[HN Gopher] The carbon capture crux: Lessons learned
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The carbon capture crux: Lessons learned
Author : tpc3
Score : 18 points
Date : 2022-09-01 15:17 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ieefa.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ieefa.org)
| andrewmutz wrote:
| I don't know why it matters that the existing users of carbon
| capture are oil companies.
|
| Sure, that means it hasn't yet been used to sequester carbon in
| other contexts, but there's no reason it can't be.
|
| It's like trying to discredit nuclear fission in 1950 by saying
| that it's a poor source of energy because all existing users of
| fission tech are weapons designers.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| From OP
|
| > Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil
| recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate
| solution.
|
| > Using carbon capture as a greenlight to extend the life of
| fossil fuels power plants is a significant financial and
| technical risk: history confirms this.
|
| Also from OP
|
| > Some applications of CCS in industries where emissions are
| hard to abate (such as cement) could be studied as an interim
| partial solution with careful consideration.
|
| Unlike nuclear fission in 1950, we don't have twenty years to
| continue extracting oil and gas. Most oil and gas extraction
| should have been hard stopped twenty years ago.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Yes I read the article, but none of this discredits carbon
| capture. It discredits burning oil and gas.
|
| You don't need to capture carbon to pump out the oil and gas,
| and you don't need to pump oil and gas to capture and
| sequester the carbon. Just because that's what oil companies
| are doing at the moment, doesnt mean that that's the best way
| to use carbon capture tech.
|
| Let's keep doing the carbon capture and stop burning the oil
| and gas.
| lozenge wrote:
| Sure but carbon capture is useless without the storage
| component. If you just sell the CO2 for food manufacturing or
| any industrial use it will just go back into the atmosphere.
|
| Unfortunately fossil fuel companies and politicians are
| throwing around the term "carbon capture and storage" as if it
| will solve everything and allow fossil fuel power plants and
| fossil fuel extraction to keep running. All the evidence is
| that it can't.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| I absolutely agree that we can't just keep burning fossil
| fuels and use CCS to fix the problem.
|
| But it doesn't matter if no one buys the carbon we capture.
| Sequestering it underground is a good outcome.
|
| And yes, it's not currently profitable for anyone to capture
| carbon and send it underground, but it is a positive
| externality and that's where government needs to step in. The
| government pays companies to do all sorts of things, and CCS
| should be one of them
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| The uses for a technology are largely driven by the people who
| initially pay money for it. Here, clearly, carbon capture has
| been paid for by oil and gas companies and no one else. It feels
| like they have given up on the technology simply because some
| companies have used it for purposes they don't approve of. As I
| see it, no one is willing to pay the cost to purchase and dispose
| of the CO2, so more profitable uses needed to be found. This is
| something we could solve simply with funding it seems. If it's
| really too expensive to collect and dispose of CO2, that would be
| a different (much more compelling) argument, but one which the
| article fails to make.
| tpc3 wrote:
| From the report: Captured carbon has mostly been used for
| enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a
| climate solution.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| And also much natural gas comes out of the ground with a lot of
| CO2 in it and has to be removed to be saleable. In fact, there
| are places you can drill in Texas where you get almost pure CO2
| and when people started doing EOR with CO2 that is where they
| got the CO2.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| What if it is?
|
| If we can make oil carbon neutral or even slightly carbon
| negative.. why not?
| outside1234 wrote:
| It won't work because it doesn't scale.
|
| About 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from
| burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol.
| About 22.38 pounds of CO2 are produced by burning a gallon of
| diesel fuel.
|
| Just think of the numbers involved to scale this to the
| planetary usage of fossil fuels.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Burning 2kg of coal and injecting 100g of oil worth of carbon
| to extract and burn 1kg of oil is barely even greenwashing.
| usrusr wrote:
| You seem to assume that the amount of carbon pushed down is
| roughly identical to the amount of additional carbon brought
| up. Is that just a hopeful symmetry reflex or do you know any
| numbers? (I don't)
| Fiahil wrote:
| Carbon capture requires power. It's never ever gonna be
| carbon neutral nor carbon negative.
|
| Unless you grow trees. They are - by far away - the most
| efficient and effective CC device that exists.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Trees are a temporary store of carbon. When they die and
| rot, the carbon is re-released. (Turning them into
| building materials makes this overall process take
| longer, of course.)
| outside1234 wrote:
| The reality is that carbon capture is no where near sufficient as
| a wholesale solution.
|
| It can help on the margins -- in terms of perhaps airplanes and
| other weight bearing users of fossil fuel that are not super well
| addressed with electrification -- but otherwise is a distraction
| from real solutions.
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