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Carbon dioxide extraction company Carbon Engineering receives $68M investment
- hairytrog 8y agoI don't understand where the energy is coming from to complete the cycle?
- sbierwagen 8y agoSolar, presumably.
- Simple_Guy 8y agoProbably a natural gas plant.
- m0zg 8y agoBaby seal tallow more likely.
- snowwindwaves 8y agoThey can run on electricity or burn natural gas but then capture the c02 from the combustion so they are still removing c02 from the atmosphere.
- hairytrog 8y agoThe atmosphere then becomes a kind of carbon reservoir and we tune the CO2 content to match our needs. Either we want to control temperatures, or we want liquid carbon fuels which are, to date, the best aerial platform fuel form. For maximum Carbon availability and use/recycling, we would want to put all the carbon locked in oil/underground into the atmosphere where it is far more available to use. This allows the Earth system to maximize its metabolic rate. Maybe we should see the burning of fossil fuels as the unlocking of Earth's buried carbon repositories so they can be more easily used. Plants concur.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoPass the doobie please.
- titojankowski 8y agoI'm building consumer products using Carbon Engineering's carbon and carbonates. Check it out here: http://bynegative.com http://bynegative.com
- bit_logic 8y ago$68M doesn't seem like much compared to the billions of capital available. Lyft can burn 1 billion per year but a crucial technology like this for climate change can't get even half of that? Society's ability to allocate capital is really ineffective sometimes. If this technology got more R&D and was refined, it could potentially be the solution for excess solar/wind. Why build expensive large batteries if all that excess solar/wind can suck CO2 from the air and produce fuel? Then cars running on such fuel could effectively be carbon neutral.
- thinkingkong 8y agoThats not really how investing works though. I agree 100% on importance but in high risk unproven markets you dont just throw 100m over the fence and see what happens. This is a phenomenal outcome.
- teslaberry 8y agosolyndra
- wrong_variable 8y agoThe main driver of C02 reduction is based around geopolitical forces and national interest, and the west is on the wrong side of history on this one. We got lucky that China / East Asia / India do not have access to cheap hydrocarbon, aligning their national interest with that of longer term survival of humanity. Some dude in BC is vacuuming up C02 in his backyard and this becomes news ? Meanwhile ... - China continues to shave off millions barrels of global oil consumption due to their initiatives involving electric buses for the masses. - China dumps so much solar production capacity on the market that it undercuts coal and gas. The solution to climate change is not going to come from cute startups but from national projects. When history books are written, the pages will be filled with praises of national initiatives taken by govts of south korea, china, germany, ... ( india ? not sure yet have to wait and see ). Pretty words are not going to be written about the richest and most carbon intensive nation on earth along with its cronies ( Canada / Australia / UK ) actively undermining efforts to fight climate change ( while continuing to export and use fossil fuels to support the bulk of their GDP ). But you will always have some dude vacuuming up CO2 in his backyard in BC to provide moral licensing.
- robk 8y agoThe UK has cut emissions more than ANY other country
- wrong_variable 8y agoThe UK has outsourced it emission .. since it helps prop up property prices in London to not have industrial waste being dumped into the Thames. Also the money from pollution in China/Russia/ME ends up leaking to buy up property in London because you know .. nobody wants to live near a coal mine. The UK provides direct military support to the Kingdom of Brunei - one of the largest exporter of Petroleum. The UK props up several petro states in ME if you haven't noticed and also sends its own men to die in case their ME cronies are threatened. UK oil companies help loot the natural resources of Nigeria and then provide banking services to a small group of warloads to hide that wealth. The UK is the big spider in the middle of the global web that connects oil, blood and money.
- D_Alex 8y agoThis is actually a very bad idea and a complete waste of money which should have been used for other projects. It reminds me of another bad idea, which just will not die - extracting water from air by cooling it. Right now, we have several technologies ready to go. Starting with the most cost-effective, and omitting the "use less" scenarios: 1. Replacement of fossil fuel power plants with carbon free electricity such as wind and solar power (also geothermal, where possible and nuclear, where palatable). Cost per tonne of CO2 saved: less than zero for about 30% of current generation, and "very low" for a good portion of the remainder. 2. Sequestration of concentrated CO2 streams, such as those produced in natural gas processing. Cost: $20-$40 per tonne. 3. Biosequestration, ie tree planting. Cost varies greatly, maybe $15-$50 per tonne. The approaches above are the only ones that are actually used in the industry today, but there is plenty of room to do more. The approaches below are considered to be economically prohibitive, and AFAIK are not in use: 4. Post-combustion carbon capture: Scrubbing the CO2 from exhaust gases of power plants etc, where the CO2 concentration is 10-20%. Cost: $50-100/tonne, PLUS the cost of sequestration, as above. 5. Pre-combustion carbon capture: here, the carbon is removed from the fuel and sequestered, and only the hydrogen is burned. Cost: $80-150/tonne, but sequestration cost is low. and then we have: 6. Removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. The article says the cost may be "under $100/tonne", but the serious estimates I have seen are circa $500/tonne. Consider that the CO2 concentration in air is around 0.04%, cf post combustion concentrations of 10-20%. Regardless of the advances in technology, this will never be as cheap as post-combustion carbon capture, which is essentially the same process but with 250 times less throughput. I am with the people who worry that this is a cynical move by the companies to avoid urgent action to reduce CO2 emissions.EDIT: another comment calls this "moral licensing", and I completely agree.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoIt might be useful for other readers to explain that on your #1, "less than zero for about 30% current generation", based on my knowledge it means that the "running cost" of building and then operating a renewable plant (e.g. financing it at current rates and then paying interest on the financed sum) is lower than the pure cost of operating existing "polluting" plants. That's why it's "lower than zero". Please correct me if that's not what you meant.
- Simple_Guy 8y agoAt this point you can figure out if a technology to reduce atmospheric carbon level will be effective or not by looking if oil companies are investing in it.
- HocusLocus 8y agoThey must really hate plant life. So where is all the energy to run this process (and refine and process the magic chemicals) going to come from? Oh yea, it's going to be clean energy like wind power, taken from that giant surplus when wind scales up to power all homes and factories and municipal treatment plants. So much left over. Many happy energy. Meanwhile, in the making not using energy department, Kirk Sorensen gets a paltry ~3 million from DOE that isn't even to be put towards development of Weinberg's MSRE concept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8&t=44m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8&t=44m40s I fear for the human race.
- abainbridge 8y agoThey could put their plants next to wind farms that have over-capacity of what the local grid infrastructure can handle - ie on a windy day they make more electric than the grid can take. The air capture would only run on windy days. That might be a reasonable way to make jet fuel.
- Brakenshire 8y agoYes, renewable energy is becoming very cheap per unit but intermittent, likely one of the ways we will tackle that is overbuilding supply, I think it’s likely we will have a class of industries popping up that can use cheap electricity available intermittently.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoMining bitcoins on AWS spot instances.
- behindmyscreen 8y agoNuclear energy
- HocusLocus 8y agoShh! Can't mention it when wind is being discussed.
- snowwindwaves 8y agoI am surprised all of the comments so far are so negative. They can take carbon out of the air and make jet fuel with it. We still need jet fuel. It makes flying carbon neutral. The CEO argues that even if all carbon emissions stopped today we would still need to remove some of the carbon we've already emitted.
- saagarjha 8y ago> I am surprised all of the comments so far are so negative. They can take carbon out of the air and make jet fuel with it. We still need jet fuel. It makes flying carbon neutral. This is either an oversimplification or the technology is not useful, since a naïve method of doing this means that you will have to put in the energy we got from burning the fuel to convert the carbon dioxide.
- jackric 8y agoGather $renewable energy for $x time (x > 8 hours), convert to high-energy-density fuel required for flight and burn for 8 hours to cross $continent... Seems useful to me!
- de_Selby 8y agoIt would need to be 100% efficient over the whole cycle to make flying carbon neutral.
- snowwindwaves 8y agothe process uses energy to create the fuel out of carbon in the atmosphere. the process does not release any carbon. the plane burns the fuel, releasing the same amount of carbon in the fuel back in to the atmosphere. What part needs to be 100% efficient to make flying carbon neutral?
- mizchief2 8y agoFurther shows that many environmentalists care more about controlling the economy than helping the environment. Being able to utilize fossil fuels without the carbon issues should be great news, but instead people are worried that it won't kill off our means of producing power fast enough.
- jandrewrogers 8y agoThis technology is fundamentally non-scalable because it relies on potassium hydroxide chemistry to sequester CO2. Let me explain: Potassium hydroxide (KOH) is manufactured by electrolysis, which is electrical power intensive. The amount of KOH manufactured every year is a microscopic fraction of the total CO2 emitted every year. Scaling this up to the same scale as CO2 production isn't simply a matter of building more KOH factories: the implied vast electrical power generation capacity and infrastructure simply doesn't exist at this scale. You would need to build massive power plants along side your KOH manufacturing. This is the kind of thing that only works when you have access to cheap excess hydropower. And this ignores the secondary issue of scaling potassium supply sufficient to support throughput at CO2 scales, even with recycling. Potassium is a mined mineral with limited reserves that is critical for agriculture. Reliable access to mined potassium is already a major concern for food security and this would require increasing the rate of mining (and depletion) of potassium reserves many-fold. No one is going to care if we've reduced atmospheric CO2 if billions are starving to death. tl;dr: This CO2 extraction process has severe practical limits to its industrial scalability. Its feasibility relies on leveraging the excess capacity of existing industrial processes, which is only possible at tiny scales for use as a point solution. Atmospheric CO2 sequestration is a bitch. The thermodynamics and chemistry rate limiters are extremely unfavorable to an economical engineered solution. Fortunately, the planet has a prodigious background sequestration rate that can be leveraged for free if human CO2 production is reduced sufficiently.
- raverbashing 8y agoHence the question is: why can't they use NaOH which is much cheaper and easier to get?
- jandrewrogers 8y agoNaOH manufacturing is electrolytic just like KOH, and is similarly limited by power generation. As to why they can't use NaOH, NaOH being a cheaper material does not imply a cheaper process -- reaction rates matter to amortized unit costs. For example, the reaction rate of KOH is almost certainly much higher than the reaction rate of NaOH, which means it requires much less physical plant/material per unit of sequestration throughput. This plant cost savings could easily offset the lower material costs of NaOH. If it actually made sense to use NaOH, the designers of this process would have used it.
- sien 8y agoThis is huge news. The implications of cheap C02 extraction are immense. See this paper on what it means. https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2716-2009.03.pdf https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/r... The key thing is that in 2100 to keep C02 ppm at 450 ppm it would cost 0.6 % of global GDP. This comment was originally submitted for the first submission of this article at : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566711 The reaction to this development on twitter and other places is fascinating. Many people are clearly upset that C02 capture at scale is likely to become economically viable.
- lsd5you 8y agoMy god, I know we can't qualify absolutely everything we say, but I feel like you need some error bars on those predictions. Actually that is an understatement. It is wildly speculative to talk about GDP proportions and technological solutions in 80 years time.
- sien 8y agoFair enough. Double it. 1.2% of GDP. The cost benefit calculations for global warming are similarly wildly speculative. But it puts limits on the cost in 2100 which is really interesting.