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It is an important technology, but it will not really help right now. It will always be cheaper to prevent creation of CO2 (burning fossil fuels) than to catch

by js8 8y ago

It is an important technology, but it will not really help right now. It will always be cheaper to prevent creation of CO2 (burning fossil fuels) than to catch CO2 back from the atmosphere. So, the first thing we need to do is to move to completely carbon emission free technology of energy production. Then we can perhaps produce more than we need (e.g. in the peaks) and can start thinking about catching some CO2 back from the atmosphere to reverse the climate changes. Unfortunately, there is not even global consensus on getting to zero emissions. In this situation, I can't imagine how there can be a consensus on doing something (like utilizing this technology) on the mass scale that helps to save the environment for free.

chris_overseas 8y ago
> So, the first thing we need to do is to move to completely carbon emission free technology of energy production. Then we can perhaps produce more than we need (e.g. in the peaks) and can start thinking about catching some CO2 back from the atmosphere to reverse the climate changes. We should be doing both in parallel. The article talks about this: "Last year’s I.P.C.C. report noted that it may be impossible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees by 2100 through only a rapid switch to clean energy, electric cars and the like. To preserve a livable environment we may also need to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. As Wurzbacher put it, “if you take all these numbers from the I.P.C.C., you end up with something like eight to 10 billion tons — gigatons — of CO₂ that need to be removed from the air every year, if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees.” "
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  > if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees. Hint: We're not. The Americans are expecting +4C https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-administration-sees-a-7-degree-rise-in-global-temperatures-by-2100/2018/09/27/b9c6fada-bb45-11e8-bdc0-90f81cc58c5d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump...
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  No, we should have started going carbon neutral in the 1980's when the science case for precautionary was solid. It is only given that carbon industry got us to ignore the dangers for more than thirty years that we now are so desperate to keep inside the carbon budget that even very inefficient solutions like carbon capture are seriously being considered.
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - FreeFull 8y ago
      Speaking of trees, massive reforestation could be one way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. As a bonus, you end up with a lot of lumber you can use for things like buildings.
      - dotancohen 8y ago
        My country has a holiday where the children plant trees every year.
        schoen 8y ago
        Maybe there could be a holiday where children and adults plant trees every month or every week!
  - benj111 8y ago
    I'm not sure its reasonable to require such a massive upheaval as a precaution. Remember those 'X causes cancer' articles, should we phase out everything implicated, as a precaution? I agree we should have moved earlier, and we should be moving faster though.
- SamBam 8y ago
  I think that the point is that if, today, you could spend $100 on pulling 1 ton of CO2 from the air, or spend $100 on green energy which prevents 2 tons of CO2 going into the air, the second is more important, even if we need to be extracting CO2 from the air. There's no point in extracting 1 ton of CO2 and putting 2 tons of CO2 back up there.
ovi256 8y ago
>always be cheaper to prevent creation of CO2 (burning fossil fuels) than to catch CO2 Why ? Where does this comes from ?
- pjc50 8y ago
  One of those processes emits energy, the other requires energy input - and to overcome the entropy, the capture process requires more energy. Edit: one barrel of oil produces 0.43 metric tons CO2 and costs about $60. Therefore, if your price of CO2 capture is more than $140/ton, it's cheaper to "capture" the CO2 by buying a barrel of oil and "sequestering" it as you would the CO2. So if carbon capture prices are more than about $150 it would be a viable business to operate a "reverse oilfield" buying oil on the open market and pumping it underground.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Shouldn’t you include the value of the energy that the barrel creates in the calculation?
    - pjc50 8y ago
      It was mostly a piece of elaborate sarcasm about the value of reducing consumption rather than capture. Going down that route, should the value of energy used in carbon capture be counted at the market rate or its opportunity cost? It's valid to point out that the value of a barrel of oil is more than its cost and this gives rise to a "consumer surplus", which leads to the carbon tax arguments. (Although, as Retric points out upthread, there are consequential CO2 side-effects from oil extraction more than just burning it, so maybe those should be counted too?)
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    This might not always be the case if for example solar energy prices keep falling as fast as they have been.
- js8 8y ago
  This is just law of conservation of energy (1st law of thermodynamics). If burning carbon to CO2 produces certain amount of energy (part of which then can be used to do useful work), then the reverse of that process, breaking up CO2 to carbon and oxygen, will require at least the amount of energy that was produced in burning it. So yeah, it's nice to have the technology to take CO2 from the air and create C and O2, however, the catch is, it requires energy. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, you will be better off not to do this thing at all, because you will end up creating a bit more CO2 in the process.
DennisP 8y ago
I don't think it's a given that it will always be cheaper to avoid emissions. Long-haul air travel, for example, isn't likely to go electric anytime soon, and it could well be that the cheapest option is to absorb their emissions from the air and inject them into the ground, rather than producing carbon-neutral jet fuel. If this technology really does get down to $94/ton, then a $100/ton price on carbon emissions is likely to give it a role. People can reduce emissions whenever it costs less than $94/ton to do so, and if it costs more, they could pay for absorption instead. $100/ton CO2 would raise the price of gasoline by a dollar a gallon, which doesn't seem all that unattainable, especially if the collected funds are redistributed as a dividend.
- ebiester 8y ago
  Or add 100 dollars to the average cost of a NY-London flight, from my quick calculations. Flights would go up 50-200 dollars each way. That's not the end of the world.
  - ancientworldnow 8y ago
    This figure doesn't take into account radiative forcing which makes that 1 ton figure act more like 3 or 4 tons in actual heating capability. Airline offset programs always ignore this (in addition to way under pricing carbon offsets because that market is mostly scams built around green guilt). Even at $100 a ton, you're talking a few hundred of dollars of price increases to offset damages. This probably reduces the number of people flying which of course raise the per capita damage and therefore cost even more.
    - stevesimmons 8y ago
      How does it raise the per capita damage? Airlines are only profitable if they fly at high load factors. If price increases reduce the number of passengers flying, the airlines will try to fly fewer planes that are just as full as today. Thus the per passenger cost is the same. (... based on a consulting project I did 20 years ago on airline network economics/route capacity optimization)
- 8y ago
dalbasal 8y ago
Depends on the energy economics. If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases... it's at least theoretically useful. At that point it's about costs. Otherwise... Say we get to 0 emissions by 2035. There will be (is) already a troublesome amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We might have to do some carbon capture even if we're not releasing new carbon.
- wcoenen 8y ago
  > Depends on the energy economics. If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases Not allowed by thermodynamics. Otherwise you could create free energy by continuously burning and recapturing the same carbon.
  - llukas 8y ago
    Just capturing might be possible - it doesn't have to be in form that can be easily used to generate energy.
  - speakeron 8y ago
    > Not allowed by thermodynamics. Otherwise you could create free energy by continuously burning and recapturing the same carbon. That doesn't have to be the case; the carbon you capture may not be in a burnable form. E.g. if carbon dioxide were captured, additional energy would be required to split off the oxygen before the carbon could be 'burned' again.
  - tom_mellior 8y ago
    It would suffice to use less non-carbon-based energy to capture the CO2.
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  "If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases" Sorry, that's forbidden by the laws of physics.
deytempo 8y ago
One thing we can do is try to hire more remote workers. Each person that doesn’t need to drive everyday is someone who doesn’t need to emit carbon every day
- justtopost 8y ago
  Pets contribute more co2 than most people. Taking care of your friends and family more than a furball may be a good alternative too.
  - jeromegv 8y ago
    Pets do NOT contribute more co2 than most people. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-diet-greenhouse-gases-climate-change https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-di... Pets do contribute surprisingly a lot of CO2 when you add them up, based on their meat consumption. But it's less than what a human would consume in meat and especially a lot less when you add how much humans transport themselves around.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    Could you break down how that's possible? The only way I can think of that being possible is if you move the goal posts for one group and compare apple mathematics to orange mathematics.
  - bengale 8y ago
    Do you have more info on this? It seems counterintuitive on the face of it, my dog doesn't take a lot of flights or drive far for example.
    - benj111 8y ago
      I think the idea is that, dogs for example have a high meat diet, and large dogs probably eat more than a person. And they might not drive but a lot of owners like to drive some where to 'walk' their dog. Although considering the levels of obesity, that the exercise might be a net benefit. Now I don't think dogs or cats cause anything like as much co2 as humans, but it is significant, and given the scale of reductions in co2 required, I think we are probably going to get to a point where large pet ownership is at least questioned.
DougN7 8y ago
Arter reading your comment I was envisioning a world that emitted no carbon. It made me wonder if the pendulum could possibly swing so far in the other direction that plants could start suffocating. Certainly not something we need to worry about now, but we humans aren’t great at avoiding unintended consequences.
- sunir 8y ago
  Zero carbon from human energy production doesn’t arrest the natural carbon cycle. Plants will continue as plants. The problem is we are literally digging carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, thereby increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon over time.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  The answer is somewhere between “no” and “what??” . As but one factor, dying plants would release CO2. The total amount of carbon in the atmosphere is (was) at equilibrium.
  - DougN7 8y ago
    Of course. I shouldn’t comment so early in the morning :(
- gus_massa 8y ago
  You [1] emit CO2 from the food you eat, so absolute zero CO2 emission is impossible. There are also emission from volcanos. For a somewhat similar scenario, you can read about the Carboniferous period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous . Essentially, the plants invented the wood but nobody know how to eat it, so the dead plants accumulated sequestering a lot of CO2. So the CO2 concentration dropped and the O2 concentration skyrocket. As a side effect, the high O2 concentration allowed bugs to became giant. (It ended when fungus learned how to eat wood.) [1] And all the other animal, fungus and even plants. And also bacteria and archaea.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
est31 8y ago
If we want to meet the 2 degrees goal by any means then given current trends we'll have to start removing net amounts of CO2 from the athmosphere. Of course, it makes most sense to do that once we are already carbon neutral, but once we are there, we should have the technology available for deployment and therefore investing in research right now is a good idea.
pdabbadabba 8y ago
> It will always be cheaper to prevent creation of CO2 (burning fossil fuels) than to catch CO2 back from the atmosphere. Maybe. But the politics could be totally different. Scrubbing would not be perceived as suppressing the activities of an existing industry. Hopefully, therefore, huge sectors of the existing economy would not mobilize against it the way they have against proposals to suppress CO2 output.
- Retric 8y ago
  I suspect large groups would organize to prevent spending 100+ Billion per year. Which would still make an insignificant change assuming we continue to produce CO2. The scale of CO2 emissions are hard to conceive. You see human heath effects in areas with poor ventilation from high CO2 levels, but as CO2 rises what constitutes poor ventilation changes. At current rates even ignoring climate changes old buildings will start to cause headaches from high CO2 levels. Buildings built at 275ppm are generally still fine at 400ppm, but that changes as you keep going.
- lucisferre 8y ago
  This claim definitely feels like a fact not in evidence. I have not seen any number for the cost to society to completely transition from CO2 creating activities and move to a CO2 negative state. Because that is what it is going to take to prevent climate change at this point. A reduction in CO2 isn't going to cut it. I would guess that cost is much higher than they think.
- jpfed 8y ago
  One problem from the fossil fuel industry's perspective is that, while scrubbing doesn't suppress their activity, doing it is essentially an admission that there's a carbon problem. And once you do that, you give up the protection that controversy and doubt affords you, and people might start demanding more extreme measures to curb carbon. Paying people to spread misinformation that maintains controversy and doubt (e.g. https://cei.org/ https://cei.org/ , who also helped maintain doubt surrounding the link between smoking and cancer) is far cheaper than the reckoning that could eventually result from admitting that carbon is a problem.
SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>So, the first thing we need to do is to move to completely carbon emission free technology of energy production. I’m very interested when a statement right off the bat throws out that we should completely and unquestionably stop using hydrocarbons which are the most efficient, portable, easy to use and safe source of energy we have ever seen. Not to mention it’s current absolute requirement in long range transport, making plastics, lubricants and production of composites that make the efficient renewable powered machines possible. How is it some people get a pass on willfully ignoring reality just because the goal is reducing emissions? So on the topic, you better hope recovering CO2 is efficient because we won’t stop using oil until it’s gone.
- pjc50 8y ago
  You can't claim people are "willfully ignoring reality" without acknowledging that capture is necessarily going to consume more energy that was emitted in release. > making plastics, lubricants and production of composites These don't put CO2 into the atmosphere until they are burned. Also given sufficient energy input they could also be outputs of a capture process...
darepublic 8y ago
I might be mistaken about this, but it puzzles me when people confidently state that people should NOT approach the problem from this angle. I feel like there is a great deal of uncertainty in this problem space and any genuine attempt to solve should be welcome.
- tozeur 8y ago
  Exactly, it’s called experimentation! The above comment is equivalent to someone telling Bosch to quit because that ammonia capture process too expensive...
  - gus_massa 8y ago
    The difference is that ammonia is expensive, you can sell the ammonia (or something produced with ammonia) to make fertilizers or explosives or something. There is a market for ammonia. When you capture CO2, what you can make? Some liquid like oil or gas that can be burn. Some solid like coal that can be burn. Some rock like limestone or marble that is more expensive than the natural one. You can't sell the products. A big chunk of the man made CO2 is in power plants. It's not a good idea to burn oil to produce energy and CO2, and then use a bigger amount of energy to transform the CO2 into something that is easy to store like oil. Perhaps you can use less energy to transform the CO2 into something like coal instead of oil, but in this case it would more efficient to make a new type of power plant that transform oil into a coal like product. (Essentially burn the Hydrogen in the oil and keep the Carbons alone. I'm not sure if this is thermodynamically posible, but IIRC the C-H bound has more energy that the C-C bound. And even if this is possible, there are the technological problems.)
    - aurelwu 8y ago
      CO2 has some commercial uses too (greenhouses, chemical industry), so they can actually sell some of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Agricultural_and_biological_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Agricultural_an... Carbon Capture - like every single other measure - won't save the climate alone but it can be a useful element in those situations where there is so much solar/wind in the grid that you need some extra consumers to not waste it. Research in that area definitely is useful, in the end it will come down to the actual prices they can achieve in reality.
furyg3 8y ago
I'm very much in agreement here, I'm glad someone's investing into researching the tech, as we may need to use it even after we've stopped burning dinosaurs. What I do like about it is that it quantifies how much it costs to recover the CO2, which is useful in calculating externalities. For example, there was recently a Canadian court ruling that bankrupt oil firms first need to fund well cleanup before creditors... to which reddit joked how progressive such a concept is. No, a 'progressive' statement is that we need to calculate how much it would cost to pull all the CO2 that was generated by using the oil as fuel and finance that as well, before creditors are paid...
radicalbyte 8y ago
We should be running full speed to cut emissions whilst also implementing things like this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI which both sequesters an enormous amount of carbon and improves our planet. In Europe at least these are things we can do without extra costs by just changing the farm subsidies so they encourage good behaviour. Just as we can do the same my moving fuel subsidies away from fossil to renewables.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Savory has been heavily heavily criticized. I'm not versed enough but it seems he's preaching more than proving. That said if you get to make people walk into places to produce carbon sequestration areas/devices instead of burning fuel .. you'd get squared returns
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    I don't know much about his methology but from what I've been reading it's possible to sequester a huge quantity of co2 in soil via active land management. I'd love to know if it was economically viable to do.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      the few bits I've read about him was not about capture but turning arid land back to green pastures, and studies concluded that none of his theories made a difference maybe he's right about co2 capture but be dubious
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
Isn't something like half of emissions from construction (steel and cement) and agriculture? Limiting fossil fuels is a good idea, but as that declines the significance of other sources of CO2 will increase. And those two sources are already increasing in absolute terms as well and will continue to increase as long as global population and living standards do as well.
robomartin 8y ago
This is the primary fallacy in this domain: Getting to zero emissions will not bring atmospheric CO2 down by 100 ppm for at least 50,000 to 75,000 years. Full stop. This is scientific fact BTW. I’ll go further than that: If we erased humanity and all we have built from planet earth on Monday —Captain Kirk beams everything into space and we all die— it would still be 50,000 to 75,000 years before CO2 levels drop by 100 ppm. Again, scientific facts. No doubt at all that what I just said is true. Irrefutable. In this very real context the only solutions will be found in technology that can consume CO2 in large quantities and hold on to it for as long as possible. Here’s another scientific truth: We already have this technology. It is easy to deploy world-wide and we know it to be effective. Even with that, this is a problem that will require generations to resolve; with a time scale in the thousands of years being likely. This is an issue that has been politicized so far —on both ends of the belief scale— that most everyone is focusing on nonsense politically-driven non-solutions rather than having true science-based conversations.
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  Small comment. For anything with dynamics this complex, science doesn't provide what can be fairly called 'facts', just projections based on current understanding. Other than that quibble I agree with your comment.
  - robomartin 8y ago
    Fair comment. The data I am relying on is based on ice core sampling at the poles. We know, to a very high degree of certainty, what our atmosphere did for the last 800,000 years. Taking this as to be my factual basis it is very easy to see what the planet has done and will do without humanity being around to muck things up. In rough strokes, atmospheric CO2 accumulates at a rate of about 100 ppm per 25,000 years and is reduced at a rate of, again, roughly, 100 ppm per 50,000 to 75,000 years. This forms the basis of my assertion that erasing the entirety of humanity, our buildings and toys would only result in a 100 ppm reduction in 50K to 75K years. In other words, as far as a human scale is concerned, this might as well be forever. We might not even exist in 75,000 years. The only way this assertion could be refuted is if someone is able to prove there is a way to take a planet-scale system and accelerate it's natural rate of atmospheric CO2 accumulation decay from 100 ppm per 75K years to something fast enough to be of practical significance to humanity. Well, I suppose the other way to refute it would be to prove that our ice core sample data is fake or flawed in some manner. That will not happen. This quality and veracity of this data is well supported in the literature and accepted to be extremely accurate. Without even attempting any math at all we can say the amount of energy required to accelerate planetary-scale effects from 100 ppm/75K years to, say, 100 ppm/100 years is likely astronomical in scale. And that much energy is rarely without consequences. Remember, if we evaporate from this planet nothing changes faster than 100 ppm/50K years at best. In order to prove de-industrializing and crippling entire nations and continents would have any merit at all someone has to prove the physics and chemistry that would deliver the desired 100 ppm change in atmospheric CO2 concentration massively faster than 50K to 75K years. This is why I am really down on the entire Climate Change business. It's a political football. Deniers are crazy and so are proponents or believers (at least politicians). They things they are talking about doing are utterly pointless and would only serve to damage countries and societies. I mean, let's say we absolutely erase the United States from the face of the planet. Why just try to go "green", let's completely erase the US from earth. What would that accomplish? Absolutely nothing. Atmospheric CO2 concentration would continue to rise exponentially at about the same rate. It certainly isn't going to go down at all. So, what are these proponents talking about? Well, nonsense, that's what they are talking about. It has become a political tool with religious undertones on both sides. I also spoke of us already having a technology that could be brought to bear on this issue world wide with relative ease. The questions to ask when looking at ice core atmospheric sample data are: 1- What made CO2 concentration increase? 2- What made it decrease. The answers are simple: 1- Fires. Massive continent-scale fires. No firemen and water dropping helicopters to stop them. 2- Weather and trees. Water precipitates CO2. So, hurricanes, cyclones, storms, rains are good. They "wash" the atmosphere. And over tens of thousands of years they'd chip away at the problem. And trees, well, trees take CO2 and turn it into, well, trees! They are a fantastic bit of technology that only requires water and soil to work! And we know how to grow trees at scale! So, instead of a lot of the nonsense being floated out there what we have to do is: 1- Control or stop deforestation. This is terrible for the planet. 2- Plant trees like our lives depend on it. All of these lawns in front of homes in a city like Los Angeles are almost criminal when you consider they do nothing but waste water and require a guy with a gasoline powered mower and blower to maintain every week. We need to seriously consider changing the culture to plant a couple of trees in front of every home of every city wherever possible. Our cities need to look like forests to the extent possible. And there you go, CO2 sequestration using the very same technology the planet has probably used for millions of years to achieve the same kind of balance. Anyhow, that's my humble opinion.

by js8 8y ago

chris_overseas 8y ago

> So, the first thing we need to do is to move to completely carbon emission free technology of energy production. Then we can perhaps produce more than we need (e.g. in the peaks) and can start thinking about catching some CO2 back from the atmosphere to reverse the climate changes. We should be doing both in parallel. The article talks about this: "Last year’s I.P.C.C. report noted that it may be impossible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees by 2100 through only a rapid switch to clean energy, electric cars and the like. To preserve a livable environment we may also need to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. As Wurzbacher put it, “if you take all these numbers from the I.P.C.C., you end up with something like eight to 10 billion tons — gigatons — of CO₂ that need to be removed from the air every year, if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees.” "

ForHackernews 8y ago
> if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees. Hint: We're not. The Americans are expecting +4C https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-administration-sees-a-7-degree-rise-in-global-temperatures-by-2100/2018/09/27/b9c6fada-bb45-11e8-bdc0-90f81cc58c5d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump...
SiempreViernes 8y ago
No, we should have started going carbon neutral in the 1980's when the science case for precautionary was solid. It is only given that carbon industry got us to ignore the dangers for more than thirty years that we now are so desperate to keep inside the carbon budget that even very inefficient solutions like carbon capture are seriously being considered.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - FreeFull 8y ago
    Speaking of trees, massive reforestation could be one way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. As a bonus, you end up with a lot of lumber you can use for things like buildings.
    - dotancohen 8y ago
      My country has a holiday where the children plant trees every year.
      - schoen 8y ago
        Maybe there could be a holiday where children and adults plant trees every month or every week!
- benj111 8y ago
  I'm not sure its reasonable to require such a massive upheaval as a precaution. Remember those 'X causes cancer' articles, should we phase out everything implicated, as a precaution? I agree we should have moved earlier, and we should be moving faster though.
SamBam 8y ago
I think that the point is that if, today, you could spend $100 on pulling 1 ton of CO2 from the air, or spend $100 on green energy which prevents 2 tons of CO2 going into the air, the second is more important, even if we need to be extracting CO2 from the air. There's no point in extracting 1 ton of CO2 and putting 2 tons of CO2 back up there.

ovi256 8y ago

>always be cheaper to prevent creation of CO2 (burning fossil fuels) than to catch CO2 Why ? Where does this comes from ?

pjc50 8y ago
One of those processes emits energy, the other requires energy input - and to overcome the entropy, the capture process requires more energy. Edit: one barrel of oil produces 0.43 metric tons CO2 and costs about $60. Therefore, if your price of CO2 capture is more than $140/ton, it's cheaper to "capture" the CO2 by buying a barrel of oil and "sequestering" it as you would the CO2. So if carbon capture prices are more than about $150 it would be a viable business to operate a "reverse oilfield" buying oil on the open market and pumping it underground.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  Shouldn’t you include the value of the energy that the barrel creates in the calculation?
  - pjc50 8y ago
    It was mostly a piece of elaborate sarcasm about the value of reducing consumption rather than capture. Going down that route, should the value of energy used in carbon capture be counted at the market rate or its opportunity cost? It's valid to point out that the value of a barrel of oil is more than its cost and this gives rise to a "consumer surplus", which leads to the carbon tax arguments. (Although, as Retric points out upthread, there are consequential CO2 side-effects from oil extraction more than just burning it, so maybe those should be counted too?)
- nicoburns 8y ago
  This might not always be the case if for example solar energy prices keep falling as fast as they have been.
js8 8y ago
This is just law of conservation of energy (1st law of thermodynamics). If burning carbon to CO2 produces certain amount of energy (part of which then can be used to do useful work), then the reverse of that process, breaking up CO2 to carbon and oxygen, will require at least the amount of energy that was produced in burning it. So yeah, it's nice to have the technology to take CO2 from the air and create C and O2, however, the catch is, it requires energy. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, you will be better off not to do this thing at all, because you will end up creating a bit more CO2 in the process.

DennisP 8y ago

I don't think it's a given that it will always be cheaper to avoid emissions. Long-haul air travel, for example, isn't likely to go electric anytime soon, and it could well be that the cheapest option is to absorb their emissions from the air and inject them into the ground, rather than producing carbon-neutral jet fuel. If this technology really does get down to $94/ton, then a $100/ton price on carbon emissions is likely to give it a role. People can reduce emissions whenever it costs less than $94/ton to do so, and if it costs more, they could pay for absorption instead. $100/ton CO2 would raise the price of gasoline by a dollar a gallon, which doesn't seem all that unattainable, especially if the collected funds are redistributed as a dividend.

ebiester 8y ago
Or add 100 dollars to the average cost of a NY-London flight, from my quick calculations. Flights would go up 50-200 dollars each way. That's not the end of the world.
- ancientworldnow 8y ago
  This figure doesn't take into account radiative forcing which makes that 1 ton figure act more like 3 or 4 tons in actual heating capability. Airline offset programs always ignore this (in addition to way under pricing carbon offsets because that market is mostly scams built around green guilt). Even at $100 a ton, you're talking a few hundred of dollars of price increases to offset damages. This probably reduces the number of people flying which of course raise the per capita damage and therefore cost even more.
  - stevesimmons 8y ago
    How does it raise the per capita damage? Airlines are only profitable if they fly at high load factors. If price increases reduce the number of passengers flying, the airlines will try to fly fewer planes that are just as full as today. Thus the per passenger cost is the same. (... based on a consulting project I did 20 years ago on airline network economics/route capacity optimization)
8y ago

dalbasal 8y ago

Depends on the energy economics. If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases... it's at least theoretically useful. At that point it's about costs. Otherwise... Say we get to 0 emissions by 2035. There will be (is) already a troublesome amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We might have to do some carbon capture even if we're not releasing new carbon.

wcoenen 8y ago
> Depends on the energy economics. If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases Not allowed by thermodynamics. Otherwise you could create free energy by continuously burning and recapturing the same carbon.
- llukas 8y ago
  Just capturing might be possible - it doesn't have to be in form that can be easily used to generate energy.
- speakeron 8y ago
  > Not allowed by thermodynamics. Otherwise you could create free energy by continuously burning and recapturing the same carbon. That doesn't have to be the case; the carbon you capture may not be in a burnable form. E.g. if carbon dioxide were captured, additional energy would be required to split off the oxygen before the carbon could be 'burned' again.
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  It would suffice to use less non-carbon-based energy to capture the CO2.
fallingfrog 8y ago
"If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases" Sorry, that's forbidden by the laws of physics.

deytempo 8y ago

One thing we can do is try to hire more remote workers. Each person that doesn’t need to drive everyday is someone who doesn’t need to emit carbon every day

justtopost 8y ago
Pets contribute more co2 than most people. Taking care of your friends and family more than a furball may be a good alternative too.
- jeromegv 8y ago
  Pets do NOT contribute more co2 than most people. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-diet-greenhouse-gases-climate-change https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-di... Pets do contribute surprisingly a lot of CO2 when you add them up, based on their meat consumption. But it's less than what a human would consume in meat and especially a lot less when you add how much humans transport themselves around.
- PakG1 8y ago
  Could you break down how that's possible? The only way I can think of that being possible is if you move the goal posts for one group and compare apple mathematics to orange mathematics.
- bengale 8y ago
  Do you have more info on this? It seems counterintuitive on the face of it, my dog doesn't take a lot of flights or drive far for example.
  - benj111 8y ago
    I think the idea is that, dogs for example have a high meat diet, and large dogs probably eat more than a person. And they might not drive but a lot of owners like to drive some where to 'walk' their dog. Although considering the levels of obesity, that the exercise might be a net benefit. Now I don't think dogs or cats cause anything like as much co2 as humans, but it is significant, and given the scale of reductions in co2 required, I think we are probably going to get to a point where large pet ownership is at least questioned.

DougN7 8y ago

Arter reading your comment I was envisioning a world that emitted no carbon. It made me wonder if the pendulum could possibly swing so far in the other direction that plants could start suffocating. Certainly not something we need to worry about now, but we humans aren’t great at avoiding unintended consequences.

sunir 8y ago
Zero carbon from human energy production doesn’t arrest the natural carbon cycle. Plants will continue as plants. The problem is we are literally digging carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, thereby increasing the amount of atmospheric carbon over time.
IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
The answer is somewhere between “no” and “what??” . As but one factor, dying plants would release CO2. The total amount of carbon in the atmosphere is (was) at equilibrium.
- DougN7 8y ago
  Of course. I shouldn’t comment so early in the morning :(
gus_massa 8y ago
You [1] emit CO2 from the food you eat, so absolute zero CO2 emission is impossible. There are also emission from volcanos. For a somewhat similar scenario, you can read about the Carboniferous period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous . Essentially, the plants invented the wood but nobody know how to eat it, so the dead plants accumulated sequestering a lot of CO2. So the CO2 concentration dropped and the O2 concentration skyrocket. As a side effect, the high O2 concentration allowed bugs to became giant. (It ended when fungus learned how to eat wood.) [1] And all the other animal, fungus and even plants. And also bacteria and archaea.

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est31 8y ago

If we want to meet the 2 degrees goal by any means then given current trends we'll have to start removing net amounts of CO2 from the athmosphere. Of course, it makes most sense to do that once we are already carbon neutral, but once we are there, we should have the technology available for deployment and therefore investing in research right now is a good idea.

pdabbadabba 8y ago

> It will always be cheaper to prevent creation of CO2 (burning fossil fuels) than to catch CO2 back from the atmosphere. Maybe. But the politics could be totally different. Scrubbing would not be perceived as suppressing the activities of an existing industry. Hopefully, therefore, huge sectors of the existing economy would not mobilize against it the way they have against proposals to suppress CO2 output.

Retric 8y ago
I suspect large groups would organize to prevent spending 100+ Billion per year. Which would still make an insignificant change assuming we continue to produce CO2. The scale of CO2 emissions are hard to conceive. You see human heath effects in areas with poor ventilation from high CO2 levels, but as CO2 rises what constitutes poor ventilation changes. At current rates even ignoring climate changes old buildings will start to cause headaches from high CO2 levels. Buildings built at 275ppm are generally still fine at 400ppm, but that changes as you keep going.
lucisferre 8y ago
This claim definitely feels like a fact not in evidence. I have not seen any number for the cost to society to completely transition from CO2 creating activities and move to a CO2 negative state. Because that is what it is going to take to prevent climate change at this point. A reduction in CO2 isn't going to cut it. I would guess that cost is much higher than they think.
jpfed 8y ago
One problem from the fossil fuel industry's perspective is that, while scrubbing doesn't suppress their activity, doing it is essentially an admission that there's a carbon problem. And once you do that, you give up the protection that controversy and doubt affords you, and people might start demanding more extreme measures to curb carbon. Paying people to spread misinformation that maintains controversy and doubt (e.g. https://cei.org/ https://cei.org/ , who also helped maintain doubt surrounding the link between smoking and cancer) is far cheaper than the reckoning that could eventually result from admitting that carbon is a problem.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago

>So, the first thing we need to do is to move to completely carbon emission free technology of energy production. I’m very interested when a statement right off the bat throws out that we should completely and unquestionably stop using hydrocarbons which are the most efficient, portable, easy to use and safe source of energy we have ever seen. Not to mention it’s current absolute requirement in long range transport, making plastics, lubricants and production of composites that make the efficient renewable powered machines possible. How is it some people get a pass on willfully ignoring reality just because the goal is reducing emissions? So on the topic, you better hope recovering CO2 is efficient because we won’t stop using oil until it’s gone.

pjc50 8y ago
You can't claim people are "willfully ignoring reality" without acknowledging that capture is necessarily going to consume more energy that was emitted in release. > making plastics, lubricants and production of composites These don't put CO2 into the atmosphere until they are burned. Also given sufficient energy input they could also be outputs of a capture process...

darepublic 8y ago

I might be mistaken about this, but it puzzles me when people confidently state that people should NOT approach the problem from this angle. I feel like there is a great deal of uncertainty in this problem space and any genuine attempt to solve should be welcome.

tozeur 8y ago
Exactly, it’s called experimentation! The above comment is equivalent to someone telling Bosch to quit because that ammonia capture process too expensive...
- gus_massa 8y ago
  The difference is that ammonia is expensive, you can sell the ammonia (or something produced with ammonia) to make fertilizers or explosives or something. There is a market for ammonia. When you capture CO2, what you can make? Some liquid like oil or gas that can be burn. Some solid like coal that can be burn. Some rock like limestone or marble that is more expensive than the natural one. You can't sell the products. A big chunk of the man made CO2 is in power plants. It's not a good idea to burn oil to produce energy and CO2, and then use a bigger amount of energy to transform the CO2 into something that is easy to store like oil. Perhaps you can use less energy to transform the CO2 into something like coal instead of oil, but in this case it would more efficient to make a new type of power plant that transform oil into a coal like product. (Essentially burn the Hydrogen in the oil and keep the Carbons alone. I'm not sure if this is thermodynamically posible, but IIRC the C-H bound has more energy that the C-C bound. And even if this is possible, there are the technological problems.)
  - aurelwu 8y ago
    CO2 has some commercial uses too (greenhouses, chemical industry), so they can actually sell some of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Agricultural_and_biological_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Agricultural_an... Carbon Capture - like every single other measure - won't save the climate alone but it can be a useful element in those situations where there is so much solar/wind in the grid that you need some extra consumers to not waste it. Research in that area definitely is useful, in the end it will come down to the actual prices they can achieve in reality.

furyg3 8y ago

I'm very much in agreement here, I'm glad someone's investing into researching the tech, as we may need to use it even after we've stopped burning dinosaurs. What I do like about it is that it quantifies how much it costs to recover the CO2, which is useful in calculating externalities. For example, there was recently a Canadian court ruling that bankrupt oil firms first need to fund well cleanup before creditors... to which reddit joked how progressive such a concept is. No, a 'progressive' statement is that we need to calculate how much it would cost to pull all the CO2 that was generated by using the oil as fuel and finance that as well, before creditors are paid...

radicalbyte 8y ago

We should be running full speed to cut emissions whilst also implementing things like this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI which both sequesters an enormous amount of carbon and improves our planet. In Europe at least these are things we can do without extra costs by just changing the farm subsidies so they encourage good behaviour. Just as we can do the same my moving fuel subsidies away from fossil to renewables.

agumonkey 8y ago
Savory has been heavily heavily criticized. I'm not versed enough but it seems he's preaching more than proving. That said if you get to make people walk into places to produce carbon sequestration areas/devices instead of burning fuel .. you'd get squared returns
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  I don't know much about his methology but from what I've been reading it's possible to sequester a huge quantity of co2 in soil via active land management. I'd love to know if it was economically viable to do.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    the few bits I've read about him was not about capture but turning arid land back to green pastures, and studies concluded that none of his theories made a difference maybe he's right about co2 capture but be dubious

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

Isn't something like half of emissions from construction (steel and cement) and agriculture? Limiting fossil fuels is a good idea, but as that declines the significance of other sources of CO2 will increase. And those two sources are already increasing in absolute terms as well and will continue to increase as long as global population and living standards do as well.

robomartin 8y ago

This is the primary fallacy in this domain: Getting to zero emissions will not bring atmospheric CO2 down by 100 ppm for at least 50,000 to 75,000 years. Full stop. This is scientific fact BTW. I’ll go further than that: If we erased humanity and all we have built from planet earth on Monday —Captain Kirk beams everything into space and we all die— it would still be 50,000 to 75,000 years before CO2 levels drop by 100 ppm. Again, scientific facts. No doubt at all that what I just said is true. Irrefutable. In this very real context the only solutions will be found in technology that can consume CO2 in large quantities and hold on to it for as long as possible. Here’s another scientific truth: We already have this technology. It is easy to deploy world-wide and we know it to be effective. Even with that, this is a problem that will require generations to resolve; with a time scale in the thousands of years being likely. This is an issue that has been politicized so far —on both ends of the belief scale— that most everyone is focusing on nonsense politically-driven non-solutions rather than having true science-based conversations.

SubiculumCode 8y ago
Small comment. For anything with dynamics this complex, science doesn't provide what can be fairly called 'facts', just projections based on current understanding. Other than that quibble I agree with your comment.
- robomartin 8y ago
  Fair comment. The data I am relying on is based on ice core sampling at the poles. We know, to a very high degree of certainty, what our atmosphere did for the last 800,000 years. Taking this as to be my factual basis it is very easy to see what the planet has done and will do without humanity being around to muck things up. In rough strokes, atmospheric CO2 accumulates at a rate of about 100 ppm per 25,000 years and is reduced at a rate of, again, roughly, 100 ppm per 50,000 to 75,000 years. This forms the basis of my assertion that erasing the entirety of humanity, our buildings and toys would only result in a 100 ppm reduction in 50K to 75K years. In other words, as far as a human scale is concerned, this might as well be forever. We might not even exist in 75,000 years. The only way this assertion could be refuted is if someone is able to prove there is a way to take a planet-scale system and accelerate it's natural rate of atmospheric CO2 accumulation decay from 100 ppm per 75K years to something fast enough to be of practical significance to humanity. Well, I suppose the other way to refute it would be to prove that our ice core sample data is fake or flawed in some manner. That will not happen. This quality and veracity of this data is well supported in the literature and accepted to be extremely accurate. Without even attempting any math at all we can say the amount of energy required to accelerate planetary-scale effects from 100 ppm/75K years to, say, 100 ppm/100 years is likely astronomical in scale. And that much energy is rarely without consequences. Remember, if we evaporate from this planet nothing changes faster than 100 ppm/50K years at best. In order to prove de-industrializing and crippling entire nations and continents would have any merit at all someone has to prove the physics and chemistry that would deliver the desired 100 ppm change in atmospheric CO2 concentration massively faster than 50K to 75K years. This is why I am really down on the entire Climate Change business. It's a political football. Deniers are crazy and so are proponents or believers (at least politicians). They things they are talking about doing are utterly pointless and would only serve to damage countries and societies. I mean, let's say we absolutely erase the United States from the face of the planet. Why just try to go "green", let's completely erase the US from earth. What would that accomplish? Absolutely nothing. Atmospheric CO2 concentration would continue to rise exponentially at about the same rate. It certainly isn't going to go down at all. So, what are these proponents talking about? Well, nonsense, that's what they are talking about. It has become a political tool with religious undertones on both sides. I also spoke of us already having a technology that could be brought to bear on this issue world wide with relative ease. The questions to ask when looking at ice core atmospheric sample data are: 1- What made CO2 concentration increase? 2- What made it decrease. The answers are simple: 1- Fires. Massive continent-scale fires. No firemen and water dropping helicopters to stop them. 2- Weather and trees. Water precipitates CO2. So, hurricanes, cyclones, storms, rains are good. They "wash" the atmosphere. And over tens of thousands of years they'd chip away at the problem. And trees, well, trees take CO2 and turn it into, well, trees! They are a fantastic bit of technology that only requires water and soil to work! And we know how to grow trees at scale! So, instead of a lot of the nonsense being floated out there what we have to do is: 1- Control or stop deforestation. This is terrible for the planet. 2- Plant trees like our lives depend on it. All of these lawns in front of homes in a city like Los Angeles are almost criminal when you consider they do nothing but waste water and require a guy with a gasoline powered mower and blower to maintain every week. We need to seriously consider changing the culture to plant a couple of trees in front of every home of every city wherever possible. Our cities need to look like forests to the extent possible. And there you go, CO2 sequestration using the very same technology the planet has probably used for millions of years to achieve the same kind of balance. Anyhow, that's my humble opinion.