[HN Gopher] A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total c...
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A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
Author : phreeza
Score : 216 points
Date : 2021-04-04 08:43 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pubs.rsc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pubs.rsc.org)
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| Given that CO2 in the air is a tiny fraction of air (0.03%) and
| it's absolutely critical for plants, plants would have evolved to
| utilize CO2 as much as possible, in the one of most energy
| efficient and safe manner that will be really hard to beat by
| 'artificial' means.
|
| Point being, that besides reducing consumption (the best being is
| by reducing population I think, rather than doing the, feel-good
| recycling etc. ) allow more forests to flourish.
|
| Side note - the fixation on CO2 as the devil or enemy number one,
| has connotations of a lynch mob or the intellectual who indulges
| in intellectual masturbation by crunching numbers, i.e a modern
| day religion.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions
| of tonnes of this "N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine
| (2-EEMPA)" stuff..
|
| I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What
| do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? We can't just dump
| that stuff in the sea.
|
| I wonder if CO2 capture does not cause more problems than it
| solves. Even if we magically _could_ capture CO2 as pure carbon
| and let the O2 back into the air, we 'd end up with enough carbon
| to fill all the mines we've emptied over the years. Where are we
| going to leave all that without making a huge environmental mess?
| And how do we transport all that there? And that's not even
| considering the energy usage and possible reagents.
|
| I think we should really reduce our energy usage instead. Every
| tonne of CO2 not emitted does not have to be captured, and the
| effects of not producing it are positive for the environment in
| more ways than just global warming.
|
| Of course we're already on a path for significant global warming,
| but I think we'll just have to deal with that as we go. I don't
| think we'll manage to do significant CO2 capture before the
| effects are irreversible anyway.
| bko wrote:
| For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions
| of people reduce their energy consumption..
|
| I wonder if this won't be a governance hazard in itself. What
| do we do after we create a global governance structure to
| reduce global emissions. We can't just tell people to stop
| using so much carbon.
|
| I wonder if reduction causes more problems than it solves. Even
| if we magically could reduce everyones consumption, how do we
| deal with population growth assuming humans still produce some
| carbon.
|
| I think we should really remove existing CO2 from the
| environment instead. Every ton of CO2 that can be captured and
| removed from the environment means some family in a poor
| country can enjoy the benefit of industrialization.
|
| Of course we're already on a path of significant global warning
| so I don't think we have a choice either way.
| derefr wrote:
| > Fill all the mines we've emptied over the years
|
| ...and why not do exactly that?
|
| Keep in mind, a _capture solvent_ is something that will stably
| hold onto the CO2 at STP. It doesn't need special care or
| treatment; the CO2 just becomes incorporated into its molecular
| structure, and now that complexed molecule is "what it is."
|
| So it's not like we'd be pumping the mines full of pressurized
| gas. We'd just be pouring a stable, non-reactive liquid or
| solid in there. Even if the mine had an earthquake, caught on
| fire, etc., that wouldn't leak the CO2 back out into the world.
| It's not nuclear waste. It's rock dust.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Not sure if it's the same stuff exactly or if the cost includes
| reprocessing but there's an amine cycle that seems to be mostly
| closed that's used for CO2 removal on submarines. So it's just
| used to separate CO2 from the rest of the output. I think
| that's what this sentence is talking about:
|
| > Notably, it is projected that this solvent can operate at a
| regeneration heat rate of 2.0 GJ per tonne CO2 for post-
| combustion capture
|
| Smarter Every Day did a video on it and atmosphere management
| on a submarine more generally which is pretty neat. The CO2
| scrubbing is around 20 minutes.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Ud6mHdhlQ
| grodes wrote:
| but we must capture de one we already emitted to balance the
| CO2 cicle
| iamthemonster wrote:
| 1. The solvent in carbon capture runs in a closed loop. You
| typically heat it, and it releases the CO2 so you can compress
| it and inject it below ground.
|
| 2. You don't necessarily need a depleted natural gas reservoir
| to inject CO2 subsurface (though they sure are convenient) and
| there is plenty of room for CO2 subsurface. It also doesn't
| creep to the surface on any meaningful timescale.
|
| 3. How do we transport it there? Pipelines.
|
| I feel like CO2 sequestration is second only to nuclear in the
| amount of unfounded concerns. There's one very well founded
| concern directly in the article - they estimate $50 per tonne
| of CO2 just to capture, let alone to store. My experience on a
| 2009 carbon capture plant design was that approx $100 per tonne
| of CO2 was the lowest carbon price that would really make
| carbon sequestration highly attractive and widespread.
|
| I also happen to think a $100 per tonne carbon price is not
| such a bad idea. But it is possible that other technologies
| would beat carbon sequestration at that carbon price point. I
| don't know.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The fossil fuel CO2 tax in Switzerland is currently 96 CHF =
| 102 USD.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| To put it in perspective, 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit)
| maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's
| very affordable when the alternatives are Water World level
| flooding or living like a vegan hermit in a cave...
| rayiner wrote:
| Yes. But don't forget that for many, berating people into
| living like a vegan hermit is part of the point, and if
| science solves that problem it gets taken away from them.
|
| It's the same people who want everyone to keep using masks
| even after vaccination.
| tptacek wrote:
| Where are those "masks forever" people? I hear about
| them, but I never seem to hear them. Is there a news
| report or something I can read?
| rayiner wrote:
| You should read my Facebook wall. I'm not saying there's
| a lot of them, but I'm apparently Facebook friends with
| all of them. :D
| dllthomas wrote:
| "Forever" or "after a particular individual is
| vaccinated, while vaccination rate generally is still low
| and incidence is still high"?
| quotemstr wrote:
| > 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful
| lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable
|
| In the eyes of the annoying kind of climate activist, the
| affordability you've mentioned is a bug, not a feature. Too
| many people who claim to care about the planet want to use
| the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and
| to roll back industrial civilization more generally. This
| sort of activist doesn't see the carbon problem as an
| engineering challenge, but instead as a political and
| aesthetic project. It's super annoying, because people like
| this reject technology that would let us have our modern
| lifestyle cake and eat it too.
|
| Not all climate activists are like this, but there are
| enough of these bad faith people around to seriously impair
| earnest and good faith efforts to solve the actual
| engineering side of the carbon problem.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Best get on and solve it as an engineering issue before
| too many people read the Unabomber Manifesto...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's
| lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more
| generally.
|
| Not roll back. But do smarter.
|
| It's not just global warming. We're shipping billions of
| tons of stuff from one side of the planet to another in
| sulphur-blowing rustbuckets. Creating continents of
| floating plastic in the oceans. Causing toxic lakes from
| harvesting rare earth minerals.
|
| We can't keep doing this. Maybe we can keep it up so
| before your lifetime is over, but sooner or later it's
| going to be a problem that can't be avoided just like
| climate change is now.
|
| There's many quick wins here. Buying locally produced
| foods instead of stuff flown in from half a world away.
| Not flying across europe for a 1 hour business meeting.
| Reducing plastic packaging.
|
| And there's good news too. We're continuing the excellent
| path of energy reduction in electric appliances. They had
| to keep adding "+"es and now rework the entire energy
| labels in Europe because "A++++" efficiency became too
| long.
|
| I think COVID already brought us halfway there. We're no
| longer used to business meetings, the fragility of our
| supply chains has opened up many eyes, and most office
| workers now work from home at least part time and do just
| fine. For the environment this has all been pretty great
| :)
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| A lot of the seemingly-dumb stuff happens because the
| market is a lot more effective at finding efficient
| solutions than gut feelings.
|
| Some of it is also because externalities like pollution
| aren't priced in, but often the seemingly-bad thing is
| actually better by most metrics.
|
| Reducing plastic packaging may be one such example: Sure,
| it reduces plastic waste, but it creates more wasted
| product, and packaging from stuff consumed in households
| is exceedingly unlikely to end up in the ocean in a
| western city that burns their trash in a waste-to-energy
| plant.
| imtringued wrote:
| You don't get it, the rich can afford to care about the
| environment. The poor destroy it because they have no
| other choice and that's not a big conspiracy, it's what
| the Europeans and Americans did 200 years ago when they
| were poor.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > We can't keep doing this
|
| In the broadest possible sense, no, we can't keep doing
| "this": either we limit fertility somehow or we got the
| Malthusian limit eventually. That's just the consequence
| of the exponential function. And right now, whether
| population will stabilize on its own before we hit
| carrying capacity is an open question.
|
| But if you hold population constant? Yes, we can keep
| doing this indefinitely, or at least until the sun boils
| the oceans in 500 million years or so. Why wouldn't we?
| There's every reason to believe that we can supply
| oranges in January to everyone.
|
| Show me the math that says we can't. I'm not persuaded by
| rhetoric about rust bucket cargo ships. It's exactly this
| sort of sentimentality that makes it difficult to
| actually make progress on addressing actual climate
| problems.
| vidarh wrote:
| Right now most population models suggest we'll see growth
| flatten within decades, and peak within a century.
|
| It's not really an open question - it would take reversal
| of long lasting trends in large parts of the world to do
| more than at most delay the reversal.
| quotemstr wrote:
| The reversal analysis you've mentioned doesn't take into
| account (not in the forms I've seen) the presence of high
| fertility subpopulations that will come to dominate
| larger low fertility populations eventually and drag
| everyone's fertility rate back up.
| djrogers wrote:
| > Right now most population models suggest we'll see
| growth flatten within decades, and peak within a century.
|
| We're way off topic here but what the heck... in my
| entire life, I've not seen one single 'population model'
| play out accurately. We've seen dozens of popular ones
| that have failed to come true in the past century alone -
| what makes today's different?
| pjc50 wrote:
| The flooding is hardly "water world":
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z
|
| "Central estimates in the recent literature broadly agree
| that global mean sea level is likely to rise 20-30 cm by
| 20503,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. End-of-century projections diverge
| more, with typical central estimates ranging from 50-70 cm
| under representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5 and
| 70-100 cm under RCP 8.53,9,10,12, though more recent
| projections incorporating Antarctic ice sheet dynamics
| indicate that sea levels may rise 70-100 cm under RCP 4.5
| and 100-180 cm under RCP 8.5, and could even exceed 2 m or
| more in far-tail scenarios4,7,8,11. Via a structured
| elicitation of opinion, experts now estimate there is a 5
| percent chance 21st century sea-level rise will exceed 2 m"
|
| Bad news for East Anglia and the Somerset Levels, and many
| estuary cities including London will need mitigation work.
| refulgentis wrote:
| #1 thank you for sharing, I was all prepared to come back
| here and say "20 cm-30 cm is a lot! that puts half of
| boston underwater!", but it doesn't, not even remotely,
| and thus is a useful reminder to me I can chill
|
| #2 to be fair to OP, think they're referencing what would
| happen to humanity as a whole if we _didn't_ have carbon
| capture, not specifically "water world by 2100", and
| something I've picked up since moving to Boston from
| Buffalo is that storm surge has a _much_ more significant
| effect when you're around so much water. Even the 20-30
| cm, once you add a foot or two of storm surge that we get
| a handful of times a year, floods most of Boston in 2050.
| linknoid wrote:
| Maybe you can help enlighten me on this. I've been struggling
| to understand the basics thermodynamics of carbon capture for
| quite some time.
|
| So we have a hydro-carbon, we mix it with oxygen, and the
| oxygen combines with the hydrogen and the carbon, and
| releases heat as a byproduct. The heat energy increases the
| pressure of the newly created CO2. This higher pressure is
| placed on one side of a turbine or a piston, and we extract
| useful work by moving it from a high density state to a low
| density state, causing it to cool in the process.
|
| Now it seems like if you want to re-concentrate that CO2, it
| should take at least as much work to compress it back to its
| original size as it released when you burned it in the first
| place, and probably a lot more, because the CO2 has been
| diffused into the general atmosphere.
|
| To state it more succinctly, we extract work through a
| pressure differential, and by reversing that pressure
| differential, won't that require more work than we got out in
| the first place by the second law of thermodynamics?
|
| I ignored the part where part of the energy is coming from
| the hydrogen. Is the hydrogen -> water where most of the
| energy is coming from, and the carbon part relatively
| insignificant?
| jellicle wrote:
| You are mostly right, but the missing part is that you
| don't need to turn the CO2 back into a hydrocarbon fuel,
| you just need to turn it into something that isn't gaseous
| CO2.
|
| So carbon capture hinges on the idea that we can find a
| low-energy route that involves a chemical reaction with CO2
| that produces something that isn't a fuel but isn't gaseous
| CO2 either. And that we can find a LOT of it.
| Majromax wrote:
| > he heat energy increases the pressure of the newly
| created CO2. This higher pressure is placed on one side of
| a turbine or a piston, and we extract useful work by moving
| it from a high density state to a low density state,
| causing it to cool in the process.
|
| You run the hot, high-pressure gas through a turbine to
| give you less-hot, lower-pressure gas. You then extract as
| much waste heat out of that stream as you can via a heat
| exchanger process, to pre-heat incoming fuel/air and to
| recover more energy by boiling water to run through another
| turbine.
|
| At the end of the process, you have a medium-temperature
| stream of combustion product that has high concentrations
| of CO2. You capture the carbon from this stream, before
| releasing the last bits of gas to the atmosphere.
|
| You gain usable energy out of the process because all of
| the _heat_ movement happens through a turbine (to directly
| generate energy) or through a heat exchanger (to recycle
| the heat to other more useful parts of the process).
| khuey wrote:
| Enthalpy of combustion for CH4 is 802 kJ and for an
| equivalent amount of gaseous hydrogen it's 286 kJ so most
| of the energy does come from the carbon.
| ethagknight wrote:
| The goal is not to re-create fuel, but to clean up the
| waste. This is more like sweeping out the ashtray
| sseagull wrote:
| This is a really good question, and a bit deeper than it
| first appears. So here is some semi-educated spitballing
| (I'm a chemist, but thermodynamics was a while ago):
|
| 1. Immediately after ignition, you have a low-volume, high-
| pressure, high-temperature amount of gas. Sequestration
| does not aim to turn CO2 back to this exact same state, but
| only a high-ish, average-temperature state.
|
| 2. Combustion often evolves more molecules of gas (look at
| the formula for the combustion of octane, and remember that
| water after combustion will be a gas). This increases the
| pressure, but is not something that needs to be reversed
| during sequestration.
|
| 3. Carbon dioxide isn't bad, but having too much in the
| atmosphere is. Sequestration doesn't aim to completely
| reverse the reaction in the first place, it just aims to
| remove it from the atmosphere so that it can't act as a
| greenhouse gas.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Ok closed loop sounds better, the article didn't clarify
| this. But the compression itself and the heating will cost
| significant energy too, don't forget this.
|
| But consider for a moment how much coal and oil we've been
| digging up since the industrial age. CO2 is much less dense
| once it's uncontained underground. It won't stay liquid at
| that pressure.
|
| In that case we'll need to have underground space of a size
| of many times the space that all that coal and oil took up,
| due to the lower density. Just pumping it there, forcing it
| underground in different spots etc will also cause
| significant ecological disruption. It's a lot of land we're
| going to be running pipelines to, drilling into to inject it,
| using heavy machinery etc.
|
| And if some of it does end up being released due to a
| mistake, it can have potentially deadly effects. Like what
| happened at Lake Nyos. Safety would really have to be
| guaranteed.
|
| I don't know, it just sounds like a solution that won't scale
| to the enormity of the climate problems, and rather more like
| big business wanting to monetise the problem itself (and also
| use it as an excuse to not reduce consumption).
|
| But anyway, if it does prove itself in trials I would change
| my mind on it.
| DennisP wrote:
| One great idea for storage is underground basalt
| formations. Inject CO2, and it'll turn into limestone in
| under two years. It can't solve the whole problem by
| itself, but there's enough capacity for gigatons of CO2.
|
| There are several entities working on this. Here's a
| company with a small pilot project, and links to scientific
| papers: https://www.carbfix.com/
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| I believe basalt can be produced artificially as well, is
| there a chance we could build limestone farms? That would
| be a neat trick.
| corty wrote:
| Artificial production alone doesn't do the trick. It
| would have to be low in energy consumption, preferably
| exothermic. I don't think there is such a reaction with
| plentifully available material. Otherwise you spend more
| energy on the basalt than the CO_2 production gave you.
|
| Also, large parts of this planet consist of natural
| basalt deposits, every area with some current or historic
| vulcanism has them. E.g. half of Siberia is a huge basalt
| deposit. Google Siberian Trap. So I do not think
| artificial production would be necessary.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > But the compression itself and the heating will cost
| significant energy too, don't forget this.
|
| That's in the abstract, it's 2GJ/ton of carbon. So, it's
| roughly 1/20 of the energy generated by burning the carbon
| at the first place.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The little detail that injecting CO2 into gas and oil wells
| can help get more gas and oil out of them is the main
| reason companies are investing in this tech. If the
| government can be persuaded to pay for the research, all
| the better!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In Texas you can find big pockets of CO2 undeground and
| pdople havd been driling holes into those and pumping the
| CO2 into oil wells. Thus the pipeline, injection, etc.
| are all developed.
|
| CO2 at 1200 psi will mix with oil very well and do
| wonders getting into pores, but to scale up storage there
| are not enough oil wells and we'd probably store in
| saline aquifers.
| DennisP wrote:
| For electricity generation, it'll be cheaper to build low-
| carbon generators. For long-distance jet travel, it's
| probably cheapest to turn the captured CO2 into fuel. For
| emissions from concrete, ambient capture and sequestration
| might be best.
|
| The great thing about a price on carbon is that the market
| would sort all this out.
| namibj wrote:
| The emissions from concrete come from limestone kilns,
| which are even easier to capture the CO2 from than coal
| power plants.
| DennisP wrote:
| Ah, interesting.
|
| Agriculture is a pretty diffuse source though. And
| ultimately, we need to take CO2 levels back down to
| 350ppm or so.
| namibj wrote:
| Oh, for sure.
| [deleted]
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I feel like CO2 sequestration is second only to nuclear in
| the amount of unfounded concerns
|
| The problem with CO2 capture specifically (specifically from
| the atmosphere as opposed to at the source) is that CO2
| comprises a very small part of air. This means you have to
| move huge amounts of air through a capture device to capture
| a very small amount of carbon. How is that ever going to make
| sense?
| quotemstr wrote:
| It makes sense because brute force engineering solutions
| are frequently the right ones. If you capture carbon from
| the air, you can mass produce _one_ kind of capture
| facility and spam as many copies of this facility as you
| need (at low cost, thanks to mass production) to give
| humanity closed-loop control over atmospheric composition.
|
| If you rely on source emissions control only, you need
| finnicky source-specific installation and control
| technology everywhere, which greatly increases the cost and
| complexity of the implementation. And there are places
| where you can't realistically do carbon capture and
| sequestration, e.g. jet engines.
|
| On top of all that, we live in a world with multiple
| governments and jurisdictions, and not all of them agree on
| the right level of investment in source capture. Do you
| really expect developing countries to give up on coal
| generation right away? What are you going to do, bomb them
| into the stone age? A climate management solution must be
| robust against the problem of uncooperative actors. We
| can't rely on everyone getting along and singing carbon
| kumbaya.
|
| Compared to source mitigations, an atmospheric capture
| approach is simpler, more robust, and better capable of
| dealing with uncooperative emitters. Yes, you have to move
| a lot of air, but that's just energy, and energy is cheap
| if you're not picky about geography or uptime, and it's
| especially cheap if you're not squeamish about nuclear.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Remember those facilities would have very high running
| costs (energy usage), it's not just a case of building
| them.
| DennisP wrote:
| The paper says 2.0 GJ per tonne CO2. One GJ is 278kWh,
| and annual emissions about 36 gigatonnes, so that comes
| to 2.4 terawatts to absorb all our emissions.
|
| Global energy consumption is about 18 TW[1], so 2.4 TW is
| a lot but not outlandishly so. It makes sense to look at
| global energy rather than just global electricity,
| because the input to this process is heat. We'd need
| clean energy sources, but we have those. Since we need
| heat and can use a fixed amount of energy constantly,
| high-temperature nuclear reactors would probably be
| ideal.
|
| It would be silly to do this instead of decarbonizing
| electricity production and converting to electric cars,
| but we also have to deal with steel and concrete
| production, agricultural emissions, long-haul jets, etc.
| Let's say we need one TW to cover emissions we can't
| easily decarbonize.
|
| Nuclear power produced 2657 TWh of electricity in
| 2019.[2] Divide by hours in a year, that's 0.3 TW.
| Assuming 50% thermal efficiency, it's 0.6 TW of heat
| energy. So basically, triple the number of nuclear plants
| in the world and we can absorb 40% of our emissions.
|
| Some of the high-temperature designs are fast reactors or
| thorium breeders. If we use either of those, we won't
| remotely strain our nuclear fuel supply.
|
| There are other methods of absorbing CO2, like
| reforestation, topsoil restoration, and olivine beaches.
| But most methods have scaling limits. Direct air capture
| with basalt sequestration[3] and/or carbon-neutral fuel
| production could easily play a large role.
|
| [1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/current_world_
| energy_...
|
| [2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/current-an...
|
| [3] https://www.carbfix.com/
| elgfare wrote:
| I guess the low hanging fruit is to attach this to a power
| plant or some other CO2 emitting process.
| Jouvence wrote:
| That's true, but then it is surely better to cut out the
| middle-man and just not use fossil fuels for static
| generation in the first place.
|
| The energy needs which are hard to meet with renewables
| (aviation, other large-scale transport) are the same
| places where CCS is non-viable due to the efficiency hit.
|
| The best we can do is decarbonise as quickly as possible,
| and live with the fallout of our failure to act this far
| - unless a significant use for captured CO2 is
| identified, atmospheric capture technology will always
| struggle with commercial viability.
| elgfare wrote:
| The best we can do is to do everything we can. It might
| also be interesting to start burning biomass and
| capturing the CO2, which would be net negative.
|
| Maybe it's viable for cement production as well.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > unless a significant use for captured CO2 is identified
|
| And a significant use that does not end in it being
| released to the atmosphere after being used :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > My experience on a 2009 carbon capture plant design was
| that approx $100 per tonne of CO2 was the lowest carbon price
| that would really make carbon sequestration highly attractive
| and widespread.
|
| Is there a market for captured carbon? I understand there is
| a small market for industrial process and carbonated water,
| but are there people buying long-term capture in large enough
| quantities to make an impact?
|
| Anyway, I don't think the price matters on that scale. Once
| we decarbonize electricity, I think it will be governments
| and non-profits that will do most of the carbon capture
| (unless there exists a large market for my previous
| question), and for those a lower price only means a higher
| rate of growth, not the difference between viable or non-
| viable.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| $50 per tonne? A coal plant produces about a tonne of CO2 for
| every MWh produced. Industrial electricity price might be $50
| per MWh. So just paying for the carbon capture doubles your
| electricity price? $100 carbon capture charge would triple
| it. I can't see how this could be competitive.
|
| We have an excellent carbon storage technology, it's called
| coal. And what's best, it's already there, underground, very
| safely, proven for millions of years! With no cost!
|
| But we're still building new coal plants in many places. In
| some places, coal plants and steel factories have shut down,
| but it's often because industry has been offshored to a place
| that uses coal, or they're replaced with natural gas, only a
| somewhat better alternative.
|
| So if leaving coal unused can't be made to work, then more
| inefficient and thus expensive methods of carbon avoidance
| likely can't either.
|
| It's like working hard in the car wash for the whole day and
| then at the end of the day, spending all the money you just
| earned on having your car washed. It's a bad strategy - you
| would have spent a lot less time and effort if you had just
| washed your car yourself.
|
| When the coal and natural gas plants have been shut down,
| then carbon capture might have a role.
|
| Nice page about world coal usage:
| https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-information-overview
| DennisP wrote:
| It certainly makes no sense to capture CO2 from burning
| coal. But lots of industries are harder to decarbonize than
| electricity production. On top of that, we're past the
| point where just stopping emissions is enough; we have to
| draw CO2 levels back down.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Capturing CO2 from burned biomass (or waste) would
| provide a CO2-negative energy source. Not enough to run
| the world, but nice to have.
| 7952 wrote:
| Co2 pricing is not the only way though. You could give co2
| capturing gas peakers a strike price in the same way as
| renewables. Or have a capacity market that is only open to
| carbon capturing energy sources.
| tjoff wrote:
| Double the price of coal sounds like an excellent thing!
|
| Still very cheap. Promotes better sources of energy.
| javajosh wrote:
| Indeed. The fact is that coal energy externalities have
| been ignored, artificially depressing the cost.
| Increasing the cost of a product to reflect those
| externalities is not a "blow to the industry", but rather
| the first time in history coal's price will reflect its
| externalities.
|
| Nope, it's not a great time to be a coal-miner, but I
| hear Biden is trying to spend $4T on infrastructure so
| maybe some of those miners can buy a truck and form a
| road maintenance company instead!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The issues with coal mining are (a) it sucks and is
| dangerous, (b) therefore, people who do it, or whose
| families have done it, feel a lot of pride about it, (c)
| in the US, it's typically located in parts of states that
| don't have a lot of other employment (Wyoming, Illinois,
| Pennsylvania, West Virginia).
|
| If you're serious about getting rid of coal in the US, it
| needs to start with "We appreciate your and your family's
| work over the years, and here's a truckload of money and
| economic development for your region so that you can lay
| down that burden."
|
| Nobody reacts favorably to doing a hard job, every day,
| and then listening to someone tell them they're killing
| the planet.
| derefr wrote:
| Asbestos, AB somehow managed to get over their pride and
| stop fighting to continue mining asbestos. They're still
| proud of the _history_ and _hard work_ that their town
| represents, but nobody there thinks it would be a better
| world if they were still digging asbestos out of the
| ground. (Heck, they finally renamed the town, too. It's
| "Val-des-Sources" now.)
|
| How the townsfolk there transitioned into that "doing it
| historically was good and necessary; but _continuing_ to
| do it today would be dumb and bad" mindset might make for
| a good case-study. It'd certainly make for a more
| respectful and in-depth interview to do with them than
| just talking about the town's name ;)
| javajosh wrote:
| _> Nobody reacts favorably to doing a hard job, every
| day, and then listening to someone tell them they're
| killing the planet._
|
| Sorry, but them's the breaks! Don't mean to sound harsh,
| but larger industries have died for worse reasons. What
| you do is what the wage earner did in the past: you suck
| it up and you move on because you have to provide for
| your family.
|
| How many layers of industries have we invented and then
| rendered obsolete by subsequent industries? That number
| varies, in energy alone consider all the changes in
| distribution, extraction, etc. There has been a great
| deal of change in our understanding of the world since
| the invention of the coal industry, and it turns out coal
| is far more expensive than we realized.
|
| I can see though why this seems synthetic, and why one
| would be motivated to challenge the assertion of fact.
| And it is true, that this argument is "synthetic" in the
| sense that it requires synthesizing many different
| observations spread over time and space using methods
| most of us aren't familiar with.
|
| But a lot of us are swayed by the argument that using all
| this stored up energy in the ground has a side-effect of
| increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in direct
| proportion to that consumption, and that this in turn is
| unwanted because CO2 is opaque to IR, and it will
| increase global temperature.
|
| There is a "false debate" about whether or not the global
| temperature is actually increasing. If you look at the
| data, or even just the satellite photos of the arctic
| over time, you should be convinced that there is no
| debate, and its just a simple fact. (And while a
| conspiracy that has modified those images is technically
| a possibility, I think there's enough on-the-ground
| evidence to back it up. If those Richard Attenborough
| narrated programs are computer generated, then they have
| rendering technology beyond anything in Hollywood.)
|
| This simple assertion of fact (and its acceptance by a
| strong majority) has real ramifications for us in the
| most personal of ways, because it is a matter of the
| quality of life for our kids and grand-kids.
|
| The scale of the change we must make is going to be big,
| and I think the coal miners are going to get the least of
| it. We Americans are all going to have to consider our
| consumption more carefully, become more frugal, more
| European. Our cars will shrink, and become electric. Our
| physical store options will become more limited, but
| computer mediated options more diverse, more local, more
| self-sustaining.
|
| Ideally this change comes naturally as small town kids
| get educated in major universities in big cities, and are
| introduced to what I can only describe as an
| "Enlightenment Era Ethos", one that is rational,
| reasonable, skeptical, experimental (and innovative), and
| which is clearly convinced of the reality and importance
| of Global Warming. Personally, I'm convinced on first
| principles. Clearly energy expenditure we make, moving a
| 4-ton SUV 15 miles each way for one person to go to the
| supermarket, where each item comes wrapped in its own
| weight of disposable, nested wrappers that serves more of
| a marketing purpose than a "safe food delivery" purpose."
|
| America can and must go through what I call the
| "Contraction", where life here becomes more European,
| communal, local and frugal in terms of the daily details
| of your life. There will also be the further embrace of a
| national safety net, and not just for old people. My hope
| is that cultural shifts will help major chains like
| Starbucks contract, too, being eclipsed by local cafes
| with better products, made with greater care, at similar
| prices, and giving more people the experience of running
| a business and being the boss! Heck, I would like to see
| the return of the local ISP business, just a rack of
| computers in an office park with battery backups and a
| person who knows how to maintain it all and secure it.
|
| So, don't be fooled. American coal workers have an
| outsized influence on national politics in those states
| because reasons. Their jobs aren't more sacred than
| anyone elses and if they feel "tied to the land" or their
| "way of life", I tell them: I'm sorry. We will all need
| to change if we're to keep our ecosystem healthy by
| averting a possibly unfixible tragedy.
|
| I will volunteer right now and in a legally binding way,
| to tutor, for free, any coal miner who wants to learn how
| to code for a living. Reach out via profile. First come,
| first serve.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > (a) it sucks and is dangerous, (b) therefore, people
| who do it, or whose families have done it, feel a lot of
| pride about it
|
| We really need to get rid of that "proud to kill myself
| to make my employer richer" trait.
|
| > "We appreciate your and your family's work over the
| years, and here's a truckload of money and economic
| development for your region so that you can lay down that
| burden."
|
| It's only fair.
| gfodor wrote:
| They're not proud because they're killing themselves for
| their employer, they're proud for killing themselves to
| feed their families, and perhaps because they are
| creating energy for others to use.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Nobody should have to choose between living a healthy
| life and feeding their family.
| [deleted]
| gfodor wrote:
| That is a strange way to say "perhaps I jumped to
| conclusions assuming people who are proud to be miners
| are foolish and ignorant for doing so"
| ByteJockey wrote:
| Ok, but people did.
|
| And there's a certain amount of pride in that struggle.
| khuey wrote:
| > I can't see how this could be competitive.
|
| It can't. Coal plants are dinosaurs that need to be shut
| down. Charging a carbon price is one way to make that
| happen faster.
| lenkite wrote:
| How does one leverage this excellent carbon storage
| technology ? Plant fast-growing trees/crops, cut them upon
| maturity and bury them underground ?
| headsupernova wrote:
| Simple - don't light it on fire.
| thatcat wrote:
| The closest thing we have to coal creation is biochar, so
| you plant the trees and then anaerobically pyrolyze the
| material and put it underground.
| namibj wrote:
| Be aware that capturing exhaust CO2 of coal plants is about
| the cheapest source of CO2 for capturing, as you just need
| to pre-enrich the air in oxygen to get nearly-pure CO2
| exhaust.
|
| This expensive part is for capturing CO2 out of ambient
| air, where you only get like 0.04%.
| ehnto wrote:
| It doesn't have to be competitive, it has to be regulated.
| If coal plants and CO2 emissions heavy processes aren't
| viable once the cost of sequestering the carbon is charged
| to the people emitting the carbon, then they should give
| way to processes that do (or be expensive enough that
| they're only used when necessary)
|
| We can't solve the crisis by trying our best not to disturb
| the status quo, things are going to get shaken up a bit.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Yes, though even now it's already possible to price CO2,
| yet somehow it doesn't factor in significantly in the
| price of goods produced with coal heavy electricity.
| scsilver wrote:
| If coal plants produce 50$ in unaccounted externalities for
| every 1MWh they produce, is it fair to any of us to allow
| them not to have to pay for it's mitigation?
| DesiLurker wrote:
| thats a good point, I'd argue given that CO2
| concentration in atmosphere is a public bad (as in taking
| ability to sustain life out of 'common biosphere'), the
| cost to remove it on a per unit basis represents a good
| measure of externalized costs of unmitigated pollution
| (just co2, ignoring other pollutants for the moment).
|
| this is doubly good because it provides a great incentive
| for the free market to minimize the costs of CO2
| sequestration and hopefully will let us hit the knee of
| the optimization curve asap.
| 8note wrote:
| The government will pay for it so they can keep a few coal
| workers in business and get their influencial votes
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > I also happen to think a $100 per tonne carbon price is not
| such a bad idea.
|
| Government here in Norway recently released their climate
| plan, and part of it was the gradual increase to 2000 NOK
| (~234 USD) per tonne of CO2 in 2030[1].
|
| Not sure if it survives the years of politics between then
| and now though...
|
| [1]: https://www.dn.no/politikk/erna-solberg/sveinung-
| rotevatn/kl...
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Does this include the carbon ultimately released from oil
| that was sold to other countries by Norway?
| [deleted]
| magicalhippo wrote:
| As I understand it no, it only covers usage of oil and
| other fossil products.
|
| On the one hand I absolutely agree that's ignoring a
| major CO2 source.
|
| On the other hand, if Norway added the CO2 tax to
| exported fossil fuel but other countries did not, would
| that affect fossil fuel consumption in any meaningful
| way?
| extropy wrote:
| I would guess no. The buyer could be pumping it back in
| the ground for all the seller knows.
|
| Requirement to sell "carbon neutral" oil to countries
| that do not have their own carbon capture rules would be
| an interesting idea.
|
| Could as well add another tax for all the other nasty
| chemicals the refinement process releases.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| >The buyer could be pumping it back in the ground for all
| the seller knows.
|
| Yeah, I'm afraid I don't buy this reasoning...
| marvin wrote:
| Super fascinating. Wasn't aware that the suggested CO2 tax
| was this high. This is the order of magnitude we need to
| aim for, in order to make CO2 removal and reduction of CO2
| emissions properly profitable.
|
| I get the impression that the tax is to be levied on the
| entity that emits CO2 to the atmosphere, not the fuel
| producer?
|
| What's also encouraging is that it's the right party
| fronting this suggestion. It's not a fringe left-wing
| environmental party.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > I get the impression that the tax is to be levied on
| the entity that emits CO2 to the atmosphere
|
| Yes that seems to be the case[1].
|
| > It's not a fringe left-wing environmental party.
|
| Indeed, so will be interesting times ahead. Not
| unsurprisingly Norway has a very oil-oriented industry,
| which obviously did not think too highly of this
| proposal. There's lots of talk about transitioning to a
| "greener economy" but precious few concrete proposals
| about how to turn those jobs green.
|
| So yeah, interesting times ahead.
|
| [1]: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/tema/okonomi-og-
| budsjett/skatt...
| holoduke wrote:
| Key is to plant plans and trees. Billions of them. Our energy
| needs will only become bigger. Transition to renewable economy
| is in progress. That's good. But there is not enough focus on
| plants and trees.
| Klapaucius wrote:
| For any mitigation solution, you have to ask 3 questions 1)
| How much does it cost 2) How much space does it require 3)
| How does it scale
|
| Planting trees performs excellent on (1) but terribly on (2)
| and (3). According to Bill Gates' recent book on the topic
| (where he aims as best has he can to summarize the state of
| knowledge as per today), you'd basically have to make a big
| forest of the rest of the world just to offset US emissions.
|
| In addition, it's not enough to plant trees, you have to
| plant trees where there wouldn't have grown any if you were
| not planting (i.e. making forest out of non-forest). This is
| going to put an additional huge strain on the need for land
| to feed more mouths, which is a problem that is only becoming
| more precarious.
| imtringued wrote:
| You're supposed to turn the Sahara into a green forest. The
| obvious problem is that you would need the cooperation of
| those countries.
| horstmeyer wrote:
| Yes and trees only store CO2 while they are alive. Once
| they die and rot, it's released back into the environment.
| Also monocultures with fast groing trees that ideally can
| be harvested come with their own problems. Planting trees
| is good way to do something now, but it's not going to
| solve the problem forever.
| graeme wrote:
| Avoiding emissions would certainly be better. It is supremely
| inefficient to dig up and burn fuel now then capture it and
| bury it later.
|
| But current global plan is to keep doing the first part, so
| we'll have to undo it. We actually _already_ likely have too
| much CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if we went to zero emissions
| today the climate would keep warming from the accumulated CO2
| and feedback effects. Takes some years for those to work
| through the system.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, _anyone_ can decide to run potential future capture
| plants, cleaning up after others (that includes the previous
| generations), while _everyone_ would have to agree to reduce
| emissions.
|
| What looks inefficient as far as pure physics goes, might be
| very efficient politically. Build some solar power plants in
| the Sahara, use the energy to sequester carbon, pay poor
| countries like Niger some money for that, reduce the current
| migration stream to Europe by creating local green jobs -
| that does not sound too bad.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Yes most people do not fully grasp the scale of the problem.
| Any way you attack it the scale is absurd making almost all
| solutions crazy. Getting the co2 back and putting it somewhere,
| ceasing all fossil fuel use, storing enough energy for wind and
| solar to work, all of these are trillion dollars scale global
| moonshot projects.
|
| *but so its all of the energy/money/effort that goes into
| modern fossil fuel extraction and processing so it isn't
| fundamentally impossible*
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| >I think we should really reduce our energy usage instead.
|
| There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's energy
| usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a dangerous
| one.
|
| Energy use is fundamentally tied to progress to such an extent
| that we should always be looking for ways to increase the
| energy available to us.
|
| Of course the energy should be produced in as low-impact a
| manner as possible, but it's long past time to accept that
| energy usage will go up, not down.
| kenmacd wrote:
| It seems this excludes increases in efficiencies. For example
| today we have lighting that uses a small fraction of the
| power of a couple decades ago.
|
| Plus we're nearing peak populations, after which the number
| of humans will be going down.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Most energy usage isn't residential in nature.
|
| It's likely our industrial needs will continue to increase
| even with a smaller population
| _jal wrote:
| Energy efficiencies do not decrease energy use, you just
| get more of the cheaper thing.
|
| I agree more with the second point; the way that I'd say
| that is humans as a species will never self-moderate energy
| use.
| samvher wrote:
| Obligatory mention of Jevons Paradox:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| CharlesW wrote:
| Thank you, I'm one of today's lucky 10,000.
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| epistasis wrote:
| This is false, energy efficiencies do decrease energy
| use, in most situations. Jevon's paradox is the
| exception, not the rule.
|
| For example, increasing fuel efficiency of cars does
| decrease energy use, because fuel cost is not the
| limiting factor foe most car travel. Similarly, more
| efficient lighting, more efficient home space heating and
| water heating, and better weatherization of homes, all
| increase energy efficiency and decrease energy use.
|
| There's only so much lighting I would ever want to use,
| only so much heat, only so much time I want to spend in a
| car. Energy efficiency is one of the most powerful tools
| we have to reduce pollution, because it makes all the
| other things easier.
| revax wrote:
| >For example, increasing fuel efficiency of cars does
| decrease energy use
|
| MPG from passenger car didn't decreased since 1976
| despite huge advancement in fuel efficiency.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CAFE_mpg_curve_from_NH
| TSA...
| porb121 wrote:
| MPG is a measure of efficiency, so it makes sense that it
| increases. To support your argument, you would need to
| demonstrate a corresponding increase in vehicle miles
| traveled per car, so that total gallons of fuel burned
| (i.e. energy) is constant or increasing.
| epistasis wrote:
| There's a lot going on with US gasoline consumption:
|
| 1) land use decisions are pushing people further from
| workplaces
|
| 2) consumers are switching from the "car" class of
| vehicle to "light truck" which is negating fuel
| efficiency improvements [1]. There's a lot going on here,
| from people getting larger vehicles for perceived safety,
| to better comfort, to just having more money to spend on
| larger vehicles. Plus, all those people who think they
| need a truck despite using the bed once or twice per
| year.
|
| 3) Demand for gasoline is incredibly inelastic in
| response to price, with huge price spikes having almost
| no change in gallons of gasoline even as consumption in
| dollars spike [2]
|
| [1] https://thenextweb.com/shift/2021/01/12/despite-ev-
| growth-ga...
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40893
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| As an anecdote: if you take an ant population (or any
| controllable population), and put it into a confined
| space with constrained resources, the population
| eventually dies due to one of two things:
|
| 1. Elimination of resources
|
| 2. Excessive waste product (in this case, excrement and
| bodily wastes; pollution)
| epistasis wrote:
| You seem to be talking about the need of a species to
| rely on a greater ecosystem in order to survive. However,
| I'm not sure how that relates to demand elasticity and
| energy efficiency. Perhaps you could be a bit more
| explicit?
| plutonorm wrote:
| Is transitioning slowly back to a hunter gatherer life style
| morally a bad idea? If so why?
| sporkland wrote:
| Depends if you think babies and moms dying is a morally bad
| thing or not.
|
| Estimated 30-50% mortality rate for babies and 1% per birth
| mortality rate for moms (times say 12 kids). Lotta innocent
| babies gotta die to achieve your goals.
|
| While this may sound tongue in cheek or a gotcha. I do
| think people underestimate how terrible, hard and brutal it
| was to live in those cultures as a human. We definitely
| create our share of travesties as modern humans (factory
| farms, anthropogenic mass extinction events, global climate
| change making the world uninhabitable). It remains to be
| seen if we can use technology to out pace some of these
| problems we've created, but I'm somewhat hopeful that we
| can, and find a path forward to live humanely and
| sustainably.
| laurent92 wrote:
| People always think about medical conditions when
| thinking about archaic societies; but there is also an
| associated cost in not having a central ministry in
| charge of monitoring violence to women. Energy abundance
| shaped people's moral values and society, we'll also lose
| them when scaling down. In other example: Who cares about
| PETA during war, who protects the gays, etc.
|
| So yes, scaling down is de facto against our moral
| values.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| How many billion people would need to die to make that
| sustainable?
| aardvarkr wrote:
| This sounds like hyperbole but it's the honest truth.
| Billions would die due to food shortages. Our modern
| farming system is incredible at its job of feeding 7
| billion people.
| dagss wrote:
| ...and yet 1/3rd of the food is thrown away/perish
| globally.
|
| There is a lot of excessive waste / inefficiencies due to
| energy being -- relatively -- cheap.
|
| If energy prices soar, many inefficiencies will get more
| attention. Like, if food becomes more expensive we would
| stop throwing away 1/3 of it. (And more houses would get
| proper insulation. And so on.)
| eloff wrote:
| You want to reduce the world population to a hundred
| million or so? How do you do that ethically?
|
| How would you get everybody to agree to accept all the
| limitations and ills of their non technological lives
| without wanting to reinvent modern civilization?
| PaulAJ wrote:
| A pure hunter gatherer lifestyle is going to support a
| percent or less of current population. So you are basically
| going to have to prohibit the vast majority of the
| population from having children for a century or so. It
| also means abandoning all technology. Good luck persuading
| people to go along with that.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Humans produce the vast majority of food we eat.
|
| If we stopped that, and just consumed the food that nature
| spontaneously produces, it supports maybe 50M people. So
| first you'd have to kill 7000M people.
|
| Even after that, I don't know how you'd stop people from
| reinventing agriculture.
|
| So on balance, I recommend against this :)
| fnord77 wrote:
| > There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's
| energy usage decreases
|
| sure there is. reduce the population by a factor of 10.
| occz wrote:
| Any true malthusian will of course voluntarily take the
| first step and remove themselves. Right?
| api wrote:
| Scratch a Malthusian and you will find either a pure
| misanthrope or a racist. In either case the solution is
| always for others to die.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Surely we can agree that growth in total energy usage must
| stop at some point? With continuous growth, you run into the
| limit of the earth's ability to radiate heat into space, or
| later on, the energy produced by the sun, in worryingly short
| timeframes.
| nerbert wrote:
| We can agree to talk about it again once we're exploiting
| the energy of the entire galaxy.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Without FTL, I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about a
| "we" doing galactic conquest, it'll be a bunch of
| societies who never talk to each other, or even separate
| species given the timescales involved.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Basically, any scientifically/1st principles viable
| technology that might save us from doing extensive
| desperation geo-engineering deserves some investment, from a
| cost/benefit point of view. Otherwise, we might learn that we
| coined the name "Antropocene" too early.
|
| _There is no viable future scenario in which mankind 's
| energy usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a
| dangerous one._
|
| Agreed. There would need to be crushing totalitarian rule
| over everyone on Earth to prevent progress, and that wouldn't
| be stable long term. Otherwise, competition by competing
| powers will inevitably result in a Kardashev 2 civilization.
| Here's why:
|
| Space solar power and fusion power are a couple of _serious_
| tech /economic inflection points. Once humanity's technology
| and our self-organization reach that level of capability, we
| are literally within striking distance of threatening any
| star system in our galaxy with huge destructive energies. We
| only need one of the two for this to be the case. Fusion is
| unnecessary at this point. If someone can establish large-
| scale industry on the Moon and the asteroids, solar power
| will be every bit as good as fusion in many regards. (At
| large enough scales, solar power _is_ fusion power,
| basically.)
|
| Modern geopolitics are _dominated_ by the logistics of energy
| transport and production. It has been this way since before
| World War II. The logistics of fueling factories, ships, then
| tanks and airplanes has absolutely dominated strategic
| thinking since even before that time. The lengths to which
| the allies went to provide the fuel to run the invasion of
| Europe were absolute feats of engineering, planning, and
| intelligence /disinformation. So just think ahead a bit: what
| if, instead of having to fuel your military, you could
| instead beam power to outposts, which would use that power to
| synthesize fuel? The side that can do that would have huge
| logistical advantages, which would also be strategic
| advantages. (There's a compelling reason why submarines and
| aircraft carriers are nuclear powered.)
|
| Going further, once we are at the level of space industry at
| scale, the Earth becomes just one location in a much larger
| context, whose available energy dwarfs the available energy
| on Earth by many orders of magnitude. At those levels of
| available energy, we could build things like Shkadov
| thrusters and Nicoll-Dyson beams. At that point, we'd have
| the hypothetical ability to move stars and build devices that
| could fry the biospheres off of planets in the bulk of our
| own galaxy.
| samvher wrote:
| A lot of energy is currently used for low-utility purposes
| (e.g. flying for meetings). There are also major
| opportunities for reduce-reuse-recycle that would not result
| in significant decreases in quality of life.
|
| I'm all for aiming for high energy availability in the long
| run, but the idea that we can just keep increasing our usage
| monotonically (without a temporary reduction to get our shit
| sorted out) seems like the dangerous pipe dream to me.
|
| Edit because I think maybe the tone sounded a bit
| short/unfriendly: I see a carbon tax as a necessary step in
| taking care of our issues, and my expectation is that this
| would reduce usage of fossil fuels quite significantly,
| temporarily. It seems likely that our energy budget would
| move more towards high-value-per-joule activities such as
| information technology and away from things like
| transportation. And I think this is a necessary step - people
| are currently quite careless about energy, especially about
| usage of fossil fuels, and I think if they become aware of
| its cost across a variety of activities they will adjust
| accordingly.
| shoo wrote:
| I agree that avoiding emissions in the first place is
| preferable to trying to figure out how to undo the emissions
| afterwards.
|
| Mental model of emission removal scope is some giant world
| system maybe 1x or 2x the size of the fossil fuel industry,
| trying to run in reverse what we've spent the last hundred or
| two years doing.
|
| Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax. Something significant like
| $250 / ton. Cannot come soon enough. Ideally a global carbon
| tax, failing that just between a few countries & with tariffs
| or sanctions or so on to penalize trading partners that don't
| regulate externalities of pollution.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Exactly that's what I think too. We have to do the removal
| much faster than we did the actual burning. And the removal
| will only cost us money, not fuel our economy. I just don't
| see this happening at significant enough scale. And the
| capture will have lots of environmental impact too if we do
| it at that massive scale.
|
| And I agree about the carbon tax. It could even pay for some
| of the removal.
|
| The strange thing here now in Europe is that greener
| alternatives like trains are taxed much higher than dirtier
| ones like airplanes. Because trains have VAT taxes on them,
| but the planes fly on kerosene that's exempt from tax and the
| price kept down due to international agreements.
|
| As a result trains aren't a reasonable alternative and won't
| be for at least the next 20 years or so (as the train network
| would have to be scaled up significantly which would have
| been happening already if it was more a better alternative to
| flying). It's a shame because Europe is a great place for
| this with lots of short-distance trips.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Most european rail is given huge government subsidies too,
| though. Also flights in the EU already have to pay for
| emissions as part of the EU emissions trading scheme.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| At least in Germany, car subsidies (investments in road
| infrastructure) are significantly larger than any
| investments in rail infrastructure.
| Aachen wrote:
| > I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself.
| What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2?
|
| I don't see coal being an environmental hazard and that's
| carbon captured in the ground. Plus you have to ask whether
| some risk of leaks or whatever is worse than not even trying at
| all.
|
| > I don't think we'll manage to do significant CO2 capture
| before the effects are irreversible anyway.
|
| - Without joking: not with that attitude we won't. Let's not
| quit before trying?
|
| - We need all solutions to develop and mature right now. If it
| turns out cement remains unsolved, for example, or maybe it's
| fertilizer that we can't find a solution for or we can't get
| the solution to farmers in low income countries, then having a
| way of removing said issue indirectly will still be helpful.
|
| - There are different degrees to overshooting. A +3degC climate
| (already way too hot by current estimates) is still better than
| a +5degC. Maybe the runaway effects at +3 make it into +5, but
| also, those effects take time to run their course. Anything we
| do to slow down, reverse, control, it all buys us time to
| decide what options to deploy. "We won't manage anyway, why
| bother" is the only wrong path to walk down. Maybe we can adapt
| to +4, but without tech to reduce emissions or counter a
| runaway effect, it won't stay at +4.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "I don't see coal being an environmental hazard"
|
| As long as you do not accidentally set it on fire ...
|
| This is actually fairly close to Aachen, no?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennender_Berg
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > I don't see coal being an environmental hazard and that's
| carbon captured in the ground. Plus you have to ask whether
| some risk of leaks or whatever is worse than not even trying
| at all.
|
| When it's in the ground it's not, no. But when we try to take
| it out or put it back in it does cause significant
| environmental disruption. Especially open mining.
|
| > - Without joking: not with that attitude we won't. Let's
| not quit before trying?
|
| Because any effort and money we throw at this won't go to
| things that are more likely to work. The scale to make CO2
| capture actually make a difference is huge. Even the thought
| of producing and siting all those capture factories is
| mindbogglingly difficult without creating even bigger
| problems. For example: If we have to ship all their machinery
| and steel from China, we're likely to emit more CO2 than they
| will capture in years.
|
| Like I said I'm open to being proven wrong but I don't think
| it will ever scale to this level.
| earlyriser wrote:
| It's important to throw money at this, but also to throw
| brains that could bring surprisingly simple ideas. Have you
| seen tech like https://noyalabs.com ? There's no need to
| create a capture factory with their approach.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| "just reduce our energy usage" has been the plan for decades,
| and it's easier said than done. Also:
|
| "Our hardest climate problems - the ones that are both large
| and lack obvious solutions - are agriculture (and deforestation
| - its major side effect) and industry. Together these are 45%
| of global carbon emissions. And solutions are scarce."
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how-to-decarbonize-america...
|
| At the very least I think carbon capture makes sense for the
| long tail of industrial processes where the "CO2 emission" to
| "cost of reinventing process" ratio starts to get less and less
| favorable.
|
| But even if you think we can decarbonize every last industrial
| process, we might as well develop carbon capture in case too
| much carbon gets emitted before that goal is achieved.
| cryptica wrote:
| As a rule of thumb, any attempt to control things on a global
| scale when there are millions of unknown variables will always
| have unexpected drawbacks and more likely than not, the
| drawbacks will not be worth the benefits.
| Klapaucius wrote:
| Underground saline aquifers are an excellent place to store
| CO2, and worldwide storage space is estimated to be orders of
| magnitude above what is ever going to be needed.
|
| Also, keep in mind that CO2 is not stored as a gas, but in
| dense phase (liquid-like), due to the high pore pressures at
| the depths considered (> 3000 feet), well above the CO2
| critical point.
|
| At these depths, any leakage to the surface would be
| negligeable unless you make a really lousy job in choosing your
| reservoir.
|
| I agree that we should aim to reduce energy usage, but I would
| argue we would need to both. As often said, there is no "silver
| bullet" to dealing with climate change, only the possibility of
| a "silver buckshot", where we'll have to do many large changes
| at once. Even if we could transit to 100% "green energy"
| overnight, that alone wouldn't take care of more than less than
| half of current emissions.
|
| A third of emissions come from industrial processes, much of
| which entirely unrelated to the energy used. In a nutshell,
| these emissions can be reduced using CO2 capture/storage, or
| alternatively we could stop making things such as steel, cement
| or fertilizer.
| watertom wrote:
| The effects are irreversible. Once the permafrost began to
| thaw, and that started back in the 80's, it's been game over.
| The permafrost is releasing massive amounts of CO2, Methane,
| and Nitrous Oxide, in about 10 years the earth itself will be
| releasing as much greenhouse gasses as humans release.
|
| The entirety of the Paris agreement has been a joke, cap
| warming? You can't cap the warming, you need to put the earth
| into a stable situation to cap the warming, but that's not
| possible. The earth's climate has a number of positive feedback
| loops running, positive feedback loops don't stop until either
| they run out of "fuel" in this case it would be greenhouse
| gases as the fuel, but with the permafrost thawing it will
| continue to thaw and release greenhouse gases, causing more
| warming, causing more gases to be released.
|
| The other way to stop a positive feedback loop is a disruptive
| event. The climate positive feedback loop is massive so the
| disruptive event would also need to be massive, like a large
| meteor hitting the earth, or a super volcano erupting, of
| course both of those events would kill most life on earth, but
| it would stop global warming.
|
| All we can do is witness what we've set into motion. What I
| think will happen is that through the acidification of the
| oceans the phytoplankton population will crash. Phytoplankton
| is the basis for the entire marine ecosystem, when that
| population crash happens, the entirety of the marine food chain
| will collapse quickly. 40% of the world's population relies on
| the ocean as their primary source of protein.
| rayiner wrote:
| Reducing energy usage is just the slow path to extinction.
| We'll never become a multi-planet civilization with that
| attitude.
|
| Also if you believe the science, reducing energy usage won't
| meet targets. The developed world will have to go carbon
| negative over the next couple of decades to counter growing CO2
| emissions in the developing world.
| rm445 wrote:
| If we could capture carbon by itself, we wouldn't bury it, we
| could make all kinds of stuff with it. The problem,
| approximately, is that you get energy from oxidising stuff, and
| have to put energy in to reduce it.
|
| Of course, turning solar energy plus carbon dioxide into
| sequestered carbon and O2 is what plants do, but evidently not
| enough compared to human action. I do wonder whether biological
| (plants, algae) action, aided by genetic modification, could do
| more for atmospheric CO2.
| williesleg wrote:
| Nice! A tree!
| gwern wrote:
| Fulltext mirror:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/science/2020-zheng.pdf
| samlosodesign wrote:
| If we do this we also need to build Snowpiercer
| worik wrote:
| At ~$50/Tonne, that is more than than current carbon prices, as
| far as I can tell.
|
| The cheapest way is to not produce it in the first place.
|
| Deepening topsoil is my favourite way of sequestering carbon.
| teabee89 wrote:
| In addition to price, I would like to see, for any CO2 capture
| tech, the estimated CO2 emission amount with scope 3 accounting
| (i.e., including the CO2 emitted in the entire supply chain,
| amortized by the estimated non-infinite lifetime).
| cryptica wrote:
| I don't see what is the point to try to remove CO2 from the
| atmosphere. I don't even understand the fuss around global
| warming.Why is global warming a bad thing?
|
| The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the
| additional heat. There will be natural selection as usual. New
| variants of plants will evolve which can absorb more CO2. All
| species on earth will find a new equilibirum as they always had
| in the past.
|
| The fear of global warming is only a human concern. The planet
| and the animals don't give a crap - Each individual specimen just
| tries the best they can to adapt to whatever the universe morphs
| into.
|
| The problem with trying to manage global situations is that
| evolution is cleverer than you are.
|
| To quote George Carlin:
|
| "We're so self-important. Everybody's going to save something
| now. 'Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those
| snails.' And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save
| the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves
| yet."
|
| "The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed.
| And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet
| will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth
| plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward
| plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees
| plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only
| reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first
| place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it.
| Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric
| philosophical question, 'Why are we here?'"
|
| Full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-
| self-import...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| True. Some areas will become uninhabitable or flooded but
| others will become more habitable (like permafrost/tundra
| regions). Nature will indeed adapt though there will be reduced
| biodiversity for a while. Especially because this effect
| normally happens on a much longer timescale.
|
| I think the problem is more that the regions that will become
| uninhabitable are currently mostly inhabited by people. And
| often pretty poor ones. It will cause millions to billions of
| people having to be relocated, causing many societal issues on
| its own, with a serious potential of societal collapse or war.
| Especially because the source and destination of these mass-
| migrations will often lay in different countries. See how
| refugees from wars in e.g. Africa or Syria are currently not
| really welcome anywhere, and multiply their numbers by 1000.
| That's the kind of disruption we're talking. Migrants will get
| more desperate while on the other side of the fence anti-
| migrant feelings will grow more and you have an explosive
| situation just waiting for a spark.
|
| And war itself is a major destructor not just of humans but of
| the planet itself. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons.
| cryptica wrote:
| Humans will use nuclear weapons eventually. They exist, so
| they will be used eventually. That cannot be stopped. "Monkey
| see, monkey do" principle. And the people in power seem to
| keep getting dumber so we are probably not far off.
| quotemstr wrote:
| There are really two separate questions that we have to
| consider when talking about the climate:
|
| 1) "Do we as a species need to be able to control the
| composition of the atmosphere?", and
|
| 2) "What is the optimal composition of the atmosphere?".
|
| The answer to question #1 is pretty clearly "yes". We're well
| on our way to becoming a Kardashev type I civilization. At that
| planetary scale, humanity's inputs to various global systems
| will just swamp the natural feedbacks that kept things roughly
| stable before people, so if we don't exert some kind of
| stabilizing control ourselves, the system will break down. Are
| we on the verge of a breakdown right now? Maybe. Maybe not.
| It's complicated. But at some point, if humanity keeps growing,
| we will reach a point where active management of planetary
| systems becomes a necessity --- we're going to have to learn to
| terraform the Earth.
|
| And as for question #2? Maybe the optimal atmosphere has more
| carbon than it did in the pleistocene. Finding the right level
| of carbon in the atmosphere is a task that will depend on fancy
| modeling and careful experimentation. But it's hard to worry
| about question #2 when we haven't figured out #1; why worry
| about exactly the right position for a knob on a complex
| machine when the machine's knob is currently broken off?
| dagss wrote:
| Question 2 cannot be answered without tying into history and
| politics..
|
| Climate change trends will likely be negative for US food
| production and citied... but excellent to Russian food
| production and affect barely any Russian infrastructure.
|
| Climate change is objectively good for Russia; devastating
| for Bangladesh, probably very bad for US and Europe..
|
| So question 2 is hard for that reason too.
| Jabbles wrote:
| _" The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the
| additional heat"_
|
| Evolution takes thousands of years. In that time species will
| go extinct, so there is no chance for them to evolve.
|
| For a simple demonstration of how fast we are changing the
| climate compared to other periods when ecosystems may have been
| able to adapt, see https://xkcd.com/1732/
| cryptica wrote:
| >> Evolution takes thousands of years
|
| Not true. Natural selection can work its magic in a single
| generation.
|
| For example, given any normal population, choose any trait
| and remove all individuals which have this trait from the
| population. The next generation will not have this trait.
| Specimens with the trait will become extremely rare depending
| on how accurate the selection process was.
|
| It can be quite radical. For example, if a law was introduced
| (with death penalty) which prevented all people of normal
| height and above from having children. In just one
| generation, all humans would become much shorter.
| Aachen wrote:
| Yeah, because there exist short humans and so their genes
| would indeed be passed on. Now check that for all organisms
| relevant to our food chain (assuming we even know which
| ones those are, and assuming we only care for ourselves and
| the rest can go extinct) there is a sufficient number of
| individuals in the relevant places able to cope with
| droughts, heat waves, flooding, storms, and other extreme
| weather introduced in the new climate.
|
| It doesn't magically just solve itself, even if that's the
| easiest thing to tell yourself and look for confirmation
| bias for.
| 8note wrote:
| Now try this with food. In one generation get these animals
| to stop needing to eat.
| Jabbles wrote:
| That's not natural selection, that's artificial selection.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding
| cryptica wrote:
| Your counter-argument is about semantics. Logically, it
| only reinforces my argument. Unless you're suggesting
| that global warming is natural and not caused by
| humans...
|
| If you agree that 'artificial selection' can work quickly
| (as scientific evidence suggests) and you believe that
| humans are the main driver of climate change (as is the
| consensus among climate scientists). Then my proposition
| that evolution can work very fast in the context of
| global warming (being an 'artificial', human-driven
| process) is a logical conclusion.
|
| QED.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Wow what a watertight argument.
|
| The key is the word "can" - which you interpret to mean
| "extremely likely", and I interpret to mean "extremely
| unlikely".
|
| Other than that, we agree.
| phreeza wrote:
| I'm not saying it will come to it, but the worst case for
| global warming is not some jungle planet, it is earth turning
| into a planet like venus, which would probably sterilize earth
| if it happens faster than evolutionary timescales that are
| needed for nature to adapt as you suggest.
|
| The argument about us not being able to save ourselves is
| really a falacy, akin to whataboutism. It's the same as saying
| we shouldn't fly to the moon as long as there is famine on
| earth, or not try to cure cancer as long as we don't have a
| cure for the common cold.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| You could even use the waste heat from a power plant to drive the
| co2 back out...
| sradman wrote:
| ScienceMag summarizes this research in an article named _New
| generation of carbon dioxide traps could make carbon capture
| practical_ :
|
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/new-generation-carbo...
| seesawtron wrote:
| This [0] AMA from the research group answers most of the
| questions I am seeing here in the thread.
|
| "Technologies range from aqueous amines - the water-rich solvents
| that run through modern, commercially available capture units -
| to energy-efficient membranes that filter CO2 from flue gas
| emitted by power plants. Our newest solvent, EEMPA, can
| accomplish the task for as little as $47.10 per metric ton -
| bringing post-combustion capture within reach of 45Q tax
| incentives."
|
| [0] reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mdouzu/askscience_ama_series
| _hi_reddit_we_are_scientists/
| williesleg wrote:
| Trees and plants consume CO2 and produce O2. By absorbing the
| CO2 you make less trees. That will kill the plants. Mission
| accomplished. Assholes.
| Aachen wrote:
| Clickable link:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mdouzu/askscien...
| londons_explore wrote:
| $47.10 per ton smells like someone has calculated the cost of
| the reagents and cited that as the price...
|
| Any estimate of this process cost would never be to 3 Sig fig.
| hansvm wrote:
| Sig figs are just a crude method to in-band signal some
| bounds on your estimates. They don't seem super relevant here
| when communicating an order of magnitude improvement.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I don't know why $47.10 is any less credible than $47, but
| here's more detail on what the estimate represents from
| TFAMA:
|
| "For the $47.10/metric ton carbon capture cost, 48% comes
| from CAPEX while the remaining is OPEX. The equipment life of
| a carbon capture unit would be similar to that of a power
| plant, about 20-30 years. The $47.10/metric ton cost is just
| for carbon capture, and does not include transportation and
| sequestration costs."
| eitland wrote:
| It is still suspicious to use so exact numbers for a
| technology that has not yet been tested out at scale at
| all.
| phreeza wrote:
| In my experience, the obsession with correct significant
| figures is an american high school thing. Why should you
| deliberately have to choose a number that is not your
| best guess? Ideally you should include confidence bounds,
| but if you don't, it shouldn't imply that you are
| confident to that level.
| kortilla wrote:
| It hints that someone doesn't understand these confidence
| values at all.
|
| Why $47.10 and not $47.1032471?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| That's definitely where I learned that it was expected.
|
| I look at it as one of many possible conventions for
| communicating precision. For what it is, it works well.
| But it's not universal, and people who do and don't use
| it should both keep in mind that the other group exists.
| nullc wrote:
| Yep. The weird thing is that their sigfig rules of thumb
| aren't particularly accurate and after any non-trivial
| operations (or more than a few operations) just give
| wrong results.
|
| Tracking precision through calculations requires interval
| arithmetic, which is a pretty big PITA and not frequently
| used.
|
| I think the sig figs cult comes out of mistaking a
| simplified lesson on precision for a useful practice.
| LasEspuelas wrote:
| Not sure exactly what you mean. It is well known that you
| should keep additional digits throughout the calculation
| and then drop non-significant ones for final results.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| When I was getting my engineering degree too many
| significant figures would earn you -2 pts.
| lb1lf wrote:
| Measure with a micrometer.
|
| Mark with a chalk.
|
| Cut with an axe.
|
| (Apparent practice at a workshop I used to frequent.)
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Old crusty semi-retired engineer I knew said when he was
| young he liked designing things to close tolerances. But
| once he was old he found more pleasure in designing
| things that worked with really shitty tolerances.
| lb1lf wrote:
| -I had a colleague once, fresh out of mechanical
| engineering at the local univerity college, who as his
| first project did a locking pawl for a winch drum.
|
| Tolerance? H7.
|
| The fitters threw a fit trying to make that happen.
| jfim wrote:
| Because it gives an idea of what range is expected for
| the actual price. If someone gets an estimate of "about
| fifty bucks" versus "about $51.04", their reaction to
| seeing a final price of say $62.17 would be different.
| The first one implies that it's a rough estimate, while
| the second one doesn't.
| phreeza wrote:
| "About" is doing a lot of work, too, no?
| throwawayfire wrote:
| If someone said "about fifty bucks" and it turns out to
| be $62.17, I'd immediately understand them to be scamming
| me.
| jfim wrote:
| Really depends on what the context is. Maybe for a taxi
| ride when negotiating a price ahead of time, but pointing
| at an object, asking for its price, getting an estimate
| that's off, then getting the actual price before the
| transaction is completed doesn't feel like a scam.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > I don't know why $47.10 is any less credible than $47
|
| It shows a lack of understanding of either basic science or
| napkin maths.
|
| For either reality, science or invention, it matters.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| I am pretty sure the $0.10 per tree of the Eden reforest
| project would be far cheaper than $47.10 per ton, to say the
| least.
|
| That would be 471 trees for $47.10.
| earlyriser wrote:
| That price is per tree planted and there's not guarantee
| the tree is going to grow. It's great to plant trees, but
| even if we could reforest the entire Earth on the good
| places we'll need other technologies to capture carbon.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Does the 0.10$ include land acquisition for the forest? If
| not, the cost could be significantly higher.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Reforestation only sequesters carbon if the land remains
| forest forever. If it's cleared again in the future then
| that carbon goes right back into the atmosphere.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Just plant trees, cut them and bury in the oceans. Nature already
| have all the necessary mechanisms to capture carbon. On the plus
| side it'll serve as an energy reserve for future civilizations
| should ours collapse.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| We have a lot of spare space for mangroves. That will store
| most of the carbon in the soil for up to 1,000 years.
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| Now let's start charging $50 a ton to release CO2
| heipei wrote:
| The EU is charging ~ $47 (USD) per ton right now.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Huh, that's a convenient and familiar looking price.
| qeternity wrote:
| Alright HN domain experts. I'm prepared. What's the rub?
| adammunich wrote:
| It's only practical on mixtures with high co2 gas
| concentrations
| mdf wrote:
| Would inside a chimney work?
| extropy wrote:
| From the abstract it seems to be very applicable to
| combustion exhausts (coal/gas plants) and consuming 5-10% of
| the combustion energy to recapture the CO2.
|
| Hard to tell what is the required CO2 concentration without
| the full article. Typical combustion exhaust seems to be ~10%
| of CO2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue_gas
|
| Edit: spelling.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I wonder how research is doing to concentrate CO2 from the
| PPM amounts we have "in regular air"
|
| There are at least two low-hanging fruits that make it
| "easier": CO2 is heavier than other important gases and
| mildly polar.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Plant lots of trees or similar, then burn them for
| electricity and capture the CO2 from the smoke.
|
| Compared to a lot of the other proposals out there it
| almost sounds plausible.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Why not just do a partial burn and reduce the remainder
| to charcoal? It would be much cheaper, require no
| chemicals, and the end product is pure carbon, which
| would be easier to store. You could literally dump it in
| a pile and deal with it later.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Making charcoal is not energy-positive and still only
| results in about 50% carbon capture, best case scenario.
| Burning it in a biomass plant with good carbon capture
| does better _and_ displaces carbon-emitting generation
| processes at the same time. As an added bonus biomass
| plants are excellent 'baseload' type plants, a feature
| that wind, solar, etc are missing without expensive
| storage and complex management schemes.
| lostapathy wrote:
| Or skip a step. Turn the trees into lumber and build
| something with it. Long-lived wooden structures sequester
| carbon until they are abandoned and rot.
| chobeat wrote:
| Like with every other solution, under the current political and
| economic systems, there's no incentive to scale it up quickly
| enough to make a dent in global warming and it will just live
| in small local prototypes and in the dreams of techno-
| solutionists.
| chr1 wrote:
| That's not a techno solution worth to dream about, the real
| techno solution is a fine grained control of weather (like
| https://viento.ai) and in that case the extra CO2 in
| atmosphere will be naturally sequestered in fields and farms
| in Sahara.
| neolog wrote:
| That "leadership team" doesn't seem qualified to be working
| in this area.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Aubrey de Grey, heh? IDK... now I like it more.
|
| What he _is_ qualified for is running this sort of
| effort. I just don 't know what to call this sort of
| effort.
|
| _Viento is a 'moonshot' nonprofit pioneering targeted
| weather security_... by combining big data, forecasting
| breakthroughs and AI directed weather interventions...
| framed as "break glass in case of climate emergency."
|
| So... I don't like the idea. I do however, like the way
| he puts together moonshot projects, generally. Maybe this
| will evolve into something better. It's useful to have
| 0.X% of people working on tech, to be doing it in an
| environment that isn't standard academia or big tech.
| pineaux wrote:
| Elon musk wasn't qualified to build a rocket company.
| Still pretty succesful though.
| neolog wrote:
| He had Ivy-league degrees in physics and economics and
| two billion dollars. More importantly, he wasn't the
| whole leadership team: the CTO was a rocket engineer and
| the COO had other experience.
| chobeat wrote:
| thanks but no thanks
| mckirk wrote:
| To be honest, the layout of that site does not exactly
| inspire confidence.
|
| But the team is interesting indeed. Incidentally, there's
| an online SSC meetup with Jaan Tallinn as guest, _today_:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jQQYCdtiH5d3CtrNC/jaan-
| tall...
| mrpopo wrote:
| I think the bigger gotcha with carbon capture is it sustains
| the quid pro quo that climate change is the biggest threat to
| unchecked energy consumption growth. Behind climate change,
| there's also biodiversity collapse, ocean fish depletion, and
| that's gonna ruin the food system billions of people depend
| on, way before they see the benefits of globalisation.
| dalbasal wrote:
| True, but if it's really good, it probably _could_ be brought
| into the political /economic system at some point. Just
| mandate zero emissions for certain classes of carbon fuel
| burners... like power new stations.
|
| Replacing the first 30% of fossil fuel usage is hard/slow. At
| some point, it will become much easier/quicker... because the
| economics will be favourable.
|
| The last 30% of fossil fuel will be hard/slow. Fossil fuel
| burning use cases that for different reasons are hard to
| replace. For these, exhaust capture makes sense.
| chobeat wrote:
| lot of wishful thinking here. There's clearly not enough
| time for this
| dalbasal wrote:
| Enough time for what?
|
| All I'm predicting is that carbon reduction will follow a
| path. Slow, then fast, then slow again. At that late
| point, exhaust capture may be mandatory... I would even
| say probably.
| chobeat wrote:
| Enough time to prevent systemic collapse that will
| inevitably make intervetions to such a scale possible.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I see.
| adammunich wrote:
| That too
| GistNoesis wrote:
| how much co2 is released each year ? -> "The world emits about 43
| billion tons of CO2 a year (2019)"
|
| This article -> 50$ per ton of capture.
|
| product = $2,15 trillion to capture the whole year emissions.
|
| US GDP 2020 -> $20.93 trillion
|
| Only a few plants and ~10% of GDP from a single country could
| solve it.
|
| Does this mean that global warming is almost a non-issue, but
| merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot the bill ?
| Aachen wrote:
| Well, as another person said, it only works with high
| concentrations. You'd have to have this country of choice go
| and install the devices on all exhausts everywhere. There's
| still a percentage getting past the exhaust, there will still
| be emissions from fertilizer and the like,
| methane/nox/refrigerants are still a thing, and so we'd reduce
| the amount of emissions by, say, 75%. That would be amazing and
| hugely helpful, but not the solution. In the end we'll need
| something around 100% (bit more due to overshooting, more
| likely than not).
| GistNoesis wrote:
| Ok, I hadn't understood, that this new solution was only
| applicable only to the CO2 produced by combustion for which
| we can easily install an exhaust filter.
|
| You quote this fraction at 75% : With some efforts we can get
| 75% reduction at 50$ per ton.
|
| What is the cost per ton to remove the CO2 from the
| atmosphere for the remaining 25%, and for the CO2 we already
| have emitted in the past ?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot the bill ?
|
| This was always the real problem.
| kylewatson wrote:
| I'm sure in 20 years we'll learn this causes cancer. And someone
| will be posting an article on how to remove this from the water
| supply.
| tim333 wrote:
| For comparison I was looking back at the "Project Vesta -
| Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches" thing.
|
| There were estimates of $10-$25 a ton for olivine rock
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415138
| thechao wrote:
| I don't know why the Democrats, in particular, don't turn this
| into political hay: it's literally the perfect counter to the
| coal issue.
|
| 1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings
| from huge defunct coal mines;
|
| 2. All of the mining & transportation infrastructure is already
| in mining country;
|
| 3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue
| collar work; and,
|
| 4. Mining country already has expertise in ... mining.
|
| Instead of rolling in and telling mine workers that "their
| livelihood is destroying the world, please go find something
| else to do", the Fed could roll in and say: "now it's your turn
| to ~save the world~; go dig!"
| fastball wrote:
| Coal has other externalities besides CO2.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 1. The tech isn't ready to deploy.
|
| 2. There are hardly any Democrat leaders left who care about
| or can talk to blue collar workers.
| petra wrote:
| It's not enough to change people's beliefs about climate
| change and political choices.
|
| >> Olivine is plentiful, everywhere,
|
| That means olivine will be mined everywhere. not necessarily
| in coal country.
| labster wrote:
| Computers are plentiful everywhere, yet more bits are mined
| in SV than anywhere else. Maybe the fact that bit mining
| expertise is concentrated there is useful to produce more
| zeroes and ones. I suppose the same might be true of
| olivine.
| silasdavis wrote:
| > yet more bits are mined in SV than anywhere else
|
| Are they?
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Just a side note, as I don't know a thing about olivine, but
| wouldn't they be able to pull the material from the waste
| piles instead of mining new material? I remember this popping
| up in a discussion about thorium (super abundant in coal
| mining waste) and that was one of the points brought up
| thechao wrote:
| Yep; straight from the tailings. It's all the transport &
| digging parts of mining, without any of the dangerous
| "going into a hole" parts of mining. Obviously, this is
| just a form of strip-mining so there's definite downsides.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think part of this is because there is a group of people
| that doesn't want there to be an easy technical solution to
| climate change. They would rather use the massive threat of
| climate change as the catalyst for social, economic, and
| behavioral change. They view climate change mitigation tech
| that does not require changes in behavior much as religious
| conservatives viewed birth control and condoms - a technical
| hack to get around immoral behavior.
| phreeza wrote:
| Neither of these mechanisms are likely to be completely price
| inelastic, so in a perfect world we would pursue both of them
| to a degree relative to their price.
| acje wrote:
| I can't imagine an industrial approach that won't fail on scale,
| lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve the problem
| these are strategies to get rich.
|
| The only kind of strategy that seems capable of delivering on
| both scale and lifecycle is one where we enhance the environment
| to capture the CO2 for us and store it in the organic food chain
| simply by scaling it up to hold the extra mass.
|
| Most likely we would have to enhance plains and deserts to become
| forests. Use regenerative agricultural practices and eat less
| meat. The big opportunity is in the oceans. There are wast "sea
| deserts" that could be transformed into more biological active
| habitats by using our industrial base to build some kind of
| structure to protect small life. Perhaps also disperse nutrients
| to accelerate biological processes.
| acje wrote:
| Wow the downvotes.. was this really that controversial? Are we
| still trying to solve the problem with the same mindset we
| created it?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| This is not an argument against the solution proposed:
|
| > I can't imagine an industrial approach that won't fail on
| scale, lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve
| the problem these are strategies to get rich.
|
| Neither this this:
|
| > Are we still trying to solve the problem with the same
| mindset we created it?
|
| I don't know if this solution is at all useful, but climate
| change is massive threat to a large percentage of humanity
| and discarding solutions because you don't like the "mindset"
| isn't going to get it done.
| stephanheijl wrote:
| I've been looking at the use of algae with regards to sequester
| img CO2 from the atmosphere. This seems to have some remarkable
| advantages: single molecules which make mass production easier,
| presumably less finicky operating procedure and way more
| straightforward to pump into disused oil wells. From the abstract
| it does seem to need CO2 being supplied to it as opposed to
| drawing it from the atmosphere actively. I assume this could be
| used in exhausts of some kind? Definite benefit is the fact that
| the CO2 is captured immediately as opposed to over a years long
| timeline, like trees.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I'm interested in causing algae blooms near the equator with
| iron sulfide. Not for co2 capture, most of that would get
| released on decomposition, but for the albedo effect. It also
| has the failsafe that if it gets too cold the algae will die
| preventing a snowball earth. They did some tests for salmon
| production, and scaling that linearly for area covered it would
| be less than a $1.5 billion project. Also we get salmon.
| sargun wrote:
| Would you get enough salmon to offset the cost? What's the
| net cost of this approach?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I wouldn't count on any savings from the $1.5B. You would
| get more salmon than we know what to do with and you have
| to harvest them or the overpopulation would mess with the
| ecosystem.
| jtolmar wrote:
| > more salmon than we know what to do with
|
| Bury them in the ground as fertilizer?
|
| Requires people to fish them up, but maybe we can
| redirect some of the effort that goes into overfishing to
| that.
| jules-jules wrote:
| Is there a way this could be used in a home-setting by private
| individuals or too dangerous/costly?
| robomartin wrote:
| Every time something like this comes up I think exactly the same
| thing: Did everyone flunk first year Physics?
|
| Someone please explain how nobody seems to care about the fact
| that you cannot violate conservation of energy.
|
| How much energy will it take to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100
| ppm?
|
| Never mind time and resources. Let's just talk energy.
|
| How much?
|
| The simple answer is: More than the energy that went into
| creating the problem in the first place.
|
| How much more?
|
| A lot more. Because these processes are not efficient at all when
| looked into in their entirety.
|
| A number?
|
| OK. How did we get the CO2? By burning oil. What did it take to
| create this oil. Billions of years of plants and biological
| matter being crushed and cooked by...solar energy. Massive
| amounts of energy falling on this planet. The end result being a
| highly concentrated source of energy. When we burn a gallon of
| oil we are releasing the culmination of what took unimaginable
| time and energy to produce.
|
| You are not going to make an impact without expending an equally
| massive amount of energy and resources.
|
| Let's say I burn a pile of lumber inside a large sealed
| warehouse. Say, 100K square feet (about 10K square meters) and
| very high. Large volume. Smoke, particles, gases disperse
| throughout the volume.
|
| You are tasked with cleaning it.
|
| You can't open windows, etc. That would be cheating. There is not
| "and then a miracle occurs" scenario.
|
| It would take an immense amount of energy and resources (relative
| to what it took to create the mess) to go find every particle and
| clean-up the noxious gases in that warehouse.
|
| If we can't clean a warehouse, what makes anyone think we can
| magically deal with a planetary-scale problem?
|
| We already know this. There are research papers that explain just
| how it is that even the idea of converting the entire planet to
| renewable energy sources is an exercise in futility.
|
| My point is: If we could just stop lying to ourselves maybe we
| can devote brain power towards dealing with the reality of the
| problem rather than the fantasies of non-existing solutions.
|
| I am not saying "let's be filthy and do nothing". I am simply
| saying we are not facing reality, which means we are wasting
| valuable time and resources "solving" a problem we cannot
| possibly solve without risking killing everything on this planet.
|
| All you need in order to understand this is the atmospheric CO2
| data from ice core samples going back 800,000 years. We know that
| if humanity was not around it would take about 50K years for a
| 100 ppm drop in CO2. In other words, with the ultimate "solution"
| --if we left this planet-- it would take 50K years. What makes
| people actually believe we can solve the problem in a generation
| or two if we stick around? That's not hubris, that's a delusion.
| Sorry.
|
| If anyone disagrees. Great. I would like to learn how I am wrong.
| Kindly explain how you are going to achieve a rate of change
| between 500 and 1,000 times greater than what could be achieved
| if humanity --and all of our technology-- got erased from this
| planet. That's the challenge. No magical technology can do better
| than the absence of humanity and all of our toys. That should be
| self evident. And yet, without us around, the timeline is in the
| 50K year range.
|
| Take your time, show how this 1000x improvement in rate-of-change
| will happen without at least 1000x the energy deployed at a
| planetary scale by natural processes.
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