Yeah, I had to write a proposal for a carbon capture project. It was really hard to make it make any sense from a systems perspective. I conclude that talking

Yeah, I had to write a proposal for a carbon capture project. It was really hard to make it make any sense from a systems perspective. I conclude that talking about using it to reduce emissions from fossil plants is idiocy only useful for PR. You are always better off not burning the carbon in the first place and just getting the electricity from another source. The only even remotely compelling case is that it lets the plant respond faster to load by dumping excess electricity into chemicals. And even there, it's not the best solution, it's probably better handled by the way we do it now with load-following plants. I think the researchers know that, they talked about using renewable power for it. But I'm sure their estimates are also based on consuming coal flue gas because they have to goose the numbers to make the CO2 cheap and concentrated enough to make any sense. So my assumption with basically any of these is that they're setting up a paradoxical situation -- assume that we're using fossil power plants for the CO2, but getting the electricity/hydrogen from renewables. That way the chemicals look close to free. But if we're still generating electricity with the fossil plant, it will always be better to just not use the plant from a CO2 and systems efficiency perspective and to instead build more renewable generation to make up the difference.