Europe's largest carbon capture facility opens in the Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

Europe's largest carbon capture facility opens in the Netherlands

yara.com

18 pointsnegura10 comments

My understanding has been that carbon capture is extremely expensive for the amount of carbon you can capture, so it’s almost always better to just invest in other carbon reduction projects like electrification. Has that changed?

The steelman for carbon capture is that after the entire economy is electrified with clean generated electricity, and everyone eats a diet of lab grown meat and we have rewilded lots of former pastures then we'll still need carbon capture to undo some of the damage.

And therefore we should invest some time and money now so that it is ready in a few decades.

That's pretty much it. However it's being pushed very, very hard by oil and gas companies in order to deflect any responsibility away from them. The amount of CO2 this place removes, assuming it can actually be run at full projected capacity, is a minor rounding error in global CO2 emissions. It won't even be noticed.

Here the expense of the capture is minimal (compared to direct capture from air) as the CO2 is a by-product of industrial ammonia production, the cost is that of some additional pipes and tanks rather than letting the gas vent to the atmosphere as was previously done.

Other existing large scale carbon capture is similar; capturing otherwise vented CO2 from LNG fields.

The expense comes with sequestration - pushing CO2 underground into ??

The worlds largest CCS project, the Gorgan LNG field, is doing some magic to inject back into its LNG extraction field, likely as part of the pressurisation scheme to extract more LNG. It would appear that something similar might be happening here as the captured gas is being shipped to a standalone Norwegian company.

* https://totalenergies.com/company/projects/carbon-capture-an...

* https://energy.ec.europa.eu/news/commission-inaugurates-euro...

* https://norlights.com/what-we-do/

There's little mention of the partners (Shell, et al.) nor of any field extraction ... but it bears looking into.

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Other ways of funding / powering sequestration exist and have yet to be explored fully (investors ??), eg: pushing carbonated water into ultramafic rock to kick start "artificial" production of natural geologic hydrogen:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramafic_rock

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...

which could very well turn a profit generating electricity directly from excess hydrogen (over and above that used to power a plant)

As always, remember that slick carbon credit schemes are almost invariably bullshit - the details matter and the tell is whether there is any actually significant and ongoing drawn of CO2 from the atmosphere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IW1J2_masg

There will come a time where we will have to decide whether we want to pay for a decarbonised future, or if we want to suffocate.

The zero sum logic behind a survivable environment is just madness.

Even if you throw out the zero sum logic, you need to make sure decarbonization investments aren’t being used as an excuse to avoid more inconvenient changes that actually reduce emissions.

We don't need carbon tax, look at this one plant in a developed country where we sort of do something about the problem!

instead of pumping it underground, is it not possible to split the carbon from the oxygen, and bind the carbon as a useful solid form?

Plants? As in vegetation. They literally do that.

Too expensive.

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