[HN Gopher] The state of carbon dioxide removal
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The state of carbon dioxide removal
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-06-15 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stateofcdr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stateofcdr.org)
| yesbut wrote:
| The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal: existing technologies have
| only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact
| upon carbon dioxide removal. It has all basically been a scam to
| get free public money.
| glatisaint wrote:
| Not really. It's necessary to meet our climate goals. They also
| depend on a lot of other technology that doesn't exist yet that
| we'll need to develop and subsidize over the coming years.
| dymk wrote:
| That was also the state of the solar power industry a few
| decades ago, it took time and coordination (government action)
| to make it the dominant, economically viable form of renewable
| energy it is today.
| goneri wrote:
| Solar is nowhere near to be a dominant source of energy and
| will never be.
| jaggederest wrote:
| > and will never be.
|
| Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power
| source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer
| of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems
| like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing
| e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the
| size of Arizona
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Saying solar is the upstream of fossil fuels is a
| technicality. Fossil fuels are more like a battery that's
| stored millions of years of solar energy (+ the earth
| itself contributed a lot of energy). Solar cells are more
| like plants and cannot be used to replace batteries and
| our current battery tech can't improve fast enough to
| supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed.
|
| Interesting that you mention fusion though considering
| fission is available today and provides a substantial
| amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the
| amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible
| impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing
| energy growth).
| ben_w wrote:
| > our current battery tech can't improve fast enough to
| supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed.
|
| I disagree. The tech itself already good enough to
| supplant the majority of cases, which in turn gives us
| more time for the things that remain (such as long-haul
| aircraft).
|
| That said, I may be a little on the optimistic side about
| how much warming the ecosphere can take. If it's
| _already_ too hot, then yes, naturally you are correct.
|
| > Interesting that you mention fusion though considering
| fission is available today and provides a substantial
| amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the
| amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible
| impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing
| energy growth).
|
| That's not what the graphs show:
| https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
|
| * Coal: down since 2012
|
| * Gas: close enough to steady since 2012
|
| * Nuclear: down since early 2000s
|
| * Wind and solar: up
|
| Looks to me like gas mostly replaced oil (since the late
| 90s); and that wind+solar is displacing nuclear (since
| the former became big enough to show up on a graph).
| lukan wrote:
| To quote Wikipedia for further context:
|
| "The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere,
| oceans and land masses is approximately 122 PW*year =
| 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002 (2019), this
| was more energy in one hour (one hour and 25 minutes)
| than the world used in one year."
| joak wrote:
| Solar is the cheapest and the one that grows the fastest.
| So eventually it will become dominant.
| yesbut wrote:
| Eventually is a long time from now.
| pfdietz wrote:
| So is never.
| ben_w wrote:
| I estimate that in the early 2030s, PV will pass the TW-
| year/year mark, or 50% of current demand.
|
| I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret
| sigmoids past that point.
| dymk wrote:
| That's not what I said, try reading my comment again. Also,
| based on the current rate of solar adoption, you're likely
| wrong about it never being the dominant form of energy
| generation.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Is solar the only source of power on long spacecraft
| journeys, like that of Voyager and so on?
| lukan wrote:
| No, Voyager uses a radioactive battery. The sun is
| already way too far away for Voyager, to provide enough
| energy.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Voyager doesn't use solar power since its incredibly
| faint as you get further from the Sun. It uses the heat
| from the decay of radioactive plutonium to generate
| electricity.
| andybak wrote:
| Well on a certain level, all energy sources are "solar but
| with extra steps" so make of that what you will.
|
| If you think I'm being silly, well... I'm not the one using
| the word "never"
| dymk wrote:
| It's all fusion with extra steps, but your point stands.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Uranium's energy derives from gravitational collapse, not
| fusion. The neutron stars whose collision produces
| uranium have undergone endothermic nuclear reactions;
| their nuclear matter (aside from its gravitational
| binding energy) is at a higher energy state than the
| initial protons and electrons.
|
| Geothermal is most either primordial gravitational energy
| from the Earth's formation or energy from decay of
| uranium and thorium. Only decay of K-40 might be ascribed
| to fusion.
|
| Tidal is derived from gravitational energy.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Solar is looking to be the ultimate winner for powering the
| world. Your contention seems without sense to me.
| Hugsun wrote:
| Combatting the byproducts of the entire industrial world is a
| huge undertaking. We should not expect statistically
| significant contributions to the fight, until the most
| promising technologies have been scaled up massively.
|
| This does not mean the field is just composed of scams. The
| opposite could be true with the same results we see.
| schiffern wrote:
| >We should not expect statistically significant contributions
| to the fight, until the most promising technologies have been
| scaled up massively.
|
| Just to put a finer point on it, we _do not want_ a large
| scale-up until we largely stop burning fossil fuel for
| stationary baseload power.
|
| Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy
| system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in
| again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically),
| plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So
| in reality the entire chain would be generating _negative_
| net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn 't a
| workable solution, obviously.
|
| No, right not we should be researching and laying the
| groundwork for a future (post-combustion) scale-up, but
| environmentally we should _not_ be scaling up just yet.
| Scaling up right now would actually generate more pollution,
| not less.
| yesbut wrote:
| The only solution to this problem is reducing / eliminating
| carbon output. And the only way to do that is to stop making
| plastics, stop burning fossil fuels for smelting, and reign in
| all global manufacturing outputs completely. All of the
| solutions you guys are promoting ignore that and are trying to
| make a profit as part of the solution of cleaning up this mess.
| Pipe dream. Scam artists.
| joak wrote:
| Agree, net zero carbon emissions is mandatory. But it's not
| enough because the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere
| will continue to heat the planet and have to be removed.
|
| This not carbon capture vs net zero, the goal is net zero AND
| carbon capture.
| yesbut wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but I don't think carbon capture
| will provide the gains needed in a realistic timeframe. I
| don't think its development should be abandoned, but we all
| have a tendency to go to sleep thinking "cool, tech will
| solve this for me" when in reality only public policy will.
|
| All of our governments are owned by these corporations that
| are trying to either continue making money via the status
| quo or make money with these fly-by-night tech-will-save-
| us-all get rich quick schemes. Nobody is bribing the
| politicians to enact policy that cuts global manufacturing
| output.
| baq wrote:
| scale 100x in a decade and 10x in the one after this or face
| extinction. we've done it with CFCs. sort of.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I bet if you took the subsidies from fossil fuels and dumped it
| into carbon removal you could solve both problems at once.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| There is removal and then there is burial. The latter is a scam.
| If buried in a liquid state, it will geologically remerge into
| the air. Proper removal requires a chemical reaction.
| lukan wrote:
| If it is sealed in a way, that it is contained for at least
| some centuries, I think it is valid.
|
| But chemically binding is of course the cleaner solution.
| dymk wrote:
| Re: burial: wood vaults might be feasible. You dig a hole, and
| bury wood in an anaerobic environment. We're pretty good at
| digging landfills (or use an existing strip mined location)
| which is basically all this is. Then you grow more trees on top
| of the landfill, rinse and repeat.
|
| It remains to be seen if this can actually be scaled up.
|
| https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021...
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