
Some progress on CO2 sequestration technologies - jseliger
https://www.fastcompany.com/90356326/we-have-the-tech-to-suck-co2-from-the-air-but-can-it-suck-enough-to-make-a-difference
======
ajross
> Over a year, the equipment can capture 4,000 tons of CO2

Not to be glib, and I'm no agronomy expert, but a quick google tells me that's
about equivalent to a square mile of hay field. Seems like if you were serious
about this problem and wanted an economical solution, buying a farm and
burying the output would be more effective than throwing money at startups
like this.

Articles like this are always written from a tone of "If ONLY there was some
way to economically extract and concentrate carbon from the atmosphere", by
journalists who then go home and tend the heirloom snap peas in their raised
beds without a sense of irony. Plants do this. It's literally what makes them
plants.

Now... maybe there's a stronger economic argument for technologies like this,
but if there is it's not filtering into the press hits. I remain suspicious.

~~~
jandrewrogers
The elephant in the room with these prototype systems is that they currently
leverage the excess capacity of existing industrial infrastructure. The
chemistry involved has unavoidably high power generation requirements because
you are fighting a very steep thermodynamic gradient. At anything beyond
prototype scales, the industrial infrastructure to provide the _raw materials_
for these prototypes would need to be purpose-built at astronomical scales,
including countless terawatts of power generation capacity that does not exist
today.

The only scalable sequestration technology is biomass for the sole reason that
it is the only method that does not require creating new power generation
facilities to feed industrial chemistry plants at an unprecedented scale.
Sequestering CO2 requires application of energy and mass on the same scale as
the energy that was released by putting it into the atmosphere in the first
place.

You can't cheat the laws of thermodynamics.

~~~
netjiro
Missing a point here. GHG _over_time_ drastically adds more net energy to the
earth system than is is used to create or capture them. This because they are
opaque to infrared radiation that would otherwise be escaping from the earth
system.

So, GHG net heating effect is proportional to the amount of heat escape they
block for as long as they remain in the atmosphere.

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lucb1e
I looked into this two days ago and decided to get a subscription with
[https://climeworks.com](https://climeworks.com) for a part of my CO2. It's
the only thing I can do until the bus that I drive to work with becomes
electric, planes for business trip start to fly electrically, there is 100%
renewable power, etc. I'm making all the right choices available to me today
(such as renewable power at home, recycling, etc.), but even so, many tonnes
of CO2 are produced for me every year. I can't just shrug and do nothing.

It's quite expensive, and all of those CO2 sequestration companies (including
Climeworks) sound pretty prototype-y. Climeworks is the one with a consumer
product and clearly states that they already remove CO2 from the atmosphere
today. This is what I got back from sales when I asked if my money will be for
R&D that might, one day, remove the CO2, or if it would support operational
costs of a machine running today:

> you will receive we state the amount of carbon dioxide that has been removed
> in your name. No one else can put a claim to that amount. [...] we run the
> machines most of the time anyway [but] proving that there is a market for
> our services (such as CDR for individuals) makes it easier for us to broaden
> the application of our technology.

So that gives me a reasonable confidence, but I'll still spread out my CO2
compensation a little in case part of it turns out to be badly spent. And
trees have more advantages than just producing rock, even if we'd need much
more surface area and water to maintain those trees than to sequester CO2 into
rock.

~~~
pier25
Thanks, I just subscribed.

------
aurelwu
Does anyone know if there is anyone researching on CH4 (Methane)
sequestration? While it's concentration is vastly lower than CO2 (around
1.6ppm vs >400 ppm CO2) it still has roughly a quarter of the impact of the
atmospheric CO2. It has a rather short half-life (8-12 years) in the
atmosphere yet the concentration is still is rising, even at an increased rate
recently with no definite explanation (might be wetlands emitting it at a
higher rate, might be melting permafrost soil in the arctic, might be a result
of fracking). I don't think it is commercially viable to do it but it might
become a sheer necessity if we run into some positive feedback loops so having
at least some basic research going on in that field might not hurt.

~~~
neural_thing
I've only seen capture at the point of production for methane. See Lanzatech,
for example.

~~~
aurelwu
had trouble finding much on their homepage but :
[https://www.lanzatech.com/2013/09/20/lanzatech-
awarded-4-mil...](https://www.lanzatech.com/2013/09/20/lanzatech-
awarded-4-million-grant-from-arpa-e-to-transform-waste-methane-resources-into-
low-carbon-fuels-and-chemicals/)

has at least some more information about it, thanks for the hint :-)

------
tunesmith
I don't understand how climate researchers can seriously have concerns about
sequestration technologies distracting us from the efforts to limit emissions.
It seems an argument that is easily dispensed with, with a bit of simple math.
Right now it seems like even if we max out _both_ efforts, we'd still have to
be lucky to get there.

I have a question about these various carbon-buying efforts. Whether it's
climeworks, or buying carbon offsets, or signing up for a service with your
power company... do these things scale?

I mean, here in Portland I think you can sign up with PGE for having 100% of
your electricity come from renewable sources, but I think that only 40% of
their power comes from renewable. So really probably only 40% of their
customers can sign up. As it is, not enough people have signed up, so they can
still say so, but big picture, you're still really only getting 40%. And
that's just the electrical part of our carbon footprint, which isn't the whole
picture.

Same with the carbon-offset buying sites. I mean, they don't really work past
a point, right? Like if every citizen in the world signs up, it implies we'd
have the entire problem solved. But we wouldn't really, don't they all have
upper limits? So how much do they actually scale? 50%, 10%, 1%?

~~~
acdha
> I don't understand how climate researchers can seriously have concerns about
> sequestration technologies distracting us from the efforts to limit
> emissions. It seems an argument that is easily dispensed with, with a bit of
> simple math.

The people who need convincing aren’t there due to math: it’s become a
political loyalty test for Republicans in the U.S. and some other groups
internationally, for many people accepting that climate change is real means
major changes in their lifestyle and business, and there’s a huge industry
supporting fake experts, think tanks, etc. pitching the message that you don’t
need to do anything.

In that light, it’s not unreasonable to worry that people will use it to push
the “no need to sacrifice now, new technology will fix everything” message,
not unlike the people hoping we can avoid making simple infrastructure fixes
because self-driving cars will solve everything real soon now.

------
jmpman
Trying to convert these abstract $ per ton numbers into something more
concrete... 1 gallon of gasoline produces 20lbs of CO2. 1 Ton of CO2
sequestration costs $150 (there’s a range in the article but that’s a good
target). If we had to pay a tax on each gallon of gas for this sequestration,
it would be $1.50/gallon. That’s a little steep, and would have a serious
impact to the short term economy. $0.50/gallon is likely more palatable.

~~~
FrojoS
I assume this is the CO2 content of one gallon but not the CO2 footprint of
producing the fuel and getting it into the tank.

~~~
hollerith
The carbon tax would be applied to the fuel used by the tanker truck that
moves the fuel from the refinery to the gas station, too.

To estimate how much that would increase the price at the pump, I would rely
on estimates of how much fuel a tanker truck can carry, how many miles per
gallon the truck gets, and the average distance from refinery to gas station
-- which I am too lazy to try to look up.

~~~
FrojoS
The energy required to extract the oil from the ground (especially in case of
fracking and oil sands) and the refining into gasoline is much larger than
what is needed for transporting the gasoline to the pump.

------
tcbawo
I had an idea once to create a credit card where a configurable percentage of
spending went towards carbon offsetting. The goal would be reduction in
personal carbon footprint and eventually going negative. This would require
both measurement of carbon-producing activities based on spending (eg.
gasoline), but also a cost-effective means of carbon sequestration. Not my
field of expertise, but taking advantage of people's desire to do good w/o
expending energy seems like it would be the way to go.

~~~
pier25
So like a self imposed carbon tax?

~~~
tcbawo
That was the thought, yeah. I was thinking of something like Mint for the
environment, paired with an optional credit card so you can contribute as you
go vs. get a 'bill' afterwards

~~~
smadge
An actual carbon tax is necessary, though. The game theory/economics of a
voluntary “tax” don’t work out.

~~~
tcbawo
Sure, I don't think it's an either-or proposition. However, I think there is a
sizable population of people that aren't interested in waiting around until a
government policy would be enacted. The purpose would be to inform/educate
people on their carbon footprint, to build a community around reducing their
carbon footprint, and give a large group of people an opportunity to
contribute in a small way that would hopefully have large aggregate results.

------
AtlasBarfed
Pet peeve: everyone does math with CURRENT emissions rate. Um, we have over a
century of backlog emissions we need to deal with too.

The only thing I last heard that was economical/promising was olivine, is that
turning into a dead end?

Pumping CO2 into the ground sounds like it works great on paper, but I think
we're fooling ourselves that it won't reenter the atmosphere.

Iron fertilization in the ocean might help acidification, but not atmospheric.

Tree planting might help but the trees die and decay eventually, and we need
to sacrifice grazing land for that.

~~~
stefco_
> Pumping CO2 into the ground sounds like it works great on paper, but I think
> we're fooling ourselves that it won't reenter the atmosphere.

Sequestration alone shouldn't be the solution, but if we can find a
thermodynamically feasible way to store CO2 for at least thousands of years
_while_ getting away from new CO2 emission, it won't matter that the solution
isn't fully permanent. Some proposed solutions are expected to be stable on
long enough timescales that the CO2 can (under proper geologic conditions)
turn into rock. Other solutions rely on keeping it in oxygen-poor environments
where it won't oxidize (which is what happened with carbon that became fossil
fuels in the first place; clearly _that_ carbon was not permanently
sequestered, since we're burning it now!).

As long as it's thermodynamically feasible to store carbon (read: our net
carbon emission goes down and it doesn't cost too much in alternative energy
sources), a relatively short (on geological timescales at least) storage
solution is more than sufficient (again, as long as it's coupled with
_critically necessary_ reductions in new CO2 emission).

[edit] There are, to be clear, many geological formations that are more than
stable enough to store volatile materials on longer timescales than are
necessary (look at how effectively salt domes trap oil through a combination
of buoyancy and impermeability of certain types of rock). The deep, possibly
inescapable problem is the thermodynamic difficulty of extracting CO2 from the
atmosphere (where its concentration is low, and hence extraction is
inefficient) vs. the relative ease of releasing energy from highly-
concentrated carbon stores like fossil fuels. It's like trying to unmix your
cream from your coffee; it's just _much much easier_ to avoid pouring the
cream in in the first place. As others have mentioned, we can rely on the fact
that nature already gives us cheap distributed solar farms with built in
sequestration abilities (also known as "plants"); non-biological methods _don
't_ come with the built in solar energy converter, and so we need to consider
the harrowing reality of thermodynamics when trying to make them scalable.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
Hell, if we can turn it back into oil or some other liquid carbon form, that
can be more reliably sequestered. Just pour it back into the places we took it
from.

EV/Solar/Wind should pass the economics of (centuries-long-engineered-and-
ingrained!) ICE and petroleum soon. We're basically waiting on solid state
batteries and some economies of scale for EVs, and solar/wind to just
incrementally pass natural gas.

Then excess load can go to some synthesis of sequesterable or load-evening
fuel, or some other scheme such as algae.

------
thatfrenchguy
Or we could focus on emitting less CO2. Those articles make CO2 séquestration
seem like a saver bu themselves, but they won’t be useful if we don’t get our
actual emissions to close-to-zero.

~~~
nickparker
Agreed. I also don't like this article mixing gigatons and millions of tons.
Feels like preying on people who don't get SI units...

"136 million tons of capacity by 2040" is 0.136 gigatons, 1/400th of our
current emissions.

This technology will help us handle the very last, most difficult to
decarbonize parts of our industrial civilization. It's nowhere near effective
enough to do anything more than that.

~~~
tunesmith
Our world current emissions are 54 gigatons / year? Yikes. I thought we were
at 35-40, my numbers must be out of date.

edit: still can't find evidence for >50\. Latest numbers I see are 37.1 from
2018. Can you link a source?

------
tathougies
Easiest progress: $200 tax credit for every tree or plant you plant on your
property and keep for x number of years. Bonus money if its from one of the
species with the best carbon offsetting potential. Even more bonus money if it
produces food for your family. Lets end the ugly lawns and get some actual use
out of the suburban landscape.

This is an especially great tax for America because while costs of enforcement
would be high in many countries. Americans are unusually honest.

------
hpoe
Seems to me that tech is going to be much better at solving this problem than
the government. After all relying on the government to force the changes
necessary hasn't panned out for the past 20 years.

Maybe after all that time we can start looking to other means to help address
the issue rather keeping trying to alter it with legislation, but hey maybe
the government will suddenly magically get its act together and things will
work out.

Of course even if the entire USA went carbon nuetral tomorrow it wouldn't do
much because the biggest contributer to CO2 emissions right now is China at
almost 2x what the US producing.

So maybe looking into technology to reduce the problem is the way to go.

~~~
hannob
I don't think you understand the problem.

Almost every climate scientist will tell you that we'll need negative emission
technologies _in addition to_ reducing emissions. They're not a replacement.

(Which is actually the main problem with all these technologies... even
reporting about them makes people think they can skip the hard part...)

~~~
axaxs
Honest question, as I'm not well read on the subject, but why?

If, say, enough of these were deployed to have a total negative balance, is
that not enough?

~~~
the8472
Actively sucking carbon out of the air is always going to be more expensive
than not emitting it in the first place due to several factors, one of them
having to build dedicated infrastructure for it on top of the energy
production infrastructure you have to build whether it's fossil or renewable.

So if you have a limited pot of money to do something about climate change
then exclusively relying on sequestration gives you less overall reduction.

~~~
thereisnospork
That's not strictly true: Airplanes, for instance, 'have' to emit CO2 via
combustion of fossil fuels: any attempt to eliminate CO2 at the source is
going to be impossible to expensive. The atmosphere has the wonderful property
of being self mixing, so Texas wind and solar driven capture can offset PA
natural gas[1] if that is how the economics shake out.

A critique about the article: Their 'moral hazard' is a joke. CO2 is fungible.
Emitting 10 tonnes and sequestering 10 tons is the same as emitting none. If
the former improves people's lives (airplanes, cars, power, etc.) the decision
is a no-brainer.

[1] hypothetically beneficial due to variability in sun/wind in addition to
geographic limitations. Power has to always be on, CO2 sequestration doesn't
have to be.

~~~
the8472
> Airplanes, for instance, 'have' to emit CO2 via combustion of fossil fuels:

Batteries may be out due to weight. Hydrogen on the other hand has a higher
specific energy than gasoline

> Emitting 10 tonnes and sequestering 10 tons is the same as emitting none.

Emitting 10 tonnes of CO2 and not sequestering will improve people's lives
today even more since they don't have to pay the cost immediately. The moral
hazard is being lazy because theoretically someone in the future might pull
off heroic efforts to save the planet.

~~~
thereisnospork
> Emitting 10 tonnes of CO2 and not sequestering will improve people's lives
> today even more since they don't have to pay the cost immediately. The moral
> hazard is being lazy because theoretically someone in the future might pull
> off heroic efforts to save the planet.

Exactly. To restate, not emitting CO2 will make people's lives worse[1] but
most of the environmental proposals I see don't seem to realize the sheer
unreasonableness of their propositions which generally boil down to 'you' need
to suffer (in concrete ways, e.g. a gas tax, not farming a rain forest, etc.)
for the (vague) benefit of other people.

[1] Given the current state of technology.

re. putting the cart in front of the horse, I agree, but if air-CO2
sequestration does hit 150$/tonne as (optimistically) projected that works out
to be a few bucks per gallon of gas: The economist in me says the optimal
solution is to tack that on to every gallon sold (and ear mark it).

~~~
the8472
> generally boil down to 'you' need to suffer (in concrete ways, e.g. a gas
> tax, not farming a rain forest, etc.) for the (vague) benefit of other
> people.

That reads fairly one-sided. Let's flip it and say you have to cut back on
some luxuries today so our descendants don't die by the millions at the end of
the century.

~~~
thereisnospork
It is one sided: its the view of the Brazilian logger who wants to cut down
his rain forest. It takes a more credible argument than vague promises of
'[his] decedents won't die by the millions' a century from now to dissuade him
when his relatives live in favelas today[1].

[1] Which is exactly the sort of activity we 'first-worlders' have been
benefiting from.

------
zachsherman
Just jumping in to echo the obvious uhh trees literally already exist

------
ryanmarsh
What if we just planted more trees?

~~~
ritchiey
Even better, plant trees, cut them down, build things out of them and grow
more.

------
WalterBright
Just plant trees.

------
m0zg
TBH I think engineering solutions (fusion, carbon sequestration, perhaps also
genetic engineering) are the only viable paths forward. Quite obviously we
won't be able to do anything through political or regulatory means without
ruining the economy and forcing people to adopt a much lower standard of
living (no cows or Hawaii vacations, no stuff from abroad, no cars, no
plastics, etc, etc).

What I don't get is why fusion research is so underfunded. Let's make it a
"going to the moon" or "manhattan project" kind of thing and let's get it done
in 10 years. Get all the smartest people under one roof and let them have at
it, without any funding constraints. $100B/yr oughtta do it. This will
completely upend the world, and solve a lot of the problems we have. With
clean, essentially unlimited energy, there's a lot you can do. The US doesn't
even have to pay for all of it by itself. I'm sure industrialized countries
will all be glad to chip in proportionally to their GDP for a world-saving
project of this kind.

~~~
effie
Apart from the obvious reasons governments don't want to put "us military
spending" amount of money into fusion research (very expensive, unclear
benefits, potentially changing global economy, hurting oil companies), it is
also not clear that putting more money at the problem would help. Look at the
mess ITER has been organizationally. It hardly seems putting more people in
that project would help.

~~~
m0zg
Pretty sure it would. After all there are multiple precedents: at least three
"unlimited budget" attempts at changing the world worked fine: WW2, Manhattan
Project, Apollo program. The first ended the British imperial ambitions and
established the US as the undisputed world leader, the second did the same in
the nuclear arms race, and the third repeated the feat in space. This doesn't
have to be super complicated like ITER.

