7 ms·

CO2 has numerous industrial applications, so you typically don’t store it but bottle it and send it elsewhere. Beer manufacturing (to add bubbles) is an anecdot

by bertil 9y ago

CO2 has numerous industrial applications, so you typically don’t store it but bottle it and send it elsewhere. Beer manufacturing (to add bubbles) is an anecdotic use; green house or urban farm agriculture is a growing need.

DoctorOetker 9y ago
the need for CO2 is extremely low, why is carbonating drinks even referenced whenever carbon capture is mentioned? the amount of CO2 absorbed in the drink will be released upon opening the drink, or else burping or farting. the amount of CO2 the plants in a green house absorbs is offset by atmospheric CO2 not absorbed by the plant... yes CO2 has niche uses, but whenever I see people mention CO2 utilization in the context of emissions reduction, it instantly unmasks their lack of knowledge. The idea that we simply capture it at the chimney, and then bring it to where we need it is in fact very similar to the thought process in a perpetuum mobile. consider pure graphite as a model of coal, you can burn it, which binds 2 oxygens for each carbon atom, now we capture the CO2, strip the oxygens, and cram all the carbon atoms together into a neatly disposable clump... the burning releases an amount of energy, the reverse process takes at least the same amount of energy. in the form of CO2 its just incredibly voluminous or incredibly pressurized or incredibly cold to keep stored. sure you can pump it underground, but the CO2 will still diffuse... then we are just obfuscating the dump the capture technology is useful if you power it with nuclear or windmills in case CO2 levels and global warming get out of hand. but it is not useful to capture CO2 from the power plant. it is better then to generate the energy with either renewables or nuclear directly.
- skosch 9y ago
  Thank you for calling the CCS crowd out on their magical thinking. The amount of CO2 we can pump underground to form carbonates with basalt rock is a drop in the bucket. Unless we find a catalyst that allows us to economically turn tons of CO2 into an inert (and maybe useful) solid or liquid, this is all going nowhere. No reason to despair, or to stop working on solutions. But today's CCS tech, and the many variations on it, will not solve our problems. At the moment, our best bet is improved natural sequestration. There is massive potential in better agricultural methods (cf. silvopasture, perennial crops, Upland rice, microbial farming), better land management, re-establishing grasslands in Siberia (cf. Pleistocene Park), farming in the ocean (cf. marine permaculture, upwelling restoration), etc.
- bertil 9y ago
  I mentioned beer because the process of capturing CO2 from fermentation and re-injecting it was invented by my family a century ago and apparently was the first of its kind (according to my uncle). My cousin and a friend of my father are working on accelerating plant and algae growth with CO2-rich atmosphere and water, in urban farms (not greenhouse) and mixed-use aqua-farming respectively. Neither have reached scale yet, but the projects seem promising -- enough that both have considered colocating with industrial CO2 emitters. I also believe that some people are looking into re-using CO2 to store energy from solar power: focus solar rays and get CO2 to react into longer chain hydrocarbons thanks to catalyst. I’m less familiar with that process.
  - DoctorOetker 9y ago
    we all know CO2 and H20 can be recombined to form fuels, its where the fossil fuels originally came from. Where do these bacteria get their energy from? Either from photosynthesis elsewhere, or by photosynthesis themselves. In either case, in order to offset the power plant at the rate is converting fuel to electricity, you need a huge area of plants or solar to recover _all_ CO2. But then you could just remove the fossil fuel burning power plant out of the equation. It is still perpetuum mobile...

by bertil 9y ago

DoctorOetker 9y ago

the need for CO2 is extremely low, why is carbonating drinks even referenced whenever carbon capture is mentioned? the amount of CO2 absorbed in the drink will be released upon opening the drink, or else burping or farting. the amount of CO2 the plants in a green house absorbs is offset by atmospheric CO2 not absorbed by the plant... yes CO2 has niche uses, but whenever I see people mention CO2 utilization in the context of emissions reduction, it instantly unmasks their lack of knowledge. The idea that we simply capture it at the chimney, and then bring it to where we need it is in fact very similar to the thought process in a perpetuum mobile. consider pure graphite as a model of coal, you can burn it, which binds 2 oxygens for each carbon atom, now we capture the CO2, strip the oxygens, and cram all the carbon atoms together into a neatly disposable clump... the burning releases an amount of energy, the reverse process takes at least the same amount of energy. in the form of CO2 its just incredibly voluminous or incredibly pressurized or incredibly cold to keep stored. sure you can pump it underground, but the CO2 will still diffuse... then we are just obfuscating the dump the capture technology is useful if you power it with nuclear or windmills in case CO2 levels and global warming get out of hand. but it is not useful to capture CO2 from the power plant. it is better then to generate the energy with either renewables or nuclear directly.

skosch 9y ago
Thank you for calling the CCS crowd out on their magical thinking. The amount of CO2 we can pump underground to form carbonates with basalt rock is a drop in the bucket. Unless we find a catalyst that allows us to economically turn tons of CO2 into an inert (and maybe useful) solid or liquid, this is all going nowhere. No reason to despair, or to stop working on solutions. But today's CCS tech, and the many variations on it, will not solve our problems. At the moment, our best bet is improved natural sequestration. There is massive potential in better agricultural methods (cf. silvopasture, perennial crops, Upland rice, microbial farming), better land management, re-establishing grasslands in Siberia (cf. Pleistocene Park), farming in the ocean (cf. marine permaculture, upwelling restoration), etc.
bertil 9y ago
I mentioned beer because the process of capturing CO2 from fermentation and re-injecting it was invented by my family a century ago and apparently was the first of its kind (according to my uncle). My cousin and a friend of my father are working on accelerating plant and algae growth with CO2-rich atmosphere and water, in urban farms (not greenhouse) and mixed-use aqua-farming respectively. Neither have reached scale yet, but the projects seem promising -- enough that both have considered colocating with industrial CO2 emitters. I also believe that some people are looking into re-using CO2 to store energy from solar power: focus solar rays and get CO2 to react into longer chain hydrocarbons thanks to catalyst. I’m less familiar with that process.
- DoctorOetker 9y ago
  we all know CO2 and H20 can be recombined to form fuels, its where the fossil fuels originally came from. Where do these bacteria get their energy from? Either from photosynthesis elsewhere, or by photosynthesis themselves. In either case, in order to offset the power plant at the rate is converting fuel to electricity, you need a huge area of plants or solar to recover _all_ CO2. But then you could just remove the fossil fuel burning power plant out of the equation. It is still perpetuum mobile...