[HN Gopher] We Need to Take CO2 Out of the Sky
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We Need to Take CO2 Out of the Sky
Author : jseliger
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-10-05 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| potiuper wrote:
| 1. Building the Tres Amigas SuperStation would have the biggest
| physical impact. Only eliminating industrial subsides would be
| easier, which is why the latest draft infrastructure bill is a
| sad joke. https://theintercept.com/2021/08/03/bipartisan-
| infrastructur...
| nielsbot wrote:
| This might sound dumb, but it's crazy to me that we're actually
| (going to) use superconductors in real projects. Still sounds
| like science fiction to my ear... but I'm getting old :)
| maxerickson wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec.
| ..
| nielsbot wrote:
| Interesting US DOE paid for it. So the lines are 100%
| efficient... but you have to subtract the cost of
| refrigeration.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Do you have a nice reference to learn more about this project?
| anonporridge wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation
| esturk wrote:
| Couldn't we make use of the excess solar energy that's often
| shown in the duck curve? That is, in the middle of the day,
| there's usually a time where more solar energy is produced than
| needed. We can harness that to capture CO2 during that time. It
| might not capture much but at least it's not wasted.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| This article doesn't talk about farming the ocean. It's
| hypothesized that Azolla water ferns drew atmospheric CO2 from
| 3500 to 650 ppm over 800000 years:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
| polytronic wrote:
| Plant trees
| Symmetry wrote:
| Trees eventually decay and rot. The problem is fundamentally
| that we're taking carbon from outside the biosphere and putting
| it into the biosphere. The Earth has self-regulatory mechanisms
| to keep that balanced with increased rock weathering going
| against constant levels of volcanic CO2 emissions but that
| solves the issue on the order of 10,000 years and trees don't
| last nearly that long. Plus, growing forests only absorb enough
| carbon per square meter to offset about watt of coal power
| production.
|
| Increasing the world's forest cover is worth doing for its own
| sake, on biodiversity grounds, but its at best a small part of
| the solution to global warming.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Do decay and rot, as processes, capture carbon? (I mean that
| I do not know)
| 1-more wrote:
| You've gotten good answers, but allow me to expand with an
| eye towards a Cunningham's law situation. We have to
| address "how did all that carbon get underground in the
| first place?" I can't tell you much about oil, but coal is
| buried trees. They buried because there were not yet
| microorganisms that could break them down. So atmospheric
| carbon ended up underground due to the extraordinary
| circumstance of 1) there were tons of trees 2) the trees
| died 3) the trees could not decompose, so their carbon
| ended up buried then subjected to geological processes that
| turned them into a kind of rock. This takes the thick, CO2
| and O2 rich atmosphere that gave us 3 foot wide dragonflies
| (which, honestly, pretty cool), and turns it into the one
| where we can live now. This process will never happen
| again, because now trees can break down.
|
| If you wanted to zoom out and squint and get a little
| biblical, this is a Garden of Eden situation. There was an
| atmosphere that could not support our lives. There was a
| perfect mix of things at the same time to change that
| atmosphere into the one in which humans flourished. It was
| something too powerful we'd never be able to replicate
| ourselves. All we had to do was not exploit buried
| hydrocarbons. But we've instead made a race to dump as much
| carbon in the atmosphere as possible, it would seem. And
| now the comfortable world we live in will doom us to live
| outside of paradise.
| Syonyk wrote:
| No, they release the stored carbon from the tree in various
| cycles.
|
| Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is
| pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density,
| over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker,
| the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to
| fires (which obviously then release that carbon).
|
| Nature is circular. Any "waste" from one process is an
| input into another process. It's humans that think in
| linear "Resources into products into waste" ways.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Carbon is fungible, so trees will consume carbon emitted
| by any source. So in equilibrium the carbon consumed by
| trees and other sources will be equal to carbon emitted
| by decaying trees, or wildfires, or any other source,
| whether man made, or coming from a comet or volcano. To
| the trees, it's all food.
|
| But outside equilibrium, the forest canopy will expand
| until equilibrium is reached, or the forest canopy will
| shrink until equilibrium is reached. You will also see
| more hungry plant life supported in environments with
| more carbon again until starvation levels are reached.
|
| It is like any other kind of food. We can think of food
| as sequestered in the living bodies of a population, with
| deaths matched by births, a constant amount is
| sequestered. But increase food and population goes up
| until starvation levels are reached and now more is
| sequestered. Decrease food and population falls so less
| is sequestered. It doesn't matter where the food comes
| from. Currently 20% of the earth's carbon is sequestered
| in plant biomass. This is why various carbon offset
| programs do include increasing forests as a legitimate
| offset, but the land has to be allocated to the forest in
| perpetuity. It's not like you can grow 10 trees, the
| point is to support a bigger forest where there are 10
| more trees permanently.
|
| Thus nature regulates carbon levels _at those altitudes
| that trees can feed from_. I have no knowledge about
| equilibrating mechanisms in the atmosphere as a whole,
| this discussion is for carbon accessible to plants.
| gruez wrote:
| >Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is
| pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given
| density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it
| gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also
| more prone to fires (which obviously then release that
| carbon).
|
| No, you can get it to sequester carbon if you plant trees
| (or other plant matter), harvest it, convert it to
| charcoal, then spread that around. Apparently in that
| form (biochar) it stays sequestered for a few thousand
| years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
| Syonyk wrote:
| Yes, but that's neither geological scale times, nor
| something nature does. I can make a forest sequester
| carbon if I dig big holes and bury trees in them, but
| that's not a particularly natural process either.
|
| Left alone, nature's cycles are mostly carbon neutral.
| [deleted]
| kjeetgill wrote:
| Thats a good question!
|
| All the carbon that makes up most of the mass of plant is
| from the CO2 in the air. Decay and rot release whatever
| carbon was captured back into the air.
|
| The same way the food you eat turns to CO2 you breathe out
| but due to fungi and bacteria.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Can we plant a ton of trees and every twenty years (or
| whatever) cut them all down and throw them in a pit, lake, or
| ocean?
| Symmetry wrote:
| If they're under water they'll probably decay to methane
| instead of CO2 which is even worse. If you can put them
| somewhere dry, though, that might work. Bury them in the
| dessert maybe?
| anonporridge wrote:
| Wildfires
| calt wrote:
| If we can increase forest cover, yes. But also, bury trees and
| plant new ones in their place.
| shakezula wrote:
| Diversity in tactics will be necessary, and trees will not be
| fast enough. We need this carbon gone by 2050, that is
| drastically short timelines.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2
| concentrations indoors?
|
| If taking CO2 of the atmosphere may take a long time then at
| least keeping our indoor environments at low levels will prevent
| the cognitive & health issues.
| philwelch wrote:
| This isn't worth worrying about. The atmosphere has a CO2
| concentration of about 413 ppm. The International Space Station
| operates at a maximum CO2 concentration of over 5000 ppm. 5000
| ppm is also the maximum safe CO2 concentration recommended by
| OSHA and the approximate average CO2 concentration aboard
| nuclear submarines. This still might be slightly too high--
| astronauts and submariners commonly report headaches, for
| instance--but it's about ten times the concentration of the
| outside atmosphere and the health effects are a little hard to
| measure. Plus, the people in these conditions are still capable
| of safely operating space stations and nuclear submarines,
| which is not a cognitively easy feat. If the CO2 concentration
| of Earth's atmosphere got that high, we'd have much bigger
| problems.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Have I got a product for you!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZUp2KF5ls
| gruez wrote:
| > Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2
| concentrations indoors?
|
| why? just because there's cognitive decline when co2 is above
| atmospheric levels, doesn't mean you get super-intelligence
| when it's below atmospheric levels. In that case you're better
| off ventilating your building than to scrub co2 from the air.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Atmospheric levels are increasing.
|
| You can't use ventilation to bring the indoor CO2
| concentration down to, say, 350ppm like it used to be
| outdoors.
|
| But I think the answer is... practical, sure I guess.
| expensive? energy intensive? waste intensive? also yes.
| philwelch wrote:
| The health effects of high CO2 concentration start to
| appear in the mid-thousands of ppm. These problems are
| about an order of magnitude away from each other.
| axus wrote:
| Is it possible to produce plastics that don't degrade or return
| CO2 to the environment? Make everything out of plastic, and then
| bury it in landfills, seems like one way to capture carbon.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Let's not. Even if you could make this work, sort of, plastics
| have all sorts of other nasty environmental and biological
| effects that we should try to avoid - they tend to break into
| pieces tiny enough to get everywhere in an organism, and then
| mimic other signaling chemicals well enough to fool systems.
| There's plenty of writing on microplastics you can dig into if
| you want to learn more.
|
| Making less out of plastic would be a good step. Making _more_
| out of plastic isn 't a good idea.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Also just producing less useless plastic. Much packaging can
| be made out of cardboard. If it needs some water protection,
| a thin wrapping of plastic is plenty.
|
| The one thing I'm not sure of is food packaging. There's a
| lot of plastic used in that, but I don't know if we have any
| alternatives. It's tough to package food because you want
| much of it to be sealed air-tight. But food packaging does
| have an advantage because it only has to last as long as the
| food inside.
| exporectomy wrote:
| I think you're stuck between the anti-plastic and anti-GHG
| ideologies. This reminds me of when anti-nuclear collided
| with anti-GHG. Not everything has a single obvious right
| answer. There are always tradeoffs. In this particular case,
| the environmental problems are easily solved by using
| landfills that don't release anything into the environment.
|
| Having said that, plastic production itself is a far bigger
| GHG emitter than burning it. Plastic product production emits
| 1.5 Gt of CO2e per year while global CO2 emissions are 35 Gt
| [1]. That's 4% of global emissions coming from plastic
| production. Incineration is hardly anything in comparison.
|
| [1] https://sci-hub.mksa.top/10.1038/s41558-019-0459-z
| uoaei wrote:
| That carbon would have to come from the atmosphere in order to
| be "capture". Converting oil products (already-captured carbon)
| into plastics is the wrong direction. It doesn't make sense to
| take a step back just to attempt a step forward.
| dtech wrote:
| Plastics can be made from starch which would capture CO2.
| However, bioplastics tend to degrade. Making plastic from oil
| as the vast majority are doesn't sequester CO2.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Turning atmospheric CO2 into plastic probably isn't as feasible
| as turning CO2 into some other stable form directly. Diverting
| petroleum production into plastic and them making sure it ends
| up in landfills rather than the sea[1] does seem like a good
| thing to the extent that plastic production funges against fuel
| production, I'm not sure to what extent these rely on
| separating different parts of the oil that comes out of the
| ground in the refinery for different uses rather than having
| one common pool that could be used for either. But plastic
| buried in landfills does seem to remain out of the biosphere
| for long enough to be a useful repository of carbon.
|
| [1] Remember, throw plastic away don't try to recycle it or
| it'll mostly end up in the middle of the Pacific
| https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...
| exporectomy wrote:
| Yep. It's misguided attempts to recycle plastic that cause a
| lot of the environmental contamination in the west.
| [deleted]
| Syonyk wrote:
| Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood"
| carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra
| energy laying around?
|
| The power system on my solar shed is, admittedly, somewhat
| overkill in an attempt to get through the winter without having
| to light the generator (so far, I've failed at this, our
| inversions are nasty). The flip side is that I have quite a bit
| of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day).
| If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of
| the panels. The office is standalone (and _way_ more trouble than
| it 's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full,
| there's nowhere to stick extra energy.
|
| I've considered various methods to use some of the surplus in
| useful ways, which so far has looked like donating a lot of
| compute to various BOINC projects (including cpdn, which is now
| out of work...). But I've not seen much work in the way of
| "things that could actually capture concrete amounts of carbon
| and store them" at this scale. It's all huge facilities, big
| multinational investment, etc.
|
| I've considered an algae grow system that would cycle air through
| some grow tanks (I have a lot of sun, growing algae in containers
| is sort of the default around here) and then bury the algae down
| some holes, but I'm not sure it really accomplishes that much.
|
| Another option I've considered is making use of some of the
| basalt laying around, getting a rock crusher to grind it into
| powder, and then either spreading it on the hill, or trying to
| find some sort of more rapid system for weathering it (tanks of
| water with airflow through them?). Of course, if algae likes
| basalt... I could combine the two!
|
| I just can't find _any_ information on smaller scale systems like
| this, and I lack the bio and chem background to really be able to
| do things like analyze rock dust for carbon content.
| davidw wrote:
| > Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood"
| carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra
| energy laying around?
|
| Trees? They make efficient use of solar energy to capture
| carbon and have a lot of other benefits:
|
| https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuou...
| antognini wrote:
| Trees are a temporary carbon store, but the issue is that
| they eventually die and rot, and then that carbon gets
| released right back into the atmosphere. A permanent solution
| would be to grow trees, chop them down, and then bury them.
| gmuslera wrote:
| It is something that have to be done anyway, as the other
| benefits matter too. But how it is done could be the
| difference between a solution and a far worse problem.
|
| Global warming is already pushing toward more frequent forest
| fires, or droughts in vast regions that if they have trees
| will end burning up as well.
|
| Intensive tree planting in relatively small areas probably is
| a bad idea, or will have a big maintenance cost to try to
| avoid that risk.
|
| But, in any case, it is the low hanging fruit of carbon
| capture. I just hope that it is done in the right way.
| Syonyk wrote:
| If I could grow the things... I struggle to get them watered
| properly.
|
| Practically, though, I'm out in some fairly high desert, and
| I have to pump water for irrigation out of a deep well. I can
| certainly do it, but I'm looking for something of a bit more
| "geologic scale" sequestration, if it's possible.
| [deleted]
| anonporridge wrote:
| FYI, it takes 7-8 trees just to offset a single person's
| breathing if this math is right.
|
| https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-
| doe...
| hagbard_c wrote:
| The maths may be right but the thought is wrong since it
| takes zero trees to offset the whole world's population of
| air-breathing organisms as all the CO2 they produce started
| out as... CO2. This is taken up by algae and plants, which
| are eaten by organisms which are eaten themselves until the
| target organism is reached, which will use the energy
| gained from consuming the previous hop in the carbon chain,
| breathing out CO2 upon which the circle is complete.
|
| Had humans consumed fossilised carbon the thought would
| still be wrong since trees only store the carbon
| temporarily, eventually it is released as CO2 when the tree
| burns up or rots away.
|
| This leaves aside the whole discussion on whether there is
| any need to offset CO2 from non-fossil sources - which
| there is not as far as I can see.
| anonporridge wrote:
| It's probably not worth the resources to do something like this
| at such a small scale.
|
| It will just never be as efficient as an industrial scale
| operation.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I'm sure it won't be as efficient as a large operation, but
| neither can I get my surplus power _to_ an industrial
| operation. And I 'd happily follow the power supplies - run
| equipment during the day, when it's clear, not run it at
| night, etc. I'm already used to using energy based on what's
| available, this would just be something additional to add
| into the blend.
|
| I've got an awful lot of basalt laying around, though...
| iforgetti wrote:
| Mine crypto and donate the money. Minimally you reduce the
| incentive for others to use electricity to mine more.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I'm not sure if that holds - wouldn't additional work on the
| network encourage others to then add more capacity to
| recapture their share?
|
| I've looked into it briefly, and came to the conclusion that
| the BOINC stuff (it used to be F@H but I gave that GPU to a
| friend for some CAD work) was more useful than crypto mining,
| because I simply couldn't mine enough to matter out here - a
| dollar or less a day sort of thing, with my annual power
| profile.
| [deleted]
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Plant about a trillion trees.
| jstsch wrote:
| We do. But it's so much easier to not pump carbon up, than to use
| tons of energy to put carbon back in the ground. Even if you'd
| use carbon free energy, for a long time coming that energy can
| offset existing fossil energy...
| anonporridge wrote:
| I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems
| like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of
| fossil fuels, someone or something _will_ eventually find it
| expedient to burn it.
|
| Hell, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that certain
| superpowers (namely Russia) decide that climate change is
| actually in their long term interest, as it devastates regions
| near the equator and opens up currently difficult to tap
| resources in their own.
|
| Slowing down carbon emission is definitely worth pursuing as
| much as possible, if for no other reason than it buys us time
| to solve the problem. But I doubt we'll ever get to a safe
| steady state until all the fossil fuel has been converted into
| a format that can't be burned.
| gruez wrote:
| > I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it
| seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile
| format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually
| find it expedient to burn it.
|
| wouldn't it be cheaper to buy fossil fuels on the open
| market, somehow convert it to a non-harmful form (eg. pure
| carbon) and then dump it in the ocean?
| anonporridge wrote:
| IDK. Maybe someone more in tune with the physics and
| chemistry can chime in, but I'd imagine you have to release
| the energy stored in the chemical bonds in some way before
| you can convert the carbon to a more stable form.
|
| The simple answer might be that you'd still have to burn
| it, but immediately convert the exhaust to a stable solid.
| I'm unaware if this conversion can be done with less energy
| than can be extracted from burning it.
| summerlight wrote:
| For now, it's true that we should focus on low hanging fruits
| like energy production and transportation. For them, we know
| what to do and some of them already have viable technologies.
| Perhaps we can achieve 80~90% of the goal by focusing on carbon
| reduction specifically optimized for those industries.
|
| But what do we do next when we're running out of these low
| hanging goals? It's more of death by a thousand cuts spanning
| across every industries you can ever imagine. And we've had a
| long, hard time to make politics work even on a very few number
| of those obvious low hanging fruits and it's still
| dysfunctional... Political will is a limited resource and we
| cannot really waste them on efforts with negligible impacts.
|
| This is why we need to prepare more general and economically
| scalable solutions that directly deal with carbon emission
| itself. Keep in mind that we're not trying to handle all of
| carbon emission problems with carbon capture. It's more of an
| auxiliary one on top of highly optimized carbon reduction
| solutions.
| philwelch wrote:
| We're going to need as much carbon neutral energy as possible
| no matter what. (If only we had somehow invented an extremely
| plentiful, carbon-neutral energy source in the 1940's, we might
| not be in this mess right now....)
|
| Once you get to the hardest marginal cases, I'm not actually
| sure what the most efficient way of offsetting the carbon
| emissions of airplanes is. It might actually be more efficient
| to just capture and sequester enough CO2 to offset the
| emissions of jet engines than to find a new energy source that
| works on airplanes.
| dlnovell wrote:
| It's not about what's easier, and it's not an either/or
| proposal. Atmospheric CO2 is currently around 419ppm. Even if
| we cut our CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow, we still have
| 419ppm. The temperature might stop going up, but it's not going
| to go back down unless we get greenhouse gasses out of the
| atmosphere.
|
| Most importantly, it's not certain that runaway warming can't
| happen even at our current temperature. Methane is being
| released from permafrost at our current levels of warming and
| is 20x as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Also, our natural
| carbon sinks (the ocean, macroalgae, forests, soil) are in
| decline whether or not we stop emitting CO2 - so CO2 may keep
| going up anyway as we lose biomass.
|
| And let's be honest with ourselves here, we're not cutting
| emissions to 0 tomorrow. Or next year. Or by 2030. Or by 2050
| most likely.
|
| We have to reduce emissions, at a level that seems
| inconceivable. We ALSO have to pull CO2 back out, again, at a
| level that seems inconceivable. The ability to scale up CO2
| removal to a planetary scale requires that we accelerate
| development right now.
| r00fus wrote:
| I wonder if atmospheric CO2 increase is correlated with the
| massive reduction in insect biomass we've seen. If so, would
| it be possible for us to reverse if we decrease insecticides
| and allow insect population regrowth.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
| fspacef wrote:
| That's what I've been saying...
| flerchin wrote:
| We need to ban crypto and decom the power plants bought for
| private mining.
| rektide wrote:
| I think a lot of "Earth Is Dimming Due to Climate Change"[1] (a
| lack of clouds), and I start to think: even removing CO2 is not
| enough. We've already changed things too much. We have to make
| the earth shinier, reject more heat coming in.
|
| I'm not exactly thrilled to be at the "let's build an electric
| drone fleet that sprays sulfure dioxide into the sky", and that
| or whatever else would have some probably ungood reprecussions.
| But I think we've got to. The existential risk of not starting
| right now is too damned high.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716717
| https://phys.org/news/2021-09-earth-dimming-due-climate.html
| akira2501 wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure our reaction to dealing with the expected
| and unexpected effects of man's continual technological and
| global reach is to run global experiments that will impact
| everyone on earth without any democratic mechanism behind that
| decision.
|
| It's more or less exactly how we got where we are now. "More of
| the same, but in the opposite direction" isn't very convincing.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| The Earth's historical, and natural state of CO2 is much higher
| than today, and we are still recovering from a little ice age.
|
| The greenest the earth has ever been was when CO2 levels were
| high, and the earth was incredibly fertile.
|
| https://holoceneclimate.com/temperature-versus-co2-the-big-p...
| bob229 wrote:
| lol, delusional. We are doomed as a species. Just accept it
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