11 ms·

Stripping CO2 from the air and using it to produce carbon-neutral fuel

120 points by fold_left 9y ago

Santosh83 9y ago
Multi-pronged solutions are needed for this massive issue. We need to avoid emissions where we can, switch to clean energy where we can, and use clean-up technologies if they do become energetically feasible. And keep in mind that just planting more trees or preserving existing rainforests can also go a long way. In the end doing something is better than coming up with endless roundtable resolutions and pledges that are then universally ignored.
foxhop 9y ago
So much managed tech for something nature already solved for us passively. I think if we just changed where and how some of our basic input and outputs go we could solve this without any tech. https://halfhillfarm.com/2017/04/21/how-hugelkultur-can-help-heal-the-planet/ https://halfhillfarm.com/2017/04/21/how-hugelkultur-can-help...
- DennisP 9y ago
  Your article says that could absorb a third of emissions, which is great. But it'd be even better if we did that and did everything possible to reduce our emissions.
  - lozenge 9y ago
    Not even a third of emissions - 30% of the increase in emissions. And, I don't see the calculation, but it surely can't be done just from the carbon in people's backyard gardens.
    - foxhop 9y ago
      I could if more people did it instead of loading branches and logs onto trucks and going into the waste stream they can be used on the same property, sunk into the ground and left for 20-30 years. It requires changing how people deal with outputs.
- nanomonkey 9y ago
  Decomposing plant matter creates C02 and methane, so Hugelkultur only suquesters carbon for short periods. Biochar, a.k.a. terrapreta which is buried wood charcoal, on the other hand is thought to be inactive in the soil for closer to 10k years. One can combine energy production from wood gasification, which produces char-ash and biochar to produce a carbon negative electricity source. Taking this a step further one can use the Fischer–Tropsch process on the resultant syngas to produce liquid fuels.
  - foxhop 9y ago
    It sequesters it for 10-30 years and then the plants and trees that are grown on or near it further sequesters CO2 and carbon. I think of composition as a "slow burn" (merging back with air). Also creating bio-char is a pain in the ass and not passive at all.
    - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
      One benefit of biochar is that it anecdotally increases soil fertility, so maybe you could produce more bio diesel while you are at it.
- notabee 9y ago
  The IPCC scenarios, which are already grim, also include hypothetical forms of carbon capture that do not yet exist, in addition to drastic emission reduction, to prevent the Earth from becoming a disaster in the next 50/100 years. This report has a good overview of the difficulties with current carbon capture plans. https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Negative_Carbon/EASAC_Report_on_Negative_Emission_Technologies.pdf https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Negative...
plaidfuji 9y ago
Chemical engineer with experience in alternative fuels here. The key line is this: "But for it to work, it will have to reduce costs to little more than it costs to extract oil today, and – even trickier – persuade countries to set a global carbon price.” Their feedstock costs are probably quite low. Air, and from the sounds of it, water to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. They're probably then doing some combination of reverse water-gas-shift + Fischer-Tropsch to go from CO2 + H2 to diesel. Not unlike a similar project in Qatar using natural gas as their hydrogen source. Problem is that carbon and hydrogen from methane is much cheaper than from air and water. Their electric/energy bill is probably massive, and also begs the question: could they fuel their plant with their own product and still have net energy gain? Or do they depend on cheap energy from more thermodynamically favorable fuels like coal and oil to be viable? Solar, wind, nuclear, batteries, electric self-driving cars, next gen A/C, hopefully fusion someday... these are the energy or conservation technologies of the future, not something that's DOA because of basic thermodynamics.
- breakyerself 9y ago
  It seems like a bet on the perpetually declining cost of solar. The cheaper solar gets the less efficient the conversion rate for storage needs to be to still be viable.
- DennisP 9y ago
  The point of something like this is that, wherever we continue to use liquid fuels, it'd be nice if they were carbon neutral. Jet aircraft will probably keep using jet fuel for quite a while, for example. But of course we'd need some kind of non-carbon energy source to make the fuel. Right now maybe we get the best bang for the buck by applying those sources to the electric grid, but with a carbon price the market would work that out.
  - hunta2097 9y ago
    I totally agree, imagine a country like Australia which has solar-rich land to spare. The efficiencies might not matter so much in exchange for a constant supply of easily-handled fuel. Or maybe a nuclear-powered site which can convert CO2 into CxHy on an industrial scale. With the added advantage of removing CO2 in the process. You also have the added advantage of not having to ship fuel in from chaotic regions of the world. Shipping produces a significant amount of the world's CO2.
LyndsySimon 9y ago
So... Wouldn't burning wood meet the headline?
- phkahler 9y ago
  Yeah, and since coal is dead biomass one would think we can burn that too. I suppose it's possible that billions of years of moss growing on rocks has produced a lot of that biomass, and that it was never all in play at once. But people generally get pissed and defensive when I mention the coal thing. I've never had anyone even attempt to refute the idea that coal is carbon-neutral in scientific manner. That's what makes it so much fun to say.
  - dllthomas 9y ago
    > I've never had anyone even attempt to refute the idea that coal is carbon-neutral in scientific manner. Except maybe nuclear, no source of energy creates new carbon. The question, vis-a-vis carbon neutrality, is "over relevant time scales, does this leave more carbon in the atmosphere (as opposed to sequestered in oil, coal, trees, whatever)?" If you create coal and then burn it, that's carbon neutral (modulo whatever you produced creating the coal). If you dig ancient coal out of the ground and burn it, that's not carbon neutral.
    - phkahler 9y ago
      >> If you create coal and then burn it, that's carbon neutral Right, there was no coal when the earth formed. It's all former biomass and was part of the biosphere. So we need to burn it to actually be carbon neutral. I did offer a refutation of this...
      - dllthomas 9y ago
        You are (willfully?) ignoring my point about time-scale, which your offered refutation doesn't address. Yes, of course the coal hasn't existed forever, and before that the carbon was presumably part of the atmosphere. But that wasn't an atmosphere ever breathed by Homo Sapiens. We don't want to make sure the atmosphere matches that at earth's creation (it wasn't always even significantly oxygenated! and if we want to put back all the carbon that includes killing all life). We want to be sure our activity doesn't leave us with significant negative consequences.
exabrial 9y ago
A few notes to help get this to the mainstream. Take these quotes: * "persuade countries to set a global carbon price" * "paid for by the emitters, or by the fossil fuel suppliers" I think they should carefully examine how such efforts have failed or been sabotaged in the past. The issue most libertarians and conservatives have is not "co2 offsetting" itself, the issue is they don't like taxes and regulations because it interferes with individual liberties. From past experience, hinging an entire industry on a government-created market appears to be a sure path to failure. For all of the clever ingeniuty described here, I'm baffled why no one is addressing that, which seems to be the bigger issue.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- scentoni 9y ago
  The carbon tax (and cap-and-trade) is the right-wing think tank alternative to reducing emissions by regulation, much like the individual mandate/Romneycare/Obambacare/ACA is the right-wing think tank alternative to single-payer/Medicare for all/universal health care. The issue is that the right wing think tanks come up with these alternatives, and then the right wing labels them as a left-wing attack upon America.
- graeme 9y ago
  I am surprised that "add carbon taxes, cut income taxes" doesn't take off. Income taxes distort the economy, so lowering them is a massive benefit - if they can be replaced with another, better revenue source. A carbon tax is an infinitely better revenue source as it reduced externalities. I think rather than focussing on emissions reduction, global climate talks should focus on a global carbon tax, offset by reductions in other taxes. (It's somewhat ineffective for one country to do a carbon tax now. Past a certain point it will just send carbon producing activities to countries without a tax. A globally agreed tax reduces this.) A tax would be the mechanism to reduce emissions. Absent such a mecanism, emissions have only grown, despite accords to reduce them.
  - hedora 9y ago
lazyjones 9y ago
Nature already developed this technology: trees. More seriously: perhaps it's not such a bright idea to build a for-profit industry on the concept of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Plants need it and if we overdo it for the sake of maximising profits, the ecosystem will suffer (alarmism: we'll all starve). Just plant more trees, please.
- eloff 9y ago
  It gets burned and goes straight back into the atmosphere. It's carbon neural, not carbon negative.
  - lazyjones 9y ago
    > It's carbon neural, not carbon negative What does the headline of this thread say? > Stripping CO2 from the air and using it to produce carbon-neutral fuel So, where's the benefit over trees? The drawback is that the fuel doesn't have any uses other than to burn it for energy. Trees, on the other hand, just suck up increasing amounts of CO2 while they grow and they don't have to be turned into fuel.
    - eloff 9y ago
      You missed the headline apparently since you were commenting about the dangers of sucking too much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Clearly if it's carbon neural there's no danger of that happening. Trees are also carbon neutral since they either burn or decompose and return the carbon to the atmosphere. But over much longer timescales than fuel - so they could still be useful in combating global warming (despite what some people say.)
      - hedora 9y ago
        In particular, if you increase the average global biomass over time, then you’ve captured some carbon. Longer term, you can bury that biomass instead of burning it or letting it decompose. Eventually, it will turn back to oil. I guess the question is whether these new technologies are better than buying up tree farms and sending their outputs to landfills at are optimized to minimize decomposition. Edit: Tree farms are a terrible straw man. Are these technologies better than simply instituting bio-waste bins alongside recycling, and burying the bio-waste for long term carbon capture instead of composting?
briantakita 9y ago
Nature already has this technology. Plants & Trees. Plants & Trees have numerous other advantages compared to Bill Gates' solution: * They are less expensive * They don't require a technological infrastructure, meaning 3rd world countries could easily deploy them * They require little to no maintenance * They promote life & ecosystems * They have been tested in the field for hundreds of millions of years * As CO2 increases, plants & trees grow & consume more CO2. A positive feedback loop! Plants & Trees are a far superior solution. We should spends billions of dollars on more plants & trees.
- 87ert3746 9y ago
  and they're beautiful and they sound good
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
blacksqr 9y ago
What is "burning wood" Alex?
- fold_left 9y ago
  You might want to see your Doctor
ilyagr 9y ago
The obvious problem is that too make enough gas to power a gasoline car, you'll need to spend more energy than it takes to charge a Tesla (likely many times more, I'm not sure what the energy efficiency of the conversion process is). I do have a fantasy that if we had an abundance of fusion energy (or just nuclear, perhaps), you could not only power cars, but also make oil from co2 and put it back where it came from.
- ams6110 9y ago
  If the energy is "free" (wind or solar) the efficiency matters a lot less.
rini17 9y ago
I hate when they confuse CO2 extraction with "cleaning the planet". Such popularizing/oversimplifying is irresponsible! These are two completely different things; clearly someone who submitted this to HN understood it too when adding the title.
avmich 9y ago
Even if there is no carbon price, the idea could work if - and that's a rather big if - the cost of making "oil" from air with CO2 and water can be made low enough. We might look into energy efficiencies along the process and into energy efficiencies to make those energy efficient components of the factory. Yes, it's far from closing economically or even energetically today. Will it always be so? However, another aspect seems to worth attention here. It seems rather inefficient first to have cars which make CO2, release it into - rather big - atmosphere, then spend efforts to capture CO2 from that. But this approach - let's pump all the air of the planet through purification devices - allows to do other things, not only capture CO2. How about extracting noble gases (it's already done, AFAIK)? Or other greenhouse gases, like methane? Or ozone-destroying substances? May be we can engineer our atmosphere to our tastes? May be we can use those technologies elsewhere - say, on Venus?
detritus 9y ago
Beyond any greater dialogue about the relevance of this tech, at any scale, in mitigating our impact on the climate, I simply like the idea that this allows for local creation of hydrocarbon liquid fuels in remote locations. Given the amount of energy required to shift energy around the globe, it makes sense to develop systems that can act independently of the greater fuel economy. It also (I think?) allows us to keep using existing ICE tech for years to come, which no matter how utopianistic one gets about electric drives, is an insurmountable reality.
tscs37 9y ago
That's a bit of a weird idea. CO2 is not present in fairly high amounts in the air, using some quick math, I would estimate that for 1kg of CO2, one would need to filter over 2.5 tons of air (Though if we keep pumping more CO2 into the air, this will become more efficient). The energy required to do this won't be trivial, so it would have to be from renewable resources. Why not use those directly? I would suggest it would be more efficient to draw the water from the air and produce hydrogen, which is a clean fuel unlike carbon (which just burns into CO2 again, under normal conditions). And if you run out of water to pull from the air, you can probably find a bit of water on this planet to use, it's not like we want a rising sea level (though it's unlike we will impact the sea level by pumping out the water and turning it into hydrogen fuel) And as I just mentioned, the CO2 you just pulled from the air will burn straight into CO2 again, in fact, it'll burn into the exact same amount of CO2 (assuming clean combustion), so it's just a very inefficient battery... [repost from dupe, original deleted]
- philipkglass 9y ago
  Using electricity directly is fine for a lot of applications. Synthetic liquid fuels are a very inefficient, very dense "battery" that you can drop right in to a trillion dollars' worth of existing fossil-powered machines. Hydrogen is (IMO) the worst of both worlds for most applications: much less efficient than battery electric systems, but can't be a drop-in fossil fuel replacement for existing airplanes/trucks/bulldozers either. Converting to hydrogen makes you pay for accelerated replacement of existing capital stock plus the inefficiency of storing energy as fuel.
- rch 9y ago
  I think it's intended as a way to (soft of) economically build out carbon capture infrastructure. At some point these facilities could transition to providing hydrogen fuel and C02 sequestration.
acabal 9y ago
One of the huge pluses of electric cars (besides the obvious elimination of humanity-threatening climate change gases) is that cities will be less choked with car exhaust smog. Living in a major US city, whose air is quite clean compared to many other places in the world, still means you get exposed to constant facefulls of car exhaust, truck smoke, and particulates every time you set foot outside. That's not healthy on a direct human level, let alone a climate change level. We're at the cusp of getting rid of this miserable pollution completely, and maybe even having truly clean air in our major cities, in our lifetimes--why invent a technology to allow us to keep the smog and particulates around even longer?
- intopieces 9y ago
  Because there is no near or medium term solution to the exhaust from shipping, which is what this invention is targeting and which comprises 1/3 of the climate change causing emissions.
  - kardos 9y ago
    Perhaps not a solution, but wind assist [1,2] for shipping seems like a way to chip away at that problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-assisted_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-assisted_propulsion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Beluga_Skysails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Beluga_Skysails
pfooti 9y ago
Legit question here, not snark. How could this possibly be better than something like an algae based biofuel? Have self-replicating, solar-powered machines do the CO2 extraction and reduction work on their highly specialized membranes. Then use the product? I get that this sounds fancy, but I'd be surprised if they can be even close to energy neutral pulling power from the grid to reduce the CO2 into hydrocarbons. At best, their plan just externalizes the carbon cost to the generator infrastructure (which could be renewable, sure, but again: plants are solar-powered as well).
- coredog64 9y ago
  AIUI, getting algae to scale is a big problem. Not 'nuclear fusion' hard, but difficult all the same. We've got more experience with mechanical and chemical processes at industrial scale, so this is easier.
- 88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago
  I've only looked into this a little bit, but I think one problem is that you're limited by either nitrates or phosphates, depending on whether the algae are being grown in ocean water or fresh water. Either way you have to supply some kind of nutrient, which has to be either mined or synthesized in some energy-intensive fashion.
  - timmaxw 9y ago
    Could you recover those nutrients when you convert the algae into diesel?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Scale and parasites. Algae are, at best, about 10% efficient at converting sunlight to fuel. To meet present U.S. petroleum neds, you might, say, put grow ponds on the east and west coasts. They would have to extend 1500 miles north-south and be about 60 miles across. That is an ambitious project, to put it mildly. Then you'd need to fertilise the ponds, drain effluent, and keep anything other than you (or your fuel harvesters) from munching on all those gigajoules of hydrocarbon energy. Fisher-Tropsch seawater-sourced synfuel would reqire a few square km of plant, and roughly 180 miles squared of solar power feed. In a world of grossly intractable fuel / energy alternatives, that's not completely beyond reason. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy_electricitytofuel_synthesis_papers_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy...
SandroG 9y ago
How about planting more trees? Cannot think of a more efficient process of removing CO2
- deleted 9y ago
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- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Hectares to tonnes, peat bogs might beat trees, but generally I'd think biology has the edge here.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 9y ago
The concept of generating synthetic fuels from biospheric sources of CO2 is not new. And atmospheric CO2 may not be the most sensible choice: costs for sequestration from seawater (measured in energy) are much lower. I'd become somewhat excited by the potential of seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis about four years ago after a set of articles from the U.S. Naval Research Lab were published. I was shocked several ways to learn that the concept was far older -- both because I'd been unaware of the fact, and that the NRL's own publications failed to cite the pioneering work in the field, from Brookhaven National Labs, in 1964 (by Meyer Steinberg). The original concept was suggested by M. King Hubbert, of "Hubbert Peak" (peak oil) fame, in a 1963 paper. I've compiled a set of early research from Brookhaven, M.I.T., and NRL: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electrical_fuel_synthesis_from_seawater_older/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri... On the positive side: the research is solid and there's ample history. On the negative: there's been very little actual proof-of-concept and virtually no scaling of the concept. This suggests potential engineering challenges. Otherwise, the basic size and energy budgets are within reason, contrast biofuels, which in virtually any configuration simply does not produce enough viable fuel to sustain modern energy budgets. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int... The acreage requirements alone approach or exceed the total land area of the U.S., in more conventional cases. In the case of algae, this is reduced to "only" virtually all current agricultural acreage. Hubbert's suggestion: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/EnergyResources.pdf http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/EnergyResources.pdf Steinberg's obituary, from 2015: https://www.newsday.com/long-island/meyer-steinberg-of-melville-worked-on-manhattan-project-1.10603175 https://www.newsday.com/long-island/meyer-steinberg-of-melvi...
technicalbard 9y ago
This is a crazy scheme. If you want CO2, there are much easier places to recover it than from AIR. Flue gas of furnaces/boilers, chemical plants that make it as a byproduct, etc. Worse, their whole plan needs a source of hydrogen, which they claim will come from green energy electrolysis - but the math doesn't work well. You'd need nuclear reactors or big hydro dams to make enough to make fuels at scale. And it won't be carbon neutral because of the second law...

120 points by fold_left 9y ago

Multi-pronged solutions are needed for this massive issue. We need to avoid emissions where we can, switch to clean energy where we can, and use clean-up technologies if they do become energetically feasible. And keep in mind that just planting more trees or preserving existing rainforests can also go a long way. In the end doing something is better than coming up with endless roundtable resolutions and pledges that are then universally ignored.

foxhop 9y ago

So much managed tech for something nature already solved for us passively. I think if we just changed where and how some of our basic input and outputs go we could solve this without any tech. https://halfhillfarm.com/2017/04/21/how-hugelkultur-can-help-heal-the-planet/ https://halfhillfarm.com/2017/04/21/how-hugelkultur-can-help...

DennisP 9y ago
Your article says that could absorb a third of emissions, which is great. But it'd be even better if we did that and did everything possible to reduce our emissions.
- lozenge 9y ago
  Not even a third of emissions - 30% of the increase in emissions. And, I don't see the calculation, but it surely can't be done just from the carbon in people's backyard gardens.
  - foxhop 9y ago
    I could if more people did it instead of loading branches and logs onto trucks and going into the waste stream they can be used on the same property, sunk into the ground and left for 20-30 years. It requires changing how people deal with outputs.
nanomonkey 9y ago
Decomposing plant matter creates C02 and methane, so Hugelkultur only suquesters carbon for short periods. Biochar, a.k.a. terrapreta which is buried wood charcoal, on the other hand is thought to be inactive in the soil for closer to 10k years. One can combine energy production from wood gasification, which produces char-ash and biochar to produce a carbon negative electricity source. Taking this a step further one can use the Fischer–Tropsch process on the resultant syngas to produce liquid fuels.
- foxhop 9y ago
  It sequesters it for 10-30 years and then the plants and trees that are grown on or near it further sequesters CO2 and carbon. I think of composition as a "slow burn" (merging back with air). Also creating bio-char is a pain in the ass and not passive at all.
  - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    One benefit of biochar is that it anecdotally increases soil fertility, so maybe you could produce more bio diesel while you are at it.
notabee 9y ago
The IPCC scenarios, which are already grim, also include hypothetical forms of carbon capture that do not yet exist, in addition to drastic emission reduction, to prevent the Earth from becoming a disaster in the next 50/100 years. This report has a good overview of the difficulties with current carbon capture plans. https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Negative_Carbon/EASAC_Report_on_Negative_Emission_Technologies.pdf https://easac.eu/fileadmin/PDF_s/reports_statements/Negative...

plaidfuji 9y ago

Chemical engineer with experience in alternative fuels here. The key line is this: "But for it to work, it will have to reduce costs to little more than it costs to extract oil today, and – even trickier – persuade countries to set a global carbon price.” Their feedstock costs are probably quite low. Air, and from the sounds of it, water to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. They're probably then doing some combination of reverse water-gas-shift + Fischer-Tropsch to go from CO2 + H2 to diesel. Not unlike a similar project in Qatar using natural gas as their hydrogen source. Problem is that carbon and hydrogen from methane is much cheaper than from air and water. Their electric/energy bill is probably massive, and also begs the question: could they fuel their plant with their own product and still have net energy gain? Or do they depend on cheap energy from more thermodynamically favorable fuels like coal and oil to be viable? Solar, wind, nuclear, batteries, electric self-driving cars, next gen A/C, hopefully fusion someday... these are the energy or conservation technologies of the future, not something that's DOA because of basic thermodynamics.

breakyerself 9y ago
It seems like a bet on the perpetually declining cost of solar. The cheaper solar gets the less efficient the conversion rate for storage needs to be to still be viable.
DennisP 9y ago
The point of something like this is that, wherever we continue to use liquid fuels, it'd be nice if they were carbon neutral. Jet aircraft will probably keep using jet fuel for quite a while, for example. But of course we'd need some kind of non-carbon energy source to make the fuel. Right now maybe we get the best bang for the buck by applying those sources to the electric grid, but with a carbon price the market would work that out.
- hunta2097 9y ago
  I totally agree, imagine a country like Australia which has solar-rich land to spare. The efficiencies might not matter so much in exchange for a constant supply of easily-handled fuel. Or maybe a nuclear-powered site which can convert CO2 into CxHy on an industrial scale. With the added advantage of removing CO2 in the process. You also have the added advantage of not having to ship fuel in from chaotic regions of the world. Shipping produces a significant amount of the world's CO2.

LyndsySimon 9y ago

So... Wouldn't burning wood meet the headline?

phkahler 9y ago
Yeah, and since coal is dead biomass one would think we can burn that too. I suppose it's possible that billions of years of moss growing on rocks has produced a lot of that biomass, and that it was never all in play at once. But people generally get pissed and defensive when I mention the coal thing. I've never had anyone even attempt to refute the idea that coal is carbon-neutral in scientific manner. That's what makes it so much fun to say.
- dllthomas 9y ago
  > I've never had anyone even attempt to refute the idea that coal is carbon-neutral in scientific manner. Except maybe nuclear, no source of energy creates new carbon. The question, vis-a-vis carbon neutrality, is "over relevant time scales, does this leave more carbon in the atmosphere (as opposed to sequestered in oil, coal, trees, whatever)?" If you create coal and then burn it, that's carbon neutral (modulo whatever you produced creating the coal). If you dig ancient coal out of the ground and burn it, that's not carbon neutral.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    >> If you create coal and then burn it, that's carbon neutral Right, there was no coal when the earth formed. It's all former biomass and was part of the biosphere. So we need to burn it to actually be carbon neutral. I did offer a refutation of this...
    - dllthomas 9y ago
      You are (willfully?) ignoring my point about time-scale, which your offered refutation doesn't address. Yes, of course the coal hasn't existed forever, and before that the carbon was presumably part of the atmosphere. But that wasn't an atmosphere ever breathed by Homo Sapiens. We don't want to make sure the atmosphere matches that at earth's creation (it wasn't always even significantly oxygenated! and if we want to put back all the carbon that includes killing all life). We want to be sure our activity doesn't leave us with significant negative consequences.

exabrial 9y ago

A few notes to help get this to the mainstream. Take these quotes: * "persuade countries to set a global carbon price" * "paid for by the emitters, or by the fossil fuel suppliers" I think they should carefully examine how such efforts have failed or been sabotaged in the past. The issue most libertarians and conservatives have is not "co2 offsetting" itself, the issue is they don't like taxes and regulations because it interferes with individual liberties. From past experience, hinging an entire industry on a government-created market appears to be a sure path to failure. For all of the clever ingeniuty described here, I'm baffled why no one is addressing that, which seems to be the bigger issue.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
scentoni 9y ago
The carbon tax (and cap-and-trade) is the right-wing think tank alternative to reducing emissions by regulation, much like the individual mandate/Romneycare/Obambacare/ACA is the right-wing think tank alternative to single-payer/Medicare for all/universal health care. The issue is that the right wing think tanks come up with these alternatives, and then the right wing labels them as a left-wing attack upon America.
graeme 9y ago
I am surprised that "add carbon taxes, cut income taxes" doesn't take off. Income taxes distort the economy, so lowering them is a massive benefit - if they can be replaced with another, better revenue source. A carbon tax is an infinitely better revenue source as it reduced externalities. I think rather than focussing on emissions reduction, global climate talks should focus on a global carbon tax, offset by reductions in other taxes. (It's somewhat ineffective for one country to do a carbon tax now. Past a certain point it will just send carbon producing activities to countries without a tax. A globally agreed tax reduces this.) A tax would be the mechanism to reduce emissions. Absent such a mecanism, emissions have only grown, despite accords to reduce them.
- hedora 9y ago

lazyjones 9y ago

Nature already developed this technology: trees. More seriously: perhaps it's not such a bright idea to build a for-profit industry on the concept of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Plants need it and if we overdo it for the sake of maximising profits, the ecosystem will suffer (alarmism: we'll all starve). Just plant more trees, please.

eloff 9y ago
It gets burned and goes straight back into the atmosphere. It's carbon neural, not carbon negative.
- lazyjones 9y ago
  > It's carbon neural, not carbon negative What does the headline of this thread say? > Stripping CO2 from the air and using it to produce carbon-neutral fuel So, where's the benefit over trees? The drawback is that the fuel doesn't have any uses other than to burn it for energy. Trees, on the other hand, just suck up increasing amounts of CO2 while they grow and they don't have to be turned into fuel.
  - eloff 9y ago
    You missed the headline apparently since you were commenting about the dangers of sucking too much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Clearly if it's carbon neural there's no danger of that happening. Trees are also carbon neutral since they either burn or decompose and return the carbon to the atmosphere. But over much longer timescales than fuel - so they could still be useful in combating global warming (despite what some people say.)
    - hedora 9y ago
      In particular, if you increase the average global biomass over time, then you’ve captured some carbon. Longer term, you can bury that biomass instead of burning it or letting it decompose. Eventually, it will turn back to oil. I guess the question is whether these new technologies are better than buying up tree farms and sending their outputs to landfills at are optimized to minimize decomposition. Edit: Tree farms are a terrible straw man. Are these technologies better than simply instituting bio-waste bins alongside recycling, and burying the bio-waste for long term carbon capture instead of composting?

briantakita 9y ago

Nature already has this technology. Plants & Trees. Plants & Trees have numerous other advantages compared to Bill Gates' solution: * They are less expensive * They don't require a technological infrastructure, meaning 3rd world countries could easily deploy them * They require little to no maintenance * They promote life & ecosystems * They have been tested in the field for hundreds of millions of years * As CO2 increases, plants & trees grow & consume more CO2. A positive feedback loop! Plants & Trees are a far superior solution. We should spends billions of dollars on more plants & trees.

87ert3746 9y ago
and they're beautiful and they sound good
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blacksqr 9y ago

What is "burning wood" Alex?

fold_left 9y ago
You might want to see your Doctor

ilyagr 9y ago

The obvious problem is that too make enough gas to power a gasoline car, you'll need to spend more energy than it takes to charge a Tesla (likely many times more, I'm not sure what the energy efficiency of the conversion process is). I do have a fantasy that if we had an abundance of fusion energy (or just nuclear, perhaps), you could not only power cars, but also make oil from co2 and put it back where it came from.

ams6110 9y ago
If the energy is "free" (wind or solar) the efficiency matters a lot less.

rini17 9y ago

I hate when they confuse CO2 extraction with "cleaning the planet". Such popularizing/oversimplifying is irresponsible! These are two completely different things; clearly someone who submitted this to HN understood it too when adding the title.

avmich 9y ago

Even if there is no carbon price, the idea could work if - and that's a rather big if - the cost of making "oil" from air with CO2 and water can be made low enough. We might look into energy efficiencies along the process and into energy efficiencies to make those energy efficient components of the factory. Yes, it's far from closing economically or even energetically today. Will it always be so? However, another aspect seems to worth attention here. It seems rather inefficient first to have cars which make CO2, release it into - rather big - atmosphere, then spend efforts to capture CO2 from that. But this approach - let's pump all the air of the planet through purification devices - allows to do other things, not only capture CO2. How about extracting noble gases (it's already done, AFAIK)? Or other greenhouse gases, like methane? Or ozone-destroying substances? May be we can engineer our atmosphere to our tastes? May be we can use those technologies elsewhere - say, on Venus?

detritus 9y ago

Beyond any greater dialogue about the relevance of this tech, at any scale, in mitigating our impact on the climate, I simply like the idea that this allows for local creation of hydrocarbon liquid fuels in remote locations. Given the amount of energy required to shift energy around the globe, it makes sense to develop systems that can act independently of the greater fuel economy. It also (I think?) allows us to keep using existing ICE tech for years to come, which no matter how utopianistic one gets about electric drives, is an insurmountable reality.

tscs37 9y ago

That's a bit of a weird idea. CO2 is not present in fairly high amounts in the air, using some quick math, I would estimate that for 1kg of CO2, one would need to filter over 2.5 tons of air (Though if we keep pumping more CO2 into the air, this will become more efficient). The energy required to do this won't be trivial, so it would have to be from renewable resources. Why not use those directly? I would suggest it would be more efficient to draw the water from the air and produce hydrogen, which is a clean fuel unlike carbon (which just burns into CO2 again, under normal conditions). And if you run out of water to pull from the air, you can probably find a bit of water on this planet to use, it's not like we want a rising sea level (though it's unlike we will impact the sea level by pumping out the water and turning it into hydrogen fuel) And as I just mentioned, the CO2 you just pulled from the air will burn straight into CO2 again, in fact, it'll burn into the exact same amount of CO2 (assuming clean combustion), so it's just a very inefficient battery... [repost from dupe, original deleted]

philipkglass 9y ago
Using electricity directly is fine for a lot of applications. Synthetic liquid fuels are a very inefficient, very dense "battery" that you can drop right in to a trillion dollars' worth of existing fossil-powered machines. Hydrogen is (IMO) the worst of both worlds for most applications: much less efficient than battery electric systems, but can't be a drop-in fossil fuel replacement for existing airplanes/trucks/bulldozers either. Converting to hydrogen makes you pay for accelerated replacement of existing capital stock plus the inefficiency of storing energy as fuel.
rch 9y ago
I think it's intended as a way to (soft of) economically build out carbon capture infrastructure. At some point these facilities could transition to providing hydrogen fuel and C02 sequestration.

acabal 9y ago

One of the huge pluses of electric cars (besides the obvious elimination of humanity-threatening climate change gases) is that cities will be less choked with car exhaust smog. Living in a major US city, whose air is quite clean compared to many other places in the world, still means you get exposed to constant facefulls of car exhaust, truck smoke, and particulates every time you set foot outside. That's not healthy on a direct human level, let alone a climate change level. We're at the cusp of getting rid of this miserable pollution completely, and maybe even having truly clean air in our major cities, in our lifetimes--why invent a technology to allow us to keep the smog and particulates around even longer?

intopieces 9y ago
Because there is no near or medium term solution to the exhaust from shipping, which is what this invention is targeting and which comprises 1/3 of the climate change causing emissions.
- kardos 9y ago
  Perhaps not a solution, but wind assist [1,2] for shipping seems like a way to chip away at that problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-assisted_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-assisted_propulsion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Beluga_Skysails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Beluga_Skysails

pfooti 9y ago

Legit question here, not snark. How could this possibly be better than something like an algae based biofuel? Have self-replicating, solar-powered machines do the CO2 extraction and reduction work on their highly specialized membranes. Then use the product? I get that this sounds fancy, but I'd be surprised if they can be even close to energy neutral pulling power from the grid to reduce the CO2 into hydrocarbons. At best, their plan just externalizes the carbon cost to the generator infrastructure (which could be renewable, sure, but again: plants are solar-powered as well).

coredog64 9y ago
AIUI, getting algae to scale is a big problem. Not 'nuclear fusion' hard, but difficult all the same. We've got more experience with mechanical and chemical processes at industrial scale, so this is easier.
88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago
I've only looked into this a little bit, but I think one problem is that you're limited by either nitrates or phosphates, depending on whether the algae are being grown in ocean water or fresh water. Either way you have to supply some kind of nutrient, which has to be either mined or synthesized in some energy-intensive fashion.
- timmaxw 9y ago
  Could you recover those nutrients when you convert the algae into diesel?
dredmorbius 9y ago
Scale and parasites. Algae are, at best, about 10% efficient at converting sunlight to fuel. To meet present U.S. petroleum neds, you might, say, put grow ponds on the east and west coasts. They would have to extend 1500 miles north-south and be about 60 miles across. That is an ambitious project, to put it mildly. Then you'd need to fertilise the ponds, drain effluent, and keep anything other than you (or your fuel harvesters) from munching on all those gigajoules of hydrocarbon energy. Fisher-Tropsch seawater-sourced synfuel would reqire a few square km of plant, and roughly 180 miles squared of solar power feed. In a world of grossly intractable fuel / energy alternatives, that's not completely beyond reason. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy_electricitytofuel_synthesis_papers_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/22k71x/us_navy...

SandroG 9y ago

How about planting more trees? Cannot think of a more efficient process of removing CO2

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dredmorbius 9y ago
Hectares to tonnes, peat bogs might beat trees, but generally I'd think biology has the edge here.

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dredmorbius 9y ago

The concept of generating synthetic fuels from biospheric sources of CO2 is not new. And atmospheric CO2 may not be the most sensible choice: costs for sequestration from seawater (measured in energy) are much lower. I'd become somewhat excited by the potential of seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis about four years ago after a set of articles from the U.S. Naval Research Lab were published. I was shocked several ways to learn that the concept was far older -- both because I'd been unaware of the fact, and that the NRL's own publications failed to cite the pioneering work in the field, from Brookhaven National Labs, in 1964 (by Meyer Steinberg). The original concept was suggested by M. King Hubbert, of "Hubbert Peak" (peak oil) fame, in a 1963 paper. I've compiled a set of early research from Brookhaven, M.I.T., and NRL: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electrical_fuel_synthesis_from_seawater_older/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri... On the positive side: the research is solid and there's ample history. On the negative: there's been very little actual proof-of-concept and virtually no scaling of the concept. This suggests potential engineering challenges. Otherwise, the basic size and energy budgets are within reason, contrast biofuels, which in virtually any configuration simply does not produce enough viable fuel to sustain modern energy budgets. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int... The acreage requirements alone approach or exceed the total land area of the U.S., in more conventional cases. In the case of algae, this is reduced to "only" virtually all current agricultural acreage. Hubbert's suggestion: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/EnergyResources.pdf http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/EnergyResources.pdf Steinberg's obituary, from 2015: https://www.newsday.com/long-island/meyer-steinberg-of-melville-worked-on-manhattan-project-1.10603175 https://www.newsday.com/long-island/meyer-steinberg-of-melvi...

technicalbard 9y ago

This is a crazy scheme. If you want CO2, there are much easier places to recover it than from AIR. Flue gas of furnaces/boilers, chemical plants that make it as a byproduct, etc. Worse, their whole plan needs a source of hydrogen, which they claim will come from green energy electrolysis - but the math doesn't work well. You'd need nuclear reactors or big hydro dams to make enough to make fuels at scale. And it won't be carbon neutral because of the second law...