5 ms·
Appart from things other comments have already mentioned there's some issue that the article doesn't properly reflect: Where does the CO2 come from? You can gr
by hannob 10y ago
Appart from things other comments have already mentioned there's some issue that the article doesn't properly reflect: Where does the CO2 come from?
You can grab the CO2 from the atmosphere and thus produce (temporary) negative emissions. But then you need even more energy in the first place. So naturally you'd get the CO2 from somewhere where you already have large amounts of CO2, e.g. a coal power plant. So you have created a justification to keep the coal plant running (with a supposedly imperfect co2 extraction process). How's that going to work out in a supposedly CO2 free energy future?
Also it should be considered that the CO2 in the plastic isn't gone for good. Plastic has a limited lifetime and will eventually end up in a landfill or a waste processing plant where it'll release its stored carbon back to the atmosphere.
So if your process is "burn coal -> capture CO2 -> use CO2 to create plastics -> plastic ends up in waste processing plant" you have delayed the emissions from the coal plant and you can argue that you have used the coal in a more efficient way, but the CO2 still ends up in the atmosphere.
- adrianN 10y agoThere are many processes that produce CO2. The article mentions cement. Cement production accounts for about 5% of CO2 emissions according to a quick Google.
- hannob 10y agoIt is an option to use process co2 like cement. But you end up with a similar problem: You disincentivize carbon reductions in cement production. If we ever want to get serious about climate change then cement has to reduce its environmental impact. This is a hard problem (I am actually right now researching for an article about the topic), but all models with serious carbon reductions assume that on the medium term co2 emissions have to go down ~95%. As there are other things were carbon reduction is really hard cement can't use up all the remaining 5%. There are and were some startups trying to create greener cement, but all that went nowhere. The one that made most headlines - Novacem - went bankrupt and no longer exists.
- rimantas 10y agoWhy coal? We have nuclear.
- hannob 10y agoHow would you use nuclear as a co2 source? That doesn't make any sense.
- andrewtbham 10y agoI agree, for this to make sense you have to use renewable power source
- jartelt 10y agoBut it might not even make that much sense even in that scenario... If our goal is to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it may be more effective to just add the renewable power source to the grid and further decarbonize our grid. Getting rid of all our coal plants would probably have a bigger impact than designing and building a system that sucks a bit of CO2 out of the atmosphere and makes plastic with it.
- worldsayshi 10y agoTurning CO2 from a coal plant into useful material seems like an oxymoron. The reason that we produce CO2 in the first place is that we get so much energy from turning it into CO2. Going the other way will cost about as much (probably more) energy than we got from burning the original fuel. That is not to say that bad policy can't cause such practice.
- jartelt 10y agoI agree with most of what you say, and agree this is an uneconomical idea. However, I think the more likely scenarios at the end of the process are that the plastic either ends up in a landfill after use or ends up being recycled. Both of these outcomes will not release all the CO2 back into the atmosphere since common plastics do not break down when buried in landfills.