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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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…
> 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.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Readit News
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.
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.
1: https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/interstate-system/5...
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.
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.)
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.
CO2 + Basalt !== Limestone
Limestone is the fossilized remains of sea creatures.
Wikipedia says:
"Calcium released by basalts binds CO2 from the atmosphere forming CaCO3 acting thus as a CO2 trap."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt#Geochemistry
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.
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 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.
Sadly, I think the situation won’t change until things get a lot worse than they are now. We’re too divided.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 seems quite possible on paper.
https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021
IEA Key World Energy Statistics 2021, pg 54:
(Rounded and expressed in Gt to make it easier to think about them, the actual source numbers: 15461 Mt, 33622 Mt).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.
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).
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.
And we are reaching that point with carbon capture. It does not matter how hard it seems. It still has to be done. There are no other options left.
is 40B including the offset from photosynthesis?
Photosynthesis is cool but there are a lot of fires these days and also decomposition.
But without those details your comment is just a poor quality and lazy attempt to disqualify people who are actually trying something.
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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.
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
37.12 billion metric tons of CO2 currently released per year
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi....
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?
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.
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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.
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.
[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…
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.
It's not clear to me if direct carbon capture needs to be distributed.
We’re still burning record amounts of coal for energy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/09/04/global-coal-...
Will these processes need to wait until we can get the proper amount of renewable energy?
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.
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.
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.
We are currently emitting ~37B tons of CO2 per year. That's ~0.375 C, so assuming we only store the carbon, that's ~10B tons of C per year.
For reference, the Empire State Building is ~365K tons - so you'd need to build ~30 thousand empire state buildings per year with the captured carbon.
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.
A single 708 km x 708 km would have these corners (Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Milan):https://goo.gl/maps/DTxdVCcK3aYUEirw8 (Rough approximation!)
30 of these: 21,240 km x 21,240 km
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.
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.
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.
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.
China will likely become carbon neutral before the US, current coal plants notwithstanding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Terraform is starting out making methane (natural gas) but will move on to kerosene
https://terraformindustries.com/
You could also ban flight but this seems more practical
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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