[HN Gopher] Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon captur...
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Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained
Author : geox
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-12-26 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| ta988 wrote:
| I feel like it is missing most of the important questions. What's
| the impact on sea life (one sentence saying we need
| monitoring...) The techniques used mean that all the
| microorganisms, planktons, algaes will be destroyed by those
| processes. What is the yield of those approaches, you remove 1000
| tons, but how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain
| and run them, the boats... What do you do with the CO2, that's
| now weight you have to move as well and put in containers that
| required CO2 to be made. This all should count in the equations
| for the credits, and from what we have seen in the past it is
| unlikely it will.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Yeah this is seems like it's reduced the complexity down to one
| dimension (removing the CO2) and has blown past any of that,
| didn't even think about the algae initially, just energy
| expenditures getting this up and running, but yeah, that's
| pretty much saying you'll solve climate change by chopping down
| trees and planting golf course grass
| youngtaff wrote:
| They're not even removing that much CO2 either
|
| > Captura's Port of Los Angeles pilot can remove about 100
| tonnes of CO2 per year from seawater. The company's new plant
| under construction in Hawaii will capture 10 times that
| amount--a measurement the company can definitively quantify.
|
| So 1,000 tonnes of CO2 / year?
| Avicebron wrote:
| So back of the sticky note math, 1,000 ton/yr, at $7.37/ton
| carbon credit resell value per Google "AI" header thing,
| that's $7,370/year profit. Hopefully that covers the boat,
| employee salaries, and fuel. Good job team.
| caseyohara wrote:
| To help quantify this further, a typical passenger car
| emits ~5 tonnes of CO2 per year. So we're talking about
| offsetting 20-200 cars per year.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-
| emissions-t...
| vsensei wrote:
| Oh no, the algae, nobody thought of them!
| jfengel wrote:
| We like them for breathing purposes. They produce about 70%
| of the oxygen.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run
| them, the boats
|
| Boats consume way more fuel than a layman may think. I've been
| on a ~80m / 20people crew coast guard ship for 6 weeks and did
| a napkin math onboard based on tank levels and refueling date.
| It was +1000l/person/day of diesel (can't remember precise
| numbers). We were moving ~50% or the time. In addition of the
| motors there were many BIG generators to make everything work:
| heating, sewage, hot water, AC, pumps, motors for cranes,
| anchor raising... you also need your motors running at least in
| low speed even when still to control your position and
| direction.
|
| I'm sure boats acting like platforms and with less crew to
| accommodate does consume less, however it's still nothing
| comparable to an onshore plant.
|
| It work "economically" because you often manage to refuel in an
| port with low fuel price.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I have wondered if you could tow a barge with the processing,
| then incentivize the box transports to pull the barge along
| behind. There are challenges with seas and storms and things
| like the tow line breaking.
|
| I read a proposal for an air extraction system that fit in a
| container, so that you could stack a few on a container ship
| and they would process air as they went from port to port.
| Typically power challenged though (you want some clean energy
| powering them). Nuclear powered container ships would be good
| for this.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, this is a common reason that environmentalists oppose
| nuclear power. First you have to prove that what you're going
| to do is making an improvement. The key element to remember is
| that we got everything right until the 1970s. After that, it's
| best to not touch things.
| gmuslera wrote:
| What could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure,
| and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the
| planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something
| significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended
| consequences.
|
| It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you
| do something big enough for causing a change it will probably
| affect a lot of things, most that will be obvious only on
| hindsight, and by Murphy it will end being something essential.
| Like what happened with the mandate of reducing the sulphur
| content in ship's fuel oil.
| cmckn wrote:
| I had the same thought when I read:
|
| > If you want to strip out 1 gigatonne of CO2 from the ocean,
| you probably have to put the upper few meters of the Atlantic
| through your machines every year
|
| That sounds...drastic! And this seems quite hand-wavy about the
| risks:
|
| > a lot of environmental monitoring needs to be done to prove
| that marine carbon-removal strategies aren't harming aquatic
| life
| grues-dinner wrote:
| It's also "only" a gigatonne, out of around 40 Gt of
| emissions per year. It's not nothing, but a medicore year of
| global economic growth will outweigh it, and outweigh twice
| the year after. Unless we get our species' electrical
| generating shit together on a war footing level of effort,
| which we won't, global GDP will be a proxy measurement for
| carbon emissions for a good while.
| exe34 wrote:
| I've had this idea for a short story for a while, where humans
| try to do carbon capture and end up going too far, leading to a
| snow ball.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Haven't seen Snowpiercer yet I take it?
| block_dagger wrote:
| I wrote a short story the other day about making the carbon
| problem obvious to every human on earth[1]. I'd love to read
| yours when you finish it. We need more fiction that focuses
| on this along with the nonfiction imo.
|
| [1] https://jck.earth/2024/12/20/heaven-scent.html
| exe34 wrote:
| Very nice! mine is not likely to get written unfortunately.
| joshuaheard wrote:
| I had the same thought. This idea sounded like the beginning of
| a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie to me. When you start
| making ocean-sized changes to the earth, you better get it
| right. My second thought was: where are they going to put all
| that CO2?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| In my sci-fi addled mind, and massive ship would trundle over the
| worlds oceans extracting readily available uranium and CO2 to
| make synthetic fuels for all time from nuclear energy.
|
| This skips a lot of important steps that likely cannot fit on one
| ship, but I love the idea of it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The oceans are big, so why limit it to one ship. Have a fleet
| of ships where each ship serves different purposes. Navies have
| been doing this for most of naval history.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Hal Clement posited schools of "pseudolife" fish processing
| seawater to extract gold/platinum and harvested by tenders in
| his short story "The Mechanic" --- it, "Raindrop" and "Halo"
| are still relevant today and highly recommended.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Costs to operate the ship would be more than the recovered
| uranium would generate. Meaning you wouldn't recover near
| enough uranium to break even on refueling the ship when it was
| needed. Same problem with gold (Fritz Haber famously tried this
| scheme thinking he could erase Germany's WWI war debts,
| usurious though they were, with gold from seawater).
| Concentration is just too low to make such processes feasible.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The synthetic fuel is what you sell. The uranium keeps you
| producing fuel for cheaper than O&G traditional extraction.
|
| But you're right: Just put a off-the-shelf modular reactor on
| the ship, then use that power to synthesize payload fuel from
| CO2, and the gold, uranium, etc are just helpful extras.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| It seems like they will do anything except the obvious because
| that would affect the economy. Why harm one business by forcing
| them to reduce emissions and profits when you can have two
| profitable companies where one pollutes and the other cancels
| that out (ideally...)?
|
| There has to be some other, unannounced benefit to funding these
| things like contributing research insights to naval warfare
| problems.
| wombatpm wrote:
| By having a second company, it becomes an expense of the
| polluting company. Now the MBA's can put a cost savings into
| their decision model to reduce their emissions. If their CO2
| cost is X and the upgrade costs are Y they can optimize,
| calculate paybacks, determine ROI. For some companies the
| calculus comes out the outsourcing CO2 capture is the best
| solution.
| jfengel wrote:
| I suspect that the unannounced side benefit is that it sounds
| cool. You get to be the guy who had the brilliant idea that
| saved the planet with no effort on anybody else's part.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| CDR technologies are being developed for the 2040s and 50s,
| when we have (hopefully) cut new carbon emissions down close to
| zero, and need to start repairing the sins of earlier decades.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Benefiting the economy is good, actually. Having resources to
| consume is good. It's not a conspiracy to do something stupid.
|
| We also probably benefit from geoengineering regardless of what
| happens to CO2 production (depending on whether we think the
| weather was better a few decades ago or not).
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Bill Bryson's description of an ecological disaster of zinc
| smelter superfund site being amazing for GDP comes to mind.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I'm sure this will end well =-)
| chvrchbvrner wrote:
| Whenever I read about Geo engineering stuff like this, I remember
| the last episode of "Dinosaurs" [0] and immediately get a bad
| feeling about it. Hopefully I'm just paranoid.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_Nature
| jstanley wrote:
| Beware of generalising from fictional evidence.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
| ANewFormation wrote:
| The most compelling of fiction tends to be compelling because
| it's based on reality. History is chock full of grand ideas
| intended to achieve some desired outcome only to create far
| worse problems than that you aimed to solve.
|
| Irrigation has destroyed entire seas, crop pests have been
| near exterminated only to learn those pests were eating far
| more dangerous pests - resulting in mass starvation, and so
| on endlessly.
|
| This entire idea _really_ seems like the sort of action we
| 're really not thinking through. Even the article points this
| out... "What's not easy to quantify is what happens after the
| CO2-depleted effluent is returned to the sea. Theoretically,
| if.." To say nothing of the million other possible issues
| mostly just handwaved away.
| Levitating wrote:
| wow good read
|
| And interesting website in general, thanks for sharing!
| moralestapia wrote:
| What a dumb take on the topic.
|
| There's hard sci-fi, for starters. Even outside that realm,
| nothing wrong with using them as cautionary tales. Asimov's
| tales excel at this, even if they're not "physically
| accurate"; who tf cares about that, honestly.
|
| No one in their right mind would treat this literature as if
| they were textbooks.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This needs to really be slowed down. Just like we need changes in
| the FDA for approval of food ingredients as opposed to the
| current process that allows ingredients by default, this needs to
| change to a process of examining what the impacts might be and
| gaining approval first. This will of course hurt innovation with
| startups by slowing things down and making it expensive, but I
| worry about irreversible consequences.
|
| That said, I doubt any of this will be stopped in time. Our
| governments (state and federal) aren't even quick enough to
| understand the impact of offshore wind farms on marine life.
| These geoengineering projects are far more complex and have less
| data available. So I think the default is that they'll continue.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I don't see how any approach where you have to put the CO2
| somewhere is ever going to work.
|
| Artificial weathering is the only approach that I've ever read
| anything remotely convincing about.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Algae seeding and having it sink to the sea floor taking the
| carbon with it also seems plausibly physically-possible on the
| face of it since it uses the exponential growth of
| microorganisms in rich growth media. And it's even using the
| same relatively concentrated carbon source as this plan. And
| it's almost 100% solar powered to boot (the iron seeding ships
| presumably would not be).
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| Very little organic carbon actually reaches the seafloor,
| though, because it is remineralised while sinking through the
| water column. Then, most of the organic matter that actually
| _does_ reach the seafloor is similarly remineralised rather
| than buried.
|
| But say we _did_ manage to get massive amounts of organic
| matter into the deep ocean, we could feasibly end up creating
| a so-called "dead zone" that is depleted in oxygen like we
| see elsewhere in the ocean, which would be detrimental to
| deep sea life.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| I didn't say it's a good idea, just that it's one of the
| few schemes that I could be convinced has some hope of even
| presenting two-digit gigatonnes of carbon to some reaction
| of interest a year.
|
| Processing millions upon millions of cubic kilometres (top
| 5m of the sea is a bit under 2 million) just screams
| science fiction to me.
|
| If we _could_ build that much processing infrastructure, we
| could just build decarbonised generation capacity in the
| first place.
| htrp wrote:
| This will definitely end well /s
| retrofrost wrote:
| I'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-
| engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We
| literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing
| the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global
| warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder
| to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus
| using a couple thousand tons of sulphur dioxide to reduce energy
| in. Maybe not as a permanent fix, but a better fix than this
| nonesense.
| anakaine wrote:
| That sulfur was removed to reduce acid rain, so its not without
| some pretty terrible side effects.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| The idea (in theory being the key word) is by injecting into
| the stratosphere minimises acid rain production and maximises
| cooling requiring less SO2
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Because (1) sulfur-dioxide injection is a short term solution
| that doesn't solve the problem long term, (2) there is a huge
| risk of termination shock if civilization ever stops injecting
| it, (3) the only long term route to a stable client is to stop
| emitting and to remove the CO2 excess we're adding, (4) all of
| this assumes that solar radiation management doesn't have
| terrible unexpected effects on the climate.
|
| We're probably going to have to do it anyway as a Hail Mary,
| since we're now seeing clouds disappear due to warming. But
| it's an emergency measure and not a solution.
| https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-s-clouds-are-s...
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