[HN Gopher] Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewab...
___________________________________________________________________
Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables,
researchers find
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 351 points
Date : 2025-02-15 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techxplore.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techxplore.com)
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Obviously
| a_c wrote:
| Would love to have someone knowledgeable share why carbon capture
| is more viable than planting trees. I always thought the idea we
| need technology to capture carbon is silly, but never bothered
| enough to research more on it
| jhonof wrote:
| Trees need to be cut and stored to actually capture the carbon
| otherwise there is a risk they burn or die and release the
| carbon they captured back into the atmosphere
| vharuck wrote:
| If there are more trees in 10 years than there are now, and
| we keep that number relatively steady, won't that mean less
| CO2 in the atmosphere? Individual trees may die and
| decompose, but they can be replaced.
| jhonof wrote:
| As you add more trees (and the globe continues to get
| hotter), the risk of forest fires increases. In theory you
| are correct that we could just keep increasing tree amount,
| but in practice that will be difficult in a lot of the
| world as it gets hotter. Trees (and algae) are great
| capture tech, but horrible long term storage tech. There
| are currently interesting proposals on how to long term
| store wood and other biomass for sequestration but I'm
| unsure if any company is doing them at scale yet. Off the
| top of my head there is burying the biomass in mines, and
| putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into
| some form of storable liquid and then storing that. I can
| only find a link for one of the two after quick googling.
|
| https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-
| 0...
| ArnoVW wrote:
| in theory, yes.
|
| but as it is, the global net change in terms of forrest is
| negative. Hell, the amazon is losing 10.000 acres a day.
| And aside from direct human intervention, there's
| desertification that's not getting any better.
|
| so in practice, no.
| filoeleven wrote:
| The Great Green Wall project is in fact reducing
| desertification.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Interesting, didn't know it. Did you read the page in
| question?
|
| " As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as
| "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats,
| absence of political leadership, and insufficient
| funding. "The Sahel countries have not allocated any
| spending in their budgets for this project. They are only
| waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European
| Union, the African Union, or others." said Issa Garba, an
| environmental activist from Niger, who also described the
| 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing
| stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for
| scrapping the project. "
| loehnsberg wrote:
| You can plant trees (or any plant really as long as they grow
| fast) and then bury it so that the carbon won't get released
| or at least very slowly. There's an older thread discussing
| this idea [1].
|
| CCS would dispose the CO2 deep underground, like where
| natural gas is usually stored or extracted from. Given the
| cost of developing natural gas storage facilities, my hunch
| is that CCS is more of way of not having to deal with carbon
| emissions today.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794424
| jhonof wrote:
| 100%, I was talking specifically about just tree planting.
| Trees are great capture tech, but horrible storage tech, so
| tree planting alone is not a good carbon capture solution.
| Biomass burial is (imo) a great and relatively simple
| solution at the moment because we have a bunch of empty
| mines to use. There is also research being done on putting
| biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some
| form of storable liquid and then storing that, but I can't
| find a link for it at the moment.
| a-priori wrote:
| When trees die, they're consumed by fungi, and the carbon is
| sequestered in humus (soil). That's totally fine, and in fact
| is an important reason to ensure that planted forests have a
| fungal culture so this decomposition process occurs properly.
|
| You're right about fire releasing carbon. But even after
| devastating fires, forests don't burn completely and plenty
| of plant matter remains. Even ash and soot is still
| sequestered carbon, not to mention charred wood even if the
| tree doesn't survive.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| That's only true under certain circumstances. Sometimes the
| biomass accumulation is permanent.
|
| My house was built in the 60's. The basement recently started
| flooding. While digging a drain to fix the problem I
| uncovered evidence that ground level used to be 18 inches
| lower than it is now. 60 years of deciduous tree action
| created enough new soil to change how the water flows...
| Instead of going around my house now it goes through.
|
| Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent
| a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how
| are you going to make money with trees?
|
| If we actually wanted to fix this, rather than using it as
| marketing spin, I figure we'd be working on ways to replace
| deserts with forests and then on ways to ensure that whatever
| soil accumulation trick my tree is doing is also happening in
| those forests. (And golly I wish we would, I've been taking
| biology classes in this direction and recent political events
| have me thinking that the I've got some significant headwinds
| here).
| gruez wrote:
| >Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't
| represent a market opportunity. You can make millions
| selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
|
| Given that carbon is emitted continuously, and forests only
| offset a fixed amount of emissions (they stop sequestering
| carbon once they're fully grown and reach steady-state),
| you basically constantly need to be planting trees. That
| creates an obvious market for tree planting companies.
| adrr wrote:
| Plant trees for paper and stop recycling paper.
| krn1p4n1c wrote:
| Money. Planting trees doesn't pay like some absurd tech idea to
| vacuum it up and bond/compress it.
| bbor wrote:
| I'm no expert, but on a theoretical level: trees--and, more
| importantly, algae--capture carbon on accident as part of their
| respiration, which even with risky genetic modification
| enhancements has a natural limit on volume/biomass-level
| efficiency.
|
| OTOH, with the right chemical process running at scale
| ("synthetic carbon capture", apparently), the sky's the limit!
| We might not have the right tech at the moment, but AFAIK there
| are multiple plausible systems that would work much better than
| what we have now.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| This is magical thinking.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Monocelular algae is on the order of 1% efficient at converting
| light into biomass. Land crops are a few times less efficient
| than them, and trees are 1 order of magnitude or 2 less
| efficient than crops.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Serious advocates consider it to be a research area, not a
| mature primary climate strategy. Someone in the 1930s would
| have been equally skeptical of "smog capture", but it turns out
| modern catalytic converters are so good that we don't have to
| choose between enjoying clear skies and driving around mobile
| smog machines.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Someone else pointed it out in a different way. Forrest only
| captures carbon as it grows. A fully grown forest is carbon
| neutral. Specific type of march land and oceans are the only
| ecosystems that properly capture and store carbon continuously.
|
| So we need to chop the trees down again and plant new ones.
| Which is more feasible than technological carbon capture, but
| still a drop in the bucket of what is needed.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| The way to look at it is: there are two carbon cycles. A long
| cycle (proto-plankton dies, gets carbonized over millions of
| years, is pumped up, burned, and ends up in the atmosphere),
| and a short cycle (tree dies, is burned / rots, and ends up in
| the atmosphere).
|
| If all we do is burn trees, there is no problem. We're not
| adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before. The
| problem is that the stuff we pump up was not there before.
|
| So capturing in trees is at best a temporary solution. In 20 /
| 30 years that tree dies and is burnt or rots, and so the CO2 is
| released again. At best it may buy us some time while we learn
| to do with less oil. But it's crazy talk to do a weekend in
| Thailand and then "offset it with trees". That's like saying "I
| was broke, but I found $100 on the street, now life can
| continue as before".
|
| I won't even mention the fact that large parts of the "offset
| economy" are essentially fraud. People that own a swath of
| forrest declaring "I was going to cut these 10 km2 of forrest
| and prevent any new tree on it, but now I won't" just so that
| they can get carbon credits. Even if it is painfully obvious
| that they never intended to do that.
| loeg wrote:
| Planting trees is a form of carbon capture!
| bbor wrote:
| I came in to drop a "glad the obvious is being confirmed!", but
| after skimming the actual study I'm sadly a little dubious of its
| reasoning. It didn't examine the two approaches (technically
| three: renewables, natural carbon capture, and synthetic carbon
| capture) on their engineering or economic merits, but rather just
| compiled historical data on jurisdictions that mainly promoted
| one of the three and compared the outcomes. I think the noisy
| nature of such an analysis is obvious, not to mention the bias
| against synthetic approaches from analyzing outdated tech. I'm a
| huge believer in renewables being the only path forward, but this
| study isn't very convincing IMHO!
|
| Also would've loved to see "degrowth"/reduce usage as an option,
| since that's the last big one people advocate for IME.
|
| P.S. does anyone know if the current US regime's "any university
| that works on federal grants is forbidden from promoting DEI"
| policy is intended to apply to climate change as well? Seems
| likely, but I don't recall seeing anything explicit in any of the
| EOs I've read. This study isn't very out of Stanford, which would
| clearly be impacted -- thus it piqued my interest.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Carbon capture has always seemed to me to be a means for
| companies to get paid both to produce carbon and then to clean it
| up.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| As they should, provided the consumer is paying and using the
| carbon.
|
| Pay an airline to take you somewhere and produce carbon, pay
| someone to remove that carbon.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Should get paid? Or should clean it up? The problem is this
| is energy and resources that could be spent on actually
| solving the problem at its source instead of finding ways to
| maintain the status quo.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| cleaning it up is solving the problem.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Is it? Or is it just kicking the can down the road? We're
| trying to clean up crumbs off the floor with a machine
| that runs on cookies.
| lesuorac wrote:
| It's an improvement no?
|
| It's like paying a fee when buying a car battery or car
| tires unless you return an old one.
|
| The fee needs to be overly pegged to inflation or
| something though otherwise you end up with the glass /
| aluminum cans problem.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The difference here is that it's not deposit to encourage
| recycling, it's just a tax, and it's not a discrete thing
| you're getting taxed on, it's everything. It's costing
| everybody more and people are being paid twice. I'm
| thinking especially of the companies trying to sequester
| carbon in the wells they empty - they end up making money
| both ways.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Again, seems reasonable. If you dont like paying them to
| pump the oil and dispose of the carbon, then don't
| consume the oil and create the emissions.
| gruez wrote:
| >The difference here is that it's not deposit to
| encourage recycling, it's just a tax,
|
| It's a tax to encourage the alternatives. If an electric
| car costs more than an ICE car, then taxing ICE cars
| through a carbon tax will make the electric car more
| attractive, at least on the margins.
|
| > It's costing everybody more and people are being paid
| twice. I'm thinking especially of the companies trying to
| sequester carbon in the wells they empty - they end up
| making money both ways.
|
| Similar logic to the above applies. Oil companies might
| be able to charge more for a barrel of oil, but it's not
| like that barrel of oil is suddenly more useful. That's
| bad for oil companies because it makes the economics of
| their product worse. They have to do more "stuff" to sell
| a given barrel of oil, but their competitors (solar
| panels or whatever) don't.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > I'm thinking especially of the companies trying to
| sequester carbon in the wells they empty - they end up
| making money both ways.
|
| Sure, but the reason solar panels are popular is because
| they're (mostly) the cheapest way to generate power. By
| adding an additional tax to petroleum products based on
| say sequestering costs (as opposed to some made-up I
| won't chop down a forest offset) it encourages non-
| petroleum products to be used.
|
| It's basically a tariff for clean energy.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Operating under that sort of nihilism, why bother saving
| babies if they are just going to die of old age at best?
| gruez wrote:
| >Should get paid? Or should clean it up?
|
| The entity who caused the pollution should be responsible
| for paying to clean it up. For logistical purposes it might
| make sense to tax at the point of production/sale rather
| than actual emission, eg. taxes at gas stations rather than
| some sort of monitoring system on every car.
|
| > The problem is this is energy and resources that could be
| spent on actually solving the problem at its source instead
| of finding ways to maintain the status quo.
|
| If the alternatives are actually cheaper, the market will
| naturally work itself out, because polluters would be
| incentivized to switch. Nobody uses plastic utensils in
| place of reusable ones, not because the government banned
| them, but because everyone knows the latter are so much
| cheaper.
| sweeter wrote:
| You literally can't just "clean it up" it's not possible.
| This is there American hyper-individualistic mindset at
| work. The problem and solution is cut and dry, anything
| else is a comfortable lie.
| gruez wrote:
| >You literally can't just "clean it up" it's not
| possible.
|
| explain? at least with carbon since it's fungible and
| global it's probably the easiest to clean up, compared to
| exxon trying to clean an oil spill or whatever.
| disantlor wrote:
| aka we pay their negative externalities? no
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think everyone should pay for their own externalities.
| Put gas in your car, and you are generating the
| externality, so expect to pay some company a gas tax to
| remove that carbon.
|
| Buy electricity from coal and the power plant is the
| emitter, who should pay for capture. However, if you are a
| electricity customer, expect that cost to be passed on to
| you on your bill.
| pornel wrote:
| Who's going to pay for carbon capture? Definitely not the
| current polluters who benefit from fossil fuel prices that
| don't include the cost to clean that up. This is like a fossil
| fuel subsidy from a debt left to someone else to pay.
| gruez wrote:
| >Who's going to pay for carbon capture? Definitely not the
| current polluters who benefit from fossil fuel prices that
| don't include the cost to clean that up.
|
| Carbon emitters through carbon pricing schemes. They already
| cover more than 20% of worldwide emissions, with China
| joining a few years ago.
|
| [1] https://www.economist.com/cdn-
| cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| The old "we can sell you the solution to the problem we sold
| you" trick.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| Or a way to take money from green investment funds: you're
| never finished, but you're always only two years away. Both
| directly from governments and from mandates on the oil
| companies to do green investments.
| Aachen wrote:
| Cite anything that says we're two years away from using
| carbon capture to clean up the climate
|
| This has never been the point. Why the strawman argument?
| Asraelite wrote:
| So what? We would still need to work on actively reducing current
| CO2 levels even if emissions dropped to zero tomorrow.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| The new paper regarding using a nuke to accelerate co2
| sequestering in the sea from MIT....is man made water
| sequestration using minerals to bind the co2 from the water count
| as carbon capture?
|
| The paper was published from RIT.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| It would be carbon capture... but it feels like such a
| needlessly destructive method. It's up there with atmosphere
| manipulation in "bad ideas that we should only even consider if
| we're desperatre"
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's destructive, but it exploits the extremely low cost per
| unit energy of nuclear explosives (particularly large ones).
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the
| oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry.
|
| All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon
| into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it,
| but with a loss factor.
|
| We continue to see companies and politicians claiming it's
| feasible and will help us become "green". We should call them out
| on their shit. If we had the renewable power budget to use proper
| carbon capture on a large scale, we would already have a fully
| green grid.
|
| ---
|
| Well... There are other methods than reversing c02 back into
| carbon chains.
|
| Capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas form
| in underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is
| a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better
| keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years with likely
| upkeep. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the
| carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)
|
| Ideas to shove c02 air bubbles in concrete are promising but
| barely enough to offset the c02 generated from creating the
| concrete itself.
|
| One promising approach is to grow plants and turn them into
| charcoal. Charcoal is great for keeping fertilizer in the soil so
| that we can spread it over crop fields for a small increase in
| yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia
| of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions.
| Almost feasible. (bamboo, algae, and sunflowers seem to be the
| highest biomass generators, but perhaps a slower crop that can
| handle worse climate is preferable)
|
| But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning
| carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to
| reverse it, but with a loss factor.
|
| I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy
| the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty,
| but there's an inaccuracy here:
|
| In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation
| of hydrogen.
|
| We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this
| regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends
| to leak, but it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons
| and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net
| energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not
| burning them in the first place.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| > In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the
| oxidation of hydrogen.
|
| This I wasn't quite aware of. Thanks for the correction.
|
| > But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and
| turn the CO2 into coal and leave it like that with a net
| energy gain
|
| This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is
| pulling a bit of weight here...
|
| > We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in
| this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas
| which tends to leak,
|
| I also agree with your list. Burning stuff for grid energy
| should stop ASAP. Liquid fuel for transport is, however, the
| most difficult and probably the last to be replaced. It's to
| the point that generating green liquid fuels (that don't use
| fossil sources of carbon) is still actively researched and
| used, as air travel or shipping may never become feasible on
| green energy sources.
| bluGill wrote:
| Ever see a diesel 'rolling coal'? They are burning the
| hydrogen and sending carbon into the air. Terrible for the
| local evironment though. this is still carbon positive
| though since some carbon is burned - just not all.
| blkhawk wrote:
| > But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and
| turn the CO2 into coal and leave > it like that with a net
| energy gain
|
| > This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is
| pulling a bit of weight here...
|
| In nat. gas this is possible - its called pyrolisis - as an
| alternative to steam reformation it is generating pure
| carbon and hydrogen instead of the CO2 and Hydrogen that
| steam reformation does.
|
| Its main downside is that it takes more energy so you get
| less usable energy out of the process.
|
| You can do it with other organic fuels as well and the
| simplest process is making charcoal from wood but its not
| as clear a way to separate out carbon there.
| taurknaut wrote:
| > Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP.
|
| Sadly I think the only viable route to this is wealthy
| countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power
| plants (and presumably replace them with something
| equivalent).
|
| This has two nice benefits. One, wealthy countries show
| they act in good faith. Two, this will greatly reduce
| wealth disparity.
|
| Of course, there's the chance some people will threaten to
| emit gas to acquire disproportionate power. This is true,
| but still preferable to the west just roasting the planet
| and then blaming china. Like grow tf up.
| amrocha wrote:
| This is putting the cart before the horses. These wealthy
| countries haven't even stopped burning fossil fuels.
| Let's focus on that first.
| rob74 wrote:
| Are you telling me that you're against good clean American
| coal?! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/trump-
| war-on...
|
| (BTW I agree with you, but the current political climate -
| and not only in the US - seems to go in the entirely wrong
| direction)
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's a pretty insane scheme called "underground coal
| gasification" which had been proposed for the Firth of Forth.
| It's the same process as town gas - partial oxidation of coal
| to hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Bus in situ. So a controlled
| underground coal fire.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| There's a similar idea to gasify old oil and gas wells.
| This sounds more feasible than doing it with coal though I
| suppose you could have a blowout. It should be cheaper too
| since it uses already drilled wells.
|
| https://protonh2.com/protonh2-advances-project-apollo-
| with-s...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn
| the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain
| - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them
| in the first place.
|
| It's also theoretically possible to have chemical reactions
| that bind carbon from the air into solid compounds that
| aren't themselves combustible without a net energy loss, but
| then you need a very large volume of reactants and produce a
| very large volume of industrial waste and it still turns out
| to be highly uneconomical compared to the cost of replacing
| fossil fuels for power generation.
| cyberax wrote:
| > It's also theoretically possible to have chemical
| reactions that bind carbon from the air into solid
| compounds that aren't themselves combustible without a net
| energy loss
|
| That's not true. The reactants must have enough stored
| potential energy to reduce carbon. You might get that for
| "free" by using accelerated weathering of rocks (the energy
| ultimately comes from the radioactive decay in Earth's
| core).
| rob_c wrote:
| > I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon
| villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely
| guilty,
|
| Unfortunately their success over the years is showing others
| like the airline industry how to behave. There's some great
| "support" getting cloud into the extreme left (who are anti
| science like the extreme right) who conveniently love talking
| about chem trail style nonsense... Which is a shame because
| if we actually made an effort to reduce these clouds we'd
| make a big step forward to improving things for little
| effort... (Notice how I'm not saying fix, we're closer to
| fusion at scale than battery powered commercial flights I
| suspect)
| cyberax wrote:
| > In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the
| oxidation of hydrogen.
|
| That's not quite true.
|
| To add some numbers, the average formula for long-chain
| hydrocarbons is roughly CH2 (one carbon atom for two hydrogen
| atoms). The enthalpy of formation of water is -286kJ/mole,
| and for carbon dioxide it's -394kJ/mole.
|
| Conveniently enough, one mole of long-chain hydrocarbons
| produces one mole of water and one mole of carbon dioxide.
|
| It's better for pure methane, as with its formula CH4 it
| produces 2 moles of water for each mole of CO2. So you get
| 572kJ of energy from hydrogens versus the same 394kJ from
| carbon.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I'm sorry, but it's clear from your statements that you don't
| know what you're talking about.
|
| > capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas
| from underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This
| is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever.
| Better keep that pressure chamber cool and leakproof for 1000
| years with yearly maintenance. (setting aside how inefficiently
| that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the
| air was free)
|
| CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical
| fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These
| reservoirs are known to be leakproof, since they've already
| been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years. Yes,
| there is a maximum limit of how much you can pump down, and yes
| there is a need to achieve good seal on plugging and
| abandonment. But that's the same as with any other subsea oil &
| gas well, it's a solved problem.
|
| Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on
| geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to
| extract in the first place.
|
| Now it _really_ annoys me thay researchers are still putting
| out papers like this, comparing irrelevant strawman scenarios
| and pretending it 's insightful. There is extremely broad
| consensus that we will need all the good solutions
| simultaneously. Stop beating a dead horse.
|
| Furthermore, since we've been dragging our heels on climate
| change, even if we achieve extremely quick shift to 100%
| renewables by 2040, we will need CO2 removal from the
| atmosphere to achieve net negative emissions.
|
| To make an analogy, it won't be enough to cut our spending to
| match our income, we then need to also pay back our old debts.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| > Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on
| geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to
| extract in the first place.
|
| Leakproof to one substance doesn't necessarily mean leakproof
| to another. Heavy oil is hydrophobic and a less mobile,
| volatile molecule than CO2. Methane otoh is lighter.
|
| That said, CO2 capture mostly works in scenarios where you
| have a highly concentrated stream AND can afford the weight
| and energy penalty of the capture apparatus. Good on big
| chemical/industrial plants, refineries and maybe gas power
| stations, and worth doing for that reason - industrial
| processes are some of the hardest to replace or avoid of the
| big emitters. Likely useless for vehicles and aircraft.
|
| It's very hard to feed 8Bn people without a whole lot of
| Haber-Bosch though, and hard to do that without methane in,
| CO2 out. All the more reason to cut down on wasteful uses of
| both food and energy.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Supercritical CO2, which behaves rather similar to a
| liquid, is also hydrophobic, which is why it is one of the
| best solvents for extracting oils from mixtures with water,
| being now preferred to older, gasoline-like solvents, which
| were hard to eliminate after extraction (if the pressure is
| reduced, supercritical CO2 evaporates from mixtures).
| svnt wrote:
| Many of these kinds of formations also house natural
| hydrogen for geologic time periods.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Yeah, that's not how caprocks on geological formations
| work. It's not a matter of pore pressure (what porous media
| people call hydrophobicity). It's a matter of caprocks
| having zero intrisic permeability.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| > Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on
| geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to
| extract in the first place.
|
| This is survivor bias. We only see the sites where it didn't
| leak too much, and extract from it. The sites that leaked, we
| don't hear about them (no oil to extract). In fact, a quick
| search shows that there are many leaking sites (both on land
| and under the oceans). The argument you present is a case of
| survivor bias, especially on the time scale of multiple
| millions years.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _This is survivor bias. We only see the sites where it
| didn 't leak too much, and extract from it_
|
| ...those are the sites we're pumping the CO2 into.
| holocenenough wrote:
| "This pressurized tank is doing a great job not leaking,
| that means it will never leak! Let's keep filling it up,
| WOO!"
|
| Strawmanning you a bit but surely you see that this line
| of reasoning leaves a little to be desired?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _surely you see that this line of reasoning leaves a
| little to be desired?_
|
| When responding to innumerate "napkin maths" and a
| sourceless speculation, on one hand, and a multibillion-
| dollar practice done by experts, on the other hand, no,
| not really.
| holocenenough wrote:
| I didn't make the initial post, and 'unsourced in this
| particular instance' doesn't mean there's no legitimate
| basis for OP's claims. To be clear, I'm not anti-CCS, but
| I have an environmental degree and based on my admittedly
| nonexpert opinion I agree with OP's assertion that it's
| not really a solution - it's a temporary measure at best.
|
| But yeah I see your point - no multibillion dollar
| industry filled with experts has ever done anything ill-
| advised, futile, or environmentally damaging simply for
| profit. _cough corn ethanol_ Can you imagine how the
| world would look if that were the case?
|
| https://theicct.org/carbon-capture-and-storage-a-lot-of-
| eggs...
|
| https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2024/09/13/leakage-at-
| firs...
|
| There are a number of scientific papers that are also
| skeptical about the long-term viability of underground
| CCS strategies but they're all paywalled so I didn't link
| them here, but you should seek them out yourself.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _no multibillion dollar industry filled with experts
| has ever done anything ill-advised, futile, or
| environmentally damaging simply for profit_
|
| Sure, they're scandals. Scandals have sourcing. Not
| supposition. Someone who assumes industry is always evil
| isn't a reliable source.
|
| I'll note that your sources are both credible and the
| first in this thread.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| > CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a
| supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the
| seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof since
| they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions
| of years.
|
| I simplified it a bit too much. CSS has been in use since the
| 1980s by the oil industry to push out more oil and natural
| gas from their wells. However, it is relatively small scale.
| I've seen proposals and demonstrations of saline aquifer
| projects, but I know of no currently operational such
| facility (and can not find it from light googling)
|
| That the chambers could store methane or oil for 100k years
| is promising, sure, but it doesn't end there. Co2 is a
| smaller atom that has an easier time moving through small
| cracks. CO2 mixed with water is also a mild acid that can
| corrode different rock types.
|
| Even if we had enough stable underground chambers, even if
| capturing the carbon and compressing it was free. How much
| could we even offset? We need a green grid first, not
| instead.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| CO2 is not a smaller atom than CH4 or H2O, on the contrary.
| And CO2 injection in a saline aquifer in the Utsira
| formation has been ongoing since 1996, there's been
| hundreds of research papers on it and multiple seismic
| imaging studies to confirm permanent trapping.
|
| > We need a green grid first, not instead.
|
| We need to do all of the things at once, unfortunately. If
| we started investing heavily in renewables in the 1960s,
| maybe we would have had that luxury.
| gruez wrote:
| >All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon
| into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse
| it, but with a loss factor.
|
| All the serious proposals for carbon capture involve use cases
| where it's unfeasible to swap in photovoltaics or whatever. For
| instance, fertilizer production, cement production, and air
| transport.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| The first two examples are feasible, the last not so much.
|
| You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the
| captured CO2.
|
| That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel
| produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2.
|
| The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship
| fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it
| can't, don't ship it).
|
| Sorry gents, those Kenyan roses for Valentines are over. Get
| your loved one some tulips instead.
| gruez wrote:
| >You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the
| captured CO2.
|
| >That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel
| produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2.
|
| Carbon capture includes direct air capture, which doesn't
| come with any weight constraints.
|
| >The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-
| ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and
| if it can't, don't ship it).
|
| Any solution that's predicated on "do it less" is going to
| be DOA politically. The options available voters aren't
| "electric planes" or "don't fly", they're "do something" or
| "do nothing". Telling people they're going to have to make
| upfront sacrifices for vague future benefits is going to be
| a losing proposition politically. Any solution to climate
| change is going to have to come from technological
| advances, not getting people to consume less. US emissions
| per capita has dropped more than 25% since 1990[1]. That's
| not because people ate 25% less meat or drove 25% less.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_
| by_th...
| Earw0rm wrote:
| How much does diffuse DAC cost?
|
| Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we
| ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address
| the problem already, before the tech is even deployed.
|
| And the next 35 years - to 2060 - have to be a much
| steeper reduction than 25%, or the 35 years after that
| will, one way or another, represent a _forceful_
| reduction of a lot more than 25%.
|
| Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption basis?
| Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends that
| are likely to continue, again more for political reasons
| than anything else.
| gruez wrote:
| >How much does diffuse DAC cost?
|
| >Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we
| ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address
| the problem already, before the tech is even deployed.
|
| It's $1000/ton today, which works out to a 70% price
| increase for a new york to london flight. I disagree that
| would "address the problem already, before the tech is
| even deployed", because zero chance anyone would vote for
| it in the first place. That's where technological
| advancement comes in. Startups claim they can hit
| $250-$350/ton by 2030[1], which is a much more manageable
| 21% increase.
|
| >Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption
| basis? Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends
| that are likely to continue, again more for political
| reasons than anything else.
|
| It's around 17% on a trade basis[2], but the point
| stands. Americans haven't eaten 17% less meat, drove 17%
| less, or bought 17% less stuff.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climeworks
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
| Ntrails wrote:
| It remains infuriating to be repeatedly lied to by
| politicians who say they can "hit net zero" etc without
| any lifestyle changes.
|
| It is utter nonsense and simply ensures every
| conversation on the topic is grounded largely in fantasy.
|
| There are hard choices to be made and we insist on
| letting people pretend otherwise. It's infuriating
| gbear605 wrote:
| Unfortunately Americans as a whole would rather have
| climate change than lifestyle change. That's a good
| portion of why Trump is president now. And most countries
| are in the same position, or want lifestyle change in the
| sense of using more energy.
|
| If technology can't do it, more climate change is
| inevitable.
| closewith wrote:
| The hard choice has been made. The world has decided to
| accept climate change in order to continue using fossil
| fuels. It's just not the choice you (or I) want.
| Thorrez wrote:
| I don't think the idea is to have the capturing machinery
| on the plane itself. The idea is to have capture machinery
| on the ground, offsetting the carbon released by the plane.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| That's right, but then you have to capture it from
| atmospheric concentrations (430ppm) rather than directly
| from a waste gas stream at a much higher concentration.
|
| It can be done but the economics don't look good right
| now. Possible very cheap solar energy in desert regions
| can change that a bit. Australia have been trying but
| they didn't get very far with it yet, granted there is
| still room for solar to get cheaper again.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Luckily CO2 is fairly fungible. Instead of the airplane
| capturing its own CO2 we can just capture 3.5t CO2 on the
| ground for every ton of jet fuel fueled into an airplane.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If the entire world's electric supply isn't decarbonised
| at that point then that money would be better spent on
| deploying renewables somewhere without a 100% clean grid
| as the article says or electrifying heat or industry.
|
| That has issues with proving the deployment actually
| displaces carbon but carbon capture has similar issues
| proving that the carbon is actually permanently removed.
| jfengel wrote:
| That's the thing. All of these mitigations are
| meaningless if we still have vast industries predicated
| on burning fossil carbon.
|
| And once we've eliminated the burning of fossil carbon,
| the mitigations are unnecessary. Nature will gradually
| find an equilibrium, and anything we do to speed it up
| (even removing carbon) is as likely to cause harm as
| good.
|
| Maybe there is a future where we have so much extra
| renewables that we can think about trying to undo what
| we've done. But any effort spent on it now feels like an
| attempt to decrease the need to eliminate fossil fuels as
| fast as possible.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we can just capture 3.5t CO2 on the ground for every
| ton of jet fuel fueled into an airplane_
|
| Entropy makes one of these _much_ easier. For planes,
| synthetic jet fuel is the answer.
|
| The sign we're taking jet emissions seriously will be
| when someone drops the _flygskam_ and hydrogen shtick and
| passes a synthetic-fuel mandate on private jets. (Less
| than 3x the cost in America [1].)
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-
| sustainable-aviati...
| slashdev wrote:
| Air transport is one of those things that would better offset
| with carbon capture - maybe even by making synthetic jet
| fuel, then it's carbon neutral - but very expensive. But
| really it doesn't matter. Air transport is 2.5% of global
| CO2. If we solved every other problem first, we could keep
| pumping oil for airplanes for centuries.
|
| Take the engineer's mindset, reach the low-hanging fruit
| first. Replace coal with nuclear and natural gas, then start
| replacing natural gas. Cars don't need to run on gasoline
| anymore, BEVs are a superior technology. The market is doing
| its work to decarbonize that all by itself. Slowly at first,
| and then all at once. If you're middle-aged today, you'll
| likely live to see the end of gasoline cars. We can speed
| things along by removing subsidies on fossil fuels or
| offsetting them with green incentives.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| The reason why nobody is replacing coal with nuclear is
| that the former is cheap and the latter is expensive. And
| at the moment, higher energy prices are a very though sell,
| politically, even if everyone agrees that we don't want to
| leave scorched earth for our kids.
| slashdev wrote:
| Only because the coal power plant doesn't have to pay for
| the negative externalities.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Or just skip the nuclear power step and go directly to
| renewables with storage since it is vastly cheaper and the
| deployment time is counted in months rather than decades.
| jmb99 wrote:
| > BEVs are a superior technology
|
| While BEVs have a lot of benefits, they are still
| objectively inferior to ICE vehicles. They're (in most
| cases substantially) more expensive, less energy dense by
| mass and volume, and require planning for refuelling
| (especially if used in areas outside of main city centres
| or for long driving, or if you live in an apartment without
| access to a charger at home). Not to mention most grids
| being nowhere near able to support the entire population of
| car drivers fast-charging their cars during rush hour.
| Gasoline-powered cars are objectively easier to own and
| use.
|
| The real solution is public transit, and convincing people
| for whom public transit is impossible that switching to
| BEVs is worthwhile, even with their drawbacks. Telling
| people that BEVs are superior technology is
| counterproductive though, when there are still very clear
| problems with them.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > They're (in most cases substantially) more expensive,
| less energy dense by mass and volume, and require
| planning for refuelling (especially if used in areas
| outside of main city centres or for long driving, or if
| you live in an apartment without access to a charger at
| home).
|
| The most popular BEVs already cost less than the average
| new car and the price will continue to decline as long as
| battery prices do. Ranges of ~300 miles are common,
| meanwhile the average commute is 42 miles, so charging at
| home is sufficient for the vast majority of usage and is
| more convenient than buying gas. Apartments will install
| chargers as electric vehicles become more common.
|
| For long trips, you begin your day having charged
| overnight and then add 200 miles of range at a
| supercharger in 15 minutes. That 500 miles is more than 8
| hours of driving at 60MPH and it cost you 15 minutes. For
| people who make such long trips on a regular basis there
| will be cars with larger batteries and more range so that
| "overnight plus once in the middle" gets back to being
| just overnight.
|
| > Not to mention most grids being nowhere near able to
| support the entire population of car drivers fast-
| charging their cars during rush hour.
|
| This is the least interesting problem. Upgrading power
| grids is a known process involving only widely deployed
| existing technologies.
|
| > The real solution is public transit
|
| Public transit doesn't work in the suburbs, the majority
| of the population lives in suburban or rural areas and
| changing that would take decades of new housing
| construction which is currently prohibited by law.
| cloverich wrote:
| > Not to mention most grids being nowhere near able to
| support the entire population of car drivers fast-
| charging their cars during rush hour.
|
| Feels a bit like a straw man. Most commuters aren't
| extending beyond the range of their vehicle for work
| commutes, and would charge at home or office on solar. I
| agree they should not be sold as though there are no
| trade offs, but after extensive research it feels that
| for a primarily commuter scenario, never having to stop
| for gas, charging at home, etc, would be not only
| practical but actually superior. I frequently have to gas
| up mid week and with a busy job and kids, it is an actual
| hassle that would be nice to be a nice upgrade.
| slashdev wrote:
| I can tell you don't own a BEV.
|
| The range is a non issue 99% of the time when you're
| driving around in your city. Charging at home is both
| cheap and super convenient.
|
| Maintenance is cheaper, the car lasts longer.
|
| I don't know a single person who buys a BEV and goes
| back. I know many who go the other direction.
|
| And as adoption rises and technology improves the case
| will get stronger and stronger.
| cyberax wrote:
| > While BEVs have a lot of benefits, they are still
| objectively inferior to ICE vehicles.
|
| This hasn't been true for a couple of years. China is an
| excellent example of that, its market flipped to EVs
| virtually overnight once the benefits of EVs became
| clear. Last year, 48% of all the new cars sold in China
| were EVs, and this year it's projected to be around 60%.
|
| > The real solution is public transit
|
| No, it's not. Public transit is nothing but a distilled
| misery concentrator. Transit is also _not_ more CO2
| effective than small-to-medium EVs when the carbon
| footprint of their _drivers_ is taken into the account.
| lukan wrote:
| "But really it doesn't matter. Air transport is 2.5% of
| global CO2."
|
| Because most people still cannot afford flying. If the
| world gets richer, more people want the privilege of
| flying. And it is not like we have an excess budget of CO2.
| Everything we reduce helps, so a carbon tax on jet fuel
| might be a good start. That is a low hanging fruit.
|
| Spreading nuclear reactors worldwide really is not. That
| would be a very hard fruit, with lots of potential side
| effects. Or do you think bangladesh will build to standards
| you think are safe?
| mapt wrote:
| Aviation fuel has a trivial replacement in renewable
| biofuels, and three nontrivial replacements in liquid
| hydrogen combustion, liquid hydrogen fuel cells, and for
| short flights in battery power.
| gruez wrote:
| >trivial replacement in renewable biofuels
|
| That's basically direct air capture with extra steps. All
| the carbon in those biofuels is coming from somewhere (the
| air).
| cyberax wrote:
| Yeah, but you basically are using self-replicating solar-
| powered machinery (aka "plants") to capture it.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Storing the CO2 after it's been separated is the easy part.
| Already CO2 is regularly injected underground to enhance oil
| extraction, and the CO2 sequestered is much greater than the
| CO2 released by burning the oil.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| >CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by
| burning the oil.
|
| Do check your source on that. Cause I cannot find it. The
| number I could find is muuuch lower than the extracted oil
| worth of co2.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I overstated it, and thank you for calling me on that, but
| one can find references that say it can breakeven.
|
| For example:
|
| https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-
| systems/gasificati...
|
| "each ton [of CO2] can yield 2-3 barrels of oil"
|
| Burning a barrel of oil produces 468 kg of CO2, so 2
| barrels would be slightly carbon negative.
| SilasX wrote:
| >All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon
| into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse
| it, but with a loss factor.
|
| That's just not true. While the conclusion may be correct
| (about it not being feasible), it's something that would depend
| on more that just this first-principles analysis. Remember, the
| goal is only that the output is "not atmospheric CO2". So that
| means it could be CO2 somewhere else, or some lower energy
| state of the carbon, or even a higher energy state that isn't
| as high as the fuel that was burned to produce it.
|
| And while, again, those methods might not be feasible, it
| depends on much more than the (false) premise that the only way
| involves completely reversing whatever process was originally
| used to extract the energy.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Carbon has a few other molecules it likes to bind to, but
| narrowing it down to what is actually abundant limits you to
| basically oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. of those, two of them
| are what we burned, and one of them is our problem.
|
| Someone else pointed out, though, that you can burn
| hydrocarbon (carbon and hydrogen chains, aka methane and oil)
| and turn it into coal (carbon-carbon).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's just not right.
|
| Carbon dioxide will bind with just about any reactive metal
| out there. Yes, there is oxygen involved, but Earth is full
| of rocks that could absorb it.
| SilasX wrote:
| Which, again, is still a different argument than the one
| you originally made.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| This was intuitively obvious already, but there's still great
| value is having proper research prove this too. Anyone building
| an argument on "carbon capture is more costly" so far had the
| burden of proving this, even if it is intuitively obvious. Now
| they can cite existing research and move on with their point.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I feel like probably not much has changed. People, who will
| listen and think a little for themselves, will already be
| able to come to the conclusion, that it is better not to put
| the CO2 out in the first place. And those who are typically
| pretending to only not believe it because one cannot provide
| a research article, are very likely to just try to discredit
| the research. Some people are just so lost, that you cannot
| change their mind with facts, whatever those facts are, and
| whatever you do. They do not want to. They want you to spend
| more time and effort on them than is proportionate.
| goatlover wrote:
| Putting CO2 out in the first place is how the global
| economy got to where it is today. It's better not to put
| CO2 out in the first place except for when it makes more
| economic sense. There are tradeoffs involved. To the extent
| renewables can replace outputting greenhouse gases, then
| that makes more sense. But where they still can't, then it
| doesn't make sense. And we likely will still need to remove
| some of that CO2 in the future.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Arguing with someone who starts demanding your obvious claim
| has the burden of proof is useless. Any proof you offer is
| going to contain an obvious step or assumption and they
| demand proof for that too.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide.
|
| But we don't [only]. A significant amount comes from nuclear
| power or renewables, especially in specific countries.
| afiori wrote:
| This is irrelevant; the total energy cycle of a green grid
| can be abstracted as fossil_production + green_production +
| carbon_capture_consumption + all_other_uses. Since
| fossil_production < carbon_capture_consumption it is best to
| simply set them both to zero
| perching_aix wrote:
| I don't really follow, what you outline seems to be a
| different argument the person I replied to outlined.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I'm also amazed people don't talk more about reducing
| consumption than carbon capture.
|
| It boggles my mind that a StarBucks coffee, drank in a few
| minutes involves a lined paper cup, plastic lid, plastic
| stopper, corrugated holder ring.
|
| Using disposable plastic utensils in dine-in restaurants also
| bothers me.
|
| All the energy spent to gather/create/transport the raw
| materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse,
| transport to the restaurant... Seems massively inefficient for
| such a short use.
|
| Yeah, a dishwasher isn't free either but surely heating some
| water to clean reusable things is got to be much better than
| disposable trash.
|
| Heck, compared to plastic ware and coffee cups, disposable
| plastic grocery bags almost seem amazingly better in terms of
| utility vs waste. (Less material)
| esarbe wrote:
| Because for many people reducing consumption reeks of
| poverty.
|
| They've grown up in a world where everything just yells
| _more! more!_ at them. It 's the dominant paradigm of our
| times - growth above everything. Conspicuous consumption as a
| measure of wealth.
|
| It's become so absurd that even the mere suggestion of
| improving efficiency - at the consumer level - is met with
| the outcry of "forcing people into poverty". We are rich, so
| we can afford to be wasteful. Not be wasteful means poverty.
|
| It's insanity.
| dublinben wrote:
| There's no profit motive behind reducing consumption to lower
| emissions, so it's not a message being pushed by companies.
| It's obviously the easiest way for most people to reduce
| their environmental impact though, but it's always been very
| unpopular to tell people to 'spend less, save more.'
| bee_rider wrote:
| > All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning
| carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to
| reverse it, but with a loss factor.
|
| Hmm. Actually. I don't think this is quite "back of the napkin
| math," which usually involves _some_ figures, if just only very
| rough ones with lots of rounding.
|
| This seems more like an argument from basic principle in the
| style of "I'll reject any proposal of a perpetual motion
| machine because, however clever, it fundamentally can't produce
| power." And I don't think your fundamental principle here
| really is correct actually.
|
| Some ideas around carbon capture are basically to do a chemical
| process that releases some energy, and then make sure the
| byproducts don't escape, and bury them underground, right?
| There's no fundamental reason that this should be impossible. I
| mean it's obviously possible to take a log, burn it in a very
| big airtight metal box (very big, so there's enough oxygen in
| there to fully burn the thing), the box will heat up, and then
| the byproducts will all be in the box, so you just don't open
| it. This is a silly contraption but there's obviously no
| fundamental law of physics being violated, so it must not be
| physically impossible.
|
| I'm unhappy to write this because I agree with your conclusion.
| Carbon capture is mostly bullshit. But it is bullshit for
| complicated reasons, not simple or fundamental ones, I think.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| There's an idea to do this with old oil and gas wells. Only
| hydrogen comes out of the well, the carbon stays underground.
|
| https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/protonh2-launches-project-
| ap...
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I'm not going to argue the economics of it but the co2 is
| typically assumed to mineralise when injected into rocks like
| basalts ands peridotites which are the primary targets for co2
| sequestration. It's not stored highly pressurised under ground.
| It is absorbed by the rocks. This has been demonstrated in both
| the lab and the environment.
| Jordanpomeroy wrote:
| This is my understanding as well. And the logistics of doing
| this can be simplified by re-using oil and gas facilities.
| Regardless of your feelings and levels of skepticism about
| oil and gas, this seems like the most straight-forward and
| low-energy path forward to me.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning
| carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to
| reverse it, but with a loss factor.
|
| No, we don't.
|
| CO2 in the atmosphere is not the lowest-energy state in the
| system. If CO2 stopped being added to the atmosphere, it would
| eventually all be consumed out by chemical weathering of
| silicate rocks into carbonates, because that's an exothermic
| reaction that consumes CO2.
|
| All the actually promising carbon capture proposals are
| essentially ways to speed up chemical weathering. The limiting
| factor here is surface area; the process is naturally very
| slow, and only occurs at an appreciable rate on the exposed
| surfaces of rocks in shallow water. None of them are cost-
| effective *yet* (and might never be), but there is not some
| one-sentence gotcha answer that prevents them from eventually
| being successful. They are not fighting against physics.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Um, no. The limiting factors are all still economic. If you
| want to try to rely on mineral weathering to reduce
| atmospheric CO2 any reasonable amount you now have to finance
| the quarrying, crushing to fine power, transport, and
| distribution of gigatons of stone or engineer a suitable
| replacement which replaces quarry and processing costs with
| input stock acquisition and synthesis leaving transportation
| and distribution untouched.
| hedora wrote:
| Basic thermodynamics say atmospheric carbon capture will be
| more expensive than switching to renewables.
|
| However, we're already committed to carbon capture because
| corrupt politicians decided not to switch to renewables in the
| 1980's, and will continue to block them for at least another
| decade (if we only want to wait another ten years to take
| action, we'll need to somehow magically replace Trump with
| democrats tomorrow).
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's all in the details, not really as simple as the napkin
| math. The CO2 capture step obviously doesn't use ALL the energy
| released from burning the fuel. You're not converting the CO2
| back into fuel, just capturing it and sequestering it somehow.
| It's a question of capital and operating expense (and risks) of
| the process overall.
| tomas789 wrote:
| This assumes that we reverse the reaction. That does not need
| to be the case. We can put it back into the ground. It can
| either stay where natgas or crude used to be or we can
| basically turn that into rock (don't know details but there is
| a process to do that). Or it can be put in salt caverns.
|
| Either way we still need to capture the CO and CO2 from flue
| gas which is costly even from point sources and way worse from
| DAC. Unless we do oxyburning or fosil fuels which is a hack but
| you need a source of cheap oxygen which we don't have unless we
| dramatically scale up electrolysis.
| tzs wrote:
| How about for the long term?
|
| My napkin math last time I did it said that if we took the
| current annual production of solar panels and used it to built
| solar farms in the world's subtropical deserts and built carbon
| direct air capture (DAC) plants in those deserts powered by
| those solar farms (using the energy requirements per kg of
| capture that current DAC plants achieve), and continued doing
| this each year, in around 200 years we'd be removing about 10%
| more CO2 per year than we'd be emitting assuming that the human
| population peaks as expected somewhere in the 10-11 billion
| range and the per capita CO2 emissions do not go much higher
| than they are now.
|
| Using the entire current annual production of solar panels for
| this is clearly impractical now, but if production of solar
| panels continues its current growth trends for several more
| years we should reach a point where diverting an amount equal
| to current production might be practical.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| We're going to lose economic growth because of climate change,
| "Staying under the 2C threshold could limit average regional
| income loss to 20 percent compared to 60 percent" [1]. Whether
| it will be significant amount, or a devastating amount is still
| to be determined. US GDP is $20T, and the difference between
| low warming and high warming is 40% loss! This means we could
| spend up to $8T a year to address climate change and it would
| still make economic sense.
|
| The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over
| 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of
| annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to
| address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could
| rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make
| electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing,
| we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most
| important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly
| people with power and influence.
|
| [1] https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-
| gdp.htm...
|
| [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-
| sen...
| Voultapher wrote:
| As much as I'm in favor of moving towards renewables, we are
| still destroying our biosphere, and the resources needed for
| renewables are not renewable ...
|
| > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is
| powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction.
| Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but
| why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces
| primarily to things like deforestation, habitat
| fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides,
| mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a
| giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous
| material extraction--directly driving many of these ills--
| only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all
| these same things that abundant evidence warns is a
| prescription for termination of the community of life.
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/
|
| Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth,
| which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics.
| Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the
| last species alive, or at least your wining will look very
| sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a
| viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a
| petri dish what it thinks.
| adamsch wrote:
| precisely, fossil fuels are ruining the economy
| cperciva wrote:
| _All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon
| into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse
| it, but with a loss factor._
|
| In addition to the chemistry other people have mentioned -- if
| we burn hydrocarbons and then capture carbon we're still net
| positive H -> H2O, capturing carbon as carbonate rocks can be
| less expensive than splitting CO2 to C and O2, etc -- most
| serious proposals for carbon capture have involved using
| _cheap_ electricity, e.g. solar power in the middle of the day.
|
| It's quite possible that using cheap midday electricity to
| generate methane (which can be easily stored in large
| quantities) which is then burned in gas "peakers" when power is
| expensive would be _economically_ profitable despite not being
| _thermodynamically_ profitable.
| DanHulton wrote:
| And the number one problem that any method of carbon capture
| that involves moving things around, is that you have to add the
| carbon expenditure of that transportation into the mix. You
| wanna create charcoal and spread it over crop fields? You then
| have to transfer that charcoal. You want to embed CO2 in
| concrete and bury the concrete? You have to move the concrete.
| (You can use it for building, but there's additional
| infrastructure for transporting the CO2 to the concrete or
| vice-versa there as well.)
|
| So many of the "barely break even" concepts don't even come
| close due to this transportation factor. Even if you use solar
| to generate electricity to power this transportation, we don't
| have excess solar yet - that's capacity that's being used for
| this new expense, not being used to offset existing expenses.
|
| That said, I'm hopeful that research, refinement, and excess
| renewable grid capacity will eventually make it worthwhile to
| do this in addition to reducing our fossil fuel usage, but we
| just _gotta_ reduce our fossil fuel usage. It's not negotiable
| anymore, and heck, never was.
| nlitened wrote:
| Could someone please explain how could carbon capture ever work?
| To me it looks as if it is a mathematically impossible thing: if
| you produce energy by releasing carbon, you would need to expend
| even more energy to capture the same carbon back, so it is
| impossible -- there's no way to produce required energy to do so.
| And if you had such an huge and cheap energy source for carbon
| capture, you wouldn't burn carbon in the first place -- you'd use
| that energy source instead.
|
| What am I missing? Am I stupid, or the people who talk about
| carbon capture are ridiculously dishonest?
| mrmanner wrote:
| The carbon dioxide is captured and stored, the actual carbon
| isn't returned to whatever form it was before burning. So
| theoretically it _can_ work (but, as it turns out, it still
| doesn't make sense).
| exe34 wrote:
| I've always thought of carbon capture as something you do later
| in the timeline, after burning carbon to get you to a society
| that can make the transition to green energy.
|
| this might be the case for example if you need a certain amount
| of innovation and that requires a certain critical mass of
| brains thinking over the problem.
|
| or maybe if you're an accelerationista, you want AI to solve it
| for you and burning carbon now to train it might make sense.
|
| but I don't think the idea is to ever burn carbon to capture
| carbon.
| loeg wrote:
| You would produce the energy without releasing carbon.
| bsdetector wrote:
| You're thinking about energy and not cost.
|
| For example, when solar plus direct air capture can remove a
| ton of CO2 for cheaper than it costs a container ship not to
| emit that CO2 then it's reduced cost for the same CO2 outcome
| even though it's using more total energy.
|
| Regardless of whether it actually makes sense to capture
| carbon, you'll see a lot of sky-is-falling fanatics and vested
| interests dismissing it because it caps the price of carbon
| credits and limits economic damage estimates. You can't price
| CO2 at $500/ton to necessitate change when it only costs
| $200/ton to capture it - without quickly going bankrupt that
| is.
|
| This is why the IPCC not even attempting to evaluate mechanical
| capture shows they aren't serious about solving the problem.
| They seemingly exist to push a fear narrative, and having an
| upper bound on the impact of CO2 limits their ability to do so.
| usefulcat wrote:
| As you point out, it probably doesn't ever make sense to use
| carbon capture to "offset" energy-related emissions. Probably
| the only way it would make sense would be as a way to reduce
| the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere _after_ we're no longer
| burning previously sequestered carbon.
| legitster wrote:
| This is kind of a silly analysis. Solar power is already the
| cheapest source of electricity ever created by man per kwh. The
| problem is geography, storage capacity, and load planning.
|
| If we're talking purely about future hypotheticals, who's to know
| if carbon scrubbers are less cost effective than city-sized
| lithium storage facilities.
| selfhoster wrote:
| Except we we replaced all current forms of power generation
| with wind and solar, it would be more expensive:
|
| https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/would-getting-all-our-electr...
| epistasis wrote:
| That's just one guy's opinion, namely:
|
| > Richard Schmalensee, Howard W. Johnson Professor of
| Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and
| Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management
|
| An economics and b-school professor is not equipped to
| evaluate a multi-decade transition, and he apparently hasn't
| even taken into account how batteries are falling in cost
| like solar and wind are.
|
| Those who do cost-optimal grid planning find that wind,
| solar, storage, our existing nuclear result in a grid that is
| cheaper than our current grid. However the problem is that we
| don't do grid planning based on what costs the least, we do
| small incremental changes from utilities that are using cost
| estimates that are years out of date, and we don't think
| about making large scale changes that result in big cost
| changes.
|
| And one other thing about looking about predictions from the
| past with grid modeling, everybody always underestimated the
| rate of how fast solar and wind prices fall. They are doing
| the same for batteries now.
| loeg wrote:
| The fine article is also just one guy's opinion. Notably
| someone who sues people who disagree with him.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson#Critiques_of
| _...
| epistasis wrote:
| Technically, not just one guy, there are coauthors:
| Danning Fu, Daniel J. Sambor, Andreas Muhlbauer:
|
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686
|
| I'm not a huge fan of Jacobson's behavior, and he has
| made some mistakes, but he's also been very very right on
| a lot of things.
|
| And while a single paper is a lot more reliable than a
| single person writing an editorial on an MIT site, it is
| still a single paper and must be taken as a pointer
| towards the truth, rather than truth revealed.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I don't think that's what he is saying.
|
| >Would switching entirely to these clean energy sources raise
| the price of electricity? Yes--at least if you don't count
| the cost of the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels,
| says Richard Schmalensee, MIT's Howard W. Johnson Professor
| of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and
| Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management..
|
| The electricity bill will be more expensive, but that's only
| because the damages to the environment caused by carbon are
| externalized costs.
|
| Presumably, if those externalized costs did show up in the
| electricity bill today, then it would get cheaper if we
| switched to renewable.
|
| >"If you take into account the total cost of running a system
| that puts CO2 into the air, [then renewables] will be
| cheaper," Schmalensee says
| jokoon wrote:
| We need to have a battery checklist equivalent for carbon
| capture:
|
| [ ] how much carbon is captured by KW?
|
| [ ] are there expected improvement in the technology in the
| future 30 years?
|
| [ ] and what do physicists say about it?
|
| [ ] is it more efficient than photosynthesis?
|
| [ ] how mature is the technology compared to other methods?
|
| [ ] who funds it?
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Is it possible to just pump a slurry of corn and various pulp
| products into dead oil wells?
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Nope. You need to understand that an oil reservoir is 100%
| rock, but a rock that is porous on the microlevel. Stuff that
| gets pumped down needs to be a proper fluid, not just a slurry,
| or it will just clog the pores in half an hour.
| alexose wrote:
| Pretty much, yeah. Vaulted Deep (https://vaulteddeep.com/) is
| doing a version of this.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The study is considering extremes, but that's not realistic.
|
| Completely switching to renewables will be more expensive than
| planting some trees for instance. If we want the most cost
| effective methods, it will be a mix of both, maybe more on the
| "burning less fossil fuels" side than on carbon capture, but
| neither extreme make sense.
|
| And it may turn out that a complete switch to renewables may not
| be enough anyways. We may need carbon capture too, and maybe some
| geoengineering.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| That very same trees that regularly go up in climate change
| caused forrest fires? Preferable eucalyptus ?
|
| Why not grow algea and dump them down the gravity well into the
| dead, dark ocean, into some high salinity pit.
| loeg wrote:
| The dollars don't actually substitute, either. We can spend on
| both more than we'd be willing to spend only on renewable
| sources.
| Matumio wrote:
| If you wonder whether you could at least capture CO2 directly
| from the combustion process (instead of out of thin air), well
| yes that's cheaper but still too expensive.
|
| The current CCS projects use highly concentrated CO2 sources,
| while the usual combustion process will generate air with only a
| few percent of CO2. There was an article last year about the
| Hammerfest LNG plant. They have a CCS project nearby, but found
| it cheaper to electrify the plant:
| https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...
| tyronehed wrote:
| Every bit of opposition to climate change mitigation comes from
| the oil industry. How incredibly evil and vile they are for being
| willing to damage the world and our environment just to make a
| buck.
| twodave wrote:
| There's certainly some of this, and there are also a lot of
| people living in difficult geographies that rely on oil. Take
| away global reliance on oil and these people either have to
| move somewhere else (and many of them aren't exactly welcome in
| their neighboring countries) or else they die, starving, and in
| the dark. I'm not really as sympathetic to this issue as I
| sound, but I don't think the characterization of 100% greed and
| evil is totally fair, either.
| twodave wrote:
| I guess I don't see how any of this is really relevant today. Can
| someone help explain? My thought process is telling me that by
| far the worst environmental offender (China) is on the front end
| of a population collapse that will pretty much serve to self-
| correct them from an environmental standpoint. That could take 30
| years at most?
|
| I'm not sure there's any sort of program we could implement in
| that time frame that really moves the needle, and when it happens
| most of the world's capacity to build things like solar cells and
| wind farms will need to be re-built, because we won't be getting
| a lot of those components we need from China anymore.
|
| And who knows? By then maybe we look up at a smaller global
| population that's largely de-globalized and decide nothing needs
| doing.
|
| In the short term it's a shame because IMO the #1 (by far, not
| close) contributor to global pollution doesn't even make it to
| the table in these sorts of discussions.
| newyankee wrote:
| China is not the worst offender. You are disregarding per
| capita, historical cumulative emissions and outsourced
| emissions. I am willing to bet that they have the resources,
| will and execution speed to decarbonise fast though, largely
| due to surplus solar and lots of batteries but also significant
| investments in wind and Nuclear.
|
| I am not sure why a lot of Americans do not talk about
| efficiency in their own backyard or are even unwilling to
| consider a smaller footprint (it is like almost in the DNA of
| the country)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The US is the worst offender by far, and seems hell bent on
| getting worse still.
|
| I wish we would acknowledge it, even just among ourselves
| would be a great start.
| wang_li wrote:
| China is #1 in annual emissions and is increasing every year
| and plans to continue increasing until at least 2030, is a
| larger annual emitter than all of Europe combined, and is #2
| in total emissions since 1750. In fact, has released more
| than all of Europe combined since 1750.
|
| Per capita is irrelevant. The thermodynamic system doesn't
| give a shit about how many people there are, all that matters
| is the amount of CO2. If you want to make some kind of moral
| argument you can't avoid asking the question of whether it's
| moral to have a kid at all. Unless you are prepared to
| consign your children to being a hunter gatherer until they
| die, they will add CO2 to the atmosphere.
|
| Consider me and my neighbor, I am single and emit 1000 tons
| of carbon per year, he and his wife emit 3000 tons of carbon
| per year. They have triplets and increase their emissions by
| 500 tons per year. But somehow they are better than me now
| because on a per capita basis their house is only 700 tons
| per year per person while I'm still at 1000 tons per year?
| Sorry, I'm not reducing my lifestyle because they like to
| fuck.
|
| If you want to measure a country or population by some metric
| other than total emissions, you should measure something like
| tons per quality of life or human development or something
| that demonstrates that the emissions are being used
| efficiently to increase overall human flourishing.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Per-capita is relevant because as individuals, we find it
| easier to get a mental grasp on the lifestyles of other
| individuals than the actions of a nation state. Contrasting
| more/less efficient lifestyles is a way to understand our
| contribution to this problem.
|
| Do we need to put a leash on our corporations and
| governments so that they stop making policies that will
| kill our children? Absolutely, let's do that. Do we need to
| be more thoughtful about population growth? Certainly.
|
| But when it comes down to crafting policies that will be
| effective, it has to make sense on the both micro and macro
| scales. Holding per-capita measures as irrelevant hides the
| details that we're going to need to fix this.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| A narrow idea of what constitutes freedom ("an F-650 with a
| full gun rack", but not "guaranteed healthcare for everyone
| that needs it", or "freedom from having to deal with
| braindead morons with F-650s and rifles", or "public goods
| and walkable cities").
|
| And you're spot on as regards China, and India as well. We've
| had a century or two to get rich off burning this stuff, they
| have not.
| slothtrop wrote:
| The rest of east Asia is currently developing at a faster pace
| (e.g. Vietnam), with increasing demand for goods and services.
| China provides, therefore their output is increasing.
| twodave wrote:
| Perhaps, and also we already know in 40 years many more of
| their infrastructure projects will lie empty and unused than
| already do. They're literally burning their way to their
| doom, and they may take globalization with them.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Following their real estate bubble, I'm not sure how much
| more of that we'll see. Xi seems to want to double-down on
| manufacturing.
|
| They're technically the global leader in solar, scaling up
| faster than everyone else.
| leafario2 wrote:
| Am I wrong in assuming that after achieving a reduction in
| emissions, the carbon in the atmosphere should be ideally
| absorbed again?
| buckle8017 wrote:
| They apply a "model" which is not described to justify an
| artificially low price for solar power delivered to retail
| customers.
|
| In reality solar is more expensive than natural gas when reliably
| delivered. Batteries, over provisioning, fly wheels, and finally
| backup idle gas power plants are not surprisingly very expensive.
| D_Alex wrote:
| Wow. Researchers could have found this by reading Hacker News
| from 2019.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19579185#19579943
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Carbon capture is our money being used to pay oil industry. It is
| for enhanced oil recovery. It is straight up theft with
| environmental marketing!
|
| Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide,
| capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Thats the equivalent of 2000
| EVs.
|
| ---
|
| We pay in 8+ different ways for fossil fuels:
|
| (1) Subsidies of trillions of dollars per year
|
| (2) Ethanol and biodiesel subsidies
|
| (3) Pay at the pump (or electricity)
|
| (4) Pay for carbon capture to help oil companies extract more oil
|
| (5) Pay for the consequences of climate change (a) increase of
| home insurance (b) bailouts of insurance and utility providers
| (c) dealing with the direct costs of climate change
|
| (6) Health costs! Pollution is directly linked to every disease
| (except STIs?). Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year.
| Think of all the cancers, cardiovascular, metabolic, every
| biological systems.
|
| (7) We pay a cost of other pollutants. Lead (thank you oil
| industry!), mercury (thank you coal industry!). Fish was a source
| of food, the best kind of renewable food, where you do absolutely
| nothing other than catch it! This source is now gone, there is so
| much mercury in fish, that all recommendations of fish are to
| limit the number of servings!
|
| (8) Every person on the planet is paying a fossil fuel tax (the 5
| above), to the super super rich. It is a transfer of wealth from
| everyone to about ~100 people. This money is used to buy all
| assets (real estate), stocks and everything else, enabling the
| super wealthy to extract every more wealth from every sector of
| the economy.
|
| ---
|
| Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6
| listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to
| grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
|
| If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in
| watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
|
| To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the
| U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40
| million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S.
| electricity demand more than 13 times over.
|
| But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only
| need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is
| wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol
| production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can
| produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT
| calculation is correct).
| slothtrop wrote:
| You can talk about the inefficiency of CC, but this is
| nonsensical. It's a woefully inefficient means to retrieve
| carbon in terms of cost. It only makes sense as a means, under
| development, to reduce prevent buildup in the atmosphere. If it
| does not do that very well, then as you can imagine, the yields
| are not great either! If it does do that well, then it's a moot
| point whether these companies profit; what matters is improving
| climate. Can't have it both ways.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Adding some references
|
| Shell Is Looking Forward. The fossil-fuel companies expect to
| profit from climate change. I went to a private planning
| meeting and took notes:
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change...
|
| Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide,
| 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out
| petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-
| carbon-ca...
|
| Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an
| All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-
| subsidies-2022
|
| 67% to 75% of energy is wasted. See Rejected energy:https://flo
| wcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...
|
| Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil:
| https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...
|
| 27 DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide,
| capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year: https://www.iea.org/energy-
| system/carbon-capture-utilisation...
|
| A ton of {coal,petroleum,natural gas} emits {2.6,2.75,3.2} tons
| of CO2. 8.5 billion tons of coal burnt every year. 4000 billion
| cubic meters of Natural gas/year (~3000 billion tons - gemini),
| Global oil production is 4.5 billion metric tons/year. We'll
| need tens of millions of DAC plants!
|
| Electrification is efficiency: The world will need less energy
| after the transition:
| https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
| Thorrez wrote:
| >But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We
| only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the
| energy is wasted.
|
| What are we wasting it on? Why will we suddenly stop wasting it
| when we switch to solar/wind?
|
| I would think switching completely to solar/wind would
| massively increase the amount of wasted energy, because solar
| and wind energy production is quite variable, so to meet
| people's needs at low production times, we need to
| overprovision our production.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's wasted as heat when converting to electricity, or as
| heat when running an engine, or wasted in low temp heating
| when a heat pump could be 4x as efficient.
|
| Most predictions are that developed nations will double the
| amount of electricity they produce to electrify transport and
| heating but this will still reduce total energy due to the
| reduction in waste heat.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Interesting, thanks.
| bee_rider wrote:
| (9) A whole lot of geopolitical nonsense is caused by oil
| related entanglements. I won't list them all because it would
| become a partisan bickering match, but surely whatever
| anybody's political alignment, they can find a socialist, or
| theocratic, or authoritarian country that's propped up by oil
| funding. Or a war partially motivated by oil. What's the cost
| of bad international relations? How much of our defense budget
| should we bill to oil companies?
| thelastgallon wrote:
| I forgot to add one of the biggest costs. The cost of
| protecting oil flow. Defense budget is to protect oil assets
| worldwide, any disruption/blockage to oil flow will mean
| economy will tank, immediately. Oil companies should be
| shouldering this cost.
| vasco wrote:
| > Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the
| 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to
| grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
|
| Isn't that for food security in case of war?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| You can't feed an entire nation nothing but corn.
| vasco wrote:
| The practicality is besides the point, I just thought it a
| bit disingenuous to not mention why the US subsidizes corn
| so much.
|
| To your point it's not the only thing like that. There's
| huge national reserves of lots of stuff, the amount of
| cheese for example is huge.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We are deep in the hole whether you want to "pay for the fossil
| industry" or not. If we don't push ourselves outside of the
| hole, we will stay there, forever.
|
| And anyway, the best way to destroy the fossil fuel industry is
| to make synthetic fuels so cheap that nobody will want to use
| the bloody variety. We can easily do that with a carbon tax,
| but if people keep insisting on stopping carbon capture
| research, we won't.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of
| the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40
| million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S.
| electricity demand more than 13 times over.
|
| How many batteries are required to make that generated
| electricity available at night?
| ironhaven wrote:
| Depending on the the wind/nuclear mix in the grid possibly as
| low as zero.
|
| But batteries are a very important innovation for power grids
| regardless of renewable energy goals. 50% of the job of an
| energy grid is just keeping the ac power supply stable when
| generation does exactly match consumption. Lithium batteries
| help smooth out spikes in demand over milliseconds and hours
| to save millions of dollars
|
| Lithium grid scale storage is awesome no matter what happens
| with renewables.
| NohatCoder wrote:
| Napkin maths would suggest something like 20% of a normal EV
| battery per household, so indeed a big investment, but
| perfectly reasonable. The harder part is that solar power
| production is much lower in the winter (depending on
| latitude), and seasonal battery storage is still a bit out of
| reach.
| lithocarpus wrote:
| Thanks for laying this out.
|
| I had no idea about this until last year, when there was an
| eminent domain vs nimby struggle I heard about concerning
| putting co2 pipelines through farms for this purpose. I always
| thought carbon capture by machines was an impractical, but
| learning that what it actually is in practice is a way for govt
| subsidies to pay ethanol and oil companies and enable them to
| extract more oil.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if a significant majority of govt money
| spent on environmental efforts has been captured by industries
| and is being used to accelerate environmental harm. I only know
| that this is the case in the areas I'm familiar with. It's sad.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Everything is expensive but we have to start everything with
| something, then explore further to improve.
| amunozo wrote:
| Carbon capture is one of the most absurd ideas I've ever heard,
| given the array of already available options.
| slothtrop wrote:
| It's not a long list, and among them is pumping sulfur in the
| stratosphere. It stops sounding so absurd compared to what's
| viable, nevermind politically.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Planting trees is also a form of carbon capture. They literally
| capture carbon from the environment and release oxygen. It's as
| if they natural evolved to counterbalance animals.
|
| Sadly, when people talk about "carbon capture" techniques,
| they're never talking about planting trees.
| niek_pas wrote:
| Trees work, but take a long long time to grow.
| Rury wrote:
| Trees are good but are largely a temporary store. Most of the
| carbon they capture ends up be re-released upon decay. Of
| course some does get more permanently sequestered in the
| ground, but a relatively small amount, and is a very slow
| process. I'm all for planting more trees, but I'm afraid the
| problem can't be entirely solved by merely planting more
| trees. It's also a rate problem - it may not be possible to
| plant enough trees to completely offset the rates we're
| adding carbon to the atmosphere.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Probably for electricity, but that doesn't represent the vast
| majority of fossil fuel use. Those are not yet abated.
| nullc wrote:
| I think it's useful to think of the atmosphere as a battery, when
| we burn fossil fuels we discharge it gradually by taking O2 from
| the air and converting it to CO2 via the 'fuel'. You can extend
| this to an idea of there being a little parallel capacitor with
| the living biomass cycle on it, but it's okay to ignore for
| discussion.
|
| We can't go on discharging it arbitrarily and leaving it there
| because that state is toxic to us.
|
| This battery is insanely useful because it's all around us.
| Because most of the work is in the ambient O2 the 'fuel' we need
| use use this battery is incredibly dense. The miraculous density
| of it is because there is two parts to it, the density when you
| consider both is unimpressive (as anyone who has tried to operate
| a chainsaw inside a fire knows all too well, or run a ic motor
| underground), but because we can usually disregard the air side
| it is truly amazing.
|
| It's so useful the all the higher life on earth also uses it,
| which is part of why discharging to much it is toxic to us.
|
| Because it's so useful we're unlikely to completely stop using it
| unless we leave the planet. But that means we need to recharge
| it. The natural recharging mechanisms are only sufficient for
| surface biomass buffer, not the depths of the planets' oil and
| coal reserves which were changed over millennia using mechnisms
| that no longer exist (e.g. biomass trapped before microbes knew
| how to digest cellulose).
|
| Unfortunately recharging it is probably going to take all the
| energy we got out of it and then somewhat more. It can only take
| less than that to the extent that we can find less enthalpic
| places to stash it that are as geophysically durable as the
| original forms. But that isn't so bad-- no one expects any
| battery to be 100% efficient, and one as useful as this one is
| worth some cost to use it.
|
| But this also means that the proper price for long term fossil
| fuels is, shockingly, not the price that maximizes oil Barron
| incomes-- it's the price that covers the cost run run the
| recharging mechanism.
|
| We don't have to make capture cheap, we just need it to be cheap
| enough that oil can be correctly priced.
| tmnvdb wrote:
| The study on which the article is based seems somewhat
| speculative.
|
| The assumption for the full renewable scenario are the existence
| of the hydrogen economy. I'm quite positive about the potential
| of hydrogen but there are quite a few unsolved problems at the
| moment and it seems the hydrogen part of the energy transition
| has slowed down a bit.
|
| Certainly the total cost of such a system is not well known at
| this time. So the cost calculation for the renewable scenario is
| quite uncertain - other energy storage tech might be more
| expensive.
|
| The carbon capture calculation is based on the assumption that
| there is no other renewables and we go 100% capture.
|
| This is not really that interesting an scenario, what matters
| more is the marginal costs of each technology at different points
| in the future.
|
| In general a healthy dose of scepticism is warented when it comes
| to long term projections or cost of technologies, though or
| course policy does require we take a stab at it.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| kind of like recycling
| turnsout wrote:
| Oh good, this will influence all the rational policymakers in the
| government who are introducing common-sense legislation based on
| science.
|
| OH WAIT
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I got some solar panels. Did the math and was impressed that they
| would pay for themselves in around just 2 years.
|
| It's a bit sad that to make money you need money, but I do
| recommend anyone who can afford it to just install them.
| loeg wrote:
| For most people the break-even is longer than that. Net-
| metering is an unjustified gift from non-paneled ratepayers to
| ratepayers with solar panels.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Even without net metering the solar panels cover a lot of the
| electricity spent and I assume they would pay for themselves
| eventually.
|
| If you do the math, a single 10W light bulb consumes 0.24kWh
| per day if you let it on all the time. A single solar panel
| is rated for 2kWh per day. Many appliances are also under
| 2kWh per use.
|
| Any electricity you spend during the day will be saved by the
| solar panel automatically. If you live alone and leave during
| daylight hours that might not be worth it, but for a lot of
| family households it's free electricity.
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah, the big variables are utility electricity price
| ($0.10/kWh utility pricing makes solar less effective than
| $0.50/kWh), price for the panels + installation, and
| ~capacity factor. If the panels last long enough, and they
| usually will, as long as the installation is appropriately
| sized it likely eventually pays for itself. It's just
| usually longer than two years.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| Idk why anyone would find this surprising...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Here is the case for carbon capture:
|
| - Even if CO2 production ends today, the elevated CO2 levels will
| remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get back to
| normal levels is some form of carbon capture.
|
| - Anyone can do carbon capture anywhere. You don't need to make
| the whole planet agree to and implement some treaty. Just put up
| some solar cells and pump the captured CO2 underground. The costs
| need to go down a few orders of magnitude, but I see no
| fundamental reason why that would be impossible
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The scale of carbon capture required to make a meaningful
| difference implies vast industrial infrastructure and natural
| resource extraction that currently doesn't exist. The carbon
| footprint of developing that would be enormous and require many
| decades to construct at a minimum.
|
| There is a good argument that the ROI and environmental
| destruction is not worth it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You mean to say that to make a new industry people will have
| to build something new?
|
| Or are you saying that the size of "all industries" will need
| to increase? Because... where do you think the carbon has
| come from?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| People truly do not appreciate the industrial scale
| required to sequester the 100 _gigatons_ per year required
| to start materially reducing atmospheric CO2. Entirely
| unprecedented, humans have never built anything like it.
|
| When I put on my very dusty chemical engineering hat, it
| would take decades just to build adequate supply chains for
| such an endeavor, assuming we waived all environmental
| review, never mind actually building the thing.
|
| Most people are not familiar with industrial processes.
| They have no idea how unfathomably large the scale being
| proposed is. In computer science terms, it is like saying
| "we are going to scale Postgres to a zettabyte sized tables
| with a billion concurrent transactions". It might be
| possible in some kind of in theory sense but no one knows
| how to reduce that idea to a real system.
| ianburrell wrote:
| The projections include a lot less carbon capture than
| 100 GT/yr. The 2C projections include 1000 GT for whole
| century. There is research that 600 GT is the most
| feasible. It would be infeasible to capture all of
| emissions, but would be feasible to replace emissions,
| and then use green energy to capture some of it.
|
| BTW, I like rock weathering as option for carbon capture.
| Crush olivine rock and dump it in the sea. That would be
| huge scale, but we know how to do mining, crushing, and
| shipping on large scale.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| New emissions are on the scale of several tens of
| gigatons per year and we have a century of accumulation
| at those kinds of rates to remove. I am not sanguine
| about the timelines.
|
| The term "large scale" is doing a lot of heavy lifting
| here. We are talking about something _qualitatively_
| higher scale than the largest "large scale" projects. We
| don't have orders of magnitude of extra capacity anywhere
| in our existing supply chains, never mind across all of
| it that would be necessary for such an endeavor. This
| would all have to be built, and building that has its own
| supply chains that need to scale to an extreme. It will
| create severe resource pressures very far removed from
| the actual carbon capture. It is a "for want of a nail"
| kind of situation.
|
| This is also economically non-productive. We can't divert
| enough expertise, manpower, and minerals from the normal
| economy to make it plausible. We are a very long way from
| having the kind of automation that would let us work
| around this issue.
|
| I am interested in viable solutions but the impossibility
| of scaling this particular solution is kind of basic
| industrial engineering. It is hard to explain where the
| resources will come from.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If there is a big carbon footprint for developing technology
| that erases carbon footprints, that's a problem that solves
| itself.
| ianburrell wrote:
| We would do the carbon capture after nearly all of the fossil
| fuels have been replaced. Like putting carbon capture on
| power plant doesn't make sense, running carbon capture with
| fossil fuels doesn't make sense. Which means we have a few
| decades before need to do it, but it is worth researching
| now.
|
| It will take thousands of years for the elevated CO2 to
| return to normal. Once we stop producing CO2, the temperature
| will keep rising for decades. We need to do carbon capture to
| keep it stable. The projections for 2C include carbon
| capture.
| fasthands9 wrote:
| I don't see how this would necessarily apply to every scenario.
| Transmission is expensive and storage is still not ideal.
|
| Briefly reading the article it seems like the author is assuming
| there is like a 1:1 global marketplace where any energy produced
| in one area can replace energy demand in another. That's just not
| the case.
| tim333 wrote:
| There was an interesting idea to fix climate change by carbon
| capture for ~$10bn in a recent Sabine video
|
| >A Big Nuclear Bomb Could Fix Climate Change, Physicist Says
| https://youtu.be/aGPKpx6pMko
|
| Just put some huge nukes in the basalt at the bottom of the
| Indian Ocean, it breaks it up so the rock absorbs CO2, job done!
|
| (paper on the idea https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1)
| acc_297 wrote:
| I won't watch that video just right now but I assume the paper
| is this one:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.06623
|
| And I'll include this colourful quote:
|
| "This is orders of magnitude larger than the largest nuclear
| explosion ever detonated, so this is not to be taken lightly."
|
| I quickly read through and may have missed it but I do not see
| any mention of the timescale over which this would work just
| that it could sequester ~30 years worth of CO2 output.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah, they do seem to skip over the details a bit. Also I'm a
| bit skeptical of the $10bn price tag.
|
| I think in practice going straight to a huge megabomb
| straight off would not be wise but maybe we could try one of
| our existing spare nukes as a prototype test? Then you'd get
| more data on how it would work.
| 00N8 wrote:
| I'm not convinced about their hand-waved explanation of
| radiation safety here:
|
| > The long-term effects of global radiation will impact
| humans and will cause loss of life, but this increased global
| radiation is "just a drop in the bucket". Every year, we emit
| more radiation from coal power plants and we have already
| detonated over 2000 nuclear devices. Adding one more bomb
| should have minimal impact on the world.
|
| I don't think "eh, what's one more detonation?" is persuasive
| when you're talking about a device more than 10x the size of
| all previous ones put together, being set off in direct
| contact with the seabed. Most of the fallout from nuclear
| testing came from the handful of ground burst tests that
| weren't fully confined, so I'm skeptical that "try to make it
| a clean fusion design" would actually be enough here. It
| would be cool if that were solvable though.
| the8472 wrote:
| You'd get the irradiated rocks either way. The difference
| is that you avoid some fraction of fission products of the
| bomb itself if it's fusion fraction is higher.
| sam345 wrote:
| Not surprising. Carbon capture methods are so out there and so
| bogus sounding with very little evidence that they will work,
| really seems just custom made to soak up government money with
| little promise of benefit and certainly not efficient.
| James_K wrote:
| It's actually way cheaper as long as you imagine that some magic
| technology gets invented in the next few years that makes it
| cheaper. Then you just have to hold of until that is created and
| if it isn't, it won't cost you anything! Even more savings!
| crocowhile wrote:
| That's comparing apples to oranges though. Renewables are to stop
| emitting CO2, carbon capture to try and recover the one we've
| been emitting in the past decades. We need both, the latter
| possibly in the shape of organic capture since it's way more
| efficient and cheap.
| schainks wrote:
| Engineering/inventing ways to emit less CO2 is fixing the root
| cause of the problem.
|
| Spending energy that likely came from fossil fuel burning to
| "capture" CO2 is like saying you've found a perpetual motion
| machine. The engineering is simpler for this in some ways, but
| it's still not really a "good" solution.
|
| I agree organic capture is a good idea, and CHEAPEST thing we
| could do to have an impact dump iron into the open ocean to
| spawn a phytoplankton bloom, but there is no money to be made
| doing that.
| sfvisser wrote:
| Isn't the point of most carbon capture schemes to use
| renewables (likely solar) as the energy source. Like
| Terraform Industries?
|
| Don't know if it will work or is economically viable, but
| sounds pretty win-win to me.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah going net zero by just stopping emissions isn't just not
| going to help our situation that much, we've already emitted
| enough to fuck ourselves properly, it's also not even possible.
|
| There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current
| technology, period. Anyone seen an electric tractor lately?
| Combine harvester EVs? Electric aircraft? Zero emission
| concrete? Electric container ships? Cheap plastics without oil?
| Electric orbital launch vehicles!? Lots of fantasy tech that
| ranges from being cost ineffective to borderline infeasible and
| we can't (or won't, anyway) run our civilization without these
| and dozens more that have no real replacement on the horizon.
| Covid has made that point really sharply clear, we just can't
| stop ourselves. Piston engined planes still _today_ run on
| leaded gas despite knowing that it 's literal poison for fucks
| sake, it's fuckin hopeless to convince anyone about anything
| when there's a chance someone might lose money.
|
| Carbon capture might help in the long run, but the bulk of it
| will have to be on geoengineering to even give us a century of
| time to remove megatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and
| oceans. And maybe a fish or two will even survive.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Carbon capture isn't about pulling carbon out of the air - it's
| about pulling carbon out of smokestacks just before it hits the
| air.
| Aachen wrote:
| My understanding is that it's not so much about undoing past
| decades, but being able to even reach zero additional warming
| in the first place. Cows won't stop farting (that sounds like
| they're the butt of a joke but it's not actually, even if some
| feed additives reduce it), so we need to compensate for the
| methane. Or air travel for relevant distances (where a train
| won't do), we don't have the battery tech to make it zero
| emission but we can totally capture the carbon. (It's not super
| economical but it's cleaning up after oneself, it's either that
| or accepting further warming and much greater costs later.) Or
| compensating whatever emissions occur as part of making those
| batteries and stuff we need to capture and use that zero-
| emission solar/wind/water energy
| very_good_man wrote:
| Tired of the green scams. Drill Drill Drill!
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| We should ban private swimming pools, tennis courts, etc.. and
| restrict the size of villas, ban mowing the lawn, in order to
| maximize the space for trees and wild plants
| Schiendelman wrote:
| ALL you have to do to increase space for wild plants is remove
| height/density limits in cities. That's it. Then let people
| make choices about how much housing they build, and let people
| make choices about where they live.
|
| You would be shocked how many people will choose to live in
| density, no matter what they _say_ they want, if we weren 't
| restricting the supply of dense housing so much it's become
| unaffordable.
|
| The suburbs would simply stop growing in their tracks.
| lukashoff wrote:
| A lot of energy from renewables are being wasted due to mismatch
| with the demand. Building storage for it is quite expensive. I
| wonder if it makes sense to set up carbon capture near the places
| which don't have the storage. For example here in the UK we're
| wasting between 13% and 25% of all wind electricity generated
| depending on the weather/time of the year.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Carbon capture technology is for installation _inside_ _chimney_
| _stacks_ , when there is no alternative to burning stuff and thus
| producing CO2.
|
| Nothing else.
|
| You'd extract the CO2 directly from the exhaust gases. It can't
| clean CO2 from the open air. It does not scale that way.
| acyou wrote:
| The more you look into it, the more you realize we are already
| doing this, kind of. Then you realize that the real low hanging
| fruit is sort of in other areas, sulfur dioxide, methane
| capture, particulate, and especially home heating. European
| wood pellet and home wood burning stove users, I'm looking at
| you.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I recently saw a video by Sabine on this paper
| https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1 that basically proposes
| blowing up a gigantic nuclear bomb in deep sea basalt deposit and
| basalt would capture the carbon.
|
| In the paper they did some math on the bomb size needed to
| reverse 30 years of carbon emissions, and it's huge (orders of
| magnitude larger than what we tested so far), although I don't
| understand why it needs to be one huge bomb. I'm sure you could
| try it with one military head and test the impact.
|
| Interesting approach in any case.
| jostmey wrote:
| ...Detonating a 81 Gt nuclear device... That's multiple orders
| of magnitude larger than anything tested during the cold war.
| It's more than all nuclear explosions and tests combined
| the8472 wrote:
| We could also use that for asteroid deflection. Someone was
| planning ahead.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)
| chris_va wrote:
| (disclaimer that I manage a climate research group)
|
| Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism
| against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper
| presents a false dichotomy.
|
| Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure
| in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to
| high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to
| land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the
| community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be
| required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming.
|
| This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from
| parties that sometimes partially align with the science and
| sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture
| because it plays well and potentially increases their
| longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop
| carbon capture as part of the toolkit.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| I also think it's a useful tool, but the economics of carbon
| capture have to sustain the cost of developing these methods.
| Pointing consumerism in the right direction seems like the most
| effective way to drop carbon emissions from both a short and
| long term perspective. We need to "stop the bleed" before
| tackling anything else.
| chris_va wrote:
| Pipelining is probably required, and there is no one magic
| solution here.
|
| It took solar 45 years to become low cost, and carbon capture
| will probably be just as difficult. If we did things one step
| at a time, carbon capture wouldn't be economical until ~2080,
| which is too late.
| criddell wrote:
| > Pointing consumerism in the right direction
|
| How do you do that?
| ghouse wrote:
| Price signals.
|
| One approach would be a revenue-neutral carbon tax on
| extraction of sequestered carbon. And border carbon taxes
| for imports from countries who don't also have an internal
| carbon tax.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think something like that would ever fly in the
| US. In fact, the opposite is more likely. The drill-baby-
| drill mantra is going to push everything in exactly the
| opposite direction.
|
| I think any solution will have to come from industry, not
| government.
| sn9 wrote:
| That's the strategy of startups like Terraform [0][1] which
| use green energy production to synthesize carbon fuels using
| direct air capture, which are on track to be cheaper than
| fossil fuels without subsidies within the next few years
| (e.g., definitely this decade). This will both displace more
| expensive fossil fuels from the market while letting us
| leverage existing carbon fuel infrastructure.
|
| The profit motive creates a self-sustaining cycle of rapid
| expansion and iteration, which should drastically increase
| the efficiency per unit as well as the horizontal scale of
| DAC so that eventually we'll have exponentially more DAC
| installed and then you can decide what to do with all the
| excess carbon, sequestering it in whatever ways make sense.
|
| [0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terr
| afo...
|
| [1] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terr
| afo...
| palata wrote:
| > we are still on a path to high warming
|
| Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk
| about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a
| world that is mostly fossil-fueled. But the truth is that it's
| not clear at all that renewables can scale to replace the
| fossil fuels. Actually it seems like they can't, realistically,
| totally replace them.
|
| Instead of focusing on how to do carbon capture and keep living
| the way we are, we should focus on preparing society for the
| inevitable global-warming-in-a-world-with-less-energy. Which
| means we have to do less with less. AI is the exact opposite,
| so we are clearly accelerating in the other direction.
|
| Carbon capture is interesting research, but if feels like it
| assumes a world with _more_ energy than today (because you need
| energy for the capture), and clean. We 're most likely not
| going there in the timeline we are looking at (the problems
| have already started, we don't have 200 years to discover a new
| energy).
| bobfromhuddle wrote:
| I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement
| producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get
| out of jail free card".
|
| I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we
| can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms,
| dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat
| climate change will be made with concrete, and there is
| currently no viable zero carbon alternative.
|
| The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market
| forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking
| hard.
| chris_va wrote:
| Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too.
|
| You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load
| leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid
| will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to
| scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Capturing something back is more costly than not emitting in the
| first place. News at 22.
| totallynothoney wrote:
| This obviously is not viable for X, Y, etc. reasons but I would
| like to know them. We select some fast growing woody plant that
| thrives on terrain useless for agriculture, we grow it at
| industrial scale and convert it to charcoal (using the energy
| generated for the process itself or the grid), we grind the
| charcoal and mix it with sea water and pump the slurry into some
| mine.
|
| Creating charcoal and taking out of the cycle isn't actually net
| negative? We don't have enough space for growing or in
| mineshafts? I'm making Centralia 2.0? It's obviously non
| economic, but everything carbon capture is like that.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I am the furthest thing from an expert on this, but isn't the
| majority of natural CO2 capture done by Algae?
| sweeter wrote:
| "don't worry, don't worry, once the environment gets unliveable
| we'll just pull the carbon out of the air. We don't need
| sustainable resources"
|
| Is a lie on par with:
|
| "I don't need to go to rehab, I can stop at any time" except the
| oil companies are the drug dealer and you are the deluded addict
| who will suffer the brunt of the consequence.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Oh no the VCs did not revolutionize thermodynamics?
| notatoad wrote:
| unfortunately, the only way this is relevant is if we actually
| price carbon emissions at the rate it costs to capture them. as
| long as you can emit for free, then switching to renewables is
| more expensive.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Since this is talking about 2050, why isn't nuclear mentioned?
| That seems like a long-enough horizon to build a few nuclear
| plants.
| krupan wrote:
| Are people still including wood and wood pellets as "renewables"?
| It seems like that would be throwing off any cost calculations
| acyou wrote:
| Point capture and atmospheric capture are vastly different
| processes, economics for point capture are great, economics for
| atmospheric capture are terrible due to the thermodynamic high
| energy input inherently required for separating out a low
| concentration (400 parts per million) substance.
|
| But this article puts both processes in the same category, which
| perfectly sets up a low-information, divisive debate. Why they
| would want to do that - well, some people stand to gain a lot
| from renewable energy program investment, let's put it that way.
| lblume wrote:
| > some people stand to gain a lot from renewable energy program
| investment
|
| Yes, everyone in fact.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The notion of carbon capture always sounded crazy to me.
|
| But there already is a technology to do carbon capture. Plants.
| Plants cover the world. How does one think a machine could do
| better?
| acyou wrote:
| European home heating using wood pellets is an environmental
| disaster. Cut down trees in North America, grind them into
| pellets, pack them in shipping containers, ship them to Europe,
| and burn them in low efficiency furnaces with zero carbon capture
| and high particulate and sulfur dioxide emissions. It's probably
| even worse than home heating using unprocessed wood, due to the
| massive amount of energy consumed in processing and
| transportation.
|
| If we can't at least point capture stacks at the individual home
| level, then forget atmospheric capture.
| johnea wrote:
| Duh?!
|
| The unasked question though: More costly to who?
|
| Modern capitalism (especially in the enrgy sector) is
| fundamentally based on externalities.
|
| Getting someone else to bear the cost, while concentrating income
| as greatly as possible, is what the modern billionaire is all
| about...
| rob_c wrote:
| Does this really. Really?!? Surprise anyone not invested in hyper
| loop being a thing?
| jslezak wrote:
| This has been obvious since day 0, for the same reason that doing
| elaborate industry-funded R&D to develop piss-extraction
| technology to filter and sequester piss from your swimming pool
| will never be more efficient than simply not pissing in your pool
| Aachen wrote:
| Is it on purpose that the analogy lends itself for arguing "and
| that's why we need the technology: we won't stop the group that
| still does this"?
|
| I'm probably more optimistic about global warming than about
| the other "environment-warming" thing!
| sega_sai wrote:
| For people in the UK I strongly recommend the BBC program on
| carbon capture
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00256gj/panorama-can-...
| that goes over several approaches, and goes over problems of
| scaling them.
|
| I personally think we have to investigate this, as we are just
| not doing a good enough job of reducing fossil fuel use.
| picafrost wrote:
| Energy companies are reporting that the cost situation for
| renewables is terrible. The thin margins continue to get thinner.
| They cannot justify pursuing new green projects to shareholders.
| We will hear a lot more about carbon capture in the years to
| come. It's the only way they can meet their climate obligations
| -- which are also being "adjusted" these days.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| For electricity, it seems like a no-brainer, but that's not the
| only emitter. I wonder what cost for carbon capture they used
| (unfortunately the article is paywalled).
|
| It seems to me like the obvious solution to the problem would be
| a CO2 tax equal to the estimated cost of carbon capture. It
| should not be higher - that would be yet another example of
| moralism that plagues so many environmental policies. Introduce
| that, properly monitor emissions (especially things like methane
| leaks), and the problem will quickly solve itself. Anything that
| remains is the edge cases where it is more economical to do
| carbon capture - so use the tax to do just that.
|
| That also covers cases where it makes sense to do the change more
| slowly. No need to decide or argue back and forth whether someone
| can or cannot do it faster. You emit, you pay, you don't want to
| pay, you don't emit. Changing quickly is too costly? That's fine,
| you pay. Oh, it's not _that_ costly when compared to the tax?
| Guess you change, then. Also fine. Want to generate electricity
| from lignite? I 'm not going to argue, I'm just going to watch
| you go bankrupt... and if you don't, there probably _was_ some
| good reason for doing that and forcing the opposite would have
| had some unintended side effects.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Is it dearer than storage though? my understanding was always
| that carbon capture if worth doing at all is for situations where
| the wind isn't blowing and the sun is dim (this nearly led to
| blackouts in uk recently)
| cbmuser wrote:
| Renewables like wind and solar don't provide baseload and
| therefore cannot replace conventional power plants.
|
| I wish people stopped comparing apples and oranges here.
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