Literally all ideas about carbon capture are quickly revealed to be cynical greenwashing if you think about one simple thing: how much CO2 do we need to store to offset global emissions?
The answer is that we need to store almost 40B tonnes of CO2, or around 10B tonnes of C if we break that down, every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year.
Unless and until emissions are reduced to a tiny minuscule fraction of current ones, carbon capture will not do even one iota to help with global warming.
He says the same thing, with receipts. All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime. They spend X million on "solving" carbon capture while spending 2*X million telling people how hard they're working on solving carbon capture.
This has been going on for decades with very very minimal progress.
But the fossil fuel companies like to tout how they will increase their carbon capture by 500% by 2030. They do not mention how that increase brings them from 0.01% of their total carbon output to 0.05% in 10 years.
Gore said in that talk that a number of countries are still increasing their production of fossil fuels. There's nothing we can do, short of war, to force other countries to stop releasing CO2, so it seems to me that carbon capture is the only solution. As the article says, "That fight of leave it in the ground we're not going to win."
The top comment makes effective carbon capture sound impossible, but to put it in perspective, the Interstate Highway System in the US alone used "enough [aggregates] to make 700 mounds the size of the largest Egyptian pyramids."[1]
If the numbers here are right, carbon capture would be (very) roughly 2x the size of the IHS, compressed into a single year, and repeated every year. An enormous project, but spread out across many willing nations, and perhaps helped by the fact that CO2 diffuses naturally through the atmosphere and doesn't have to be transported like sand and gravel.
Difficult but doable, if the political will existed.
> There's nothing we can do, short of war, to force other countries to stop releasing CO2
That's a good point that is not mentioned enough in these discussions. Basically, we cannot stop other countries from releasing CO2, but we can "steal" their air.
That is completely false. Try investing a few billion dollars into building renewable power and grids in India, with no strings attached (that is, without retaining ownership or asking for dividends etc), and see if that doesn't stop them from building more coal plants.
The top three countries _today_, and China is > 2x the US, who is ~ 2x India -- China alone emits 30% of the CO2.
How should we force China to stop emitting?
India wasn't even in the top 50% 20 years ago -- the nation is developing, they're burning fossil fuels and they're going to keep doing it to bring their people out of poverty. Should they keep their population in poverty?
What about other developing nations? Will Nigeria and Indonesia and Pakistan and Brazil decide that they'd rather keep their populations poor than build fossil fuel plants?
Because wealthy countries pay high prices for fossil fuels, and less wealthy countries can't afford them. If rich countries stop using them and the price falls, there will be a lot of new demand.
Why focus on CO2 per capita? Total emissions is the measure that affects the climate. The same emissions, spread among more people, would cause the same climate change.
And the US only accounts for about 15% of total emissions.
Because people have a right to a decent life. You can't demand Chinese and Indian and African people live without power and AC just because they can't afford state of the art power grids, while smugly living off of more than a hundred years of being ~the only CO2 emitters, on which we've built our way of life (and this includes not just the USA but the EEA and a few other rich countries as well - India especially has lower CO2 emissions per capita than any of the self-proclaimed "green" nations in Europe).
And note that the solution for reducing emissions in China and India is relatively simple: commit string-free resources and money to building renewable grids and nuclear instead of coal.
> the solution for reducing emissions in China and India is relatively simple: commit string-free resources and money to building renewable grids and nuclear instead of coal
Money is fungible. Subsidising Chinese power means subsidising its military. Given it’s presently a dictatorship, that’s a dangerous proposition.
We should focus on decarbonising ourselves. Once our per-capita emissions are lower than others’, we can show them the way.
You could in principle stipulate that the aid is only offered as long as no new coal power is being constructed (so maybe just a few strings attached). That would get rid of the option to siphon [too much of] the money for military purposes.
Regardless, my point was that there are many options besides war for quite directly reducing other cointries' emissions. There may be second order effects, so I'm not necessarily advocating for it, but there is certainly no reason to say "we've done all we can".
> There's nothing we can do, short of war, to force other countries to stop releasing CO2
Well forcing ultimately ends in forcing violently, so this seems to be a bit tautological.
We (and other wealthy nations) can directly subsidize the replacement of carbon emitting processes to the extent possible with the agreement not to build more. This won't happen of course, but the idea that the only way forward is to force people is ridiculous.
> All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime
Aren't most of them startups? The point of the article is that this is the first time an oil company is doing it (and they're doing it to inject into fields, not for climate reasons). If Gore is really claiming all carbon capture projects are by oil firms then surely he is lying.
You're probably confusing carbon capture in general (which already exists in some quantities, although still small to what would be meaningful) with DAC. For the latter, Climeworks is kinda the leader, which is an independent startup. But even there, there's also carbon engineering, which is funded and owned by oil corps. (You may still call that a startup in the sense that it's a relatively young company trying something new, but well...)
But for carbon capture in general, all the large players are fossil fuel corps. Equinor in Norway, Shell in Canada, etc., all big oil. The only meaningful player that is not fossil fuel associated is Carbfix in Iceland.
> You're probably confusing carbon capture in general (which already exists in some quantities, although still small to what would be meaningful) with DAC.
If so, it's the person who posted the Al Gore talk that's confusing it, not the responder who assumed the Gore talk was about DAC, the original post.
IOW, someone did a bait & switch and folks who keep trying to talk about DAC are "confused".
Literally, direct action from Republican operatives. It's called the Brooks Brothers Riot. The list of currently high-profile consultants/etc. That were there is quite enlightening.
I'm not sure if I can blame the BBR, when it seems that 1) those doing the recount were remarkably inflexible about the deadline (what matters more? the deadline, or the recount, especially when it is being disrupted?) and 2) those who supplied the deadline were also being remarkably inflexible about the deadline.
The fact that BBR worked is only because those two points were true?
That was part of it. Another part was that some Floridian voters were illegally denied the right to vote because their names happened to be the same or similar to names on a (poorly maintained, IIRC) list of convicted felons. The privately owned company in charge of maintaining said list was aligned with the Republican party, and most of the felons were African American.
Edit: that may sound like a small number of votes, but in such a close election even a small number can make a huge difference.
Most likely it's basically a corporate handout. It can also be a way to invite reciprocity. I don't know if that was part of the original intent here, but given the raft of voter ID laws that the US has seen in recent years (which prevent such an infinitesimal amount of actual voter fraud, yet coincidentally happen to adversely affect voters of one party much more than the other) it doesn't seem at all far fetched.
Naturally it's never described that way. It's typically framed as something like 'we should delegate this task to the private sector because they're more efficient'.
Yes and: Since corporations are not subject to public records requests, privatization (outsourcing) is a terrific way to transmute even banal administrative functions into black boxes.
* "why were those managing the recount so inflexible about when the re-count had to be completed by?"
* "why wasn't there any middle ground that could have been achieved by those (ostensibly) asking for 'openness' and those wanting to do the recount?" --- for example, by this, I am imagining something like the police maintaining order amongst the viewing public, so that they do not physically harm or otherwise distract the re-counting officials, and having professional observers from both parties available to make rounds as the process is being executed?
The most ridiculous detail about that botched election is the hanging chads were caused by those election administrators not clearing the chads from the prior elections.
Just turn each unit over and shake it. (Like a three hole punch.)
Not following procedures. One of the many consequences of conducting elections on the cheap.
That’s not what I’m saying. Florida did not have them administrative capacity to conduct an accurate count. That would have been fine if the margin were thousands of votes, but in a tight election it ended up affecting the outcome.
In general, I think we should reserve the term "greenwashing" for fake projects. Lots of carbon offsets, for example, actually do nothing at all. If you're using those projects to offset your personal emissions, you're wasting your money. If you're a corporation, it's great because although it's not real, it's cheap and looks good.
On the other hand, if you pay Climeworks then they will actually remove the CO2 from the air that you think they're removing, and bury it in deep basalt where it will turn into limestone. It will be quite expensive, and it's a woefully inadequate approach on its own, but it's real and measurable. For most corporations, it's worthless for greenwashing because it costs too much.
(An oil company using captured CO2 to pump more oil out of the ground probably still counts as greenwashing, though.)
The majority of these projects are net carbon emitters, so they fit any definition of greenwashing.
I also consider woefully small and unscalable, even if real, contributions to represent greenwashing. For example, the plastic straws craze, that attacked a problem that barely even constitutes a fraction of a fraction of a percent of plastic pollution, was pure greenwashing. And by this definition, literally all carbon capture initiatives, even the most well intentioned, are just greenwashing.
They're only net carbon emitters if they're powered by fossil fuels. The Climeworks plant is powered by geothermal. Any renewable or nuclear power source would be fine.
It's expensive but it's scalable. There is a vast supply of suitable basalt formations. In terms of land area, it absorbs a thousand times as much CO2 as planting trees.
I have seen a lot of complaints about the sheer number of devices that would be required, but this is the sort of scale that civilization is accustomed to. We built enough hardware to put that CO2 in the air. We can build enough to take it out. The real question is whether it can be made cheap enough in mass production to make a difference. That will partly depend on clean energy costs, but they are dropping constantly.
It's certain that reducing emissions will be more cost-effective in most cases, but for some applications, like long-distance jet travel, we probably can't get away from hydrocarbon fuels for the foreseeable future.
From what I'm reading, the method they're using right now to store the CO2 requires around 25 tonnes of water per tonne of captured CO2, and requires clean water at that. They are apparently working on using saltwater instead, but don't have the tech yet.
So I'm not personally convinced it is actually scalable for now. I will admit that they seem more serious than others (in particular, more than the company in this article, which is using CO2 to push more oil out of the ground).
CaCO3 is indeed the principal component of limestone, but not all Calcium Carbonate is limestone. I have no idea whether the process of basalt binding CO2 is efficient; WP doesn't detail the process. Nor does TFA; and I'm not surprised, because Oxy's goals are completely orthogonal to the production of CaCO3.
40B tonnes - if this is the only thing we tried to do and did not do any effort in reducing the usage. I don't know if any of those capture projects are ever going to be viable, but this specific opposition doesn't make sense. We're not stopping every other effort to try this thing, so "it won't solve the whole problem" is not a useful comment. No one thing is going to solve this whole problem and nobody is claiming it will.
If you look around this thread, you'll see plenty of people suggesting exactly that - that it's actually better to focus on carbon capture, that it's more doable than reduction etc.
The reality is just the opposite: the only option for stopping climate change is to reduce CO2 emissions completely. Now, if we were at a point where we're emitting some few tens of millions of tonnes instead of the 40B we emit today, maybe then carbon capture to help offset the last few trickles would make some sense - but not before then, not in any way shape or form.
>If you look around this thread, you'll see plenty of people suggesting exactly that - that it's actually better to focus on carbon capture, that it's more doable than reduction etc.
If we assume a carbon capture cost of $600 per ton and storage costs of $400 per ton, then the total cost of getting rid of one ton is $1000 just to keep the math simple.
1 kWh of coal power emits 1kg of CO2. This means that your power bill wouldn't double or triple, it would quadruple even in countries like Germany where electricity prices are already high. Even if you believe in capture, you will have to quit coal and go with gas simply because that one only triples the price of electricity. You will also have to get the energy from somewhere. In fact, most of the cost of the carbon capture and storage will be in generating renewable energy to run the capture process to begin with. So what these people are implying isn't that we are going with renewables, no, the power generation of fossil fuels will be a tiny fraction of the total power generation.
If we stopped all emissions, global warming would be capped at a certain level - basically, at a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere you have a certain world temperature. Warming doesn't continue endlessly just because there are greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - an equilibrium is reached, at a higher temperature than the previous equilibrium with less CO2.
> The reality is just the opposite: the only option for stopping climate change is to reduce CO2 emissions completely
Perhaps. But knowing what we know about this issue and:
- our elected officials
- Big Inc and Big Inc leadership
- The momentum from Cronie Capitalism
- The general public's inability to change habits
- Humans fondness for the status quo
- Etc etc etc
How realistic is reduction that extreme? And if we could wouldn't we be leaning in that direction already?
Note: I do agree with you in theory. I wish it were likely. But realistically I know it's not. Things are going to get worse - perhaps much worse - before they get better.
I don't get why people say things are going to get worse before they get better. Global warming is a problem of cumulative carbon buildup - it just gets worse before it gets worse, and if you hit points that start to trigger feedback loops, then it gets worse no matter what humans do. Though I'd rather not believe it, my suspicion is that it's already much too late in the game to change the outcome.
Relatively, the ecosystem is low concern when compared to the sociopolitical implications. The latter trending in the wrong direction is early days. It *will* get worse.
Well, I think that people will have major changes to the status quo as climate changes become more extreme and habitable zones start to become inhabitable.
Note that the most affected will not be the current rich countries, e.g. Europe, North America unless they choose to be by allowing in refugees. Being Northern means a few degrees of warming still has them well within the habitable zone, requiring fairly minor sacrificies to keep same quality of life.
That seems a simplistic evaluation. North America is already experiencing anomalous weather events and climate change isn't necessarily just going to be areas getting hotter (although that will happen), but also weather patterns drastically changing. The big issue is of course food security and changing weather patterns are going to decimate some crops and result in widespread famines.
A simple example...people (in the West) can't change their diet and lifestyle for their own well being, what are the odds they'll change (e.g., less factory farmed animal proteins) for the good of others and the planet?
The carbon capture odds are certainly low, but when compared to changing the forward momentum of the current system...ships of that size don't change direction easily or quickly.
Either we hit the iceberg, or we find a way to blow it out of the water. Avoiding it? That'll take a miracle.
there are a lot of people arguing strongly for one xor the other. reduction in harm and reduction in use are both good things. neither need to be prioritised more than the other. however, one is easier to legislate for
I disagree. There are limited resources to spend on this issue, physically, and politically, and economically. Every bit of carbon capture technology that you build is taking up resources that would be infinitely better spent on carbon emission reductions: more efficient devices, more robust consumer products that can be replaced once a decade or less, more local production to reduce long-distance transportation, PR campaigns against over consumption, etc.
And again, carbon capture is simply not a viable technology. It's almost like using a shovel to take water from a leaking pipe and move it to a nearby puddle: lots of effort for little gain, and there's no guarantee that the puddle won't connect back to the leak.
Not to mention, most of those who peddle it are outright dishonest. Most have 0 plans for storage, and instead plan to "re-use the captured carbon", for example to grow plants mute efficiently in green houses, which is to say, to release it back at a slightly lower rate.
And finally, even if by some magic the effort was somewhat successful, and we built up huge deposits of sequestered carbon, the most likely next step is for some idiot politician to start advocating for burning it as soon as the trend became slightly positive.
if you solve carbon capture, you solve the problem. efficiency cannot be permanently solved. efficiency is still worth seeking, but if you solve carbon capture you don't have to bother with efficiency
for CO2 to be captured, you need some equivalent of the energy from sunlight in photosynthesis. so build these carbon capture facilities in places with powerful natural energy sources, and build them to last eternity
> if you solve carbon capture, you solve the problem
In what way does it solve anything? At that point we built a huge Rube Goldberg machine that burns coal for X energy, spends 2X energy on getting back the carbon (it’s simple entropy), producing that offset from nuclear and renewables.. it may be fun as an art installation somewhere, but to play with this bullshit at the scale of our planet is just ridiculous.
this is what life on earth does. it's not some kind of wacky googly eyes rube goldberg machine, it's what plants and animals have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. carbon capture's job is to refine and accelerate the plant side of the equation
First of all, there is no reason behind life. It just is, and on a big enough scale it is just thermodynamic equations in a closed material, but open energy system being driven by sunlight.
Also, in and of itself life is 100% carbon neutral, or actually carbon decreasing as it is not 100% efficient - that small inefficiency is basically how we got many of our current oil/coal reserves. Biology did fix a big “mistake” of it, and since a few million years ago even trees can be properly “burnt” by fungi, so only some carbon is actually lost due to some extreme conditions (like it fall into whatever that embalmed it for a long time).
The problem is that we reintroduce all these lost efficiency buffers in a few years that is such a fast paced change that it has dire consequences.
Also, the reason for carbon in case of life is energy and a fundamental temporary constituent of the very thing. We do use carbon for many things, but the energy part can be entirely replaced by more efficient generation into electricity which is much more readily applicable than ATP is.
Life isn't exactly neutral to the environment. CO2 levels were down to 260 ppm in the the last 5,000-7,000 years.
20,000-25,000 years ago CO2 levels were down to 180-190 ppm.
If CO2 levels had dropped to 150 ppm it would've been a catastrophe. Most plants need at least 150 ppm CO2 concentration for photosynthesis. Life could've just wiped out most of life by accident relatively recently.
The chance of that happening now is impossible because of us, but it goes to show that life is not as in balance with the world as we like to think.
Sure, and a “bit” back the first photosynthesis producing oxygen wiped out almost everything on the land, as O2 is just such a reactive gas.
As I wrote, life is not an intelligent design, it has no way of knowing better and thinking of the future: that leftover banana will rot as fast as it can and afterwords leave everything dead in its wake. It just so happened that some form of equilibrium is always met and that Earth has many kind of buffers to change. But it can’t outcompete us in burning coal, we are the new microorganism that almost killed everything by inventing photosynthesis.
A stated opinion maybe useful as an axiom for you, but most don’t believe this.
Some people believe life has a reason/meaning and is therefore worth protecting through a many faceted approach (one of which is being discussed here).
Then try to read more than just the first sentence of what I wrote, maybe? Our philosophies may not agree but I’m explicitly talking about the protection of the planet.
From an engineering perspective life is an incredibly sensitive rube goldberg machine.
We have yet to find another world that has the right combination of googly eyes and string and tape to sustain relatively stable complex life.
We struggle to understand the far reaching effects that even simple changes have on our planets systems and ecosystems.
We have evidence of the system throwing itself so far out of whack that huge portions of life have died off.
> "for CO2 to be captured, you need some equivalent of the energy from sunlight in photosynthesis."
There's approximately three trillion trees on the planet, plus as many more shrubs, bushes blades of grass. The amount of surface area of all their leaves combined is not capturing enough CO2 to help. So to solve carbon capture we would need machines which touch more air than all the leaves on Earth, pumping through a nontrivial amount of the planet's atmosphere, and finding the dispersed 400 CO2 needles in every million haystack molecules of atmosphere.
On the other hand the UK (which raises sheep) imports lamb from New Zealand some 11,000 miles away, by boat or plane.
It's unthinkable that we can solve carbon capture at all, but compared to the ease of stoping the emissions of those flights/ships is fantasy.
No, the theoretical point of carbon capture is to take the carbon we released from the ground back into it. Ultimately, there is simply too much CO2 in the atmosphere at the moment. The long term goal has to be to permanently sequester it back into the ground - essentially reversing the last 100-200 years of burning fossil fuels, replacing everything we got from coal, oil, and gas with better alternatives so we can keep living a life that is at least as decent as today's.
It is impossible for human civilization as we know it to thrive longer term if we keep the current amount of CO2 (and thus carbon) in any way that is circulating.
Of course, capture can and should be the goal after we do the much much easier thing, which is not releasing even 1kg more of the already trapped carbon from the ground.
> It is impossible for human civilization as we know it to thrive longer term if we keep the current amount of CO2 (and thus carbon) in any way that is circulating.
I’m not sure that true. Han civilizations “thrived” under much worse conditions than we can reasonably expect (by that I mean that technological/economical/social progress historically outweighed environmental factors and I don’t why this won’t be the case in the future)
Han civilization was vastly different from human civilization as we know it today, so it seems you're agreeing with me. I wasn't claiming humans would go extinct, just that there would be a massive upheaval that would entirely change civilization.
Also, the Earth has never been as inhospitable to human life as it's expected to be since any known civilization started, so there's no historical precedent to compare to in terms of speed or effects of adaptation.
Sorry. I’m not sure how did I manage to write that, it was supposed to be “civilizations have [thrived]”.
> Earth has never been as inhospitable to human life as it's expected to be since any known civilization started,
That debatable and very hard to quantify. Also it really depends on the region, e.g. Europe was probably quite worse than now during the “little ice age” or the 600s (coincidentally the Arabian peninsula seems to have thrived during that period due to higher humidity).
Climate change was the reason many ancient civilizations collapsed, it seems to have been a pretty regular occurrence and we were only be to break out of that circle in the late middle ages/1500s.
But.. why? The problem is that we put an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere from million years old plants that was stored there just fine. If we just continue to circulate the existing amounts (and increase it in a tiny bit slower rate because let’s be honest, that’s the reality) we are not even a bit ahead.
Because gasoline/diesel/etc. are very energy dense and much easier to store and transport than any alternativd.
In some cases e.g. airplane there simply seem to be no other options (unless there is a massive breakthrough in battery tech and possibly out understanding of physics). So ‘clean’ burning synthetic fuels don’t seem like a terrible idea.
Of course it all comes down to energy efficiency, but if solar/wind continue growing and carbon capture somehow becomes cost-efficient (assuming free solar/wind energy) it seems like a much better option than continuing oil extraction or even biofuels (which of course is also technically “carbon capture” just not very land/water efficient).
> we are not even a bit ahead.
Of course. But how does it make it different from every other option? Moving to 100% renewables won’t reverse climate change either .
I think you might have a very fundamental misunderstanding on how thermodynamics works?
The maximum theoretical efficiency for a combustion engine is about 50%. We'll probably struggle to hit 40%, and that too only after a fair bit of further investment (in particular, materials science investments, and the production of most engineered materials itself requires a fair bit of energy, which generally increases based on the non-standardness/"information-content" of the material (very roughly: "how likely is it that we find a naturally occurring deposit of it on Earth").
So, you cannot really "re-use what's already in it [the atmosphere]". Not sustainably, not while also accommodating growth.
> I think you might have a very fundamental misunderstanding on how thermodynamics works?
Why would you say that? lol.
If we have a large surplus of cheap solar/wind energy during certain periods (which is unavoidable if they share will continue increasing significantly in the future). Of course yeah, that only works if this process becomes relatively cheap and efficient.
I'm not entirely sure if you do have a misunderstanding, which is why I asked the question. I'm trying to figure out why you think "carbon capturing" is equivalent to "being able to re-mine hydrocarbons"?
Assuming for the moment that the rest of the process is perfect (that is: ignoring that it costs energy to perform carbon capture, ignoring that it costs energy to convert from captured carbon back into some sort of usable hydrocarbon, etc.):
it is already very challenging to get to even 50% efficiency in the engines involved in converting a fuel into electricity; whether that engine is an ICE, or a steam engine often used to convert certain renewable sources of energy into other forms.
(Essentially, useful engines that produce mechanical work from difference in average energy between two bodies operate in cycles. Suppose we start at time 0, and it takes k time ticks for a cycle to start from its initial state X(0), go through its processes, and return back to the initial state: X(k). The fact is that X(0) and X(k) must be different, they cannot be exactly the same, because then that would mean that it is impossible to distinguish between X(0) and X(k), and your engine is not just an engine, but a time machine. (This is why entropy is closely related to the fact that time is an "arrow": always moving in a particular direction.))
All this to say: it is not possible to use a finite source of energy for a "long time", unless the finite source dwarfs by "many orders of magnitudes" (how large the magnitude, determines how much time before it runs out) the energy drained from it per time tick.
So even if we got carbon capture working as a way to "recycle fuel" (totally, totally ignoring the fact that it will cost more energy to do the carbon capture and store said captured carbon, than the mechanical work we get out of it (the nuclear fusion problem, except not even technically solvable)) it would not last us for more than a few seconds.
(Existing hydrocarbon reservoirs do dwarf our current energy use per time tick, but not by that much, and not if we also want to accommodate material growth, because of the energy cost of also "safely managing" the byproducts of the hydrocarbon->mechanical work process.
The sun in particular, massively, massively dwarfs our current use per time tick. This is what makes "renewables" renewable: they have a massive bank of energy banking them. We have an awe-inspiring fusion reactor just throwing energy at us for a while. How do we convert it into usable work?)
Putting all that together as the context then, my question to you would be: how can one still use captured carbon as a sort of battery in any meaningful way? Is there a misunderstanding of thermodynamics involved on your part, or could you help me understand where my misunderstanding around thermodynamics lies (I am not an expert, just a novice)?
I understand/understood the inherent inefficiency. My entire point was that if solar/wind makes up majority of you power generation capacity there will be certain periods of time when significantly more power will be generated than there is demand for.
> totally, totally ignoring the fact that it will cost more energy to do the carbon capture and store said captured carbon, than the mechanical work we get out of it
Which is fine if you essentially have free energy during those periods.
Don’t get me wrong, it would only make any sense if carbon capture processes improve significantly but I don’t see how the laws of thermodynamics are an issue if you have an excess of energy you can’t use for anything else (of course other forms of storage might still much cheaper, you can make more aluminum during those times do even less sensible things that carbon capture like mining bitcoin etc.)
> more efficient devices, more robust consumer products that can be replaced once a decade or less, more local production to reduce long-distance transportation, PR campaigns against over consumption
You're advocating for degrowth policies.
Degrowth is an evil, destructive, murderous mentality, and if you support it, you're evil.
The only thing we should be doing is building more energy production capacity. Primarily nuclear, and also some solar (to use for e.g. air conditioning and maybe some energy intensive industries that don't need constant power).
Carbon capture is a good way of supporting more energy production.
Amazing what propaganda and convenience does to people.
Environmental "degrowth" measures (that in reality are just growth measures that take externalities into account) are evil, while the companies and the economic system literally destroying the natural environment and the prerequisites for human civilization on the planet are fine.
What you refer to as "degrowth" is not necessarily what the parent is.
Like most political terms it has been used in a variety of ways by different people.
Some of the classic "degrowth" proponent ideas would reduce the viable Earth human population to around a billion and this would be seen as a good thing. I know three such people personally.
The best way I have to understand why it has been so hard to shift to renewables is: so-called "growth proponents" are the actual "degrowth proponents" who are completely okay (and would prefer) billions of people dying.
I advise you sit down and do the modelling, the data on electricity storage costs (consider kw, kwh, cycles reaction times and annual maintenance please) and wind and solar production variation is available.
IIRC worst case projections of HALYs lost due to climate change is under 10BY
> IIRC worst case projections of HALYs lost due to climate change is under 10BY
Those models are wrong, it's as simple as that.
They are probably wrong in ways that would be completely transparent to anyone actually looking into how they are constructed.
I can't say specifically what is wrong about the model you are referring to, but let me give an example that illustrates one common issue:
Agriculture, forestry and fishing accounted for ~5% of the world economy last year.
Loosing 5% of the economy is not good, but it is not that bad. But in reality, of course, loosing that particular 5% would lead to the total collapse of all civilisation.
Those kinds of dynamical effects are extremely difficult to model, and literary anyone doing that kind of modelling is a crackpot, no more or less. (But crackpots sometimes win prices, so that's good for them I guess...)
My point is: be extremely sceptical of "models" that tries to "value" ecological damage based on current prices. The present biological web on earth is the only place we know in the universe where we know humans can live and thrive. Let's not ruin it for a few percentage points of imaginary economic growth.
Storage is not the unsolved problem. While I cannot say that I have personally done the calculations in detail, I can say that I have engaged with people who have done the calculations, and spent a lot of their life doing those calculations.
Also, I have no clue what "HALY" stands for, and searching for this term didn't lead to anything concrete either. I'm assuming BY stands for 10 billion years.
You can be pro-sustainability and pro-growth. Examples are (product-neutral) carbon tax and solar&nuclear power.
You can also be anti-growth and disguised as pro-sustainability. Examples are being anti-consumerism, anti-energy-abundance (including being pro-solar without solving for intermittency), and meat tax (i.e. singling out a single product that you don't like).
"More efficient devices" also falls in the second category, as (1) it's pursuing energy-scarcity, not energy-abundance, and (2) it's usually implemented as "uses less energy by being worse" (e.g. dishwasher that runs longer, cars with lesser range) not "uses less energy by being more efficient" (prime example are actually petrol cars, which have massively increased in efficiency in last few decades).
We need to be pro-growth but it is difficult to balance that with sustainability. For example:
In practice, carbon taxes are easy to game and are counter-productive. The companies prioritize profits (growth) to the exclusion of sustainability; the governments are bureaucratic and slow, so they're always years behind the businesses playing the game.
> "uses less energy by being more efficient" (prime example are actually petrol cars, which have massively increased in efficiency in last few decades).
Jevon's Paradox is that as resource usage becomes more efficient (cheaper), there is a _greater_ overall use of the resource. This isn't bad per se, but it does mean that greater efficiency will not lead to reduced usage.
Nuclear power is one of our best current options, even though it's often derided for cost. But in lots of ways, we can't stop developing nations from burning fossil fuels, so energy developed nations produce from other sources can be use to capture those emissions.
There's tons of potential for "degrowth" that's neither destructive nor murderous.
Our society is overwhelmed with low-quality, throw-away products that don't do anything to improve health or well being.
If we want to live sustainably on this planet we need stop producing goods to keep the engines of consumerism running and start cutting back these lunatic outgrowth that are only possible by allowing companies to externalize the long-term costs their products cause. That includes disposal and recycling.
> start cutting back these lunatic outgrowth that are only possible by allowing companies to externalize the long-term costs their products cause
Note that while properly taxing those externalities is the theoretically perfect solution, in practice calculating the costs is so infeasible it would paralize our economy, particularly if we don't allow grandfathering in previous goods, practices, foods, etc.
Merely assessing a particular food type for long term health costs is a 20 year £500 million study.
When assessing a carbon tax for example you can try and come up with an exact figure or you can simple tax the amount of carbon extracted from the ground. That does account for methane leaks from natural gas pipelines, but it’s much better than nothing.
Start low and increase it every year until you hit net zero or large scale carbon sequestration actually becomes viable.
My suggestion is 5$/ton and increase it by 10% per year above inflation, but you don’t need to use round numbers.
Gasoline including manufacturing and transport would be ~2c/gallon right now and ~25c/gallon when cars manufactured todays cars get taken off the road. Which isn’t enough to crush ICE cars today but would rapidly scale demand as additional manufacturing comes online. Similarly aviation wouldn’t instantly be killed off but alternatives would see a significant boost where possible.
Starting higher isn’t a bad idea, but politically I think starting slow and scaling exponentially is reasonably viable.
I think the strongest argument for growth is that more growth means more redistribution of wealth, but if the degrowth means there's better distribution of wealth, then I'm all for it
That’s not an argument for degrowth, so your attacking a strawman. Further, your suggestion is incredibly inefficient and so would result in a lower standard of living for humanity.
The litmus test for carbon capture is to see what kind of carbon tax would be needed to offset the costs and hit net zero. If you actually implemented it you wouldn’t see massive scale carbon capture programs and current emissions you would instead see a vast reduction in emissions.
His description of degrowth as "an evil, destructive, murderous mentality, and if you support it, you're evil" is already a strawman, with ad-hominem and moral panic thrown in.
God forbid we forego "business as usual" while the bodies start piling up from continued growth's side-effects that are not impacted at all by kludges and unfeasible patches like "sucking carbon dioxide", "electric cars", and other such not-even-half measures...
Nuclear wasn’t the biggest issue with the suggestion rather than the carbon capture first approach. However the reason Nuclear is more expensive at scale than battery backed renewables is it takes a great deal of effort that could be used on other things. You can add whatever subsides you want, someone needs to actually do the work.
Obviously wind/solar power plants and batteries etc still need manpower and materials it’s just vastly less. We could run the world on nuclear power, but millions of extra people directly or indirectly supporting the nuclear industry are millions of people not building amusement parks, maintaining bridges, providing healthcare, etc etc.
PS: Risks also get factored into the above calculation at scale. Three mile island didn’t cause significant issues for public health but it did destroy valuable equipment and cleanup was expensive. As such even the cost of insurance represents an economic cost in the long term. 1 or even 500 reactors may have zero significant issues, build 10,000 of them around the world and someone will once again fuck something up.
> Nuclear is more expensive at scale than battery backed renewables
How much storage you putting there? Because unless it's an hour then nuclear will be cheaper.
The 90% of the cost of 100% solar and wind comes from needing to store up to several weeks worth of electricity.
Also, the vast majority of the cost of nuclear comes from overregulation. Plants were 6x cheaper 40 years ago even adjusting for inflation. And we know how safe those are (safe enough to kill less people per kwh than solar and wind back in 2010!). People/politicians simply seem to calculate a death due to radiation as worth $2 billion to prevent, while a death from lung cancer isn't even worth $1 million (numbers very approximate).
You’re mistaken on several points. The major concern with Nuclear is the economic cost of accidents not the deaths. Grid solar is by far the safest option per kWh, but we still subsidize relatively deadly rooftop solar because such low numbers of deaths aren’t a major concern for regulators.
Next both Nuclear and solar/wind want storage/dispatchable power to follow the daily, weekly, and yearly demand curve. Hydro can provide significant flexibility but scaling Nuclear means falling capacity factors and thus higher cost per kWh without storage.
As to battery backed solar, there’s several existing power plants that operate with the ability to store 40-50% of their daily generation capacity that are viable with current grid prices. Significant renewable storage is therefore already cost effective as long as the source electricity is cheap enough.
Finally regulations don’t really explain the price differences alone when you compare different countries and they all have similar issues you need to look deeper. One example of a root issues is modern skilled workers simply demand higher salaries. Most industries have offset this with higher levels of productivity and or outsourcing, but the Nuclear industry has completely failed here.
In theory many of these issues could be addressed, but current plans fail to do so in fundamental ways. Small modular reactors for example have gotten a lot of press but only address a small portion of overall costs. Not useless but you still need expensive workers, thick concrete walls for safety, fuel enrichment, heat exchangers, turbines, cooling towers and ponds, security guards, decommissioning, etc etc.
CANDU reactors attempted to address the need for enrichment but failed to be cost effective for other reasons. And so it goes through many promising concepts that never materialized.
No. Just no.
Just because we have two options doesn't mean both are equally good.
And our resources are limited ! We cannot do everything, we have to choose.
The problem is not trying it, the problem is painting it as a solution for continued fossil fuel exploration.
If we could agree that carbon capture is a small part of the solution, direct air capture an even smaller part, and the primary goal needs to be phasing down fossil fuel production, that would be fine. But there is no such agreement, and many major players in both the CCS and DAC space explicitly advertise their tech as a replacement for fossil fuel phasedown, not as an addition.
A simple calculation of energy immediately reveals the entire endeavor as complete nonsense: more energy is spent producing and capturing the carbon than simply modifying the process to produce less carbon. Just calculate how much carbon you would have to capture to reach one average nuclear power plant replacing equivalent coal power plant(s).
Just from the energy levels of carbon (high, burns well) and carbon dioxide (low, inert gas) you can deduce, if there is an sequestration facility that is worth the power it consumes, its a perpetual motion machine and impossible.
Nobody is claiming that removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is producing energy, it will always cost some energy. When we reached zero carbon dioxide emissions, then one can consider actively lowering the carbon dioxide level by pulling some out of the atmosphere. But until then it is essentially avoiding carbon dioxide emissions vs continuing them and then spending more money to undo them. In principle this could work, if avoiding emissions in one place was more expensive than undoing them in another place - if we only had really bad batteries, then it might make sense to keep combustion engines and capture the carbon dioxide in stationary facilities. In practice and at scale I neither see it necessary nor feasible.
To be darkly humorous, there is a probability that a very large recession looms in the horizon. Chinese property market crash, no replacement for driver of the world economy. Nosediving birth rates and population structures. Very soon global warming might solve itself: collapsing population and collapsing economy.
Population collapse is a very long way away, places like Nigeria and Chad continue to grow at an incredible rate and India won't top out for another 30 years at least. World population 100 years from will still be higher than today.
Air is only about 0.04% CO2. A kg of air is about 820 liters. To get 1kg of CO2 out of that, you need to process about 2M liters of air. Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2. Assuming you can extract all of it of course.
The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business. The goal with this is merely delaying that moment. The cynical bit is of course that they are using lots of government subsidies to pretend to capture tiny amounts of carbon. A significant portion of the IRA (1 trillion $) has been earmarked for, once more, fattening the pockets of oil and gas industry.
All the carbon capture in the world to date doesn't add up to anywhere close to more than absolutely irrelevant token amounts of carbon relative to the amount we're continuing to put into the atmosphere. This amount btw. continues to grow year on year. We've merely slowed the pace at which the increase is growing. That growth is showing signs of maybe starting to decrease very soon. We'll still be putting out a larger amount of carbon every year though. We're decades away from turning that growth into actually net removing carbon. And we'll need to keep that up for centuries before it turns around current trends in global warming.
But stopping the burning of oil and gas, which is now very doable, would be a nice start. That's billions of tonnes per year of co2 that we don't have to remove from the atmosphere. Orders of magnitude more than these companies will ever capture. The best way to capture carbon is to leave it in the ground and not burn it.
I found these numbers extremely helpful, but because I'm scientifically illiterate, I still don't really know how much 2bn liters of air is. I mean, for a comparison on roughly the same scale, how much air blows through a wind farm each day?
While I'm not saying this whitepaper is wrong, keep in mind that this is done by Carbon Engineering who receive funding from people and organizations like N. Murray Edwards[1], Chevron Corporation, Occidental Petroleum and BHP[2] which either have hands deep in the oil or mining market, among other things. There is financial incentive to provide results that are in-line with what your funders want, and it's nothing new that this kind of thing has been, and still is being done. It's just hard to prove often.
So as with all science, consult multiple whitepapers, including ones that don't have direct or borderline not indirect funding from those who have financial incentive to get a result that increases revenue or similar, to get a clearer idea of the probability that the topic isn't incorrect or what have you.
As an aside, whether it's right or wrong (since it's a heated topic), I feel these videos demonstrate at least the possibility of companies playing with these kinds of things. They're amusing to watch, if nothing else, in my opinion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM and https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw
While you're correct that whitepapers can mislead, you really should provide an alternative reputable source or give potential methodological critiques rather than mere motive disparagement.
Especially when the original claim, "the energy required to pump it through would offset any capture" is not just wrong, but wrong by a factor of 50 for electricity production from natural gas.
> Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2.
I'd appreciate an attempt to actually put some numbers on how much it would cost to pull in a billion billion litres of air, because on the face of it this sounds like it might only cost a trillion dollars in equipment, not counting the giant solar farm required to run it.
Sequestering billions of tons of carbon every year requires billions of tons of chemical feedstock that we normally produce in the thousands of tons. That industrial capacity would have to be created. Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials.
Many of the emission neutral DAC models I’ve looked at lose 10% — billions of tons — of their industrial chemistry inputs every year even assuming expansive recycling of the input components to the extent possible. The annual loss greatly exceeds current annual production for all purposes.
People talk about climate change as causing a 1m rise in sea levels. Averting that kind of economic and population dislocation makes the kind of energy costs being discussed seem like pissing into the ocean.
1m rise is tiny cost wise compared tk the global economy, just look at the Netherlands, who have calculated[1] they'd need to spend under 0.1% of their GDP to get new barriers and flood control in place to counteract 1m sea level rise.
The effects on agriculture are far more severe than sea level rise.
Right but you when you can put all the industry and money into not producing that much CO2 in the first place I'd wager that's far more effective way to having less CO2 in atmosphere than trying to capture it post-factum.
Or just slapping the same CO2 sequestering method at the end of industrial chain that creates CO2 rather than trying to catch it later.
> Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials.
Better to resign ourselves to poverty and lower living standards than try to actually solve the problem quickly because it seems hard, right?
Some problems don't just "seem" hard, they are hard, and there simply is no quick solution, and no amount of wishing for it and pretending there is, nor even ingenuity and venture capital, can make a feasible solution manifest.
SpaceX had a huge and long runway, took over from ex-NASA guys who worked on the Shuttle. Thrust vectoring and other key technologies already had been developed in similar companies. John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace worked in the space.
Carbon capture is not exactly picking up where the Shuttle left off.
The most interesting part of carbon capture is the offshoot technologies.
You don't need to live in poverty to live in a carbon-neutral world. The vast majority of the problem could be tackled by some reduction in the massive over-consumption and over-production of goods currently happening all over the world.
Could it really? The biggest CO2 producer in the world is China (who emits more CO2 than the USA, EU and India combined), a big chunk of that on building buildings, are they massively overconsuming?
I don't see how modern productive agriculture (without which the supportable world population without completely destroying the remaining natural areas of the world goes down to 2-3 billion) would work in a carbon neutral world without using giant solar or wind farms to essentially produce artificial fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2... which sounds like carbon capture tbh.
China is producing the majority of junk the rest of the world consumes. Also, while of course, China needs to be a partner in reducing emissions, but it's also important to remember that they are emitting less per capita then many EU nations, not to mention than the USA.
The ideal here would be for the world's richest countries, whose wealth has been built off of emitting the majority of the CO2 already in the atmosphere, to fund massive green energy projects in countries like China and India. There's no reason why China should be building new coal plants to bring electricity to their population while the already electrified EU and USA twiddle their thumbs and import another hundred million tonnes of plastic doodads.
Industrial Agriculture is responsible for effectively burning off most of the carbon captured in the soil.
Using no-till, regenerative techniques can capture carbon back into the soil, improve water retention, reduce soil temperatures, reduce the need for chemical feedstocks (fertilizer, herbicides, etc.), and simultaneously produce livestock (and their feed), all while producing comparable amounts of crop.
The only increased input required is active local management, which requires downscaling production, but as an upside allows diversifying the nature of crops produced.
All that consumption drives GDP though. As long as we continue to worship that (both economically and politically), we are unlikely to voluntarily consume less at the national level.
Does your kid you really need that $5 throwaway toy that breaks within 20 minutes of playtime? Do you really need 20 low-quality shirts a year that rip with the third usage because the fabric is so flimsy?
We've put too much emphasis on consumption of low-quality goods. We are drowning in shitty stuff.
Getting rid of shitty stuff isn't "lower living standard" or "poverty".
It's not. [0] Especially if you consider a) the sheer amount of pieces of clothing produced and b) the expected use one gets from one such T-Shirts (see [1]).
These are examples of systemic waste product that are only useful for consumerism churn. Besides T-Shirts and plastic waste, there are tons of products that are produces with the least concern for long-term usage. Because it not "economic" - only because we allow to externalize all the associated costs.
The first link has been victim of a game of telephone, where the original source had 15kg per T-Shirt, more than half of that was washing costs, assuming 50 hot washes (and this from over 15 years ago when washing machines were less efficient and electricity much less green). 6kg from T-shirt production being their actual estimate.
Is 6kg "a lot"? Depends what you're comparing it to. Worldwide clothing industry in general seems to be around 1% of total CO2 according to the above link.
I would love it if we had a sensible estimate for what the sum of CO2 externalities is, but my understanding is estimates can differ by over two orders of magnitude.
I wouldn't get hung up on individual products. This - gratuitous consumption of throw-away products - is an societal issue that needs to be addressed in a systemic way.
Imagine how long it actually takes to build one structure like that, even with modern techniques.
You're perhaps thinking of how long it took to build more modern mega-buildings like the Empire State Building or Burj Khalifa. But those are much lighter weight than the great pyramid (365k tonnes and 500k tonnes respectively, compared to the 6M tonnes of the great pyramid).
Building even one such pyramid per year would be a huge project for a wealthy industrial state. And there aren't 1500 wealthy industrial states in the world to help with the others.
Sure (and that is crucial for various reasons, mostly related to fire hazards). But for the same reasons building roads is cheaper than building tunnels, burying carbon is harder than stockpiling it on the ground. At a minimum, you have to move a similar volume of soil to the carbon you're going to bury, and then move some of it back. And of course, a volume of soil equal to a certain volume of carbon is almost certainly heavier, since carbon isn't all that dense.
So yes, building 1500 great pyramids of Giza is actually a low ball estimate. The right image is burying 1500 great pyramids of Giza - which is much harder and more expensive.
I don’t think people suggest that carbon sequestration is an alternative to reducing emissions. It’s just that we have already emitted too much for net zero to be enough. We need to unburn a lot of coal to keep the planet comfortable.
Read this thread again. Plenty of people are suggesting it exactly for that purpose. Why do you think the biggest proponents and investors by far in the area are fossil fuel companies?
The intended message, just like for geongnineering, is "keep burning oil, we'll figure it out another way".
Burying carbon is a great idea. Similar to the great idea of preventing cells from reproducing without limit (cancer). The important question is, in both cases: how do you do it? With carbon there is an additional question: what is the demand? This is the interface with neoliberal capitalism: what is the demand? For cancer drugs, it's obvious. For carbon sequestration, it's less obvious. Currently we require individual consumers to prefer carboon negative products. But that's clearly not sustainable. Assuming we have a technical solution, what then is the political solution?
Think of the huge investment required to extract fossil fuels and process them into something useful. Now imagine something similarly huge in scale, but the output product, instead of being incredibly valuable, is actually useless.
Captured carbon isn’t worthless. It represents an amount of damage that wasn’t done to the environment in the future.
There’s no free lunch here. You either pay the cost now or you pay it later. Florida is already paying since their homes are quickly becoming uninsurable, and that’s not going to get better.
Lots of carbon have already been captured, in the form of the fossil fuels that remain underground. What we need to do is to stop releasing it into our atmosphere. Once that is largely done, we can start talking about the much more costly process of recapturing it from the atmosphere.
While this is true, we eventually need to go net negative. There is no other option.
Energy curtailment (overproduction) will likely be a common reality in some seasons by 2030 and definitely in the following decade.
Building plants that are the most efficient at using that otherwise wasted energy to 'fix' our past mistakes (plus desalination and other uses) are better than just wasting the energy completely.
Geoengineering is like an emergency tracheotomy. It might keep us alive for a bit and we might end up needing it, but it isn’t a solution - just a desperate patch that buys us a little more time.
Literally all ideas about carbon capture make sense when you think about the main goal of all urgent projects: draining public money from the taxpayers and storing it into offshore accounts
One hectare of bamboo captures approximately 50 tons of carbon per year. Seems like we need only 2M square kilometers of bamboo to offset all the carbon emission of humanity. It's a bit more than Alaska or less than a half of Sahara. It seems like a lot, but I think it is doable, given ease of bamboo planting.
Of course we need to gene engineer variety of plants to capture the carbon for different locations. I believe in fast-growing pine or maple for that matter.
At 50 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, to capture the 40B tonnes of CO2 emitted every year you'd need 800M hectares of bamboo (or 8M km²). So you'd have to plant almost the entirety of the Sahara desert (9.2M km²) with bamboo to get this.
Also, you're saying 50 tonnes per year, but bamboo doesn't live for a very long time, and after it dies, it will relatively quickly decompose and release everything it captured back. So, in reality, you'd have to plant the whole of the Sahara with bamboo and then harvest it every year (or, to be fair, maybe every couple of years), storing all of the bamboo somewhere where it can't decompose, forever.
So no, bamboo (nor any other plant) is not even close to a solution, not at the current rate of emissions.
For comparison world uses around 97 000 000 barrels of oil per day, or about 3.5 billion tonnes of oil per year.
Switching to synthetic oil (or any other hydrocarbon - I think methane is the easiest) would make a significant difference (and would make renewables much more viable, by solving the energy storage problem).
Carbon in the atmosphere is a stock and flow problem, even if we get to net zero emissions, we have just stopped the problem from getting worse. At that point, we need carbon capture to be scaled up and efficient. I don't think it's premature or greenwashing for technologists to support early efforts to get this tech ready. I don't think many supporters of carbon capture think the goal is to offset all the current emissions. They mostly think of carbon capture as a way to eventually deal with historical emissions.
Yep. We need massive new sources of green power generation, probably nuclear until fusion gets going. We need to build stable liquid hydrocarbons and inject them back into oil wells, and build new coal mountains to replace the ones we extracted.
It's a completely insane amount of energy and effort, and every fossil fuel we burn makes it harder.
I think it's possible and worthwhile. It isn't really any more cartoonish than the wastefulness of our current material culture.
I've always assumed any adequate carbon capture solution would need to be roughly equal in scale to every bit of fossil fuel infrastructure (oil well, refinery, oil tanker, pipeline, coal mine, power planet, etc.) currently in use. That would be just to break even on current emissions, not reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Regenerative agriculture can capture about 1/2 ton of carbon per acre/year. Given there are 4.62 billion acres of farmland in the world, that would be about 2 Billion tons of carbon captured per year. 1/5 of the total, it's not a fix, but it would help.
The tech is somewhat sensible when you slap it at end of the production chain, before CO2 gets to the atmosphere, but that's about it. Even if it "works" it would still require humongous amount of energy wasted to do it, just because it's separating tiny amount of CO2 per litre of air
Neat thing about trees is, you can cut them down, and then use them for things before that happens. Trees also provide ancillary benefits by just existing, such as reducing ground temperatures and acting as wind breaks.
It's almost like the entire universe requires compromise and there are no perfect solutions.
Yep, it's all just delusion that allows people to sleep night after night while contributing to the catastrophe that is climate change. But hey, if it means a few old men didn't have to change their lifestyles then it's all good, right?
This is where you start explaining how trees capture carbon, how much, and where it is stored. Explain how we use trees in large quantities to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, where and how many? Who should do this and who is going to pay for it? Genuinely curious.
But without those details your comment is just a poor quality and lazy attempt to disqualify people who are actually trying something.
The problem is the majority of a tree's weight is water; to turn a Kg of carbon into tree requires about 1.8 Kg of water (that's from memory but it's order-of-magnitude right). This isn't necessarily a non-starter but it's a huge practical problem with trees in particular (IIRC bamboo is a better candidate).
Growing trees then cutting them down and burying them is actually a decent carbon capture mechanism, except for the fact you're then depleting your soil and you'll need to burn even more CO2 making more fertilizer...
Literally all ideas about man made climate change are quickly revealed to be just fantasy if you think about one simple thing: how much CO2 do we need to produce to change the global climate?
The answer is that we need to produce almost 10B tonnes of CO2 every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year.
I don't understand if this argument makes sense, but I feel it doesn't.
Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon (hand-waving at thermodynamics here)?
Also, don't all methods of carbon capture produce new emissions again because they need energy, resources etc?
I don't claim to be able to do the hard science here, but the comparison you make seems a lot more far-fetched to me than that of the original comment.
edit: sister comments already make the argument much more clear and I guess the self-doubt of people with responsible intention versus the chuzpe of climate denialists contributes even more to our dire outlook.
If you were being sarcastic: oh well, not helpful.
Quoting a sibling comment here:
> The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business
To burn coal, we have to dig it up from the ground. Is it possible that we one day find a way to "dig it up from the air" instead which is "less hard" than to dig it up from the ground?
Or that we find some other process which has seperating carbon and oxygen as a byproduct? Like some form of photosynthesis? Trees already do this.
The fastest bird can fly 200 mph.
Apollo 10 flew at 25k mph. A factor of over 100.
Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.
> Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.
I don't agree: using a bird and an Apollo space mission in speed comparison is a completely invalid support for that proposition: the rocket which launched Apollo 10 had to burn 770 tons of kerosene and 1300 tons of liquid oxygen in 150 seconds to achieve these speeds which are possible to be kept then only once outside of atmosphere and outside of the earth "gravity well". It didn't depend on anything of unknown physics or chemistry: Tsiolkovsky published his rocket equation in 1903.
Contrary to that, your "maybe 100 times" would depend on something different from what we know the physics and chemistry say for the last hundred years.
> Is it possible that we one day find a way to "dig it up from the air
That makes zero sense — thermodynamics prefer lower energy states. Coal burns on its own, so that’s the direction of the reaction. It doesn’t become coal on its own, so you have to put energy into that and you net lose on that.
That's why the most effective "carbon capture" we can possibly make - is not emitting it in the first place. It's really that simple...
I'm not saying we shouldn't invest money and time in carbon DAC, it will become important later after we stopped emitting tons and tons of CO2 every day.
"At the fundamental level, Terraform’s machines capture carbon dioxide (CO2), generate hydrogen (H2), and react them to form carbon-neutral natural gas (CH4). Our CO2 concentrators can also capture enough water from the air to supply our process with plenty left over. "
They seem to very deliberately not use the name methane in their presentation. CH4 is methane.
So it would be like using our solar potential to capture and then turn atmospheric carbon into fuel again. Probably battery storage will be cheaper, right?
Clear to see how cynical it is if you keep pumping carbon out of the ground at the same time as trying to reclaim some bit of it from the atmosphere.
At that point, why don’t just stop the ever-increasing rate of CO2 release we do? Sounds much easier than recreating millions of years worth of photosynthesis that did the same thing (coal, oil is from plants mostly that lived many millions of years ago) we conveniently dig up.
The reason my original argument works and your sarcasm doesn't is that extracting resources from the ground is much easier then putting them back in. Mining is easy - that's why we have gigantic mega mines. Building things from the mined materials is much harder - that's why we don't have anything resembling the same scale of buildings compared to the largest mines.
I may be completely wrong, but I have read that the underlying chemistry is endothermic, which is to say, requires energy to occur.
In other words, you have to generate energy to remove CO2 from the air.
Problem is, how do you generate that energy - on the civilizational scale required - in a way which produces less CO2 than you're removing from the air?
Right now we're already failing, globally, to replace dirty energy with clean. India IIRC has an aspirational goal to be off coal by 2070...!
How do we manage to produce a purely green civilizational-level energy supply, doing it all a second time over as well, and now or soon, to start producing the energy to remove CO2 from the air on a scale which will matter?
You don't need to build carbon capture plants near people, you can build them anywhere in the world.
So you can put them in places where you have the potential for large amounts of cheap renewable energy that would otherwise be unused. Build solar plants in the middle of the desert, build tidal and wind generation on remote islands. There are plenty of places where green energy projects never got off the ground simply because the cost of transmitting it to places with energy demand was cost prohibitive.
The bigger problem is that simply removing CO2 from the atmosphere is not enough, you have to actually store it somewhere and be confident it will stay locked up for centuries, otherwise the effort is wasted.
You need to build carbon capture at emission sites however.
Carbon density in regular air is too low for capture to be efficient, it needs to be captured as the air exits fossil fuel power plants, which is difficult enough as is (I believe we can reasonably get about two thirds of the CO2 this way) to not be enough at all.
All in all, carbon capture is just a way to pretend to solve issues while only dealing with symptoms. GHG (and CO2) are just one of the many consequences of the excessive pressure our society has on our environment, and solving just one consequence won't save us from all the other (resource exhaustion, biodiversity collapse, GHG besides CO2).
It would have to be nuclear, I imagine. Doesn't seem like any other method would have the juice required while simultaneously being able to power all the other stuff we want (and not also creating emissions).
I can't believe the cosmic irony that probably the biggest "success" of the environmental movement and arguably its motivating raison d'etre might be the one thing that would destroy the earth's environment. Imagine an alternate reality where nuclear uptake continued at rates of 50s/60s and where we'd be today.
Using nuclear to power carbon capture will only make it more expensive. You do realize that only the cheapest energy is viable for carbon capture?
Also, among "pro nuclear" advocates there is this tendency to blame the problem on "stupid people" (environmentalists, politicians, Chernobyl watchers, etc) but once you disregard that and let them build their project suddenly you get budget overruns, delayed schedules and failed projects and surprise cleanup costs from decommissioning.
There isn't a cosmic irony. People are against nuclear power because frankly: it sucks.
> budget overruns, delayed schedules and failed projects
How the fk is that unique to nuclear powerplants? Also, did you take into account the same shit for coal plants as well, that are multiple orders more numerous?
And they produce orders of magnitude more energy than a similarly sized other plant, so the question is more like -- is a single nuclear plant statistically more likely to go wrong vs any one of 100 or 1000 "normal" plants?
Are we discussing the building of them or operation of them?
Due to the complexity of nuclear plants, any issues encountered during building are likely to drastically effect the costs and time required, whereas coal plants are a more mature technology that we already have a lot of experience with. NB. I'm not claiming that coal plants are a better choice (they're not), but that there's less risks involved with the financing and manufacture of them.
If we're discussing the operation of already built plants, then I can't find any stats, though I'm sure there's been at least some explosions or fires in coal plants. I daresay that a coal plant explosion is a lot easier to deal with and resolve than a nuclear plant explosion considering the problems with toxic materials.
But nuclear plants can’t explode, that’s just nonsense. There are 436 nuclear plants active on Earth and there was only two accidents in more than half a century, one with the older tech we already knew back than that it is bad design plus.. the whole soviet management of it, the other is a neverbeforeseen sized tsunami plus mismanagement.
I think people who are exasperated with blind nuclear activism also don't want coal. Yours is a strange kind of whataboutism that isn't even relevant.
Issues with commissioning/decommissioning nuclear plants are unique in the magnitudes of sunk costs, both time and money, as well as the somehow still astonishing to many delays and hidden costs that somehow always catch us off guard and somehow are unique to each site and were somehow completely unpredictable that nonetheless somehow happen in every instance.
Yet look at French’s energy graphs vs that of Germany.
Also, frankly, this is such a topic that the capitalist view makes no sense - there is no buyer/seller for green-ness (though it can be introduced into the system through laws like carbon taxes), these are costs that must be coughed up by governments, period.
I still believe that a nuclear baseline and a renewable variable energy production on top is the cleanest, greenest solution that actually further our case. There is simply no competition on the efficiency of nuclear.
> but once you disregard that and let them build their project suddenly you get budget overruns, delayed schedules and failed projects and surprise cleanup costs from decommissioning.
Those idiots are NEVER disregarded, they've put in place a huge amount of extremely expensive regulation that makes nuclear 10x as expensive as it would be otherwise (compare 1980 nuclear power cost per KW to today), all to prevent the occasional Fukishima which kills one person and makes a couple of square miles uninhabitable (technically theres another 200 you evacuate from for a few weeks and then another 20 for a decade or so but a brief look at Fukishima radiation maps[1] shows nothing that would be over the cancer detection threshold[2]).
History has shown various times[1] that our timeline is the one to bet on when it comes to narrowly avoiding the extinction of much of human life. My bet is thus that one or several of the many ideas how to avoid a total climate crisis will prevail, in a soft-quantum-immortality kinda way.
[1] examples: Hitler‘s halt before Dunkirk and his various other silly mistakes (resulting in them not being able to develop the bomb first), Vasili Arkhipov‘s abort to launch a nuclear torpedo during Cuban Crisis, Stanislav Petrov not reporting what their systems indicated to be a nuclear attack…
Well, better to panic and run in 1000 directions, none of which going away from the planet that is so far our only habitat? It will work out one way or another. And either many-worlds is true, and some of them will carry on human life, or it’s not, I‘m wrong and all these examples were just lucky accidents. In the second option we‘re likely screwed either way, because the number of ways that humanity can kill itself is growing by the decade, and one of these will trigger sooner or later.
This is such a... strange way to essential just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. Like a student deciding not to study, because why would that help. Either he fails or another in a—essentially—another world does or doesn't. Problem solved.
This kind of attitude is problematic regardless of the topic though. Because whether it works out or not isn't dependent on you, because what you're describing is just noping out of the situation and ignoring it.
And, for those who genuinely do care, one way or the other. That take the many hours upon hours to write out good whitepapers on the topic, how is that panicking exactly? Sure, there is a lot of horror media, purposefully misleading information, and doomer attitudes thrown around from either side of the argument, and some of those average (statistically speaking) folk can probably be described as panicking. And there's also companies doing and implementing things only for the PR, or to remove heat from themselves, or preemt such things, and what have you. But I still wouldn't go so far as to write the entire topic off because some people are panicky and a lot of companies have financial incentives to earn more regardless of morality.
I do agree that, on the current course, I can't see humanity lasting very long, so to speak... that is, if nothing is done about it. Sure, perhaps nothing will work out. Perhaps everything will fix itself if one ignores the problem. Perhaps the fictional student ends up passing either way. Perhaps it won't. But is that reason enough to simply brush our hands of it? To just let it happen? Sitting back and doing nothing won't make things better either. Doing something has—at least—the potential for change, whether good or bad.
I never said to do nothing. I just don’t see value in worrying about things out of our control. I do my best to keep my family’s footprint low (and already live on a country with comparatively low footprint). But most of this whole thing is at best in the hands of corrupt politicians and at worst completely rudderless.
No so probabilistic, but more like a linear combination of approaches maximizing for gain function and economy of scale. I can tell you with certainty planting trees is far down on the list.
At the top of the list would be strategies that utilize biological processes as the capture component of CCS. Kelp and phytoplankton robotic oceanic aquaculture seem the most obvious. Going GMO to increase yield and reduce needs for micronutrients would probably be helpful. Terrestrial CCS would look like either chemical processes or DACCS. I think the Microsoft approach has legs to it if it can be demonstrated, Omniprocessor-style.
For soil health and to combat desertification, it would be wiser to stop rain forest loss and reintroduce megafauna across the world to improve non-wooden plains / semi-wooded land.
I think along the same lines. On the point of megafauna, isn’t it rather dependent on having enough large predators? E.g. in temperate forests, wolves have been shown to be very effective at repairing forest health by keeping deer at bay, leading to positive changes throughout the ecosystem.
Well it is. The question is what percentage you assign to the probability of having survived so far. Depending on that it can give evidence towards many-worlds (coupled with the anthropic principle).
> Problem is, how do you generate that energy - on the civilizational scale required - in a way which produces less CO2 than you're removing from the air?
The answer is simple: trees, moors and other biological processes. That would also work out on scale, as it has before humans have ever entered the play.
Forests and such are carbon neutral unless somebody goes there, cuts the trees, and crucially does something to prevent the wood from burning or decomposing for hundreds or thousands of years. That is the costly part.
That's a fairly simplified view of what a forest is. A forest is not just a bunch of trees, but an ecosystem where perhaps the most important part is the soil, which in the long term is the bigger carbon reservoir.
A lot of the carbon that first goes into the trees eventually ends up in the soil, which if left undisturbed (i.e. not used for farming) is stable and does not leech significant amounts of CO2.
Admittedly the downside of this is that such soil is almost absurdly fertile. This is in large why slash-and-burns are so popular where ever there's old forest. Indonesia, Brazil, etc. Like it's not even about the lumber, the farmland is amazing for a decade or so.
Unless you are talking about terra preta (where you intentionally produce charcoal and work it into the soil), the natural process of accumulating soil organic matter is too slow to make a dent to climate change.
I've heard people mentioning biochar and similar processes of capturing carbon in the soil, do you know how viable it is? How much bang for the buck we could get from it? Is it a possible strategy when done in a decentralized manner all over the planet?
> A lot of the carbon that first goes into the trees eventually ends up in the soil, which if left undisturbed (i.e. not used for farming) is stable
Stable, as in the amount of carbon that is captured is offset by the amount that is released?
That sounds like after a short while forests become carbon neutral, unless we cut the trees down and do something to prevent the wood from burning or decomposing.
There's a lot more biomass in an older forest than a younger one, especially a planted forest. Carbon capture will slow down, granted, but a forest takes hundreds if not thousands of years to reach true equilibrium.
There's an immediately obvious difference in biosphere density if you step into a forest that was cut and re-planted a fifty years ago, one that was slash-and-burned a hundred years ago, and primeval forest that's been around since the end of the ice age. There's just a lot more stuff growing in a forest the older it gets. Trees keep growing for a very long time as well, easily doubling or even quadrupling the biomass of a younger tree.
All the fossil-sourced carbon we've put into the air the last 100 years or so was, at one point or another put into the ground, mostly by vegetation.
Re-planting forest isn't probably in its own an adequate solution, but it shouldn't be dismissed entirely. Compared to active carbon sequestration, the energy cost of letting a forest grow is negligibly low.
> All the fossil-sourced carbon we've put into the air the last 100 years or so was, at one point or another put into the ground, mostly by vegetation.
As I understand it, carbon comes from plant matter indeed, back from the Carboniferous period. Back then no life form had evolved that was able to break down wood lignin, so wood could not decompose. That stopped around 300 million years ago when certain fungi evolved, which is why carbon is no longer produced and thus remains a fossil fuel.
Forests are essentially carbon neutral according to every source I can find. I'll be happy to learn otherwise.
Except it tooks millions of years to capture the amount of carbon we are releasing in decades, and much of that capture will not actually work in today's ecosystems: all coal deposits were formed in the window of time between trees evolving the production of lignine and microbes evolving the ability to decompose it.
It takes ~40 trees to capture one ton per year, with ~40B tons emitted each year, that means planting roughly 160B trees each year. Humans have changed the world in a manner which natural ecosystems cannot recover on their own. We need to cut emissions to 0 and plant trees, establish moors, and other forms of CO2 capture.
Yes, but I you cut and store the wood at maturity you could plant fresh trees instead. The point is, trees are an entirely inadequate solution to climate change, at least on the CO2 front.
That's far too inefficient to supply the energy needed to sustain modern area-efficient farming, so which 5 billion people are you picking to die of starvation?
If I got the article right, the plan is to use underground carbon stores like a battery, “charging” it by pushing carbon under that has been pulled from the air, and “discharging” by pulling it up later? That has to be one of the most inefficient ways of storing energy imaginable.
Sahara solar plants + carbon capture? Solar capture in Africa is supposed to have a lot of potential except for the problem of transporting the power. If you can use it locally, maybe it's more valuable.
It's not clear to me if direct carbon capture needs to be distributed.
I did some calculations on this a while back, using the energy requirements of direct air capture (DAC) CO2 removal that we currently know how to produce and deploy.
The results I got where that if we built a very large solar farm (500 000 km^2) operating at the efficiency of current commercial solar farms and used all its output to power DAC CO2 removal, that would be enough to remove about half as much CO2 as we currently emit each year. In effect it would be as if we had cut emissions back to 1970 levels.
Note that since the solar farm would just be used to power DAC, it would not need electrical infrastructure outside the farm itself. We just need a place where we can put in 500 000 km^2 of solar panels and a bunch of DAC facilities.
The atmosphere does a good job of distributing CO2 so the solar/DAC facility doesn't need to be near any heavy CO2 emitters either.
BTW, the output of a 500 000 km^2 solar farm per year is about equal to the total yearly energy use of humanity, which shows just how insane the amount of solar energy available is. Let's call this one Human Energy Unit (HEU).
Build two HEU's worth of solar/DAC and we are effectively carbon neutral.
Of course you wouldn't have to build these as 500 000 km^2 facilities. 500 facilities of 1000 km^2 would do, or any other combination that gives us 1 HEU total of energy that is all used for DAC.
How far could we take this?
The 5 largest subtropical deserts in the world have enough room to hold 30 HEUs worth of solar farms.
If we built all those and turned them all on at once it would take one year to remove enough CO2 to get us down to 320 ppm, which is around the levels we had in 1960. Two years would take us back to levels last seen around 1800. 6 years would get us down to pre-industrial levels.
That was all using technology that we have today. It would be a huge project, but it does not require any new science or new engineering. Just a lot of money, politics, manufacturing, and construction.
> The 5 largest subtropical deserts in the world have enough room to hold 30 HEUs worth of solar farms.
If we built all those and turned them all on at once
Funny enough, this was done in the SF novel “The Hail Mary Project”, and derided by the scientists in the book for furthering climate problems dramatically by turning a normally heat reflective surface into a heat absorbent surface.
Worth investigating before committing our deserts to power collection.
This is a fantastic analysis. I think a lot of sibling comments are missing an important point: Say we build enough solar to produce enough energy for peak demand. That’s going to end up wasting multiple HEU’s of electricity during the day (unless we build an insane number of batteries).
For reference, cities currently cover 3 500 000 km^2 of the earth. Also, solar density is still improving, and other sources of energy exist.
I find it funny that we're carbon neutral if we build two HEUs. Surely, we can just build the one, shut down all other energy production, and call it a day?
By simple thermodynamics we can be 100%, not 99%, 100% sure, that the energetic cost of removing CO2 from the freaking atmosphere is higher than the benefit of putting it there in the first place.
If you want the process to be sustainable then it has to be reversible. Burning 1000W worth of fuel only to spend >1000W of electricity to remove it from the atmosphere and turn it back into fuel is clearly a net cost compared to just using 1000W of electricity to cook your food. Or less than that with non-inductive methods, since electric heat pumps can produce more than 1000W of heat from 1000W of electricity by removing some of it from the environment.
A non-sustainable process that converts fuel to CO2 and then into a solid or liquid that isn't fuel could theoretically have positive efficiency, but it is by no means guaranteed to (especially when the competition is heat pumps), even if it did by a small margin it could still cost significantly more, and it implies that you're eventually going to both run out of fuel and convert it all into an enormous amount of industrial waste.
That's very different from benefit. Also I don't see how that's related to what your original comment was arguing for (cost of replacing stoves).
Maybe I should add that I do agree with your conclusion (that replacing the stoves makes sense). I just disagree with the argument from "basic thermodynamics" which gives you "100% confidence".
Oxidizing carbon fuels is a irreversible process, meaning an increase in entropy. Dispersion of CO2 in the atmosphere also increases entropy.
We will always, 100% of the times, expend more energy to reverse a irreversible process than we could possible extract from this irreversible process.
This statement is valid regardless of the path chosen.
Which naturally spawns the argument 'let's not reverse it, let's do CH to CO to Cx, all we have to do is find x'.
The problem is this is not valid because we burn a lot of fuel.
Even if we found x, it would not be enough to sustain our rate of carbon emissions. In 2022 the world consumed 5.8*10^12 liters of crude oil.
So it would be necessary to include y. And z. Etc until n.
Inevitably including a regeneration step Cn + H to CH + n.
Now the path looks like:
CH -> CO -> Cx -> Cy -> (...) -> Cn -> CH
Which is a closed loop, meaning net power loss. With 100% confidence.
Maybe the one who oxidizes CH pays the bill to remove the CO2 emitted. Is it even possible to put such measure worldwide? Logistics would suddenly be prohibitively expensive for all but the most valuable products per weight/volume. Globalization is addicted to fossil fuels.
Well, that is literally all we did and build and invest in the last century or so. The very power grid of the world is based on carbon fuels. We can't run our carbon removal machinery on dirty power or we would be emitting more than we could possible remove.
It becomes 100% clear the winning strategy is not removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it is replacing all machines and appliances that burn carbon. Worldwide.
Again, I agree with your claims about entropy. I also agree with the claim that replacing stoves is generally good.
One still does not imply the other. The question was about what makes sense. That's economically, socially, politically, regionally, etc. Amount of energy extracted via some processes is not the same as benefit. However, benefit is what matters. I guess this discussion isn't moving forward from here.
Yeah, the missing key is seeing power and energy as money, because that's essentially how our economy works.
We can convert one in the other, at different conversion rates granted, but still.
Energy input cost is a line in every company spreadsheet, it can block or allow companies to succeed. Today this line is kept artificially low because we base our economies on a very exothermic open loop CH to CO. Closing this loop is not an option because basic thermodynamics, which is the very logic behind carbon removal.
We have to stop entering this path as much as possible.
While this is a tiny contribution to global warming, funny enough, it turns out that reducing this kind of emissions is also very cheap. To the point where you get very solid emissions reduction per dollar spent.
If we had emitted 37 billion metric tons of CO2 a year each year for the last 400 years that would be a total of about 1.48 x 10^19 grams of CO2. That's more than we now have in the atmosphere so this gives us a convenient upper limit.
12/44th of the mass of CO2 is from carbon, so that is 4 x 10^18 g of carbon to deal with if we wanted to store all the carbon current in atmospheric CO2.
The density of carbon depends on what form it is in--diamond is a lot denser than graphite, which is a lot denser than carbon powder. Let's store it as graphite, which has a density of 2.2 g/cm^3.
We'd need 1.8 x 10^18 cm^3 for that much powdered carbon, or 1.8 x 10^12 m^3, or 1800 km^3.
But remember that we are getting all this carbon we need to deal with using energy from massive solar farms. Put the solar panels a few meters off the ground, and dump the graphite under the solar panels. If the graphite was dumped into a pile 1 m tall it would need 1800 km^2 of area.
That would be just a tiny fraction of the area available under the amount of panels we'd have to be using to capture that much carbon. Spread evenly under all the panels it would be less than a millimeter.
No, I just wanted to know if we covered some large deserts with solar panels could that power enough DAC to make a difference.
A quick Googling to find current worldwide solar panel production suggests that it would take about 90 years of current production for the panels for a 500 000 km^2 solar farm, so to build enough to just cancel out current emissions would need about 180 times the resources that currently go annually into solar panel production.
So we'd probably need to increase mining (and several other things) by about 20x if we wanted to use this approach to get enough DAC to bring emissions to net zero.
I think that's about as far as I can go. I don't know enough about the availability of various resources to figure out if the various things needed are abundant enough and accessible enough that we could increase production by 20x.
i would be beyond surprised if covering 10% of the planet's land in solar didn't require any new science or engineering. i doubt we even have the labor force or materials to pull it off, timeline notwithstanding
It's carbon neutral on the order of magnitude of a century. If we were to plant a forest in the Sahara, it'll largely be net positive capture for at least 3 decades, and then we'll be able to replace coal with that wood, making a global net zero (but we'd already have reduced co2 in the atmosphere).
Replacing oil with wood would probably require quite a lot of work though (as making the desalination plants to make a forest)
So, for example, we have cleared forests to make way for farmland. Reversing that would increase the total amount of carbon held.
Perhaps I should have said increasing the amount of equilibrium biomass or something to more clearly include rewilding or ecosystem changes. It’s not just plants that are a carbon store, after all.
I don’t think this is likely to represent a full solution, if that is the subtext to your comment.
> the output of a 500 000 km^2 solar farm per year is about equal to the total yearly energy use of humanity
And discovering this factoid didn't lead you to realize how insane the whole idea is?
> Just a lot of money, politics, manufacturing, and construction.
Oh yes. Surely just a matter of that. I understand you're more interested in getting ballpark numbers than actually solving this problem though, so thanks for sharing.
We need to store about 10B tons of C per year if we were to be carbon neutral. We're going to need to build a lot of megastructures out of wood to even keep pace.
We still need building materials, and trees are cut down all the time for building materials and paper. Besides, wood decays very, very slowly. There's a couple trees nearby that were felled 25 years ago, and they are just starting to rot.
Besides, they don't have to be buried that deep. People are still finding intact bodies in bogs in England from thousands of years ago. They're just a few feet down.
In the desert things decay pretty slowly, too. See Sylvester, the cowboy mummy in a museum in Seattle that was found in a sand dune in Arizona with a bullet hole in him.
Bogs are a "special" type of environment that are good at preserving or mummifying tissue, and the majority of bog bodies are not preserved, they're in various states of decay. It's a big deal when an intact and/or well-preserved bog body is found because of it.
you think 25 years is enough to store CO2 in? even 1000 years is not enough since we will need to entomb all available wood. But that is all stupid anyway because of this:
To start reversing the CO2 emission we would need as many trees it takes to take up the current CO2 emissions and then a bit more.
From what I found you can estimate every m³ (a bit less than 1 American fridge) of Wood stores 1 ton of CO2. Say each hectare of Forest with fast growing trees produces ~ 10m³ per year (more when they are cut down but they need to grow over a decade+. So if they take 10 years that is 100m³ wood yield at the end).
Humanity produced by some estimates 37 billion tons of CO2 in 2020. That means you need 3.7 billion hectare of forest.
The USA has a land area of 157.7 million hectare. So you need an area of 23 times the LAND area of the United States of America just for trees just to HALT CO² at today's level.
How well are fast growing trees growing in the Arizona desert btw?
Things grow very well in the Arizona desert when they're watered. Lots of sunlight!
You're right that trees cannot be 100% of the solution. But they can be a big part of it.
> you think 25 years is enough to store CO2 in?
It's starting to rot at 25 years, lying in the rain and mud and beetles. There are logs much much older than that lying around the local woods. There are stumps over a century old. My house is 25 years old, and the wood structure that has been kept dry has no rot at all. None. Zero. Simply by keeping it dry.
> It's starting to rot at 25 years, lying in the rain and mud and beetles. There are logs much much older than that lying around the local woods. There are stumps over a century old.
Limited to rot resistant trees, such as cedars. Even then, not shielded from the rain for 25 years and not seeing much rot would be amazing.
My point is that 25, 100, or 5000 years is not a long time in this case. The also issue with wood is not that it "cannot be part of the solution". The issue is that it is part of green-washing "solutions" that always calm people down for a bit because something is being done. then nothing else happens for 10 years.
Also I live in a house made from wood, stone, straw and dirt. Depending on how you count its about 400 years old. before that it burned to the ground once. And the Wooden parts aren't actually that old they have been replaced as recently as 100 years ago. the inside has been redone in the 80ies tho and a lot of the wood got taken out.
Its silly to argue for wood as a storage medium even on the basis of that.
This story sounded so cool, I just looked it up. Unfortunately, the bullet hole is apparently fake and the reason he didn't decay is because an embalmer deliberately mummified him immediately after his death by injecting him with an arsenic-based fluid, which killed off all the bacteria and insects invading the body.
Sounds good, but... Where's the desalination tech which allows to use water in the desert without diverting the existing limited resources from surrounding areas? How do you transport and establish the usable quantities of soil where you have a desert now? That's not a "just plant some trees" solution.
For the record, back of a napkin calculation says: 500000km2 of medium density forest of medium water requirement trees needs ~100MW of energy just for desalination. Then the construction of the irrigation grid, maintaining it, pumping the water, staffing the initial works, machinery, etc. goes on top of that.
So it’s completely unreasonable. We’re not going to be building 100km2 solar plants let alone a 1000km2 one. Even if we do, something like that is enough for the energy requirement of a few countries so the CO2 problem would probably fix itself
It says it covers an area of 56 square kilometers. But, it's not laid out as a square, large amounts of that area are empty.
Also: "The Bhadla Solar Park has faced some challenges due to its location and scale. One of the main challenges has been dust accumulation on the solar panels, which reduces their efficiency and output. The park is also located in an arid region that experiences frequent dust storms and sandstorms."
Whether it's unreasonable or not, I don't think we have much of a choice.
Obviously the goal is to move as much stuff off of GHG emissions, but we've done a lot of damage to the atmosphere. If you look at a CO2 graph in the atmosphere over 40,000 years our GHG emissions are basically a vertical line:
Nature would eventually take care of it, but that would take centuries. On top of that, it's unlikely that we will be able to cut all GHG emissions. Having some amount of carbon capture seems important.
Fortuitous timing from my perspective. I was just thinking in the past day or two about fiddling with numbers in the more mundane 'replace current energy use' w/ 'renewables' realm. The impetus being simply having an extra moment for my mind to regale me w/ impending potential horrors in light of Exxon's release only days ago of their "ha ha, we're definitely sailing right past CO2 etc. required to stay under 2C of global average temp increase by 2050, M'Fers!" report ...
I thought, of course, of the always attractive "breakthrough" possibility, but ... in particular, fusion isn't it.* So, deployment of renewables is the obvious solution ... and, solar, in particular, has made massive strides in the past decade+.
What you're talking about is actually much more attractive, though. Sounds like a potentially great implementation / execution. And, all of this - much more rapid deployment for (electric) power generation, or, even better, as you propose, I think - seems like exactly the context in which a new "TVA" (Tennessee Valley Authority) or similar (maybe even "Apollo Project") would be the way to actually get it done with the urgency that seems warranted.
Of course, the US coffers have been so raided, it may take the kinds of "national pain" experienced around a century ago to generate the political "housecleaning" required to, well really, "right the "USS USA". As usual, it's not clear the will is there in the electorate. But, I'd say this much for sure: as old as I am now, the behavior of people older than me has disgusted me in many ways for years, and anyone younger than me should be thoroughly pissed off, I think. I don't want to veer into more of a rant - suffice it to say ... if you look at the benefits a certain generation enjoyed, then consider their voting for policies / tax breaks likely to deny such benefits to future generations (already happening, of course - take a look at college tuitions in the US, for just one example), it's a travesty.
In any case, I think another commenter raised a good point regarding the materials requirement. I'd imagine that would be "paid back" many times over very easily by the scheme overall, but don't know for sure ... I know there have been issues with having enough of the right type of sand to make high (enough) purity silicon wafers for chip manufacture ... but, my knowledge is very limited in these areas in general. If anyone has a real handle on what the materials side of this type of scheme looks like, I'd be interested...
* It was always such an attractive idea ... sounds so perfect ... until you know about neutron generation / flux and realize that something like a "tokamok", in particular, is just not likely to be economical AT ALL (the problem being that without some method to contain neutrons or method for preventing generation, you bombard your materials and end up having to replace / "decontaminate" / etc. far too quickly ... at least, based on my sense of best methods available around 10 years ago ... last time I was involved in any work even marginally related to anything in that field). In any case, even if we have or can determine ways of further reducing neutron generation or ... doing something w/ Higgs or something to deal better w/ the neutron problem, seems like it'd take more like a "miracle" than a breakthrough at this point for it to have any bearing on the climate problem on the timescale relevant.
Edit: realized couple oversights / clarifications (not that it's likely to matter, but, prefer to put in anyway): I have nothing against fission apart from its merits. It's been expensive and track record hasn't been good - plus waste, proliferation, etc. concerns. Practically, it's the cost issue (generally related to the other issues I mentioned, of course). I keep waiting for the advanced / modular / "standard design" reactors we've been promised for years... the track record vis-a-vis AP-1000 (already rather old, but, at least deploying) is not confidence inspiring.
Regarding "certain generation", I've known too many from that generation who sat in taxpayer funded jobs essentially not fulfilling THEIR responsibilities as they RAILED against taxes and the POOR. I have a dim view based on personal experience - too many I knew were spoiled and hypocritical to an unbelievable degree. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty who were decent etc. So, obviously, I don't mean to blanket condemn any generation ... usual qualifications etc. apply.
If you want to turn it back into an oil like substance you will need to expend more energy than you originally got out of it thanks to thermodynamics. In practice it is even worse than that since separating the CO2 from the N2, O2, and everything else in the atmosphere is also energy intensive.
The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration. This is why people are so angry at NEM 3.0, it's cutting the excess energy production we need as a prerequisite for saving the environment off at the knees.
No, this is incorrect. You can absolutely burn hydrocarbons, use the energy to do carbon capture, and end up with less CO2 in the air than when you started.
Compressed CO2 is still a lower energy state than the hydrocarbons, so you can get net energy out.
You couldn't end up with the same hydrocarbon that you started with, of course - that would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
There is no place to store all that - and don't say depleted gas and oil wells since those are ruined as long term storage by whats been done to them to get the oil or gas out.
So you need to build the structures to keep 20km³ of liquefied CO2 each year (liquefying also takes energy).
And then you need to pump these giant amounts of CO2 sludge (or whatever form it will have) back where you drilled oil out of, hoping it will stay down. That will cost a lot of energy too.
> The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration
Or you build solar and wind plants specifically for carbon sequestration. Then you don't have to worry about coordinating with the needs of the grid. You don't even need the plants to be on the grid. That frees you up to put them places where there is plenty of wind or solar but no infrastructure transporting electricity which would otherwise by useless for solar and wind currently.
California currently gets much of its electricity from a 500 mile long intertie to the Pacific Northwest. There are plenty of plausible places to put a big solar farm which are less than that distance from civilization, e.g. Arizona or Nevada. At which point you want any of its output during peak consumption hours to go to decarbonizing the grid, regardless of what you do with the off-peak.
You actually end up with net negative carbon if you burn natural gas and use the energy to do CO2 capture (albeit just barely). This is because the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds of a hydrocarbon have more energy in them than the carbon-oxygen bonds in the CO2 that is released from combustion.
I'm not sure if you meant to do this on purpose but...
Factoid actually means something that sounds true but isn't, which is exactly the case with the post you're referring to because they didn't account for the extra losses on top of the base thermodynamics.
The word 'factoid' means what the communicating parties agree it means. As per my observation, on HN it currently means something like
"a small probably unimportant but interesting fact"
(wiki definition for factlet[0]). I don't like it, but HN is not the place to cultivate our own language, dang will shadowban and eventually ban us :\ Best we can do is using the word factlet, and hope people will switch to it.
No, because energy isn’t fungible and the world isn’t a single country. Using nuclear to do CO2 extraction in the developed world will still help even as China and India continue to use coal.
This isn’t the first comment in this thread that implies that we need carbon capture to „help out“ those developing countries become carbon neutral.but developing countries are contributing less to the problem than developed ones, have used up only a fraction of the carbon budget of the industrial countries and are also more likely to emit less in the future.
China will likely become carbon neutral before the US, current coal plants notwithstanding.
China is the world’s largest CO2 emitter. India and Africa will join them as they develop in terms of standard of living. It’s irrelevant to climate change who contributed more to the problem in the past.
It costs orders more than extracting it in the first place. Unless you take into account the long term cost of keep extracting oil, then is infinite vs a finite cost, no matter how high is it.
This is all from memory:
Diethyl-ammonia works but is energy intensive to regenerate. Zeolites require less energy to regenerate but also absorb water. Some zeolite crystal structures might exist that are less hydroscopic, but have yet to be discovered. MOFs are like zeolites, but easier to fine tune and some good CO2 absorbers that are also not too hydroscopic have been identified. MOFs have some serious stability issues.
It must take at least what coal releases when burned, but there are two catches…
The first is that it could use intermittent renewable energy. Solar PV during the day is already cheaper than coal. Just run CO2 removal when renewables generate surplus.
The second is that coal plants are heat engines. Most of the energy released burning coal is rejected as heat. CO2 removal might in theory be made more efficient than this. So it might not be quite as bad as it appears at first glance.
That being said I still doubt this technology could make a dent in the problem without massively cheap energy. It would require either solar panels that are as cheap as vinyl siding or something like practical high yield fusion.
We will need more wind and solar than required for load to cover cloudy and calm days. I have seen 3x to 5x overcapacity. This should be cheaper than long-term storage, at least with current storage prices, and better to have more power than storage. The result is there will be extra capacity for running intermittent stuff like capture.
I haven't seen anyone address how we will pay for carbon capture. By the time we start doing real capture, the CO2 produced should be low so carbon tax will be low.
> We will need more wind and solar than required for load to cover cloudy and calm days. I have seen 3x to 5x overcapacity.
The theory being that power would be essentially free most of the time because there would be a surplus. But then wouldn't people just use more? It's only "free" until people come up with other uses for inconsistently available large amounts of power, at which point you have to outbid them.
This assumes that what people pay for power is determined by how much it costs to produce. That's already not the case in most countries. Energy prices are determined by taxes and subsidies.
You can install renewable energy at home. If it's cheap enough to overbuild by 3-5x and the grid is overcharging for it then people will do that instead, and then the grid ceases to operate in most places. There is a non-trivial possibility of that happening regardless if storage gets cheap enough, because local generation and storage would remove the cost of distribution and outcompete the grid.
More to the point, that clearly wouldn't be "free electricity"; it would be a huge tax on electricity -- on renewable electricity -- used to subsidize the energy use of carbon capture. That's not free because the market price is zero, it's "free" because someone else is paying for it.
It's also crazy. You have the ability to offer cheap renewable energy and you're going to not? What kind of misanthropic policy is that?
Paying for carbon capture is big problem since there is no profit and needs to be done collectively.
One option would be taxing energy. The carbon tax would be small by that time. That would also keep the price higher.
I had idea for retroactive carbon tax, making people pay for their past consumption. Those of us that are older got lots of benefit from polluting CO2, and makes sense to have us pay to remove it. The feasibility depends on the price, and how to charge lots of people who are retired.
> One option would be taxing energy. The carbon tax would be small by that time. That would also keep the price higher.
Taxing energy, carbon or otherwise, is highly regressive. It only works if you refund the money. Otherwise people freeze to death or go broke.
Taxing non-carbon energy makes no sense because you're not trying to discourage it. You might as well just use income tax.
> I had idea for retroactive carbon tax, making people pay for their past consumption.
The records to use for this are unavailable. Nobody knows how much gasoline someone bought in 1995. It would also generally be impossible to collect; what if your contribution for 75 years of carbon emissions was meant to be $250,000 and you only have $100,000? Do we take your last dime and leave you to starve? What about people who are already dead? Do their kids have to pay?
Retroactive taxes and taxes on retirees are both going to be intensely unpopular.
Which is why people want to justify it by claiming we're going to have a lot of surplus energy to use for it. But how does that work unless the competing demand for energy is negligible, which seems implausible?
Every part of it seems like some company trying to extract government money for their inefficient solution that costs more than it would to reduce emissions by the same amount.
There are two problems, only one of which is discussed here.
We need to remove the last century's emissions, and yes, that can be, and initially will be an excuse to pollute further. I see that as a transient problem: eventually we will start to structure things against it by internalizing other externalities (e.g. other pollution) and expanding the emissions scope (not just oil). It's reality that we can't decarbonize overnight (we could't replace all the passenger cars by Monday, and how many peoples' pensions depend on oil stocks?), so funding cleanup technology on the backs of oil pollution helps get it going.
The second, bigger problem is that the thermodynamics of these plants that suck the atmosphere through a straw is absurd, a trivial calculation that is obvious upon reflection. The atmosphere is f'ing huge, and you need to attack the problem at scale, which means, like it or not, physical chemistry and biology powered by sunlight.
One thing I haven't seen is analysis if carbon capture from air or weathering rocks is better. Carbon capture has been promoted as way to make fossil fuel plants green, and does have advantage of working better on concentrated exhaust.
But carbon capture will really be needed once fossil fuel plants are gone.
I think weathering rocks may be the better option. It doesn't require any new technology. It would be similar to mining but with steps to crush the rock and either spread it or dump in ocean. We could use electrified version of existing equipment.
Direct air carbon capture refers to pulling the carbon out of the atmosphere, regardless of the process (weathering rocks, using catalysts, etc). Most processes perform better with a higher percentage of CO2 in the intake, so most could be stuck on a smokestack (or in an urban center).
My take from reading and listening to things about this is: the jury is still out. All of these ideas are very early in their learning curves, so it seems the relative slopes of those curves is still a very open question.
I've said this in a couple other comments, but my perspective on this is: That's why it's awesome people are working on it now! When you still have a couple decades to travel up the learning curve is exactly the right time to work in earnest on a nascent technology.
It's a great thing that people started working on wind and solar power a few decades ago!
Why are we even trying to suck it out of the sky, if we could much easier suck it out of the oceans, where it is 150 times more concentrated, and then let the oceans suck it out of the sky as they have done for the whole time.
This paper https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-... two years ago said that it would need solar plants worth less than the COVID stimulus bill, and it would produce H2, soft water and limestone, all of which can be sold and can displace fossil sources.
China went from poor to being pretty well off in a few decades. We should assume that poor countries won't stay poor and that they will work towards our levels of quality of life.
> How much % of the worlds population are financially able to afford international shipping?
Another way of looking at that is: what percentage of the world regularly consumes products that went from one country to another by plane and I think it's probably reasonably high?
The entire thought process of "Occidental Petroleum": "So we are using C02 to push oil out of the ground, but it's kinda expensive, can we make it so government pays for it? Totally, call the Media Relationships department".
The whole thing is green washing theater. It doesn't even address how the "sucking CO2 from the air" is going to be ecologically viable, just a hand-waivy "Think giant fans. Chemical reactions suck the carbon out of the sky and then store it underground." lol
Unless you want to bomb China and India and Africa, carbon capture is going to be a major aspect of any response to climate change. The amount of concrete that’s going to be poured in those places over the next century is by itself going to release enormous amounts of CO2.
My point is it is rediculous to argue for geoengineering while pointing your finger at the third world, when the country with the largest historical emissions still relies heavily on coal.
It sure does.
One chinese person driving a gas vehicle, shouldn't be blamed over Taylor Swift taking a thousand trips on her jet just because he is from China.
Everybody needs to pitch in.
It’s not about blame, and we will never get everyone even in single countries to “pitch in,” much less have the world working together. That’s a children’s fantasy.
The world the west is confronted with is this: Chinese and Indians want to live like Americans. The legitimacy of the government in places like China and Bangladesh rest on being able to deliver 6-8% GDP growth every year. They won’t do anything to jeopardize that, and we can’t control what they do. So carbon capture is going to have to be a pillar of any climate mitigation strategy.
It seems pretty self evident that China would not be in favor of military action to enforce climate goals. GP's point was that still developing nations are going to continue producing CO2 regardless of what electric grids look in OECD nations.
What matters for the climate is absolute emissions, not the some underlying fairness metric. Chinese CO2 emissions dwarf ours. Further: China's CO2 emissions are rising. Ours peaked in 2008, and are today lower than they were in 1990.
What matters is per capita emissions, not some arbitrary measure based on how borders happen to have been drawn hundreds of years ago. A small country like Kuwait, or the US (relative to China) cant just pretend not to be part of the problem, because they can point at some region with more people that consequently have larger emissions.
And historical emissions are relevant, since the carbon budget relates to the total amount of co2 in the air above pre-industrial levels. That co2 budget was largely "spent" by the US.
Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam. There's already more CO2 in the air than we want. Even after we get to net zero emissions, we'll want to suck some of it back out. It's reasonable to question whether it makes sense to be focusing resources on it right now, when it is not the lowest hanging fruit toward reaching net zero, but personally I think it is, because it takes many years for technologies to mature, so it makes sense to get that flywheel spinning on these technologies now.
I think what you're responding strongly to is capturing emissions from point sources where fossil fuels are being burned. I don't think that's a scam either - I'd characterize it as an unfortunate necessity due to path dependency - but it's a very different thing than direct air capture.
An oil company running a piddly project and getting it covered on NPR, with a favourable reaction from the Department of Resource Extraction, is a scam.
Sorry I meant nobody who works seriously on climate solutions. There are many people who are in that category and reasonably believe point source capture is a bad / scam idea (which, again, I disagree with this strongly), but it's still clear to those people that we need to get direct air capture of some kind working at some point in time to reverse the trend rather than just mitigate it like we're doing now (though many reasonably believe now isn't the right time, which, again, I disagree with).
Any solution that draws electricity from the grid is a scam because it's better to shut it down along with the matching amount of power generation.
Any solution that relies on scarce resources like fertile soil, freshwater or agricultural waste is a scam because it has zero impact at this scale and will never grow beyond that.
In theory, there are feasible solutions that would rely e.g on solar energy and seawater, but I'm yet to see one.
If you people "who works seriously on climate solutions" want to be taken seriously outside of your circle, you first need to call out openly and honestly all the scams in your field.
But since they amount to like 95% of it no one dares to disrupt the flow of money. Basically you're like "people seriously working on mortgage derivative solutions" in 2008.
> If you people "who works seriously on climate solutions" want to be taken seriously outside of your circle, you first need to call out openly and honestly all the scams in your field.
I didn't say I was one of those people. But the reason the people who do work seriously on climate technology don't consider DAC a scam is not that they are dishonest, it's that it isn't a scam; it's a nascent technology that may not work out, but currently seems promising.
> Any solution that draws electricity from the grid is a scam because it's better to shut it down along with the matching amount of power generation.
The nice thing about connecting things to the grid is that then instead of decarbonizing the energy use of a bunch of heterogenous things, you can focus on decarbonizing the grid, and then everything connected to it benefits at once.
As a general rule, "nobody thinks that" or "nobody is saying that" are false -- there are always folks who do, sometimes very vocally. We must stop pretending extremists aren't out there.
I thought it would be clear from context that I meant "nobody who seriously works on this problem" rather than "no internet randos". People on social media believe all kinds of dumb things.
But there is an actual and notable difference of opinion between point-source carbon capture and direct air capture among people who work in the space.
It’s a sincere question. I didn’t have a point. I was surprised to see someone saying that attempting to sequester carbon for the good of the planet is a scam.
Saying something is a scam implies it’s completely a scam.
Equating NFTs with attempting to sequester carbon is not an appropriate comparison.
Most people working at Fox are not Rupert Murdoch and haven’t signed a contract with the devil using a newborn’s blood.
Jokes aside, some organisations exist primarily for the benefit of special interests.
In fact, most organisations serve a special interest, it’s just that in many cases that’s “shareholders” and we’ve all accepted that as a stand-in for “the economy” and call it a good thing.
There are many organisations that exist only to serve some agenda.
Most think tanks, for example. Lobby groups, industry organisations, unions, etc…
Sometimes these interests align with the general public interest but most often they do not. That’s why they need private funding — the public demand doesn’t exist.
Hydrogen power is a classic example. Just look at the companies behind the hydrogen companies and it is all petrochemical giants. They’re simply “greenwashing” their dirty energy.
The people working for these special interest organisations are just like everyone else working for shareholder-owned private profit organisations. They’re not evil, selfish, or deluded. They’re just accepting a salary in exchange for labour.
Think of the employees of Enron or Theranos. They weren’t evil, they were just working for companies that were.
Net negative carbon emissions requires money. Somebody will have to pay a lot of money to capture and sequester that carbon. Their plan is to have the oil pay for it, but eventually it will have to be us.
Their solution doesn't solve the problem, but it's a step on the path towards a solution.
The primary assumption is that solar energy is going to be almost free within a decade because we will massively overprovision it to balance yearly variation.
Then you need to find a cheap industrial process which uses electricty to do something which has a positive climate impact.
Chemical reactions suck the carbon out of the sky and then store it underground
We used to call this swamps back when we thought wetlands were useless and were busily filling them in to create "productive" land, like farmland, thereby losing 85 percent of our global wetlands since the 1700s.
I'm fond of the saying "That government is best which governs least."
I would like to see a wetlands version of Temple Grandin's guidelines for the beef industry that got widely adopted because McDonald's de facto enforced it. They give you a list of goals or standards and don't micromanage how to achieve it.
Excellence requires some flexibility. Top-down dictates tend to set a minimum standard but frequently also de facto undermine the ability to hit a higher bar.
I just want to point out how efficient your last sentence is in deflecting criticism about him.
You start with a strawman: "people dislike him because of his delivery instead of his message". This way you immediately dismiss critics of him as "focussing on the tone instead of the content".
But if that didn't convince the reader, you immediately follow up with an argument against people who dislike the content, by saying that flaws in content also don't really matter as long as he's more than 50% right.
Uh, we just weren't recording the amounts of carbon dioxide that were being removed from the sky in the past, by green stuff that we've killed off. The sad reality is that we're (net) emitting record amounts of carbon dioxide.
the Sad thing is those were not sucking CO2 out of the Atmosphere for a long time - they were just carbon neutral because trees and wood does not last forever and decaying wood releases the CO2 back in to the air.
That means you cannot plant yourself out of climate change in any reasonable time frame.
Is there anything I can do at a small scale on my own to sequestrate carbon dioxide?
For example, I could install solar panels and use them to power a machine that sequestrate carbon dioxide. Does such technology exist?
After trying to reduce our emissions as much as possible, what kind of "best" choice to we have next?
Individually, reducing the carbon emissions you are directly responsible for (either by using greener tech or just reducing consumption) and planting some trees is basically the best you can do directly. This kind of tech, if it does become a good solution, will be a large industrial process, not something it makes sense to operate individually. And of course the best thing to do is continue to advocate for action politically, even though it may be hard to count exactly how much of a difference you are making there.
I think the best way to sequester carbon out of the air is to plant a sapling, let it grow into a big tree, and then keep the tree around (or at least keep the wood in some form). If you know anyone with a chunk of land, try to convince them to plant a lot of trees.
That is indeed the best you can do, as an individual, for carbon capture. It is also entirely useless, as the amount of carbon a tree sequesters are completely irrelevant at the scale of the problem. The largest tree in the world weighs less than 600 tonnes. That means it captured at best 2200 tons of CO2 - and that is the lifetime total, over 2200-2700 years.
Charcoal is stable in the ground at least for a couple of centuries, probably longer, and reasonably good for plants. So you can just till it under or bury it.
Store it. That's the carbon you've sequestered, now you need to make sure nothing happens with it to turn it back into CO2. Careful in particular that it doesn't just catch fire.
The global ecosystem is a living, complex, adaptive system, and will recover with or without human intervention. Whether humans survives as part of that adaptation remains to be seen.
Rather than looking at this as if we are separate from the ecosystem we live in, and try to sequester carbon, I think the better approach is to develop deeper relationships with local ecosystem.
The problem isn’t carbon. The problem is that the carbon is not moving through the ecosystem. Probably one of the more practical things is to separate the local hydrological cycle from the local carbon cycle — that is, plant more stuff; feed onsite composting to the plants; make greater use of greywater, even blackwater; design dwellings and sites with sun and shade and more passive heating and cooling in mind.
"The global ecosystem is a living, complex, adaptive system, and will recover with or without human intervention."
On the trajectory we're currently on, a significant fraction of all species on earth could go extinct. There will be life, yes, but significantly less diverse life.
Take polar bears for example. At the rate things are going, they will go extinct. On the other hand, the polar bears that are cross breeding with their cousins, the grizzly bear, are producing offspring better adapted to melting ice caps.
If we want to have better genetic diversity, it’s not going to come from reducing carbon emissions. It will be things like planting wildlife refuges in your front yard, at least poly-cropping not mono-cropping, letting landraces develop for local conditions instead of insisting on standardized produces. It’s participating within the ecology and not trying to take the entire yield and maximizing usefulness to humans. Reducing carbon emissions will not, by itself, get us there.
The carbon being put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels wasn't part of the ecosystem for millions of years. Simply moving it around the cycle isn't really going to solve the excess (though whether the air is the best place to try to remove it from the cycle is an important question).
Pollution, desertification, ocean acidification, habitat destruction are as great, if not greater concerns, and yet here we are, picking a single metric as if changing that alone will solve everything.
Well, a lot of those are being driven in large part by climate change. I don't think I was saying that reducing CO2 back to pre-industrial would solve all environmental problems, just that reducing it is an important part to improving a lot of them.
Pollution is not driven by climate change. It is driven by our industrial processes that includes fossil fuels. It also includes the processes that goes into high-tech materials. We don’t have forever chemicals and microplastics because of climate change.
Desertification has to do with ecosystems degenerating. While there are regions that are desertifying because of changes in percipitation patterns, our industrial scale agriculture and feedlots are depleting the soil in a way that is leading to desertification, even without changes in climate patterns. We kill soil with fertilizers and pesticide. We got rid of beavers, and the way they reroute rivers and watershed to spread out water, making the land less resilient. We pipe water to grow things in areas we probably shouldn’t. The Great Dust Bowl was not a result of climate change.
Ocean acidification is a result of the ocean absorbing more atmospheric CO2 as a consequence of burning fossil fuels. It has affects on the health of marine ecosystems. It is not a consequence of climate change.
The problem is that it will be a lot harder to grow food after 3°C of warming and also to get people drinking water. At some point your "deepening relationship" has to feed billions of people. That's assuming the heating is stopped at that point. Otherwise it gets worse until people are starving, which might eventually reduce CO2 emissions.
Atmospheric temperature is one thing. A focus on that leaves blindspots to things like land temperatures.
Soil is alive, dirt is dead. Healthy soils helps with water retention, and changes the local microclimates. So does designing canopy layers — agroforestry and perennial food forests.
Industrial scale monocropping is not adaptive, and kills off soil. It is fragile, and contributes little to regulating temperatures in the local microclimates.
There are solutions beyond simply looking at carbon emissions or industrial scale carbon sequestering.
Soil damage only happens where it happens while warming can significantly reduce arable land on the planet. This matters a lot for feeding people.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't care about maintaining soil qualiy but your comment "heating irrelevant, just deepen your relationship with the environment" is vague and people basically hear "do nothing about the CO2/warming because it's fine, we just need more hippies loving the soil". That's probably not what you meant but it's how it sounds.
There was a time I used to think I was doing my part by recycling. I did not know then, this stuff gets ship overseas to be dumped, or that it often gets burned. Or that the ethics of recycling was a result of clever marketing by the corps involved to shift this burden onto individuals. I grew up with it and recycling made be feel as if I was doing my part to help save the planet without really ever considering a change in the way of life.
This is exactly what I am seeing with the messaging around “climate change” and “carbon emissions” and “carbon credits”. It allows people to continue with the way of life they are used to and feel good about doing their part.
When I say “get connected with the local ecosystem”, I am not espousing a hippie view.
Part of our modern way of life insulates us from really understanding at an instinctual and bodily level, what it means to be a part of an ecosystem or a community. I mean it literally: many people do not actually know what it is like to eat an apple off a tree, let alone a relationship with that particular tree, and all the birds, bees, worms, fungi, and microbes involved with that apple.
I don’t know how to say this any more literally and directly. Advocating for “doing something about CO2/warming” is so far away from getting your hands dirty, and knowing at a deep level, that this is our home, and we’re not the only ones living here, and that the land can very well provide healthy food, and our actions directly
impacts the land around us.
Oh and as for warming — the Soviets were able to adapt warm-weather fruit bearing trees, and we can do the same. There are plenty of heat-hardy edible plants, if we are willing to go beyond the small handful of monocropped “food” we have standardized on. We can try using industrial scale solutions, but we are just kicking the can down the road. It is our way of seeing the world around us that lead us here.
Purchase synthetic bio-oil CO2 sequestration from Charm Industrial at $600/metric ton. They already have this in production, and sequester CO2 in the form of shitty biodiesel in spent oil wells. You can go net zero immediately and literally.
Clearly this technology isn’t an alternative to curtailing emissions, but we do still need carbon in our post-fossil future (e.g. for steel making, and as an input to liquid fuel synthesis). It would be nice to get this from the air.
I think we should fund more research for converting the CO2 into usable products instead of just storing it (stuff like carbon fixation or chemical conversion). Who knows, perhaps we find a carbon negative (energy wise) solution to just convert it on site, and we can place these "factories" around the world where there's an excess of energy (near nuclear power plants, desert solar installations, etc.)
CO2 removal and sequestration will be a net energy sink no matter what you do, since it amounts to “unburning” some portion of fossil fuel combustion that’s already been committed. The question is what methods are the least bad in terms of thermodynamics, and how much renewable and nuclear energy capacity are we willing to divert?
Plants are a temporary solution at best, as they decompose and catch fire which puts their carbon back in the atmosphere. We need to be sequestering CO2 into more permanent forms
>How do you think the “carbon” got into the ground in the first place. You’re being gaslit.
When the carbon deposits formed some parts of plants/animals did not break down, because a microorganism that could break them down hadn't evolved yet. They essentially just piled up for millions of years. Eventually such microorganisms did appear and that's why wood rots.
Commercial growers add CO2 to their greenhouses because plants grow bigger when the CO2 in the atmosphere is in higher concentrations. But when the plant dies all that CO2 goes back into the atmosphere.
Our problem isn't oxygen, our problem is too much carbon.
If it works I think its hard to call it greenwashing. It might be a bad allocation of resources, if the resources could be spend on more efficient solutions.
It might also be greenwashing if presented as a solution in it self, but as a supplement in the transition it might make sense.
Mother Nature has provided us with this "technology" all along, in the form of plant life. It'd be imagined in science fiction if it didn't already exist! And it's self-reproducing and only needs water and minerals in the soil to survive. It's miraculous! We just need to stop destroying it, plant more, and let the problem solve itself. There are so many other productive uses of our wealth, like housing people.
That's not how it works, sadly. Oil and coal got created in a time where there where no microbes that could break down trees, so dead trees just built up over millions of years and when buried slowly turned into oil and coal. Nowadays there are microbes that break down dead wood, so besides that it would take an enormous amount of time for plants to suck out enough CO2, it would also not stay out of the atmosphere. Unless you start cutting down trees and storing them in some underground caves in conditions where they don't rot or something. A huge and very slow effort.
Common myth. Millions of years of tree growth would have taken the earth to ~0 ppm CO2, preventing plant life. There were likely organisms other than white rot fungi that broke down lignin. Most petroleum formation occurred from dead diatom sediments on the sea floor.
Isn't the plant life carbon neutral? I thought whatever carbon a tree extracts during its lifetime, it releases when it decomposes. Unless we chop it down and store it (and plant a new tree!), the tree doesn't remove much carbon from the atmosphere (long term, on average). Do I misunderstand how this works?
> I thought whatever carbon a tree extracts during its lifetime, it releases when it decomposes.
Trees can live for hundreds of years. Guess what happens when there are more live trees.
> Unless we chop it down and store it (and plant a new tree!), the tree doesn't remove much carbon from the atmosphere (long term, on average).
But you in fact can do this. Or chop it down and make furniture or buildings out of it, which themselves can last for hundreds of years.
And even if you don't know some cost effective way to keep the dead trees from decomposing, that process itself takes decades after the tree has already grown and died, which at minimum buys us a decent amount of time to figure something out.
A single plant is carbon neutral over its entire growth/decomposition cycle, yes. But the ecosystem as a whole, plants grow faster than they decompose, and it is carbon negative. The excess oxygen production is balanced by animals and fire. So yes, we can make plants more carbon negative by slowing decomposition, and by cutting them down when growth rates slow making room for new plants. Bury the stuff, sink it in the ocean, build wooden things, use it as a component of other manufacturing materials. Just add land and water, which seems to be the problem.
Basically all the coal we have burnt was at one point peat bogs. They seem to have been a great success at sequestering carbon for us to eventually release. We've done so, proving your point, but it took a while.
Reforestation, with controlled logging of mature trees to sequester the carbon. Most likely as a building material, given that our current demand for wood is higher than what existing forests can sustainably supply.
The people working on CO2 capture aren't idiots, they know that plants are a competing technology. People are pursuing CO2 capture because it is orders of times more efficient than plants in terms of space use, water use, etc.
To be fair, if they aren't idiots or deluded, they're cynical profiteers and scammers. Industrial carbon capture does nothing useful other than helping to sell a narrative that we can fix global warming without massively reducing emissions.
I’ll grant that sequestering CO2 requires land, but water falls from the sky. In terms of value, there’s a lot of economic distortion going on here: technology gets you investor attention, while the unexciting act of buying up land for CO2 sequestration in plant matter won’t get VCs and other investors to hand you money. There’s a profit angle here; that’s the only reason anyone will invest in this stuff.
This kind of cynicism is brain rotting. Different people are trying to figure out different things. Planting a bunch of trees is something other people are working on. It just isn't what the specific people in this article happen to be are working on.
No, I got it right the first time: it's cynicism that rots brains. Cynicism sounds smart, but pretty much never is. Both optimism and skepticism are good. But cynicism is bad.
The comment I replied to was cynicism rather than skepticism.
My skepticism (call it cynicism if you like; it doesn’t bother me) is borne of nearly 50 years watching history repeat itself and people chasing fads. I’m all for technology, but it’s not a solution to every problem. If you think technology is the best solution to restoring our earth’s balance, make your case.
I think the $10T or whatever outlandish figure that proponents of carbon-recapture technology plan to spend would be better spent on a land trust on which native plants would be cultivated. $10T will buy an enormous amount of land upon which billions of trees can grow.
Growing trees on land trusts (and land trusts in general) is a great idea. It's also not in any way mutually exclusive with developing carbon capture technology.
If it were actually $10T in public funds that people are proposing to develop carbon capture technology (it isn't, but it is irrelevant whether or not it is), then I would certainly vote in favor of another $10T to buy land and plant trees.
Money really isn't the relevant constraint here. The constraints to carbon capture are, in my view, the same as any other climate technology: public and private will, land availability, and energy. That's in order of most to least intractable.
The global economy could easily absorb $20T of public funding for the DAC + billions of trees plan from now to 2050, if there were the political will for it. But of course, there isn't.
But if there were, the constraint would then be the trade-off between land use to plant the trees vs. solar arrays for the energy to power the DAC machines. But one really nice thing about DAC is that it may not have much constraint with respect to location, so it may be possible to put it in places with plentiful energy that can't easily be used in other ways. (This is not true of land for billions of trees.)
But the will thing really is the biggest constraint, and it's why I'm an "all of the above" advocate. There are lots of great solutions to this problem that you can wishcraft about executing if you were the unchallenged emperor of the world, but there is no path to an authoritarian global hegemon who uses their power to plant billions of trees. And even if there were, frankly I think global authoritarianism would be a worse outcome for humanity (and the environment) than our current climate change trajectory.
So there's no point daydreaming about some perfect "if we would only do this one thing!" solution and getting all frustrated and cynical about how it isn't going to happen because people are too selfish or stupid or whatever. That's letting perfect be the enemy of good. The solution to this will be a cobbled together coalition of a bunch of different stuff - both policy and technology - that people and governments are willing to do.
And you may retort, as many do, "no, that won't be the solution, there just won't be a solution, we're doomed!". And you may be right about that. And I may even have joined the cynical doomer contingent, if it weren't for all the herculean effort at invention over the last half a century having already put us on a much better trajectory than anyone thought we would be on at this point. We're not so far off from being able to beat this thing, we have almost all the technology we need, and a ton of people interested in attacking the problem from different angles both for selfless, but importantly also now for selfish reasons.
It will be good if wealthy and well-run oil companies begin to see a bigger upside in carbon-negative technologies rather than carbon positive ones. Very annoying from a karma / spite perspective, but good from a solving-the-problem perspective.
I don't disagree at all that billions of trees would be an excellent "technology" for this, but it's just naive to put all your eggs in that one not-gonna-happen basket, and it's childish to throw up your hands in frustration that it isn't going to happen and become cynical about other technologies.
No they weren't. The vaccines were incredibly successful, saving millions of lives, and have been constantly pilloried by "the most cynical or outright conspiratorial people", to this day.
The thing those people are usually most credited with being right about - the "lab leak theory" - is also not something they have ever been proven right about. It was indeed very wrong to shut down all discussion and debate about that theory, because there was - and still is - insufficient evidence either way. But that was something that many people outside the cynical-and-conspiratorial crowd said at the time. Indeed, one of the reasons it was such a giant mistake to discredit the perfectly reasonable "we don't have enough evidence to say whether lab leak or animal-borne is more likely" folks is that it lumped them in with the cynical-and-outright-conspiratorial crowd that was, and still is, incorrectly convinced that there is compelling evidence that it was a lab leak. The truth is that nobody outside the party leaders in China will ever know the answer to this. But the completely sure lab leak people are just as wrong as the completely sure animal-borne people; it's just very uncertain.
This is actually an excellent demonstration of the difference between cynicism and skepticism. The cynical people were just as wrong about everything as anyone in the un-skeptical mainstream.
You're retconning the idea that "many people outside the cynical-and-conspiratorial crowd" talked about the lab leak theory, which isn't the case. Anyone who raised it was marked as being in that crowd regardless of what they said or who they were. I remember all this very clearly, the idea that this one was somehow different is just wrong. Everyone who talked about that was dumped into the "dangerous people who must be censored and suppressed" bucket, right up until one day overnight the US government's position suddenly flipped, at which point there had supposedly always been lots of open discussion. Just total coincidence that the DRASTIC guys who blew it open all had to be anonymous.
Other things that were dismissed as cynical expert-bashing that they were later proven right about:
1. They will develop a vaccine and force us to take it using some sort of unforgeable marker (predicted in 2020, debunked as conspiracy theory, proven true <2 years later)
2. Masks work (debunked by experts Jan/Feb/March 2020)
3. Masks don't work (debunked by experts after that)
4. "Crush the curve" won't last two weeks, it will go on for much longer (predicted April 2020, proven true months later).
5. The virus can spread on long range air currents via aerosols so masks/lockdowns/mass testing won't impact case numbers (debunked Feb/Mar 2020, proven true shortly after by the Diamond Princess, denied for years after).
6. The vaccines will turn out to need more than 2 doses (predicted early 2021, debunked, proven true <6 months later).
7. The vaccines won't work even with more than two doses (predicted early 2021), which is of course correct because they were introduced with the claim they were 95% effective against infection which is obviously nowhere even close to true even if you believe the later claims about savings lives.
8. Bill Gates will get rich off the vaccines (tin foil hat garbage until it was true)
9. The vaccines won't really be as safe as they claim (predicted 2020, many severe side effects like heart damage and diabetes are now recognized as being real by the medical community after previously being denied).
And we could go on.
COVID was an absolute shit-show of credentialed "experts" being proven wrong, over and over, by random people on the internet. The pattern was that the most maximally cynical people were always right. For example, in 2020 I didn't believe that governments would force vaccines on people. I thought all the jabbering about qr codes or quantum dots was tinfoil stuff. More fool me: the conspiracy theorists were right and just a year later I was being forced to constantly show qr codes to be allowed to go anywhere or do anything. And I got lucky, I wasn't forced to take it via my job.
> Anyone who raised it was marked as being in that crowd regardless of what they said or who they were.
This reads like maybe you didn't read my comment, and were just like "oh good, an opportunity to pop off on this topic!". I said, explicitly, that lumping in regular skeptical folks with the cynical contrarians was the worst part of the mistake. You aren't expanding on a point we disagree on, you're just venting about it.
Honestly didn't read past your #1, because you're already just spouting bullshit. I saw "Bill Gates" somewhere in the rest of that, so I'm certain it only gets worse from there.
Have a good day!
Apologies to everyone else for feeding the trolls.
Now actually do the numbers on how many trees we need to plant per year, to offset our climate emissions. It's cheaper to capture carbon, and that's saying something.
Not at the scale they'd need t. The sun evaporates water from the sea, but nobody is expecting the whole sea to have evaporated by the end of today - because atmospheric sunlight is too small in scale to boil the ocean.
Basically, yes. But at scale, most ecosystems of plants reach an equilibrium where old plants die and rot, releasing as much CO2 as the growing ones are taking in.
Is this like the in vogue political talking point these days or something. You're like the fifth person across a couple different articles that I've seen make this "point" today.
Instead of supplying any energy to these facilities, one should reduce the production of some coal plant by the same amount of wattage. That would have a better carbon balance.
These are completely independent variables. You can energize DAC facilities and replace coal power plants simultaneously. Whether you do, or don't do, one of these things has no effect on whether you do the other.
I'm not sure why you are downvoted, this is correct on the thermodynamics. It will always take more energy to remove a ton of CO2 than the amount energy you get from a coal or gas power plant producing a ton of CO2.
So to run a DAC plant from a grid that has a decent proportion of electricity generation from fossil fuels, you are making it worse overall (producing more carbon to power the plant than it is removing), and conversely, if you are running a DAC plant from 100% clean energy, you'd get better bang for your buck if you used that clean energy to displace fossil fuel use (because every kilowatt hour of fossil fuel energy you can replace with clean energy prevents a larger amount of carbon being emitted than the DAC plant could remove with the same amount of energy).
From a thermodynamic point of view would only make sense to run a DAC plant somewhere that already had a 100% clean grid, and only when it happened to be producing a surplus of clean energy.
The point is the carbon capture plant shouldn't get any power. For sure there is no point in running direct air capture from carbon-emitting power sources. (It may, but very unlikely, be worth running it from some fossil fuel station with carbon sequestration of its own, but these in effect don't really exist outside of a handful of not particularly successful test projects. Though direct air capture is kind of in the same position at the moment, so it's all basically just experimenting with the technology at the moment.)
This might make sense if there were a single big but scarce global bucket of instantaneously available energy. But that's not how it works. The availability of energy is incredibly skewed across location and time.
Indeed. I wasn't insinuating it never made sense to power something like this today, just that it only makes sense when there is excess renewables available.
Yes but there are excess renewables available, in many places at many times. So it's already the case that it makes sense to power something like this, in many places at many times.
We have know for a long, long time just how important a ratio that minuscule amount makes. As you yourself just stated, if you cut the current minuscule amount to a lower minuscule amount, some plant species would die. And similarly, if you raise the current minuscule amount to a higher minuscule amount, the planet heats up and many animal and plant species will die. The balance required for the ecosystem that includes us took a long time to develop and stabilize. The huge rise in this extremely sensitive number has taken a minuscule amount of time (2 hundred years, not 2 hundred thousand or 2 million). A minuscule number making a huge shock to a huge ecosystem with a lot of inertia, the full effects of which have not yet been felt. But even without our help, I'm sure a new balance will eventually stabilize. And it will likely include humans. Our civilization is a little more fragile though, itself only having been around for a minuscule amount of time and only a global famine away from collapsing.
It also requires a minuscule amount of Novichok to kill a person.
Humans are really bad at understanding very large and very small numbers intuitively.
Would you let me inject 0.02% of your blood volume worth of hydrogen cyanide into your body and we see if it's a "miniscule amount" that can't do anything? Of course not, that's well enough to kill someone! Discounting something because the number looks small must be the laziest bad-faith argument one can make...
And of course nobody wants to remove all the CO2 in the atmosphere. Another silly, bad-faith diversionary argument...
The answer is that we need to store almost 40B tonnes of CO2, or around 10B tonnes of C if we break that down, every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year.
Unless and until emissions are reduced to a tiny minuscule fraction of current ones, carbon capture will not do even one iota to help with global warming.