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The other poster is correct. The prices are complete fiction at any scale that has any impact at global levels. The price is literally infinite at that scale a

The other poster is correct. The prices are complete fiction at any scale that has any impact at global levels. The price is literally infinite at that scale as the resources do not exist.

Dylan16807 7y ago
Which resources? Money can buy employees and manufacturing capacity. What are the things that would cost more per unit the more you buy?
- Misdicorl 7y ago
  Mostly power generation. Don't quote me but I recall reading we'd need approximately a million times more power than currently produced to capture current emissions with current technologies. Grab a factor of ten from reduced emissions and another factor of 100 from tech improvements and it's still way out of reach
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    We emit about 40 billion tons a year, so that would imply we need the entire world's electricity supply to capture 40 thousand tons. This single tiny test plant is capturing 4 thousand tons. The number you read is wrong by miles. If we look at $100 a ton and guess that half of that is power at 10 cents a kWh, we would need 20 petawatt hours per year. Current world production is 25 petawatt hours per year.
    - jandrewrogers 7y ago
      The prototype uses the excess capacity of existing industrial infrastructures which is many, many orders of magnitude smaller than is required to meaningfully reduce atmospheric CO2. It uses chemicals that are extremely energy intensive to produce from mined minerals. Scaling the raw inputs would require massive scaling mining, energy production, logistics, etc far beyond anything that has ever been done before by a very large margin. Their $100 per ton is extremely optimistic because it doesn't require building the upstream supply chain that can feed their processes at the required scale. It isn't like this is something that already exists, it all has to be built from scratch, is amortized into the cost per ton, and has much worse than linear scalability. I'm not sure how to accurately convey just how qualitatively inaccurate your perception of our capacity to do this at scale is. Constructively, I'd like to see the argument that we can manufacture the potassium hydroxide at the scale required to sequester all 20th century CO2 in 20 years. The math, inputs, and capacity for the entire supply chain are public. There is much opportunity for rigor but even cursory analysis shows that it is not remotely feasible to effect CO2 sequestration this way even with heroic efforts. And that is under the most ideal of circumstances.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  Energy and raw chemicals. I think few people appreciate what the implied scales are for anything remotely resembling fast sequestration (read: this century) of atmospheric CO2. There are finite supplies of everything. We've only every been able to do gigaton industrial chemistry when it was strongly thermodynamically favored; in this case we are trying to run it backward up a steep gradient. The chemical processes described would also require globally depleting mined chemicals that we also use to produce food. We would need to manufacture several orders of magnitude more raw materials, including the entire upstream supply chain, than exists today. The actual scale is comparable to current global GDP for many of the proposed industrial plant solutions when scaled up. We simply don't produce the required chemicals, nor have the underlying resources to produce said chemicals, at anything remotely resembling those scales. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. I trained as a chemical engineer, I can do the math. It isn't a problem of employees. We literally have no capacity to produce the upstream resources to feed these industrial designs at the required scale. The inputs to their process are not produced by magic. This is a fairly technical point but literally no one has offered a proposal for how the chemistry would scale to a level that would solve atmospheric CO2 this century. It is a really hard problem. We are trying to run planetary scale thermodynamics backward. The amount of energy required is mind-boggling even in the most optimistic scenarios.

The other poster is correct. The prices are complete fiction at any scale that has any impact at global levels. The price is literally infinite at that scale as the resources do not exist.

Dylan16807 7y ago

Which resources? Money can buy employees and manufacturing capacity. What are the things that would cost more per unit the more you buy?

Misdicorl 7y ago
Mostly power generation. Don't quote me but I recall reading we'd need approximately a million times more power than currently produced to capture current emissions with current technologies. Grab a factor of ten from reduced emissions and another factor of 100 from tech improvements and it's still way out of reach
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  We emit about 40 billion tons a year, so that would imply we need the entire world's electricity supply to capture 40 thousand tons. This single tiny test plant is capturing 4 thousand tons. The number you read is wrong by miles. If we look at $100 a ton and guess that half of that is power at 10 cents a kWh, we would need 20 petawatt hours per year. Current world production is 25 petawatt hours per year.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    The prototype uses the excess capacity of existing industrial infrastructures which is many, many orders of magnitude smaller than is required to meaningfully reduce atmospheric CO2. It uses chemicals that are extremely energy intensive to produce from mined minerals. Scaling the raw inputs would require massive scaling mining, energy production, logistics, etc far beyond anything that has ever been done before by a very large margin. Their $100 per ton is extremely optimistic because it doesn't require building the upstream supply chain that can feed their processes at the required scale. It isn't like this is something that already exists, it all has to be built from scratch, is amortized into the cost per ton, and has much worse than linear scalability. I'm not sure how to accurately convey just how qualitatively inaccurate your perception of our capacity to do this at scale is. Constructively, I'd like to see the argument that we can manufacture the potassium hydroxide at the scale required to sequester all 20th century CO2 in 20 years. The math, inputs, and capacity for the entire supply chain are public. There is much opportunity for rigor but even cursory analysis shows that it is not remotely feasible to effect CO2 sequestration this way even with heroic efforts. And that is under the most ideal of circumstances.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
Energy and raw chemicals. I think few people appreciate what the implied scales are for anything remotely resembling fast sequestration (read: this century) of atmospheric CO2. There are finite supplies of everything. We've only every been able to do gigaton industrial chemistry when it was strongly thermodynamically favored; in this case we are trying to run it backward up a steep gradient. The chemical processes described would also require globally depleting mined chemicals that we also use to produce food. We would need to manufacture several orders of magnitude more raw materials, including the entire upstream supply chain, than exists today. The actual scale is comparable to current global GDP for many of the proposed industrial plant solutions when scaled up. We simply don't produce the required chemicals, nor have the underlying resources to produce said chemicals, at anything remotely resembling those scales. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. I trained as a chemical engineer, I can do the math. It isn't a problem of employees. We literally have no capacity to produce the upstream resources to feed these industrial designs at the required scale. The inputs to their process are not produced by magic. This is a fairly technical point but literally no one has offered a proposal for how the chemistry would scale to a level that would solve atmospheric CO2 this century. It is a really hard problem. We are trying to run planetary scale thermodynamics backward. The amount of energy required is mind-boggling even in the most optimistic scenarios.