, we can successfully bootstrap some amount of space-based industry without trashing too much Earth's liveability.
1) "Opportunities on earth" will always be more efficient in many aspects. Cost, waste, energy demand, reliability, throughput to provide for the 99% remaining on earth, the ones we actually try to solve problems for. You are ignoring cost-benefit analysis, scaling factors and side effects.
2) You are betting on space industries to compete and replace earth bound processes but only give launch capabilities as an argument. I think there are vast uncertainties and unknowns to overcome. Even if it plays out as you imagine, it will probably neither happen in your lifetime nor in next generations. All the while we continue to damage your foundation because we chase a pie in the sky.
3) Shooting for mars is idiotic. Going for the moon yields similar results and is much "easier". From there the rest of the solar system gets closer to us but please keep in mind, I am still not talking about self sustaining colonies or industries. Given that our earth still provides plenty, shooting for space in general is idiotic imo. If I had to bet on a technical long shot solution, I would go for nuclear fusion instead of bezos/musk, who I suspect to be equally delusional.
Please read closely. Id like to tell you something about population dynamics.
Maybe you have heard about the malthusian point of crisis, where food demand overshoots supply and a population starts to decline/collapse. This picture is incomplete.
Every species faces 3 categories of destabilizing threats: resources/nutriment, waste products and selective factors (a general term for internal/external stressors like predators, war, diseases, catastrophes, etc). All of our man made problems fit into one of these categories! In the long run, every species has to solve these problems!
Pointing at the potential resources and space for landfills beyond earth will not free you from these constraints, it just extend your grace period and enables you to pretend to have solved anything. An actual self sustaining colony means producing _and recycling_ everything, from the vital technology stack down to every day products. If any tech billionaire ever reaches that awareness of the problem and a solution for it, then why build it in space?!
What we need is a circular, sustainable econmy, which is also a big moonshot, unfortunately. But either way, the realization of the problems we face is the first step. CO2 is just one our urgent waste products. Can you name a second one with global implications?
I agree with your points, which I could summarize as "my 1) is very difficult".
May it be more accessible with mechanical systems instead of humans working outside of Earth?
Anyway, I hope you understand and agree with my main point: to continue economic growth in our biosphere will just destroy this biosphere, quicker than we realize.
Going fully sustainable / having recycling rates of 100% / having zero impact on our environment ... is impossible I think. But I absolutely dont need to measure against that hard goal to conclude how much we are f'ing things up. So yea, I generally agree with you, even though i wouldnt put it on economic growth alone.
The thing is, we already have a real-world example of how a large space program benefited Earth: the Apollo program. It wasn’t just about getting to the Moon — it led to a wave of new technologies that had nothing to do with space travel but ended up shaping industries back on Earth. That’s what happens when you push engineering and science to their limits. Space missions are, by their nature, some of the most ambitious and disciplined blue sky projects we undertake. They force researchers and engineers to tackle extreme challenges, and in doing so, they produce breakthroughs that spill over into everyday life. That kind of well-funded, high-stakes R&D has historically driven progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers.
Now, when people talk about space expansion as unrealistic or too difficult, what they’re often really saying is that it’s too expensive. And historically, they’ve been right — cost has always been the biggest obstacle. But that’s exactly what’s changing. Before SpaceX, launching anything into orbit cost around $15,000 per kilogram. That meant sending a single astronaut into space could cost nearly a billion dollars. At those prices, space wasn’t an option for anything beyond government-funded prestige projects.
But we’re already past that era. Falcon 9 proved that launch costs can be dramatically reduced, and we’ve seen the direct impact of that—Starlink is a perfect example of a space-based system that’s already providing real-world benefits. With Starship, the cost of going to orbit could drop by another order of magnitude. If that happens, access to space will go from being a rare, ultra-expensive event to something routine. That completely changes what’s possible.
I think it’s shortsighted to assume space won’t provide massive benefits to Earth. Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, space development is on that same trajectory. The same people who dismissed reusable rockets a decade ago are now watching them land on drone ships in the ocean.
I just think it’s worth taking a step back and asking: is this skepticism really coming from a place of objective analysis? Or is it just part of the broader push to downplay space exploration, especially when it’s coming from the private sector? Because if history has shown us anything, it’s that ambitious, long-term projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.
My point of view comes from the other side. I am asking how species/societies fail and land on the 3 categories of failure, call it the great filter if you like. I should have pointed them out more clearly, that resources, waste products and selective factors are what we need to solve in the long term. CO2 is just one waste products of the many, that is in public awareness.
I am not downplaying the advances in space flight. I am also not ignoring, that there are limited benefits along the road for the general population. I strongly do object to the hype, framing it as a solution to societal problems though. I hope I made my self clear now.
Calling me shortsighted is the wrong word, I am pessimistic. Shortsightedness would imply that there are actual things to see. I am pessimistic about the competitiveness of orbital solar energy and about the cost-benefit of bulk deorbiting of resources – which still would be unsustainable. I am also pessimistic about upper atmospherical pollution, space debris and even more detached/delusional and politically way overrepresented billionaires on an ideological doomed mission to mars, while earth burns out.
Besides that, there are military, astronomy and telecommunication usecases (intentionally ignoring geoengineering), which I am also not downplaying, they are just irrelevant to our pressing issues. I kind of agree with one label you threw around: “distraction”.
Just pointing at
> progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers.
> cost [drops] by another order of magnitude. [...]. That completely changes what’s possible.
> Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, _space development is on that same trajectory_
> if history has shown us [...] ambitious projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.
does not impress me at all. To me, that is just vague gesturing at the sky. Except Computers, which can digitally model anything, which is why they pushed into every aspect of our lifes, space flight has limited use cases and unique constrains. That is the foundation of my pessimism.
To make myself clear: My point of view comes from the other side. I am asking how species/societies fail and from there I focus on sustainability as a key principle for any attempt of solving things. A cloud-castle as a promise of salvation and source of hope for our future does not work for me. On the contrary, space flight delusion _in a thread about the broken promises of carbon capturing_ – the lack of problem awareness generally – angers me every time. We should have sustainability departments with strong regulatory tools by now, but i think elon would disagre with me on that. I am slowly losing my hope living in this idiocracy. Thanks for questioning my objectivity.
Take climate science. Without satellites, we wouldn’t fully understand how CO2 moves through the atmosphere. Space tech tracks deforestation, ocean shifts, and extreme weather. Even climate models rely on it. Dismissing space as just billionaires playing with rockets ignores how much we already depend on it.
You say space-based industries — like orbital solar, asteroid mining, and colonies — won’t be competitive. But major tech shifts always start out looking impractical. Aviation was once a luxury. Early computers had "limited use cases". If people had written them off, they would have been wrong. Space is following the same trajectory.
I get the skepticism that lower launch costs alone won’t create large-scale space industries. But history shows that when costs decline, new demand emerges. Starlink already proves this. Starship is designed to push costs even lower, making things possible that never were before. That’s not hand-waving—that’s measurable progress.
Now, about closed-loop sustainability. You’re right that a space colony would need to recycle everything. But that’s exactly why we should invest in it. Perfecting closed-loop systems in space improves resource efficiency on Earth. The better we get at sustaining life in extreme conditions, the better we can solve sustainability challenges here.
Maybe space-based solar and asteroid mining won’t scale soon — maybe they will. But assuming today’s economics will never change is shortsighted. Early solar panels were inefficient and expensive, yet now they’re among the cheapest energy sources. The cost curve changed. Space industries are still young — dismissing them now is premature.
You focus on how civilizations fail, but the best way to prevent failure is through innovation. Expanding our toolkit, not restricting it, is how we solve challenges like sustainability.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic to believe space will be a major part of that.
Fetuses do not properly develop in the womb outside of Earth gravity.
Sorry. End of the road for that sci-fi pipe dream.
Can it? How?
If we can't get a solar panel on our roofs I can't see the impetus to get them up past the moon.
But, given how we keep rushing into predictable disasters, I now expect to live to experience personally, first hand, a K2-level Kessler cascade from the inside.
When people figure out the missing parts of VN replicators, that all happens over a handful of decades.
One: deindustrialize and let China control all industrial production while having massive carbon dioxide emissions or,
Two: reindustrialize and challenge China's industrial production advantage while having massive carbon dioxide emissions.
Low emissions aren't on the table. They're not a possibility. So at this point I'm deeply suspicious of anyone peddling that fantasy. They are, most likely, spreading Chinese misinformation, wittingly or unwittingly.
China "won" before the game even began for the simple fact of them being a very late developer. Development is not even guaranteed as a consequence of industrialization anymore; see premature deindustrialization. No misinformation needed, just cold hard historical laws.
Even if they're physically in the US, are these robots driven by AI, or remote control? If the former, does this re-industrialisation create any jobs? If the latter, why hire Americans to control the robots rather than much cheaper Cubans or Vietnamese or Salvadorans?
The average price was onshore with tower: 1894 Yuan/kW onshore without tower: 1513 Yuan/kW offshore with tower: 3307 Yuan/kW offshore without tower: 2698 Yuan/kW
source: https://wind.in-en.com/html/wind-2456186.shtml (chinese)
In 2024, 121GW of wind turbines were connected to the grid worldwide, 80GW of which in China, 41GW worldwide outside China. In 2023, China added 77 out of 112GW
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
If you're worried about how artificially elevated CO2 levels affect agricultural products, then you should start taking issue with commercial greenhouses, which regularly pump CO2 in to increase yields. This is a common practice, and only now is it being viewed as something bad or strange because it's not convenient for the climate change narrative that presents industrial emission of CO2 as the apex threat that requires government-enforced collective action to solve.
While there is a "CO2 fertilization effect" where rising atmospheric carbon dioxide can initially boost plant growth, scientists are increasingly stating that this effect is reaching its limit, meaning plants can no longer absorb as much CO2 due to factors like nutrient limitations and other environmental constraints, effectively capping the potential for further carbon uptake from the atmosphere.
In the long run, humans cannot indefinitely alter atmospheric composition without risking conditions that could undermine life’s prosperity. At sufficiently high concentrations, CO2 also impairs human cognition, as our physiology is not adapted to the extreme levels that were once common in Earth’s distant past.
That said, we should remain open to the possibility that CO2 emissions have net positive effects in the short to medium term. If that is the case, CO2 mitigation strategies could be adjusted accordingly—focusing on economically efficient transitions rather than rushing to eliminate CO2 emissions at all costs. This would mean prioritizing the replacement of CO2-emitting energy sources where it is already cost-effective, while investing in R&D to lower transition costs in areas where immediate replacement would be prohibitively expensive.
The species of plants were at a different evolutionary stage. Further, a lot of bio matter wasn't in the form of human consumables. Algae was by and large the main CO2 absorber of prehistoric periods.
It took millions of years of growth for plants to sequester the carbon we are currently emitting. That's millions of years of adaptation to the ever changing atmosphere composition.
The optimal CO₂ concentration for plant growth in greenhouse farms typically ranges between 800 and 1,200 ppm (parts per million). Some high-intensity commercial greenhouses may use levels up to 1,500 ppm, but beyond that, the benefits diminish, and excessive CO₂ can start to have negative effects.
The current atmospheric CO₂ level is approximately 420–425 ppm as of 2024, which is significantly lower than the optimal greenhouse levels for plant growth but much higher than pre-industrial levels (~280 ppm).
--
Worth noting that at 1,000 ppm, CO2 begins to impair human cognition, and if we really want to be safe, we really shouldn't allow it to even get close to that, e.g. 700 ppm is probably already cutting it too close.
The gist of it, CO2 supplementation can be beneficial to some plants (not all plants) IFF you also tweak all other inputs into growth. Not something that happens outside of a greenhouse.
> Plants may not show a positive response to supplemental CO2 because of other limiting factors such as nutrients, water and light. All factors need to be at optimum levels.
[1] https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-...
Any time I watch the news I feel like this is already happening.
One critical impact of higher CO2 concentrations is that drier climates see more vegetation, so you see a lot of greening in previously arid, barren places. And that also has massively positive implications for farm yields.
just as importantly, since you're making a practical argument for why we should care, your own linked analysis suggests America will experience very little impact from global warming. impact levels run from a bit below +10 to a bit below -30 with zero as no impact; looks like our projected impact is around -10.
if you were assigning America some vaguely proportional cost, we could do so relative to emissions (giving us a $40T bill) or GDP ($72T). both of those numbers are significantly greater than the current national debt. they would bankrupt the nation, cripple the common man with inflation, and screw us out of any shot at reindustrializing.
as usual, unsaid is the massive downgrade in standard of living people expect us to somehow magically accept to build this bridge to nowhere.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-ins...
They said the US could spend 8 Trillion a year and it would still make financial sense.
Your Mackinsey report says the whole world should spend 9.2 Trillion a year to make the transition and that it makes financial sense to do so, both due to avoided costs of climate change and that many of the things needed to transition have a positive return in investmemt anyway.
Your own contribution on top of the report just seems muddled and confused given what you've cited.
Are you saying Mackinsey are wrong and it would be cheaper to do nothing? They're very clear even in the executive summary that is not the case:
> The rewards of the net-zero transition would far exceed the mere avoidance of the substantial, and possibly catastrophic, dislocations that would result from unabated climate change, or the considerable benefits they entail in natural capital conservation. Besides the immediate economic opportunities they create, they open up clear possibilities to solve global challenges in both physical and governance-related terms. These include the potential for a long-term decline in energy costs that would help solve many other resource issues and lead to a palpably more prosperous global economy.
In addition to the chemistry other people have mentioned -- if we burn hydrocarbons and then capture carbon we're still net positive H -> H2O, capturing carbon as carbonate rocks can be less expensive than splitting CO2 to C and O2, etc -- most serious proposals for carbon capture have involved using cheap electricity, e.g. solar power in the middle of the day.
It's quite possible that using cheap midday electricity to generate methane (which can be easily stored in large quantities) which is then burned in gas "peakers" when power is expensive would be economically profitable despite not being thermodynamically profitable.
So many of the "barely break even" concepts don't even come close due to this transportation factor. Even if you use solar to generate electricity to power this transportation, we don't have excess solar yet - that's capacity that's being used for this new expense, not being used to offset existing expenses.
That said, I'm hopeful that research, refinement, and excess renewable grid capacity will eventually make it worthwhile to do this in addition to reducing our fossil fuel usage, but we just _gotta_ reduce our fossil fuel usage. It's not negotiable anymore, and heck, never was.
You have to be careful not to double-count progress but if you consider things relative to status quos, then you're still looking at progress right? Like improvements are still good, right?
Like if you're dead set on building a building, you're gonna need concrete no matter what. Might as well use "good" concrete I guess? Though there's likely not much magic to where building the building _reduces_ CO2 net.
No, because they share a budget and thus have opportunity cost.
Fungibility is pretty context dependent
This is still the best option, but even after having spent over 20 years in environmentalism in various aspects we have to admit that carbon-free is simply unattainable panacea for a myriad of reasons that go far beyond the scope of this post; but it is this form of absolutism that is the biggest hindrance from my POV--outside of the stalemates and endless impasse created by tribal/identity politics, but they often benefit from the status quo.
The truth is that methane is and remains the the biggest threat in terms of 'carbon chains,' and with a focus on market based solutions to capture and re-purpose these leaks/vents to ancillary purposes (Bitcoin mining proved the concept) and a continued expansion in plant/tree cultivation of a myriad of cultivars we would be better suited than ANYTHING that has been offered to date.
The perpetual need to try to go headlong for a one-size-fits-all approach is what has allowed us to have all the technology we need to start to reverse these systemic issues to our biosphere but be left at a constant dead-end while we wait for corporate elites and their political class cohorts to delay progress.
Sidenote: Bio-char is very useful, I worked with Biodyanimc farmers with BSc in hand on this topic in EU who were traveling to Africa to promote the use of bio-char and it's benefits to help subsistence farmers to be able to support and eventually scale their farms; while at the same time the Bitcoin community via Bit-pesa was helping with micro/small loans to said farmers that allowed for (gradual) progress.
And it is this type of seemingly diametrically opposed communities need to be bridged in order for things to actual work.
It is happening, but only started to truly kick off on its own in the past couple of years.
Given the lifespan of grid generation assets even a 3% increase in electricity mix per year will lead to near 100% renewable penetration when it reaches saturation.
For example, you could run a gas turbine in Germany in winter at night during a spike of the consumption and run carbon capture on a desert during the day
In a sense you use atmosphere as battery/transportation system.
I am not saying that this must make sense but this is far more complex than napkin math.
It seems highly unlikely that even 100 years from now we'll be net positive on CO2 release into the atmosphere. Renewables are a thing, and we're making significant progress.
So once we're net negative, it'll be up to us to figure out how much CO2 to release, but it seems a certainty that long before 1000 years we will no longer need to store any of the captured carbon.
For a year? And can you offset them again the following year by adding more the next year?
Every year.
That's a lot of transport energy, a great deal of fertilizer, and a continent's worth of liquid gold.
Don't forget the additional area required to offset the energy expenses of that annum's worth of additional agriculture.
Certainly a detail worth checking, farmland in Australia is much less than the area of Australia.
https://energy.fortescue.com/en/green-energy-tech/green-ammo...
https://www.fertilizerseurope.com/paving-the-way-to-green-am...
https://www.yara.com.au/crop-nutrition/grow-the-future/susta...
with capital investment and scheduled ground breaking on plants: https://energy.fortescue.com/en/our-green-projects/gibson-is...
You would have to ask them again, demanding their thought process or sources from third parties like myself is fruitless.
I think you're forgetting location and energy sources are a big factor here. Nobody is suggesting burning carbon to capture carbon. If you could somehow e.g. use nuclear power in the middle of the continent to capture carbon emitted across the world - that would be incredibly useful, even if you had to put in twice as much power as you had obtained originally.
(I am not suggesting carbon capture is a particularly good idea, just pointing out that your napkin math ignores some key factors.)
It’s what the napkin maths say. Obviously someone as pious as you would never use electronics or fly or hang out on a startup accelerator forum.
The issue isn't whether or not it's feasible now.
Reducing usage of fossil fuels is a prisoner's dilemma problem... No country is going to do it if it hurts them in any way.
Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done. Carbon capture is the only potential way to reverse this and that alone is worth investing in.
It might not be feasible today but that doesn't mean it won't be feasible in 50 years...
That’s an understatement. Billions would perish in the name of “the greater good”
storage numbers also often suck. frankly, hydrocarbons are probably a better option to synthesize and store than something like lithium-ion batteries. and storage becomes a much bigger concern if one considers running a grid primarily on inconsistent renewables rather than using them as auxiliary power sources. plus your magical all-green grid still needs gas peakers most likely unless you massively overbuild that storage and generation.
The most efficient fossil fuel power plants (combined cycle plants that burn natural gas to power a generator driven by a turbine, and then use the heat from the exhaust to generate steam in a second turbine) have an efficiency of about 60%. That doesn't even begin to address the inefficiency in "synthesizing" "hydrocarbons." Electrolysis, for example, is less than 95%.
If you have such a fundamental ignorance then you are not remotely qualified to be making comments like "wind and solar are more expensive than they're made out to be!"
You must know better than all those silly grid and solar/wind farm operators! You should ring them up and tell them how stupid they are to be using solar and wind, how they have no idea what it's actually costing them!
And no, green power is not "unreliable." Hilariously, during the massive Texas blackouts during the ice storms, wind and solar were just about the only power sources still working...
That German power system you alt-righters love to shriek about for being stupid for going green? They have one fifth the outage rate the US does. As they massively increased their green power sources, their grid reliability went up. https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...
Several countries in Europe have periods where their grids are entirely powered by renewables. But suuuuure, "magical green power" is unreliable.
you are wrong. green power is unreliable in the sense that it doesn’t produce constant load. i am asking you nicely to open one book and learn about the duck curve, then go analyze what storage at grid scale would actually cost.
you’re rephrasing what i said in an aggro manner: running temporarily off renewables doesn’t change the need for storage and peakers. all the countries i know of who’ve done that have much, much lower energy consumption and are much smaller than America.
not sure where you got this alt-right allegation, but please go learn some more about this topic. in the mean time, know your place and mind your manners.
Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper presents a false dichotomy.
Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming.
This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from parties that sometimes partially align with the science and sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture because it plays well and potentially increases their longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop carbon capture as part of the toolkit.
It took solar 45 years to become low cost, and carbon capture will probably be just as difficult. If we did things one step at a time, carbon capture wouldn't be economical until ~2080, which is too late.
How do you do that?
One approach would be a revenue-neutral carbon tax on extraction of sequestered carbon. And border carbon taxes for imports from countries who don't also have an internal carbon tax.
I think any solution will have to come from industry, not government.
The profit motive creates a self-sustaining cycle of rapid expansion and iteration, which should drastically increase the efficiency per unit as well as the horizontal scale of DAC so that eventually we'll have exponentially more DAC installed and then you can decide what to do with all the excess carbon, sequestering it in whatever ways make sense.
[0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...
[1] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terrafo...
Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a world that is mostly fossil-fueled. But the truth is that it's not clear at all that renewables can scale to replace the fossil fuels. Actually it seems like they can't, realistically, totally replace them.
Instead of focusing on how to do carbon capture and keep living the way we are, we should focus on preparing society for the inevitable global-warming-in-a-world-with-less-energy. Which means we have to do less with less. AI is the exact opposite, so we are clearly accelerating in the other direction.
Carbon capture is interesting research, but if feels like it assumes a world with more energy than today (because you need energy for the capture), and clean. We're most likely not going there in the timeline we are looking at (the problems have already started, we don't have 200 years to discover a new energy).
We need to get everybody much below the Europe line here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
Tackling AI comes automatically from the required policy to rapidly ramp down fossils use. (For example cap-and-trade applied to electricity market transferring the emissions quota to electricity prices)
I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative.
The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.
You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.
What workforce is going to sign up for those jobs? "We will call you when the wind starts to blow, you need to be ready to start your shift within 30 minutes of the call."
The lifetime of a cement plant is 30-50 years, and they cost 100-200M Euros to build, so even if there were a process that was ready to scale today, producing a cement that passed regulatory standards, we'd still be making some Portland cement into the 2070s.
Ergo, producers would like to stick a carbon-capture plant onto their kilns.
Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
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We pay in 8+ different ways for fossil fuels:
(1) Subsidies of trillions of dollars per year
(2) Ethanol and biodiesel subsidies
(3) Pay at the pump (or electricity)
(4) Pay for carbon capture to help oil companies extract more oil
(5) Pay for the consequences of climate change (a) increase of home insurance (b) bailouts of insurance and utility providers (c) dealing with the direct costs of climate change
(6) Health costs! Pollution is directly linked to every disease (except STIs?). Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Think of all the cancers, cardiovascular, metabolic, every biological systems.
(7) We pay a cost of other pollutants. Lead (thank you oil industry!), mercury (thank you coal industry!). Fish was a source of food, the best kind of renewable food, where you do absolutely nothing other than catch it! This source is now gone, there is so much mercury in fish, that all recommendations of fish are to limit the number of servings!
(8) Every person on the planet is paying a fossil fuel tax (the 5 above), to the super super rich. It is a transfer of wealth from everyone to about ~100 people. This money is used to buy all assets (real estate), stocks and everything else, enabling the super wealthy to extract every more wealth from every sector of the economy.
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Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
Shell Is Looking Forward. The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change...
Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...
Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
67% to 75% of energy is wasted. See Rejected energy:https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...
Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil: https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...
27 DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation...
A ton of {coal,petroleum,natural gas} emits {2.6,2.75,3.2} tons of CO2. 8.5 billion tons of coal burnt every year. 4000 billion cubic meters of Natural gas/year (~3000 billion tons - gemini), Global oil production is 4.5 billion metric tons/year. We'll need tens of millions of DAC plants!
Electrification is efficiency: The world will need less energy after the transition: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
What are we wasting it on? Why will we suddenly stop wasting it when we switch to solar/wind?
I would think switching completely to solar/wind would massively increase the amount of wasted energy, because solar and wind energy production is quite variable, so to meet people's needs at low production times, we need to overprovision our production.
Most predictions are that developed nations will double the amount of electricity they produce to electrify transport and heating but this will still reduce total energy due to the reduction in waste heat.
Isn't that for food security in case of war?
To your point it's not the only thing like that. There's huge national reserves of lots of stuff, the amount of cheese for example is huge.
And anyway, the best way to destroy the fossil fuel industry is to make synthetic fuels so cheap that nobody will want to use the bloody variety. We can easily do that with a carbon tax, but if people keep insisting on stopping carbon capture research, we won't.
How many batteries are required to make that generated electricity available at night?
But batteries are a very important innovation for power grids regardless of renewable energy goals. 50% of the job of an energy grid is just keeping the ac power supply stable when generation does exactly match consumption. Lithium batteries help smooth out spikes in demand over milliseconds and hours to save millions of dollars
Lithium grid scale storage is awesome no matter what happens with renewables.
I had no idea about this until last year, when there was an eminent domain vs nimby struggle I heard about concerning putting co2 pipelines through farms for this purpose. I always thought carbon capture by machines was an impractical, but learning that what it actually is in practice is a way for govt subsidies to pay ethanol and oil companies and enable them to extract more oil.
I wouldn't be surprised if a significant majority of govt money spent on environmental efforts has been captured by industries and is being used to accelerate environmental harm. I only know that this is the case in the areas I'm familiar with. It's sad.
Pay an airline to take you somewhere and produce carbon, pay someone to remove that carbon.
It's like paying a fee when buying a car battery or car tires unless you return an old one.
The fee needs to be overly pegged to inflation or something though otherwise you end up with the glass / aluminum cans problem.
It's a tax to encourage the alternatives. If an electric car costs more than an ICE car, then taxing ICE cars through a carbon tax will make the electric car more attractive, at least on the margins.
> It's costing everybody more and people are being paid twice. I'm thinking especially of the companies trying to sequester carbon in the wells they empty - they end up making money both ways.
Similar logic to the above applies. Oil companies might be able to charge more for a barrel of oil, but it's not like that barrel of oil is suddenly more useful. That's bad for oil companies because it makes the economics of their product worse. They have to do more "stuff" to sell a given barrel of oil, but their competitors (solar panels or whatever) don't.
Sure, but the reason solar panels are popular is because they're (mostly) the cheapest way to generate power. By adding an additional tax to petroleum products based on say sequestering costs (as opposed to some made-up I won't chop down a forest offset) it encourages non-petroleum products to be used.
It's basically a tariff for clean energy.
The entity who caused the pollution should be responsible for paying to clean it up. For logistical purposes it might make sense to tax at the point of production/sale rather than actual emission, eg. taxes at gas stations rather than some sort of monitoring system on every car.
> The problem is this is energy and resources that could be spent on actually solving the problem at its source instead of finding ways to maintain the status quo.
If the alternatives are actually cheaper, the market will naturally work itself out, because polluters would be incentivized to switch. Nobody uses plastic utensils in place of reusable ones, not because the government banned them, but because everyone knows the latter are so much cheaper.
explain? at least with carbon since it's fungible and global it's probably the easiest to clean up, compared to exxon trying to clean an oil spill or whatever.
Buy electricity from coal and the power plant is the emitter, who should pay for capture. However, if you are a electricity customer, expect that cost to be passed on to you on your bill.
Carbon emitters through carbon pricing schemes. They already cover more than 20% of worldwide emissions, with China joining a few years ago.
[1] https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...
This has never been the point. Why the strawman argument?
Spending energy that likely came from fossil fuel burning to "capture" CO2 is like saying you've found a perpetual motion machine. The engineering is simpler for this in some ways, but it's still not really a "good" solution.
I agree organic capture is a good idea, and CHEAPEST thing we could do to have an impact dump iron into the open ocean to spawn a phytoplankton bloom, but there is no money to be made doing that.
Don’t know if it will work or is economically viable, but sounds pretty win-win to me.
Modern solar definitely makes this idea more attractive but you’re still emitting more carbon to build the solar in the hopes you’ll store more than you produced in X years. It is not a great value proposition versus making the grid more efficient or just emitting less by using that solar for the grid instead of sequestration.
There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current technology, period. Anyone seen an electric tractor lately? Combine harvester EVs? Electric aircraft? Zero emission concrete? Electric container ships? Cheap plastics without oil? Electric orbital launch vehicles!? Lots of fantasy tech that ranges from being cost ineffective to borderline infeasible and we can't (or won't, anyway) run our civilization without these and dozens more that have no real replacement on the horizon. Covid has made that point really sharply clear, we just can't stop ourselves. Piston engined planes still today run on leaded gas despite knowing that it's literal poison for fucks sake, it's fuckin hopeless to convince anyone about anything when there's a chance someone might lose money.
Carbon capture might help in the long run, but the bulk of it will have to be on geoengineering to even give us a century of time to remove megatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans. And maybe a fish or two will even survive.
That's not quite true. All the technology is here, just not yet deployed.
> Anyone seen an electric tractor lately?
Biofuels exists. Even now, we have enough biomass to produce replacement fuel for agriculture, long-distance trucking, and rail transport. We just waste it on mostly useless ethanol.
> Electric aircraft?
Aircraft will switch to SAF (synthetic fuel). Right now, manufacturers are working on adapting and certifying engines to use 100% SAF and the work is expected to be completed around 2030.
> Zero emission concrete?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2432222-zero-carbon-cem...
> Electric container ships?
https://www.yara.com/corporate-releases/the-worlds-first-cle...
The technologies are here already. They now need to mature and then be deployed.
At 2-3x the price. Ask an average farmer what their profit margins are. Oftentimes, roughly zero already.
> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2432222-zero-carbon-cem...
Unless it's the same price or cheaper as regular concrete, it will be used by literally nobody. No nation has the balls to mandate something like that when there's a billion real estate lobbyists telling them otherwise either.
> the work is expected to be completed around 2030
Great, we might actually see some of these planes in active service by 2120 then!
> https://www.yara.com/corporate-releases/the-worlds-first-cle...
There's also https://electrek.co/2024/05/02/fully-electric-10000-ton-cont... and a hundred hydrogen prototypes, and flettner rotors, and wingsails that went absolutely nowhere in practice.
Shipping uses the lowest quality, cheapest possible fuels that are borderline impossible to compete with, ships are large investments that last 30 years and nobody wants to spend money retrofitting them with a new powertrain. Note how solar in general was basically a rounding error in terms of usage until it became cheap enough to actually displace existing alternatives.
All of these technologies have 50 years of dev time to practical scale and cost competitive effectiveness in them at best, so they can almost be considered a fantasy along with net energy gain fusion for any kind of notable impact beyond pilot projects.
Fuel is about 3% of the farm expenses ( https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/2023_... ), even tripling it will not make produce significantly more expensive for consumers. But individual farmers can't switch because it will make their individual farm uncompetitive. That's where the regulation should come in to force _everyone_ to switch, negating the competitive advantages.
> Shipping uses the lowest quality, cheapest possible fuels that are borderline impossible to compete with
Shipping had largerly switched to low-sulfur fuel by 2020, resulting in an additional increase in temperature, as fewer particulates are emitted.
> All of these technologies have 50 years of dev time to practical scale and cost competitive effectiveness in them at best, so they can almost be considered a fantasy along with net energy gain fusion for any kind of notable impact beyond pilot projects.
Not really. Most of the technologies required for low-CO2 economy exist right now, and just need to be deployed. It just needs political will to force its adoption.
Yeah that has been a blunder of epic proportions, certainly helped a lot to bring last year up to 1.5 C.
Well I hope you're right, but frankly I think political will is too focused on pointless infighting and corruption to get anything done even if they wanted to. Most people aren't even demanding anything from their representatives, they just want cheap food, cheap gas and no taxes. The Paris Agreement has become a complete joke by now, nobody's even trying to abide by it anymore.
Zero additional anthropic warming result in progressive global decarbonizing thanks to carbon sink. (If the carbon sinks still exist when we reach 0 net emission and the permafrost hasn't thawed yet)
But this article puts both processes in the same category, which perfectly sets up a low-information, divisive debate. Why they would want to do that - well, some people stand to gain a lot from renewable energy program investment, let's put it that way.
Yes, everyone in fact.
I feel like Im ruining santa claus…
They sure as hell are incentivized to at least make others do. An increased awareness for environmental issues is profitable. I would go further and think that genuine interest in the future of humanity is more plausible than the required cognitive dissonance.
> Neither do you.
Completely needless accusation.
Producing solar, batteries, wind farms EMITS carbon and has large environmental impact. The energy sector will sell you whatever…
> > Neither do you. > Completely needless accusation.
99% of environmentalists are just posturing. I guess it’s possible you’re different, but just remember you probably emit more carbon than almost every person who’s ever lived.
> you probably emit more carbon than almost every person who’s ever lived.
That seems exaggerated. I live a vegetarian diet and do not own a car, my home electricity is 100% local renewables and I am very mindful of the carbon impact of any products I buy. While the Western industrial lifestyle is still unsustainable, I do think these small-scale changes are beneficial. Of course the ambient societal carbon emissions are incomparable to pre-Industrial timeframes, but that is widely known.
> However the emissions are negligible compared to the running emissions of fossil fuels
This is untrue but for the record, I'm referencing climate impact, not just emissions.
Solar has great emissions compared to FF in VERY SPECIFIC CONDITIONS. Its obvious that solar only works intermittently, and only provides efficient power in places where we have lots of sun next to large demand (think population centers).
Most of the worlds solar panels are produced in China, where they burn coal for the bulk of their industrial energy. Burning coal to produce panels, and placing them in non-sunny regions creates extra emissions, not less...frequently not even breaking even on the carbon cost of the initial production/distribution during the lifespan of the panel.
> fossil fuels which you don't seem to actively dislike
Of course I don't actively dislike inanimate substance. This is what freaks me out about the cult-like support for solar. Without fossil fuels, we would lose access to food, shelter, medicine, infrastructure, etc. The way some people talk, I'm starting to think the renewable crowd believes it's "worth it."
> Assuming that the world's power usage does not dramatically shrink in the future, especially solar farms will have to be built on a massive scale
1. We could use other forms of power generation...solar is not the only game in town.
2. The materials required for solar production are finite. It's unsustainable to extract/process all the materials required for such a feat, barring some sort of physics breakthrough in hyperconductivity. We literally do not have the materials OR the technology.
> That seems exaggerated. I live a vegetarian diet and do not own a car, my home electricity is 100% local renewables and I am very mindful of the carbon impact of any products I buy.
That's all well and good, but once you start taking flights, using infrastructure , electronics, ML workloads, developing software, etc, you've already beaten most others today and historically.
How many african peasants worth of emissions do you think your lifestyle produces? How do you think the food you consume is produced and distributed? Why aren't you considering the emissions required to pour concrete and produce steel?
If we can't at least point capture stacks at the individual home level, then forget atmospheric capture.
Also would’ve loved to see “degrowth”/reduce usage as an option, since that’s the last big one people advocate for IME.
P.S. does anyone know if the current US regime’s “any university that works on federal grants is forbidden from promoting DEI” policy is intended to apply to climate change as well? Seems likely, but I don’t recall seeing anything explicit in any of the EOs I’ve read. This study isn’t very out of Stanford, which would clearly be impacted — thus it piqued my interest.
The assumption for the full renewable scenario are the existence of the hydrogen economy. I'm quite positive about the potential of hydrogen but there are quite a few unsolved problems at the moment and it seems the hydrogen part of the energy transition has slowed down a bit.
Certainly the total cost of such a system is not well known at this time. So the cost calculation for the renewable scenario is quite uncertain - other energy storage tech might be more expensive.
The carbon capture calculation is based on the assumption that there is no other renewables and we go 100% capture.
This is not really that interesting an scenario, what matters more is the marginal costs of each technology at different points in the future.
In general a healthy dose of scepticism is warented when it comes to long term projections or cost of technologies, though or course policy does require we take a stab at it.
Completely switching to renewables will be more expensive than planting some trees for instance. If we want the most cost effective methods, it will be a mix of both, maybe more on the "burning less fossil fuels" side than on carbon capture, but neither extreme make sense.
And it may turn out that a complete switch to renewables may not be enough anyways. We may need carbon capture too, and maybe some geoengineering.
Why not grow algea and dump them down the gravity well into the dead, dark ocean, into some high salinity pit.
>A Big Nuclear Bomb Could Fix Climate Change, Physicist Says https://youtu.be/aGPKpx6pMko
Just put some huge nukes in the basalt at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, it breaks it up so the rock absorbs CO2, job done!
(paper on the idea https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06623
And I'll include this colourful quote:
"This is orders of magnitude larger than the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated, so this is not to be taken lightly."
I quickly read through and may have missed it but I do not see any mention of the timescale over which this would work just that it could sequester ~30 years worth of CO2 output.
I think in practice going straight to a huge megabomb straight off would not be wise but maybe we could try one of our existing spare nukes as a prototype test? Then you'd get more data on how it would work.
> The long-term effects of global radiation will impact humans and will cause loss of life, but this increased global radiation is “just a drop in the bucket”. Every year, we emit more radiation from coal power plants and we have already detonated over 2000 nuclear devices. Adding one more bomb should have minimal impact on the world.
I don't think "eh, what's one more detonation?" is persuasive when you're talking about a device more than 10x the size of all previous ones put together, being set off in direct contact with the seabed. Most of the fallout from nuclear testing came from the handful of ground burst tests that weren't fully confined, so I'm skeptical that "try to make it a clean fusion design" would actually be enough here. It would be cool if that were solvable though.
Most of fallout in a "regular" nuclear weapon comes from uranium fission by products and from neutrons activating the surrounding materials. In addition, most thermonuclear (fusion) bombs use natural uranium tamper to contain the fusing hydrogen. This tamper soaks up fusion neutrons and fissions, and that actually produces a significant part of the overall yield.
But that's not the only option. It's possible to use a lead tamper instead, so it won't produce any fission byproducts. The Soviet Tsar Bomba did that, and it resulted in the cleanest nuclear explosion on a per-kiloton-basis.
It's also possible to add a boron neutron absorber around the fusion stage to further limit the amount of fusion neutrons that can create dangerous activated materials.
Of course, even a relatively clean weapon is still going to produce plenty of pollution.
Yes, but if the bomb is surrounded by a blanket of boron, it will absorb most of the fusion neutrons. Not _all_, but a significant part of them.
The budget is actually not unreasonable. Fusion warhead scaling is easy, especially if you are not worried about practicalities for combat applications. You just keep on adding bigger stages.
And a boron blanket is literally a boron blanket. You can't do any real engineering for it, it's going to become a highly ionized plasma within the first moments of the explosion, held together only by inertia.
And there is not much military, it's more about scientists here than military people (about one hundred permanent people, space/climate scientists and biologist). The island is full of basalt yes, like most of the island, and the island is BIG. But if you are gonna nuck a french island, you should ask the French.
And it's the more important French island of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (after Adélie Land if you count it as an island).
Btw, we should be able to make the bomb ourself.
Reference: https://limitesmaritimes.gouv.fr/thematiques/espaces-maritim...
If the nukes are in the basalt then it is game over. We all reincarnate elsewhere in the universe.
It has to be deeper if you believe the paper.
That "paper" feels like an LLM wrote it.
If we're talking purely about future hypotheticals, who's to know if carbon scrubbers are less cost effective than city-sized lithium storage facilities.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/would-getting-all-our-electr...
> Richard Schmalensee, Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management
An economics and b-school professor is not equipped to evaluate a multi-decade transition, and he apparently hasn't even taken into account how batteries are falling in cost like solar and wind are.
Those who do cost-optimal grid planning find that wind, solar, storage, our existing nuclear result in a grid that is cheaper than our current grid. However the problem is that we don't do grid planning based on what costs the least, we do small incremental changes from utilities that are using cost estimates that are years out of date, and we don't think about making large scale changes that result in big cost changes.
And one other thing about looking about predictions from the past with grid modeling, everybody always underestimated the rate of how fast solar and wind prices fall. They are doing the same for batteries now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson#Critiques_of_...
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686
I'm not a huge fan of Jacobson's behavior, and he has made some mistakes, but he's also been very very right on a lot of things.
And while a single paper is a lot more reliable than a single person writing an editorial on an MIT site, it is still a single paper and must be taken as a pointer towards the truth, rather than truth revealed.
>Would switching entirely to these clean energy sources raise the price of electricity? Yes—at least if you don’t count the cost of the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, says Richard Schmalensee, MIT’s Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management..
The electricity bill will be more expensive, but that's only because the damages to the environment caused by carbon are externalized costs.
Presumably, if those externalized costs did show up in the electricity bill today, then it would get cheaper if we switched to renewable.
>“If you take into account the total cost of running a system that puts CO2 into the air, [then renewables] will be cheaper,” Schmalensee says
Right, if you produce solar panels with coal-based electricity.
I personally think we have to investigate this, as we are just not doing a good enough job of reducing fossil fuel use.
- Even if CO₂ production ends today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get back to normal levels is some form of carbon capture.
- Anyone can do carbon capture anywhere. You don't need to make the whole planet agree to and implement some treaty. Just put up some solar cells and pump the captured CO₂ underground. The costs need to go down a few orders of magnitude, but I see no fundamental reason why that would be impossible
There is a good argument that the ROI and environmental destruction is not worth it.
Or are you saying that the size of "all industries" will need to increase? Because... where do you think the carbon has come from?
When I put on my very dusty chemical engineering hat, it would take decades just to build adequate supply chains for such an endeavor, assuming we waived all environmental review, never mind actually building the thing.
Most people are not familiar with industrial processes. They have no idea how unfathomably large the scale being proposed is. In computer science terms, it is like saying “we are going to scale Postgres to a zettabyte sized tables with a billion concurrent transactions”. It might be possible in some kind of in theory sense but no one knows how to reduce that idea to a real system.
BTW, I like rock weathering as option for carbon capture. Crush olivine rock and dump it in the sea. That would be huge scale, but we know how to do mining, crushing, and shipping on large scale.
The term “large scale” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. We are talking about something qualitatively higher scale than the largest “large scale” projects. We don’t have orders of magnitude of extra capacity anywhere in our existing supply chains, never mind across all of it that would be necessary for such an endeavor. This would all have to be built, and building that has its own supply chains that need to scale to an extreme. It will create severe resource pressures very far removed from the actual carbon capture. It is a “for want of a nail” kind of situation.
This is also economically non-productive. We can’t divert enough expertise, manpower, and minerals from the normal economy to make it plausible. We are a very long way from having the kind of automation that would let us work around this issue.
I am interested in viable solutions but the impossibility of scaling this particular solution is kind of basic industrial engineering. It is hard to explain where the resources will come from.
It will take thousands of years for the elevated CO2 to return to normal. Once we stop producing CO2, the temperature will keep rising for decades. We need to do carbon capture to keep it stable. The projections for 2C include carbon capture.
> One extreme would see a complete switch to using heat and electricity generated by wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower for all energy needs (...)
> The other extreme would see countries maintain their current reliance on fossil fuels with some renewables, nuclear, and biomass (...)
The study might be well intentioned, but since none of the two scenarios has a probability that is different from 0, its use for policy makers, investors, and voters might be very little. In reality, it will always be a mix of both approaches, not because I'm "the truth lies in the middle" kind of guy, but simply because there might be local optimizations found along the way that favor one or the other approach (or both at the same time) based on local and temporal considerations with regard to the financial, technological, political, social, ecological, and cultural conditions.
https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
but as it is, the global net change in terms of forrest is negative. Hell, the amazon is losing 10.000 acres a day. And aside from direct human intervention, there's desertification that's not getting any better.
so in practice, no.
“ As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project. “
CCS would dispose the CO2 deep underground, like where natural gas is usually stored or extracted from. Given the cost of developing natural gas storage facilities, my hunch is that CCS is more of way of not having to deal with carbon emissions today.
You’re right about fire releasing carbon. But even after devastating fires, forests don’t burn completely and plenty of plant matter remains. Even ash and soot is still sequestered carbon, not to mention charred wood even if the tree doesn’t survive.
My house was built in the 60's. The basement recently started flooding. While digging a drain to fix the problem I uncovered evidence that ground level used to be 18 inches lower than it is now. 60 years of deciduous tree action created enough new soil to change how the water flows... Instead of going around my house now it goes through.
Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
If we actually wanted to fix this, rather than using it as marketing spin, I figure we'd be working on ways to replace deserts with forests and then on ways to ensure that whatever soil accumulation trick my tree is doing is also happening in those forests. (And golly I wish we would, I've been taking biology classes in this direction and recent political events have me thinking that the I've got some significant headwinds here).
Given that carbon is emitted continuously, and forests only offset a fixed amount of emissions (they stop sequestering carbon once they're fully grown and reach steady-state), you basically constantly need to be planting trees. That creates an obvious market for tree planting companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crowther_(ecologist) https://crowtherlab.com/ https://iview.abc.net.au/show/forest https://www.memorabletv.com/news/the-forest-trillion-tree-hy...
OTOH, with the right chemical process running at scale (“synthetic carbon capture”, apparently), the sky’s the limit! We might not have the right tech at the moment, but AFAIK there are multiple plausible systems that would work much better than what we have now.
So we need to chop the trees down again and plant new ones. Which is more feasible than technological carbon capture, but still a drop in the bucket of what is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crowther_(ecologist) https://crowtherlab.com/ https://iview.abc.net.au/show/forest https://www.memorabletv.com/news/the-forest-trillion-tree-hy...
If you cut down an entire forest to bury it (with hypothetical carbon-neutral machinery), then replant the entire forest, you can still end up emitting more carbon than you store.
If all we do is burn trees, there is no problem. We're not adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before. The problem is that the stuff we pump up was not there before.
So capturing in trees is at best a temporary solution. In 20 / 30 years that tree dies and is burnt or rots, and so the CO2 is released again. At best it may buy us some time while we learn to do with less oil. But it's crazy talk to do a weekend in Thailand and then "offset it with trees". That's like saying "I was broke, but I found $100 on the street, now life can continue as before".
I won't even mention the fact that large parts of the "offset economy" are essentially fraud. People that own a swath of forrest declaring "I was going to cut these 10 km2 of forrest and prevent any new tree on it, but now I won't" just so that they can get carbon credits. Even if it is painfully obvious that they never intended to do that.
It's a bit sad that to make money you need money, but I do recommend anyone who can afford it to just install them.
If you do the math, a single 10W light bulb consumes 0.24kWh per day if you let it on all the time. A single solar panel is rated for 2kWh per day. Many appliances are also under 2kWh per use.
Any electricity you spend during the day will be saved by the solar panel automatically. If you live alone and leave during daylight hours that might not be worth it, but for a lot of family households it's free electricity.
The current CCS projects use highly concentrated CO2 sources, while the usual combustion process will generate air with only a few percent of CO2. There was an article last year about the Hammerfest LNG plant. They have a CCS project nearby, but found it cheaper to electrify the plant: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...
We can't go on discharging it arbitrarily and leaving it there because that state is toxic to us.
This battery is insanely useful because it's all around us. Because most of the work is in the ambient O2 the 'fuel' we need use use this battery is incredibly dense. The miraculous density of it is because there is two parts to it, the density when you consider both is unimpressive (as anyone who has tried to operate a chainsaw inside a fire knows all too well, or run a ic motor underground), but because we can usually disregard the air side it is truly amazing.
It's so useful the all the higher life on earth also uses it, which is part of why discharging to much it is toxic to us.
Because it's so useful we're unlikely to completely stop using it unless we leave the planet. But that means we need to recharge it. The natural recharging mechanisms are only sufficient for surface biomass buffer, not the depths of the planets' oil and coal reserves which were changed over millennia using mechnisms that no longer exist (e.g. biomass trapped before microbes knew how to digest cellulose).
Unfortunately recharging it is probably going to take all the energy we got out of it and then somewhat more. It can only take less than that to the extent that we can find less enthalpic places to stash it that are as geophysically durable as the original forms. But that isn't so bad-- no one expects any battery to be 100% efficient, and one as useful as this one is worth some cost to use it.
But this also means that the proper price for long term fossil fuels is, shockingly, not the price that maximizes oil Barron incomes-- it's the price that covers the cost run run the recharging mechanism.
We don't have to make capture cheap, we just need it to be cheap enough that oil can be correctly priced.
In the paper they did some math on the bomb size needed to reverse 30 years of carbon emissions, and it's huge (orders of magnitude larger than what we tested so far), although I don't understand why it needs to be one huge bomb. I'm sure you could try it with one military head and test the impact.
Interesting approach in any case.
Seems stupid - they are both being used, so even the business-as-usual scenario is a mixture. If indeed the 100% WWS + 0% CC/DAC scenario is better than than the 95% WWS + 5% CC/DAC scenario, then it is logical to conclude that CC/DAC is useless, but according to the tables and figures, they didn't even look at whether a 50/50 WWS + CC/DAC split would be better or worse. Yet their conclusion is still "policies promoting CC and SDACC should be abandoned". They have these really complex models but at the end of the day it is garbage in, garbage out.
Sadly, when people talk about "carbon capture" techniques, they're never talking about planting trees.
Unless you have an ecosystem that prevents rotting (e.g. an anaerobic swamp) in which case you have steady accumulation of carbon (e.g. in a form of peat, which is a fire hazard btw). When people speak of planting trees to capture carbon they rarely mean creating swamps.
Creating charcoal and taking out of the cycle isn't actually net negative? We don't have enough space for growing or in mineshafts? I'm making Centralia 2.0? It's obviously non economic, but everything carbon capture is like that.
You would be shocked how many people will choose to live in density, no matter what they say they want, if we weren't restricting the supply of dense housing so much it's become unaffordable.
The suburbs would simply stop growing in their tracks.
It's like a new wave puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
I can't credibly participate because from my perspective what is being discussed is a popular sci-fi series that I haven't read. The dogmas and rituals are alien to me.
Briefly reading the article it seems like the author is assuming there is like a 1:1 global marketplace where any energy produced in one area can replace energy demand in another. That's just not the case.
It seems to me like the obvious solution to the problem would be a CO2 tax equal to the estimated cost of carbon capture. It should not be higher - that would be yet another example of moralism that plagues so many environmental policies. Introduce that, properly monitor emissions (especially things like methane leaks), and the problem will quickly solve itself. Anything that remains is the edge cases where it is more economical to do carbon capture - so use the tax to do just that.
That also covers cases where it makes sense to do the change more slowly. No need to decide or argue back and forth whether someone can or cannot do it faster. You emit, you pay, you don't want to pay, you don't emit. Changing quickly is too costly? That's fine, you pay. Oh, it's not that costly when compared to the tax? Guess you change, then. Also fine. Want to generate electricity from lignite? I'm not going to argue, I'm just going to watch you go bankrupt... and if you don't, there probably was some good reason for doing that and forcing the opposite would have had some unintended side effects.
I'm probably more optimistic about global warming than about the other "environment-warming" thing!
[ ] how much carbon is captured by KW?
[ ] are there expected improvement in the technology in the future 30 years?
[ ] and what do physicists say about it?
[ ] is it more efficient than photosynthesis?
[ ] how mature is the technology compared to other methods?
[ ] who funds it?
The paper was published from RIT.
In reality solar is more expensive than natural gas when reliably delivered. Batteries, over provisioning, fly wheels, and finally backup idle gas power plants are not surprisingly very expensive.
What am I missing? Am I stupid, or the people who talk about carbon capture are ridiculously dishonest?
this might be the case for example if you need a certain amount of innovation and that requires a certain critical mass of brains thinking over the problem.
or maybe if you're an accelerationista, you want AI to solve it for you and burning carbon now to train it might make sense.
but I don't think the idea is to ever burn carbon to capture carbon.
For example, when solar plus direct air capture can remove a ton of CO2 for cheaper than it costs a container ship not to emit that CO2 then it's reduced cost for the same CO2 outcome even though it's using more total energy.
Regardless of whether it actually makes sense to capture carbon, you'll see a lot of sky-is-falling fanatics and vested interests dismissing it because it caps the price of carbon credits and limits economic damage estimates. You can't price CO2 at $500/ton to necessitate change when it only costs $200/ton to capture it - without quickly going bankrupt that is.
This is why the IPCC not even attempting to evaluate mechanical capture shows they aren't serious about solving the problem. They seemingly exist to push a fear narrative, and having an upper bound on the impact of CO2 limits their ability to do so.
Nothing else.
You'd extract the CO₂ directly from the exhaust gases. It can't clean CO₂ from the open air. It does not scale that way.
Is a lie on par with:
"I don't need to go to rehab, I can stop at any time" except the oil companies are the drug dealer and you are the deluded addict who will suffer the brunt of the consequence.
OH WAIT
The unasked question though: More costly to who?
Modern capitalism (especially in the enrgy sector) is fundamentally based on externalities.
Getting someone else to bear the cost, while concentrating income as greatly as possible, is what the modern billionaire is all about...
But there already is a technology to do carbon capture. Plants. Plants cover the world. How does one think a machine could do better?
I wish people stopped comparing apples and oranges here.
I’m not sure there’s any sort of program we could implement in that time frame that really moves the needle, and when it happens most of the world’s capacity to build things like solar cells and wind farms will need to be re-built, because we won’t be getting a lot of those components we need from China anymore.
And who knows? By then maybe we look up at a smaller global population that’s largely de-globalized and decide nothing needs doing.
In the short term it’s a shame because IMO the #1 (by far, not close) contributor to global pollution doesn’t even make it to the table in these sorts of discussions.
I am not sure why a lot of Americans do not talk about efficiency in their own backyard or are even unwilling to consider a smaller footprint (it is like almost in the DNA of the country)
I wish we would acknowledge it, even just among ourselves would be a great start.
Per capita is irrelevant. The thermodynamic system doesn't give a shit about how many people there are, all that matters is the amount of CO2. If you want to make some kind of moral argument you can't avoid asking the question of whether it's moral to have a kid at all. Unless you are prepared to consign your children to being a hunter gatherer until they die, they will add CO2 to the atmosphere.
Consider me and my neighbor, I am single and emit 1000 tons of carbon per year, he and his wife emit 3000 tons of carbon per year. They have triplets and increase their emissions by 500 tons per year. But somehow they are better than me now because on a per capita basis their house is only 700 tons per year per person while I'm still at 1000 tons per year? Sorry, I'm not reducing my lifestyle because they like to fuck.
If you want to measure a country or population by some metric other than total emissions, you should measure something like tons per quality of life or human development or something that demonstrates that the emissions are being used efficiently to increase overall human flourishing.
Do we need to put a leash on our corporations and governments so that they stop making policies that will kill our children? Absolutely, let's do that. Do we need to be more thoughtful about population growth? Certainly.
But when it comes down to crafting policies that will be effective, it has to make sense on the both micro and macro scales. Holding per-capita measures as irrelevant hides the details that we're going to need to fix this.
And you're spot on as regards China, and India as well. We've had a century or two to get rich off burning this stuff, they have not.
They're technically the global leader in solar, scaling up faster than everyone else.