
Will Carbon Capture Be Ready on Time? - evo_9
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428355/will-carbon-capture-be-ready-on-time/
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MikeCapone
All I've read about CCS over the years make it sound more like a
marketing/stalling tactic. There are huge problems to be overcome, most of the
worst kinds of coal plants aren't compatible with it anyway, and there are big
risks from leaks, etc..

All the effort put into making it happen should probably be used on long-term
solutions rather than a band-aid.

More wind, more solar, more geothermal, more hydro, more investments in
efficiency, and grid-scale liquid-metal batteries (see this TED talk:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy.html)
) seem to be a better bet.

~~~
DennisP
I did the math on those liquid-metal batteries a while back, and figured out
that getting an adequate amount of grid storage would take about a thousand
years of antimony production.

Tom Murphy's Do the Math blog is pretty good for this sort of thing. Most
renewables can't scale up to run civilization (nor can their combination), and
storage is an unsolved problem at the scale we'd need.

The two non-fossil energy sources that could do the job are solar (not
counting the storage problem) and advanced nuclear.

~~~
MikeCapone
> I did the math on those liquid-metal batteries a while back, and figured out
> that getting an adequate amount of grid storage would take about a thousand
> years of antimony production.

Could you elaborate on that? Do you mean at current rates of production? You
do realize that supply has no incentive to exceed demand, correct? If demand
increases rapidly, there will be a huge incentive to increase production. As
far as I know, antimony isn't rare and there's no reason why we could produce
significantly more and match demand for these types of batteries.

~~~
DennisP
Haven't been able to find it...I think it may have actually been 1000 years
magnesium, 10,000 antimony, but I'd have to figure it again to be sure. I
calculated by assuming each metal was about a third of full-load weight of a
shipping container, taking the storage capacity they claimed per container-
size battery, and using Tom Murphy's estimates of how much storage we'd need.

I did assume current production rates. However, increasing the mining output
by a factor of hundreds wouldn't necessarily be trivial. For example,
wikipedia reports that China has annual antimony production of 120K tonnes,
which is 89% of the world's total. The largest deposit is only 2.1 million
tonnes.

Wiki also mentions that "antimony was identified as one of 12 critical raw
materials for the EU in a report published in 2011, primarily due to the lack
of supply outside China."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony#Top_producers_and_prod...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony#Top_producers_and_production_volumes)

~~~
MikeCapone
I don't have answers, but I know that unless an element is very rare in the
Earth's crust, price signals are usually pretty good at making supply rise
very rapidly. I was reading about the beginning of the nuclear age and how
everybody thought that uranium would be in very short supply, but it turned
out that once it becomes a valuable commodity, lots of cash goes into
exploration and many new significant deposits are found. If there's no
incentive, of course there's no point in even looking for the stuff.

I know that's fuzzy, but I would guess that professor Sadoway did what he said
that he did, which is to pick an element that is common and that should be
cheap.

I'm also not sure quite how many of these types of batteries we'd need. There
are other methods of storage (ie. hydro power in places like Quebec, Norway,
etc, which can act as giant regional batteries) and we can make the grid much
smarter about demand-response and things like that. The solution won't be a
single silver bullet, but a combination of things, including efficiency (lots
of low-hanging fruits there, despite all the progress we've made -- the Rocky
Mountain Institute has a lot of good stuff about this).

~~~
DennisP
That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the
element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up
production by two or three orders of magnitude.

Hydro power is good as far as it goes, but there's only so much you can build:
[http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-
stor...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/)

But that's a good point on uranium. In fact, in Japan right now they're
extracting uranium from seawater at about double the current cost of mined
uranium. There's enough uranium in seawater to last us millions of years,
especially if we went with fast reactors (which can burn U238, a hundred times
more common than U235).

That seems like a pretty good silver bullet to me.

~~~
MikeCapone
> That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the
> element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up
> production by two or three orders of magnitude.

I'm not saying new supply will come online instantaneously, but it could be
faster than most of us expect if price spikes enough. But in any case, grid-
scale liquid-metal batteries would no doubt roll out like most other
technologies, which is progressively enough to let supply mostly catch up. In
the same way that cell phones or computers didn't go from zero to millions in
a day, this will probably be done over many years.

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calinet6
Of course not. By the time we see enough effect from carbon, it will be too
late to reduce the emissions. Before that time, no one will invest in the
commons as they don't derive any individual benefit.

Humans are imperfect sensors and even more imperfect judges of issues at this
large scale. We see it even at such small sizes as our economy, much less the
global ecosystem.

We operate on such small scales of time and space that we first need an
extension of our collective ability to perceive before we will solve this
problem that is so much larger than us. Perhaps there is room for technology
there.

------
DennisP
There are a lot of ways to sequester CO2 besides just injecting it underground
somewhere. Biochar, for example.

~~~
stuff4ben
Also with a link the other day to something about graphene I got to thinking,
"Graphene is just carbon, why not convert CO2 to graphene?". Turns out someone
already did:
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110620161308.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110620161308.htm)

