17 ms·

Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

191 points by hunglee2 7y ago

phs318u 7y ago
It's worth pointing out the "omg" math moment in this paper. According to various mitigation scenarios modelled, the amount of CCS required (in addition to other mitigating approaches) requires the construction of an "average typical" CCS facility at a rate of between one a week, and one a day, until 2050. I'm not sure how to describe how this makes me feel, other than "ill".
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Another thing is where will all that energy required to break down CO2 come from. It's so bizarre that you hear so little about that, almost like nobody can do simple accounting on Joules: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
  - lrem 7y ago
    Isn't the lack of that energy the reason for proposing storage in the first place?
  - Tuna-Fish 7y ago
    Binding carbon from CO2 does not necessarily cost energy. The reactions CaO -> CaCO3 is exothermic, and the same is true for the equivalent reaction for magnesium, and the reactions forming carbonates from the silicates of those metals. Eroding volcanic rock naturally pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere, as erosion slowly reveals metals that were reduced by the volcanic heat. This process is naturally quite slow, but it can be sped up, for example, by fracking basaltic rocks and feeding carbonated water in them. The pilot project for was ran in Iceland and was successful enough to lead to both constructing a full-scale plant and scaling the process out to multiple different locations in Europe. The current main open problem is substituting seawater for fresh water for the process (Using a lot of fresh water is not exactly a problem in Iceland, but presents challenges for scaling the process out).
    - leoedin 7y ago
      This relies on the right sort of rock. Is it ubiquitous enough that we can account for meaningful amounts of carbon sequestration?
      - Tuna-Fish 7y ago
        Yes, by many orders of magnitude, to capture not just all existing emissions but the emissions that results from burning of all the fossil fuels on the planet.
        bamboozled 7y ago
        Have you read about this! Curious about what others think!
        darkmighty 7y ago
        By available, do you mean 'It exists on the planet crust', or 'It can be accessed at a significantly lower cost than the forward (breakdown, e.g. the cost of equivalent oil) energy cost?'[1], and if so, do you have sources to back that up? [1] If it costs more, or even not significantly (an order of magnitude at least) less than the cost of oil for equivalent emissions, than the economic proposition is dire. Solutions so far have those economic difficulties afaik, and we're still at a stage where we have easily available capture resources (i.e. we haven't depleted or saturated a number of them) -- we're talking about a planetary scale solution here
        Tuna-Fish 7y ago
        The first definitely, the second remains to be proven. You can find most of the relevant scientific articles by searching for 'carbfix' on sciencedirect. The current results are promising, but there are still challenges to overcome. Notably, the system they run in Iceland absolutely guzzled fresh water, and while this is not a problem in Iceland, it would prevent the scaling up of this project to a true planetary-scale solution. Work is ongoing for figuring out if saltwater would clog up the wells too badly, and how this can be mitigated. Also, as the carbfix project took in CO2 and H2S as highly concentrated gases, as the direct problem was to get rid of the emissions of a geothermal plant. To scale up to carbon capture from the atmosphere, they'd have to either set up their system to use less concentrated input gases, or figure out a cost-effective method of separating and concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere. Not saying this is necessarily a silver bullet for all our emissions, just saying that the original concern of the poster I replied to about where the energy to split CO2 it going to come from is not actually as big of a deal as it seems.
  - igravious 7y ago
    Very true. I may email the researchers of this report about this, surely they've spent time thinking about this. (More recent stats) https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-production.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-prod... https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption-statistics.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption...
- igravious 7y ago
  It has been widely reported than China is to build a Coronavirus treatment hospital in Wuhan in six days to manage the treatment of people with said virus. This article is suggesting that we ought to treat climate change with a similar degree of alarm and urgency. This is not happening, therefore we should start preparing for the probable scenarios, not the improbable ones. “To get to net-zero emissions, the residual emissions must be counteracted by CO2 removal to achieve net zero emissions (dark green). Most models do this with afforestation or bioenergy with CCS (BECCS). Non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions (such as methane) add to the residual emissions (not shown).” I'm all for massive afforestation programs, I'm less for BECCS – fight nature with nature I say.
- algo_trader 7y ago
  In 2019 we built ~500 large renewable energy projects. Total 180GW, or about 2 per day. We can and should built about x2-x3 more. Current bottlenecks is NIMBY, competing fossil assets, and transmission. It will be hard, so feel "ill but hopeful".
  - revax 7y ago
    What does a "renewable energy project" means?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - greglindahl 7y ago
      180GW / 500 = 360 megawatts average, does that help set the scale?
  - natch 7y ago
    The numbers were referring to carbon capture and sequestration projects, not renewable energy projects. Both help with getting carbon out of the atmosphere. But they are not the same thing. Energy projects generally produce or help deliver energy for the locale that creates and funds them. That means there is political will for them, locally. CCS projects benefit the global climate, but not the local taxpayers directly. I’m all for them but your average climate denier is not going to be onboard. It’s way beyond being a hard sell. Hopeful is not the feeling that naturally arises here.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Is that 180GW of capacity or of generation? With renewables these values are often different by ~4x due to intermittency.
- johnmorrison 7y ago
  I think looking at the total rate is naturally going to feel heavy. Instead, consider this: per country on average, that rate is between one every 4 years, and 2 every year, until 2050. That's not bad at all.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Presuming every country has the same ability to pay. Once you get outside the G20, or top 40, you may well be asking the impossible.
    - johnmorrison 7y ago
      Of course I don't mean to suggest we should actually split it up by country - it's just a nice mental model that splits by ~40 million person groups.
  - labawi 7y ago
    Depends whether you are China or Vatican. Perhaps a per-capita calculation would be more appropriate: 1/day global = 1/day / 7000·1Mp = 1/20y per 1M people; 5/1y per 100M. USA should do a lot more, Africa can get a pass.
    - johnmorrison 7y ago
      > Africa can get a pass. As an African I disagree w/ this. But you're right, global powers like the US/EU/China should and will likely contribute the most.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        Having seen the effect of China and India getting a pass in the UN Climate summits -- because of where they were 30 years ago, no one should get a pass. Otherwise it'll be a source of much future regret.
        johnmorrison 7y ago
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  I find it fascinating. Now I know why the Easter Islanders were building statutes burning up all the trees. The world has gone insane and I'm along for a ride I don't want to be on.
tobias3 7y ago
My intuition is that it would be almost always cheaper to pay e.g. Norway and Saudi Arabia to not pump out the captured carbon (in form of fossilized plant matter) in the first place, instead of pumping it out in the form of oil, burning it, then capturing the CO2, liquifying it and finally pumping it back underground where hopefully it doesn't bubble up again. But that would be the problem a world-wide carbon emission trade/carbon tax would solve... Weirdly, I always see oil nations such as Norway here or Saudi Arabia pushing for CCS, as if this solution would be in their interest... while really reducing CO2 emmissions for them would be as simple as pushing a stop button.
- CPLX 7y ago
  I mean it actually isn’t that simple. In a market with significant inelasticity in demand you’d certainly see the price rise if they pressed the stop button, but the decline in consumption in the short term wouldn’t be as severe. As long as there’s other places to get the product the market would adjust to meet that demand. Granted in the long term higher prices would help a lot, but a tax at the point of demand/consumption would likely work a whole lot more cleanly.
  - BOOSTERHIDROGEN 7y ago
    That is interesting explanation, any references about inelasticity ?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tobias3 7y ago
    Yeah, everything every individual or even individual country does doesn't matter in the grand scheme. That's kind of the problem (tragedy of the commons). One way to break the tragedy of commons is to lead by example, take the societal high ground, pressure others to join and finally shun everybody that doesn't participate. E.g. Norway could press the stop button, they'd be poorer (but other countries aren't lucky and don't have any oil) it wouldn't reduce CO2 output much over the short term, but maybe that would put other countries on the path to do it as well. In general the more upstream the taxation the easier to implement (it would be easy to simply tax the oil an oil rig produces), while the tax income would be probably fairer distributed if the tax is at the more consumption level/downstream.
algo_trader 7y ago
CC will probably never happen on the large scale. It is inherently inefficient and a final, last resort. Preventing emissions: Renewable electricity. EVs. Hydrogen. Synthetic food stuffs. Etc Handling the last 5%-10%: tax carbon, and allow nature to recover (rain forests, fisheries, natural bio-mass, etc). The idea of carbon capture while some developing country is cutting down forests is bizarre. Luckily population is stabilizing, and the world is getting richer and urbanized.
- inciampati 7y ago
  We are at the point of last resort. There is no viable way to solve the distributed problem of carbon emission. People can argue all they want about renewables and regulation. Half the world won't give a damn, and we'll be left where we are. Carbon capture is a much more centralized response. It actually might be possible for a few rich nations to get together and implement systems to drive it at scale. Unfortunately, we are already at a point where there might be no other mechanism to intentionally modulate the climate.
  - tomp 7y ago
    > There is no viable way to solve the distributed problem of carbon emission We haven't even tried. Tax all products, in particular imports (China etc) based on their CO2 emissions. The Western worlds (EU + US + a few others) still represents the majority of consumption / buying power, and has the option of enforcing standards on cheap-labour producing countries. We just have to have the will to do it. I hope Trump's anti-China stance (albeit for the wrong reasons) might spur other countries into thinking in this direction. Edit: I'm also terribly annoyed by these stupid "pop-interventions" like "eat less meat" and "use paper straws". I don't want the government to tell me what to do (that's totalitarian and completely unacceptable from my perspective), the government should instead adjust the incentives so that all externalities are properly accounted for; then I'm free to drive less (or buy a Tesla) and eat more meat, whereas someone else (with the same budget but different preferences) can instead adopt a vegan diet and go on frequent roadtrips.
  - blueadept111 7y ago
Proven 7y ago
No, it's not necessary at all. It would also be uneconomical and therefore pointless. You might as well pay people to not work. Hey isn't that exactly the appeal of MMT? People could do nothing, emit less CO2 and still get paid.
londons_explore 7y ago
People are missing the fact that the oil and gas industry is strongly in favour of CCS for 2 main reasons: 1. It makes extracting and burning oil not so bad - no need to make rules limiting oil extraction, we can simply start some CCS projects. 2. Injecting CO2 into deep oil wells actually helps get more oil out of them. Get the government to pay for CCS, while the oil company profits off increased yields.
- hannob 7y ago
  This is actually an important point. It doesn't remove the need for CCS though. I think people advocating for CCS should be careful what they ask for. Reasonable things to do would be: a) CCS should be confined to areas where no feasible technical alternative exists (e.g. cement) and to negative emissions. b) No support for CCS as in Enhanced Oil Recovery. This is creating more emissions than it avoids.
  - natch 7y ago
    What is the reference to cement supposed to indicate here?
    - Valgrim 7y ago
      Cement releases CO2 as part of it's chemical curing process. It contributes to about 8% of worldwide emissions. Another industry where CO2 as a chemical byproduct is vented at a massive scale in the atmosphere is with the steel industry. Both are good targets for carbon capture at the source.
      - hannob 7y ago
        > Cement releases CO2 as part of it's chemical curing process. It contributes to about 8% of worldwide emissions. Just to nitpick here, but I think this is crucial to understand: 8% is more plausibly a number for the total emissions of cement, including energy emissions. The chemical emissions are more in the range of 4%.
hurricanetc 7y ago
CCS is absolutely going to be necessary. So is nuclear. What is the renewable alternative for the cement, steel, shipping, and aviation industries? Environmentalists need to get out of their own way and stop treating good as the enemy of perfect. Some progress is better than no progress. All technologies and approaches will be required. https://mobile.twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/1194886600255266816 https://mobile.twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/11948866002552...
- caf 7y ago
  For steel, it's hydrogen direct reduction. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652618326301 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    That process is entirely electric and so the benefits depend completely on the energy provider, is 10 years away from actually-maybe happening, and requires CCS to be carbon neutral. The last bit is the most relevant to this particular discussion.
    - hannob 7y ago
      > requires CCS to be carbon neutral Why would that be? Hydrogen doesn't contain any carbon. If you produce the hydrogen from electrolysis and the electricity from renewables the process would be carbon free. (You can still argue that there are emissions in construction and such, but I don't think that's what you meant.)
      - hurricanetc 7y ago
        There are other metals and materials involved. It’s a partial solution. We really aren’t even close to a truly carbon neutral steel production. Maybe by 2100.
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mdorazio 7y ago
Plug for Project Vesta [1], which I donate to. It's the only energy-practical proposal I've seen so far for real carbon capture aside from replanting a million acres of trees and hoping people don't burn them... again. [1] https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/
- falcolas 7y ago
  It doesn’t take a person. Forests burn, it’s part of their natural lifecycle. Lightning is one of the biggest starters (once you pull out mankind).
- hedora 7y ago
  Project Vesta seems too good to be true (planet-scale CO2 removal at $10/ton that also de-acidifies the oceans, and it is already scaling up(?)). Have any reputable third parties validated their claims?
- funklute 7y ago
  I was quite curious about this project a while back. But I later talked to an academic, a friend who happens to be an expert in the kinds of reaction kinetics the project relies on. His view was that they are not using the correct reaction rates in their calculations. He said they were linearly extrapolating existing data, when in reality it is a non-linear relationship. So my understanding is that their reaction rates still need to be empirically validated. Disappointingly, my friend had no faith that this would ever work - although academics have of course been wrong before. Regardless, I'm very interested to see how this project plays out.
  - ProjectVesta 7y ago
    Hi Funklute, most of the models out there for dissolution kinetics and weathering rates are a type called "shrinking core models" such as those used in analysis by Hangx and Spiers (2009). Those models definitely do not take into account the effect of grain-on-grain collisions, surface abrasion, the constant refreshing of warm, acidic water, and/or fauna such as lugworms[1]. For example, the constant collisions chip off fine fractions of olivine that themselves weather rapidly. And the constant grinding removes a silica coating that dramatically slows the weathering rate of stationary olivine. Lugworm digestion can speed up the weathering rate by 100x-1000x, etc. Ask your friend if he knows of any models that take even some of these considerations into account, as all of them will be present in the coastal environment and contribute to our accelerated weathering rates. Also, please show him these simple desktop shaker experiments here [2] and here [3], that show the rates are much higher than the core shrinking models calculate when the olivine is in motion (and these experiments are in fairly cold water compared to the tropics). This is the type of research that we base our calculations on. That said, we are in agreement that we need the rates to be empirically validated. So, first we are going to deploy a Phase Ia Safety Pilot Study, and once that is on the beach we will begin work on our Phase Ib Speed Pilot Study to demonstrate the accelerated rates. Thank you for your optimism for the project, we welcome feedback and hope to help spread the understanding of the underlying processes that make the project viable :) [1] https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_88/1/ https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_88/1/ [2] https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_67/4/ https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_67/4/ [3] https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_90/9/ https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_90/9/
cagenut 7y ago
This article has some good charts and visualizations. Just to add one for context, this is from the IPCC SR15 report 2 years ago: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3b.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3... The yellow sections are BECCS, which is basically burning biosmass for energy and then using CCS to capture the co2 from it. That is to say, CCS has already been factored into the models as a necessary assumption for a long time now. Keep in mind this is completely distinct from using CCS for continued burning of coal/gas/oil, and absolutely not about using it for enhanced oil recovery. Using CCS in those scenarios is like losing money on every unit sold and trying to make it up in volume, its simply bad math.
pfdietz 7y ago
CCS can be a way to keep using fossil fuels for dispatchable supply, in a way that meshes nicely with renewables. In particular: make hydrogen from the fossil fuel 24/7, store the hydrogen, sequester the CO2, and when needed burn the hydrogen in power plants (or other uses).
tito 7y ago
Surprising they include Direct Air Capture as CCS. Here's the more detailed 32 page PDF that accompanies the linked CCS article: https://pub.cicero.oslo.no/cicero-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2633470/CICERO%20Report%202019%2021%20web.pdf https://pub.cicero.oslo.no/cicero-xmlui/bitstream/handle/112... I publish a weekly newsletter on carbon removal: http://bit.ly/carbon-updates http://bit.ly/carbon-updates
trickstra 7y ago
Here you can try to create your own solution to keeping global warming below 2°C: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.6 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.... (rabbit hole warning: you can easily spend hours playing with this site) It's not impossible to create solutions that don't require carbon capture, but those tend to have the uncomfortable side effect of raising electricity prices two- or three-fold in the next 20 years. But here is one that I created which keeps the prices stable and also achieves 2 degrees: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=-1&p7=2&p16=-0.05&p30=-0.05&p39=42&p47=4.2&p50=4.1&p53=3.8&p55=3.8&p57=-8.4&p59=-84&p63=2.2&p64=2.8&p65=85&p67=39&v=2.7.6 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=-1&...
- tito 7y ago
  That looks like a powerful tool! I've been on the lookout for something interactive like that for awhile, only saw desktop-based simulators. Nice find, curious where you came across it.
  - trickstra 7y ago
    It's also the third generation of their simulator - they've been collecting data and creating tools like this for a bunch of years now: https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/ https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/ I just randomly found it in some article about a month ago.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Keep in mind that this simulator is very focused on status-quo. It's not even possible to simulate an exponential curve for solar or a methane catastrophe.
  - trickstra 7y ago
    You can change the assumptions under top menu Simulation->Assumptions. Some of them determine how quickly can a technology come to market, how much it makes future improvements cheaper etc. Also here are more detailed explanations and examples of how the model works: https://docs.climateinteractive.org/projects/en-roads/en/latest/guide/renewables.html https://docs.climateinteractive.org/projects/en-roads/en/lat...
DenisM 7y ago
Perhaps we can reconsider recycling of paper products as a first step? If you send a paper bag to the landfill it’s buried in the ground (sequester), a tree is cut down to make a new paper bag, and a new tree is planted to make new material for more bags. Thus carbon is continuously captured from the air and buried deep. If you recycle a bag then the old tree dies of old age and decomposes releasing the captured carbon back into the air. The new tree repeats the cycle, with no net carbon capture.
- ianstormtaylor 7y ago
  Not sure if you’re joking or not, but that is not how it works at all. https://ensia.com/features/methane-landfills/ https://ensia.com/features/methane-landfills/
  - DenisM 7y ago
    I’m not joking and my observation does not square with your link. A close friend has taken a tour of a local landfill in WA state and was shown a perfectly preserved months-old banana that was dug out by the presenter from the landfill. Apparently the landfills, at least here, are completely sealed. If a banana stays “fresh” for months a sheet of paper will stay fresh for a century. And be that as it may, suppose we create special landfill for paper - that one can easily be made completely sealed and good for a thousand years.
    - hedora 7y ago
      Modern landfills have pumps to push oxygen into the garbage to accelerate decomposition. Without them, newspaper takes >> 50 years to decompose. Diverting waste paper to a sealed dump would definitely sequester carbon. (But you need to make sure the production of new paper is carbon neutral vs recycling for this to work out).
      - DenisM 7y ago
        How can production be not carbon neutral? When trees are cut new trees grow in their place, unless the place is used as a construction site or something. https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/mass-timber-construction-really-renewable-and-sustainable.html https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/mass-t...
travisporter 7y ago
Highly recommend reading sustainable energy without the hot air by the late David MacKay. Even though dated, he really puts numbers behind every broad stroke assumption that causes pause
mmmuhd 7y ago
I think carbon capture is the way, I will soon do a show hn of our little company called carbonHarvester, we have as per as I know the cheapest technology of capturing the CO2 out of thin air, our aim is to enable anyone using an air conditioner to harvest CO2 from thin air with a little additional energy bill, and we can regenerate the captured CO2 cheaply.
- tito 7y ago
  Nice! Add your company to AirMiners, the largest index of companies mining carbon fro the air: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org We'll feature it on the top of the list.
  - mmmuhd 7y ago
    Wow nice index, will add ASAP, your site need the lock (https) by the way. Thanks.
    - tito 7y ago
      Yes, I wanna get that "secure" bling
  - hedora 7y ago
    Hey, thanks for putting this list together. Is anyone actively curating it one level down: Current $/ton, predicted $/ton, total feasible scale, third party (preferably peer reviewed) vetting for scams, etc?
    - tito 7y ago
      I would love to add this info! Any suggestions how to pull this data or how to display it? tito@impossiblelabs.io
  - detritus 7y ago
    Neat! Not sure how useful it would be to others, but the first thing I tried to do was sort the list by country.
daxfohl 7y ago
So who pays? Government isn't going to convince people to do it, or else they would have just implemented carbon taxes to begin with.
ci5er 7y ago
I want to applaud you for making the most vanilla contribution in 114 years. It turns out that everyone who appears to care doesn't give a shit, and CCD doesn't matter, and neither does natural gas. I personally think it is a huge global warming scam - but if I am wrong - go to nukes. They waiting and safe (recently)
- strainer 7y ago
  Even without CCS fossil can be switched to carbon neutral biomass and syn-gas for that occasional demand which is not economic to meet with oversupplied renewables, hydro and battery storage. Nuclear promotion desperately ignores that there will be plenty of energy generated most of the time by far more economic solar, wind, hydro and storage. There will be no point to staff and run nuclear's thermal plants most of the time, its simply not a solution for occasional supply deficits.
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    This assumes that intermittent renewable sources plus storage can be built out at astronomical scale without running into unexpected economic, regulatory, or environmental challenges. In many similar expansions of new tech, big challenges show up once the fleet size shows up. This was the central tenant of Komanoff's Power Plant Cost Escalation book (free pdf of it here: http://komanoff.net/nuclear_power/Power_Plant_Cost_Escalation.pdf http://komanoff.net/nuclear_power/Power_Plant_Cost_Escalatio...)
    - strainer 7y ago
      This term "astronomical" applies no more to the scale of renewables needing built than it would nuclear. The existence of a somewhat related pdf doesn't make the prophecy realistic, that big challenges are more likely to show up for future renewable builds than for nuclear builds. The actual situation is nuclear can hardly get built currently due to "economic, regulatory, or environmental challenges" while renewables can and already have big fleet sizes.
      - 7y ago
WalterBright 7y ago
The best and cheapest way to capture carbon is to plant trees. Lots of them.
- hedora 7y ago
  That’s true for the next year or so, but it only will push the clock back a few years. At that point, we run out of land. I’m not arguing against it — every bit helps. However, something better needs to come along, and we need to invest in that thing.
- travisporter 7y ago
  a hectare of trees captures 1 to 10 tonnes of CO2 per year (http://www.sicirec.org/definitions/carbon-capture http://www.sicirec.org/definitions/carbon-capture). That's about 7500 square meters of forest per person (assuming 11 tons per person per year). It's theoretically doable, but would require enormous forests.
dlet 7y ago
Title: "Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C" In the article: "There are at least some scenarios that can meet the Paris goals without CCS." WTF ?!!
ci5er 7y ago
If you say so (and I am not saying that you are wrong), but the cost of mining coal and oil and the cost of digging and refining those Li-whatevers, can not be ignored. Pease and love
supernova87a 7y ago
CCS technology is uneconomic. Like incredibly uneconomic. Like, the last thing you would pay for after doing all other possible things. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/gillingham_stock_cost_080218_posted.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/gillingham_sto... https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate-climate-change https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate...
- whatsmyusername 7y ago
  3 degrees of warming turning into 7 degrees of warming because of the chain effect is probably a bit less economical than tackling the problem. But I'll be dead so whatever. Live your best life.
- elihu 7y ago
  > The higher the bar, the greater the cost. McKinsey’s analysis defines an upper cost threshold of €60 per tonne avoided (i.e. the chart only shows alternatives that are ‘cheaper’ than €60 per tonne). 60 Euros per ton doesn't seem terribly bad. Burning a gallon of gas generates about 20 pounds of CO2 (hydrogen from the gas bonds with oxygen from the air, resulting in CO2 emissions that weight about 3 times as much as the weight of the original gasoline). So, every time you refill a 15 gallon gas tank, that's about 300 pounds of CO2. I'm not sure if the chart uses metric tons (about 2200 pounds, let's say it does. It looks like most of the CCS options on that chart are in the range of about 40 to 60 euros per ton. 60 euros * (300 pounds / 2200 pounds) is about 8.18 euros, or about 9 US dollars. That's significant; people would complain. It's not insurmountable though. People would still keep driving. It's worth noting that the carbon capture options listed are specifically carbon capture from existing fossil fuel power plants. There may well be other carbon capture options that are cheaper, like sequestering carbon from plant biomass. (I didn't read the paper, maybe it goes into that.)
- MChristopherson 7y ago
  That is an important point that struck home with me when I came to realize just how minuscule the amount of carbon dioxide is in the air relative to other gases: it's nigh-on a rounding error. I think many of us just haven't internalized the percentages of gasses, and probably, like myself, often have it all backwards. An alien doing a fly-through of our solar system would describe our planet as a nitrogen atmosphere. In descending order: Nitrogen: 78 percent Oxygen: 21 percent Argon: .9 percent CO2: a measly 0.04 percent Groking that last value really helps frame the challenges that CCS has to deal with (and also gives one an appreciation of just how powerful of a greenhouse gas CO2 is).
dx7tnt 7y ago
Very helpful advice coming from a country that has run its whole economy off its oil reserves since the 80s.
himinlomax 7y ago
Is there even just a small scale production implementation of carbon capture? Last I checked it wasn't even working in the lab beyond trivial scale.
williesleg 7y ago
Nice, let's start with China and India. HOW DARE YOU CHINA AND INDIA!
egberts1 7y ago
Plant a billion trees; problem solved.

191 points by hunglee2 7y ago

It's worth pointing out the "omg" math moment in this paper. According to various mitigation scenarios modelled, the amount of CCS required (in addition to other mitigating approaches) requires the construction of an "average typical" CCS facility at a rate of between one a week, and one a day, until 2050. I'm not sure how to describe how this makes me feel, other than "ill".

H8crilA 7y ago
Another thing is where will all that energy required to break down CO2 come from. It's so bizarre that you hear so little about that, almost like nobody can do simple accounting on Joules: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
- lrem 7y ago
  Isn't the lack of that energy the reason for proposing storage in the first place?
- Tuna-Fish 7y ago
  Binding carbon from CO2 does not necessarily cost energy. The reactions CaO -> CaCO3 is exothermic, and the same is true for the equivalent reaction for magnesium, and the reactions forming carbonates from the silicates of those metals. Eroding volcanic rock naturally pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere, as erosion slowly reveals metals that were reduced by the volcanic heat. This process is naturally quite slow, but it can be sped up, for example, by fracking basaltic rocks and feeding carbonated water in them. The pilot project for was ran in Iceland and was successful enough to lead to both constructing a full-scale plant and scaling the process out to multiple different locations in Europe. The current main open problem is substituting seawater for fresh water for the process (Using a lot of fresh water is not exactly a problem in Iceland, but presents challenges for scaling the process out).
  - leoedin 7y ago
    This relies on the right sort of rock. Is it ubiquitous enough that we can account for meaningful amounts of carbon sequestration?
    - Tuna-Fish 7y ago
      Yes, by many orders of magnitude, to capture not just all existing emissions but the emissions that results from burning of all the fossil fuels on the planet.
      - bamboozled 7y ago
        Have you read about this! Curious about what others think!
      - darkmighty 7y ago
        By available, do you mean 'It exists on the planet crust', or 'It can be accessed at a significantly lower cost than the forward (breakdown, e.g. the cost of equivalent oil) energy cost?'[1], and if so, do you have sources to back that up? [1] If it costs more, or even not significantly (an order of magnitude at least) less than the cost of oil for equivalent emissions, than the economic proposition is dire. Solutions so far have those economic difficulties afaik, and we're still at a stage where we have easily available capture resources (i.e. we haven't depleted or saturated a number of them) -- we're talking about a planetary scale solution here
        Tuna-Fish 7y ago
        The first definitely, the second remains to be proven. You can find most of the relevant scientific articles by searching for 'carbfix' on sciencedirect. The current results are promising, but there are still challenges to overcome. Notably, the system they run in Iceland absolutely guzzled fresh water, and while this is not a problem in Iceland, it would prevent the scaling up of this project to a true planetary-scale solution. Work is ongoing for figuring out if saltwater would clog up the wells too badly, and how this can be mitigated. Also, as the carbfix project took in CO2 and H2S as highly concentrated gases, as the direct problem was to get rid of the emissions of a geothermal plant. To scale up to carbon capture from the atmosphere, they'd have to either set up their system to use less concentrated input gases, or figure out a cost-effective method of separating and concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere. Not saying this is necessarily a silver bullet for all our emissions, just saying that the original concern of the poster I replied to about where the energy to split CO2 it going to come from is not actually as big of a deal as it seems.
- igravious 7y ago
  Very true. I may email the researchers of this report about this, surely they've spent time thinking about this. (More recent stats) https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-production.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-prod... https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption-statistics.html https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption...
igravious 7y ago
It has been widely reported than China is to build a Coronavirus treatment hospital in Wuhan in six days to manage the treatment of people with said virus. This article is suggesting that we ought to treat climate change with a similar degree of alarm and urgency. This is not happening, therefore we should start preparing for the probable scenarios, not the improbable ones. “To get to net-zero emissions, the residual emissions must be counteracted by CO2 removal to achieve net zero emissions (dark green). Most models do this with afforestation or bioenergy with CCS (BECCS). Non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions (such as methane) add to the residual emissions (not shown).” I'm all for massive afforestation programs, I'm less for BECCS – fight nature with nature I say.
algo_trader 7y ago
In 2019 we built ~500 large renewable energy projects. Total 180GW, or about 2 per day. We can and should built about x2-x3 more. Current bottlenecks is NIMBY, competing fossil assets, and transmission. It will be hard, so feel "ill but hopeful".
- revax 7y ago
  What does a "renewable energy project" means?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    180GW / 500 = 360 megawatts average, does that help set the scale?
- natch 7y ago
  The numbers were referring to carbon capture and sequestration projects, not renewable energy projects. Both help with getting carbon out of the atmosphere. But they are not the same thing. Energy projects generally produce or help deliver energy for the locale that creates and funds them. That means there is political will for them, locally. CCS projects benefit the global climate, but not the local taxpayers directly. I’m all for them but your average climate denier is not going to be onboard. It’s way beyond being a hard sell. Hopeful is not the feeling that naturally arises here.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Is that 180GW of capacity or of generation? With renewables these values are often different by ~4x due to intermittency.
johnmorrison 7y ago
I think looking at the total rate is naturally going to feel heavy. Instead, consider this: per country on average, that rate is between one every 4 years, and 2 every year, until 2050. That's not bad at all.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Presuming every country has the same ability to pay. Once you get outside the G20, or top 40, you may well be asking the impossible.
  - johnmorrison 7y ago
    Of course I don't mean to suggest we should actually split it up by country - it's just a nice mental model that splits by ~40 million person groups.
- labawi 7y ago
  Depends whether you are China or Vatican. Perhaps a per-capita calculation would be more appropriate: 1/day global = 1/day / 7000·1Mp = 1/20y per 1M people; 5/1y per 100M. USA should do a lot more, Africa can get a pass.
  - johnmorrison 7y ago
    > Africa can get a pass. As an African I disagree w/ this. But you're right, global powers like the US/EU/China should and will likely contribute the most.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Having seen the effect of China and India getting a pass in the UN Climate summits -- because of where they were 30 years ago, no one should get a pass. Otherwise it'll be a source of much future regret.
      - johnmorrison 7y ago
buzzkillington 7y ago
I find it fascinating. Now I know why the Easter Islanders were building statutes burning up all the trees. The world has gone insane and I'm along for a ride I don't want to be on.

tobias3 7y ago

My intuition is that it would be almost always cheaper to pay e.g. Norway and Saudi Arabia to not pump out the captured carbon (in form of fossilized plant matter) in the first place, instead of pumping it out in the form of oil, burning it, then capturing the CO2, liquifying it and finally pumping it back underground where hopefully it doesn't bubble up again. But that would be the problem a world-wide carbon emission trade/carbon tax would solve... Weirdly, I always see oil nations such as Norway here or Saudi Arabia pushing for CCS, as if this solution would be in their interest... while really reducing CO2 emmissions for them would be as simple as pushing a stop button.

CPLX 7y ago
I mean it actually isn’t that simple. In a market with significant inelasticity in demand you’d certainly see the price rise if they pressed the stop button, but the decline in consumption in the short term wouldn’t be as severe. As long as there’s other places to get the product the market would adjust to meet that demand. Granted in the long term higher prices would help a lot, but a tax at the point of demand/consumption would likely work a whole lot more cleanly.
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 7y ago
  That is interesting explanation, any references about inelasticity ?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tobias3 7y ago
  Yeah, everything every individual or even individual country does doesn't matter in the grand scheme. That's kind of the problem (tragedy of the commons). One way to break the tragedy of commons is to lead by example, take the societal high ground, pressure others to join and finally shun everybody that doesn't participate. E.g. Norway could press the stop button, they'd be poorer (but other countries aren't lucky and don't have any oil) it wouldn't reduce CO2 output much over the short term, but maybe that would put other countries on the path to do it as well. In general the more upstream the taxation the easier to implement (it would be easy to simply tax the oil an oil rig produces), while the tax income would be probably fairer distributed if the tax is at the more consumption level/downstream.

algo_trader 7y ago

CC will probably never happen on the large scale. It is inherently inefficient and a final, last resort. Preventing emissions: Renewable electricity. EVs. Hydrogen. Synthetic food stuffs. Etc Handling the last 5%-10%: tax carbon, and allow nature to recover (rain forests, fisheries, natural bio-mass, etc). The idea of carbon capture while some developing country is cutting down forests is bizarre. Luckily population is stabilizing, and the world is getting richer and urbanized.

inciampati 7y ago
We are at the point of last resort. There is no viable way to solve the distributed problem of carbon emission. People can argue all they want about renewables and regulation. Half the world won't give a damn, and we'll be left where we are. Carbon capture is a much more centralized response. It actually might be possible for a few rich nations to get together and implement systems to drive it at scale. Unfortunately, we are already at a point where there might be no other mechanism to intentionally modulate the climate.
- tomp 7y ago
  > There is no viable way to solve the distributed problem of carbon emission We haven't even tried. Tax all products, in particular imports (China etc) based on their CO2 emissions. The Western worlds (EU + US + a few others) still represents the majority of consumption / buying power, and has the option of enforcing standards on cheap-labour producing countries. We just have to have the will to do it. I hope Trump's anti-China stance (albeit for the wrong reasons) might spur other countries into thinking in this direction. Edit: I'm also terribly annoyed by these stupid "pop-interventions" like "eat less meat" and "use paper straws". I don't want the government to tell me what to do (that's totalitarian and completely unacceptable from my perspective), the government should instead adjust the incentives so that all externalities are properly accounted for; then I'm free to drive less (or buy a Tesla) and eat more meat, whereas someone else (with the same budget but different preferences) can instead adopt a vegan diet and go on frequent roadtrips.
- blueadept111 7y ago

Proven 7y ago

No, it's not necessary at all. It would also be uneconomical and therefore pointless. You might as well pay people to not work. Hey isn't that exactly the appeal of MMT? People could do nothing, emit less CO2 and still get paid.

londons_explore 7y ago

People are missing the fact that the oil and gas industry is strongly in favour of CCS for 2 main reasons: 1. It makes extracting and burning oil not so bad - no need to make rules limiting oil extraction, we can simply start some CCS projects. 2. Injecting CO2 into deep oil wells actually helps get more oil out of them. Get the government to pay for CCS, while the oil company profits off increased yields.

hannob 7y ago
This is actually an important point. It doesn't remove the need for CCS though. I think people advocating for CCS should be careful what they ask for. Reasonable things to do would be: a) CCS should be confined to areas where no feasible technical alternative exists (e.g. cement) and to negative emissions. b) No support for CCS as in Enhanced Oil Recovery. This is creating more emissions than it avoids.
- natch 7y ago
  What is the reference to cement supposed to indicate here?
  - Valgrim 7y ago
    Cement releases CO2 as part of it's chemical curing process. It contributes to about 8% of worldwide emissions. Another industry where CO2 as a chemical byproduct is vented at a massive scale in the atmosphere is with the steel industry. Both are good targets for carbon capture at the source.
    - hannob 7y ago
      > Cement releases CO2 as part of it's chemical curing process. It contributes to about 8% of worldwide emissions. Just to nitpick here, but I think this is crucial to understand: 8% is more plausibly a number for the total emissions of cement, including energy emissions. The chemical emissions are more in the range of 4%.

hurricanetc 7y ago

CCS is absolutely going to be necessary. So is nuclear. What is the renewable alternative for the cement, steel, shipping, and aviation industries? Environmentalists need to get out of their own way and stop treating good as the enemy of perfect. Some progress is better than no progress. All technologies and approaches will be required. https://mobile.twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/1194886600255266816 https://mobile.twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/11948866002552...

caf 7y ago
For steel, it's hydrogen direct reduction. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652618326301 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  That process is entirely electric and so the benefits depend completely on the energy provider, is 10 years away from actually-maybe happening, and requires CCS to be carbon neutral. The last bit is the most relevant to this particular discussion.
  - hannob 7y ago
    > requires CCS to be carbon neutral Why would that be? Hydrogen doesn't contain any carbon. If you produce the hydrogen from electrolysis and the electricity from renewables the process would be carbon free. (You can still argue that there are emissions in construction and such, but I don't think that's what you meant.)
    - hurricanetc 7y ago
      There are other metals and materials involved. It’s a partial solution. We really aren’t even close to a truly carbon neutral steel production. Maybe by 2100.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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mdorazio 7y ago

Plug for Project Vesta [1], which I donate to. It's the only energy-practical proposal I've seen so far for real carbon capture aside from replanting a million acres of trees and hoping people don't burn them... again. [1] https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/

falcolas 7y ago
It doesn’t take a person. Forests burn, it’s part of their natural lifecycle. Lightning is one of the biggest starters (once you pull out mankind).
hedora 7y ago
Project Vesta seems too good to be true (planet-scale CO2 removal at $10/ton that also de-acidifies the oceans, and it is already scaling up(?)). Have any reputable third parties validated their claims?
funklute 7y ago
I was quite curious about this project a while back. But I later talked to an academic, a friend who happens to be an expert in the kinds of reaction kinetics the project relies on. His view was that they are not using the correct reaction rates in their calculations. He said they were linearly extrapolating existing data, when in reality it is a non-linear relationship. So my understanding is that their reaction rates still need to be empirically validated. Disappointingly, my friend had no faith that this would ever work - although academics have of course been wrong before. Regardless, I'm very interested to see how this project plays out.
- ProjectVesta 7y ago
  Hi Funklute, most of the models out there for dissolution kinetics and weathering rates are a type called "shrinking core models" such as those used in analysis by Hangx and Spiers (2009). Those models definitely do not take into account the effect of grain-on-grain collisions, surface abrasion, the constant refreshing of warm, acidic water, and/or fauna such as lugworms[1]. For example, the constant collisions chip off fine fractions of olivine that themselves weather rapidly. And the constant grinding removes a silica coating that dramatically slows the weathering rate of stationary olivine. Lugworm digestion can speed up the weathering rate by 100x-1000x, etc. Ask your friend if he knows of any models that take even some of these considerations into account, as all of them will be present in the coastal environment and contribute to our accelerated weathering rates. Also, please show him these simple desktop shaker experiments here [2] and here [3], that show the rates are much higher than the core shrinking models calculate when the olivine is in motion (and these experiments are in fairly cold water compared to the tropics). This is the type of research that we base our calculations on. That said, we are in agreement that we need the rates to be empirically validated. So, first we are going to deploy a Phase Ia Safety Pilot Study, and once that is on the beach we will begin work on our Phase Ib Speed Pilot Study to demonstrate the accelerated rates. Thank you for your optimism for the project, we welcome feedback and hope to help spread the understanding of the underlying processes that make the project viable :) [1] https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_88/1/ https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_88/1/ [2] https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_67/4/ https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_67/4/ [3] https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_90/9/ https://projectvesta.org/science/#dflip-df_90/9/

cagenut 7y ago

This article has some good charts and visualizations. Just to add one for context, this is from the IPCC SR15 report 2 years ago: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3b.png https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3... The yellow sections are BECCS, which is basically burning biosmass for energy and then using CCS to capture the co2 from it. That is to say, CCS has already been factored into the models as a necessary assumption for a long time now. Keep in mind this is completely distinct from using CCS for continued burning of coal/gas/oil, and absolutely not about using it for enhanced oil recovery. Using CCS in those scenarios is like losing money on every unit sold and trying to make it up in volume, its simply bad math.

pfdietz 7y ago

CCS can be a way to keep using fossil fuels for dispatchable supply, in a way that meshes nicely with renewables. In particular: make hydrogen from the fossil fuel 24/7, store the hydrogen, sequester the CO2, and when needed burn the hydrogen in power plants (or other uses).

tito 7y ago

Surprising they include Direct Air Capture as CCS. Here's the more detailed 32 page PDF that accompanies the linked CCS article: https://pub.cicero.oslo.no/cicero-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2633470/CICERO%20Report%202019%2021%20web.pdf https://pub.cicero.oslo.no/cicero-xmlui/bitstream/handle/112... I publish a weekly newsletter on carbon removal: http://bit.ly/carbon-updates http://bit.ly/carbon-updates

trickstra 7y ago

Here you can try to create your own solution to keeping global warming below 2°C: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.6 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7.... (rabbit hole warning: you can easily spend hours playing with this site) It's not impossible to create solutions that don't require carbon capture, but those tend to have the uncomfortable side effect of raising electricity prices two- or three-fold in the next 20 years. But here is one that I created which keeps the prices stable and also achieves 2 degrees: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=-1&p7=2&p16=-0.05&p30=-0.05&p39=42&p47=4.2&p50=4.1&p53=3.8&p55=3.8&p57=-8.4&p59=-84&p63=2.2&p64=2.8&p65=85&p67=39&v=2.7.6 https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=-1&...

tito 7y ago
That looks like a powerful tool! I've been on the lookout for something interactive like that for awhile, only saw desktop-based simulators. Nice find, curious where you came across it.
- trickstra 7y ago
  It's also the third generation of their simulator - they've been collecting data and creating tools like this for a bunch of years now: https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/ https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/ I just randomly found it in some article about a month ago.
marcosdumay 7y ago
Keep in mind that this simulator is very focused on status-quo. It's not even possible to simulate an exponential curve for solar or a methane catastrophe.
- trickstra 7y ago
  You can change the assumptions under top menu Simulation->Assumptions. Some of them determine how quickly can a technology come to market, how much it makes future improvements cheaper etc. Also here are more detailed explanations and examples of how the model works: https://docs.climateinteractive.org/projects/en-roads/en/latest/guide/renewables.html https://docs.climateinteractive.org/projects/en-roads/en/lat...

DenisM 7y ago

Perhaps we can reconsider recycling of paper products as a first step? If you send a paper bag to the landfill it’s buried in the ground (sequester), a tree is cut down to make a new paper bag, and a new tree is planted to make new material for more bags. Thus carbon is continuously captured from the air and buried deep. If you recycle a bag then the old tree dies of old age and decomposes releasing the captured carbon back into the air. The new tree repeats the cycle, with no net carbon capture.

ianstormtaylor 7y ago
Not sure if you’re joking or not, but that is not how it works at all. https://ensia.com/features/methane-landfills/ https://ensia.com/features/methane-landfills/
- DenisM 7y ago
  I’m not joking and my observation does not square with your link. A close friend has taken a tour of a local landfill in WA state and was shown a perfectly preserved months-old banana that was dug out by the presenter from the landfill. Apparently the landfills, at least here, are completely sealed. If a banana stays “fresh” for months a sheet of paper will stay fresh for a century. And be that as it may, suppose we create special landfill for paper - that one can easily be made completely sealed and good for a thousand years.
  - hedora 7y ago
    Modern landfills have pumps to push oxygen into the garbage to accelerate decomposition. Without them, newspaper takes >> 50 years to decompose. Diverting waste paper to a sealed dump would definitely sequester carbon. (But you need to make sure the production of new paper is carbon neutral vs recycling for this to work out).
    - DenisM 7y ago
      How can production be not carbon neutral? When trees are cut new trees grow in their place, unless the place is used as a construction site or something. https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/mass-timber-construction-really-renewable-and-sustainable.html https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/mass-t...

travisporter 7y ago

Highly recommend reading sustainable energy without the hot air by the late David MacKay. Even though dated, he really puts numbers behind every broad stroke assumption that causes pause

mmmuhd 7y ago

I think carbon capture is the way, I will soon do a show hn of our little company called carbonHarvester, we have as per as I know the cheapest technology of capturing the CO2 out of thin air, our aim is to enable anyone using an air conditioner to harvest CO2 from thin air with a little additional energy bill, and we can regenerate the captured CO2 cheaply.

tito 7y ago
Nice! Add your company to AirMiners, the largest index of companies mining carbon fro the air: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org We'll feature it on the top of the list.
- mmmuhd 7y ago
  Wow nice index, will add ASAP, your site need the lock (https) by the way. Thanks.
  - tito 7y ago
    Yes, I wanna get that "secure" bling
- hedora 7y ago
  Hey, thanks for putting this list together. Is anyone actively curating it one level down: Current $/ton, predicted $/ton, total feasible scale, third party (preferably peer reviewed) vetting for scams, etc?
  - tito 7y ago
    I would love to add this info! Any suggestions how to pull this data or how to display it? tito@impossiblelabs.io
- detritus 7y ago
  Neat! Not sure how useful it would be to others, but the first thing I tried to do was sort the list by country.

daxfohl 7y ago

So who pays? Government isn't going to convince people to do it, or else they would have just implemented carbon taxes to begin with.

ci5er 7y ago

I want to applaud you for making the most vanilla contribution in 114 years. It turns out that everyone who appears to care doesn't give a shit, and CCD doesn't matter, and neither does natural gas. I personally think it is a huge global warming scam - but if I am wrong - go to nukes. They waiting and safe (recently)

strainer 7y ago
Even without CCS fossil can be switched to carbon neutral biomass and syn-gas for that occasional demand which is not economic to meet with oversupplied renewables, hydro and battery storage. Nuclear promotion desperately ignores that there will be plenty of energy generated most of the time by far more economic solar, wind, hydro and storage. There will be no point to staff and run nuclear's thermal plants most of the time, its simply not a solution for occasional supply deficits.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  This assumes that intermittent renewable sources plus storage can be built out at astronomical scale without running into unexpected economic, regulatory, or environmental challenges. In many similar expansions of new tech, big challenges show up once the fleet size shows up. This was the central tenant of Komanoff's Power Plant Cost Escalation book (free pdf of it here: http://komanoff.net/nuclear_power/Power_Plant_Cost_Escalation.pdf http://komanoff.net/nuclear_power/Power_Plant_Cost_Escalatio...)
  - strainer 7y ago
    This term "astronomical" applies no more to the scale of renewables needing built than it would nuclear. The existence of a somewhat related pdf doesn't make the prophecy realistic, that big challenges are more likely to show up for future renewable builds than for nuclear builds. The actual situation is nuclear can hardly get built currently due to "economic, regulatory, or environmental challenges" while renewables can and already have big fleet sizes.
    - 7y ago

WalterBright 7y ago

The best and cheapest way to capture carbon is to plant trees. Lots of them.

hedora 7y ago
That’s true for the next year or so, but it only will push the clock back a few years. At that point, we run out of land. I’m not arguing against it — every bit helps. However, something better needs to come along, and we need to invest in that thing.
travisporter 7y ago
a hectare of trees captures 1 to 10 tonnes of CO2 per year (http://www.sicirec.org/definitions/carbon-capture http://www.sicirec.org/definitions/carbon-capture). That's about 7500 square meters of forest per person (assuming 11 tons per person per year). It's theoretically doable, but would require enormous forests.

dlet 7y ago

Title: "Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C" In the article: "There are at least some scenarios that can meet the Paris goals without CCS." WTF ?!!

ci5er 7y ago

If you say so (and I am not saying that you are wrong), but the cost of mining coal and oil and the cost of digging and refining those Li-whatevers, can not be ignored. Pease and love

supernova87a 7y ago

CCS technology is uneconomic. Like incredibly uneconomic. Like, the last thing you would pay for after doing all other possible things. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/gillingham_stock_cost_080218_posted.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/gillingham_sto... https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate-climate-change https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate...

whatsmyusername 7y ago
3 degrees of warming turning into 7 degrees of warming because of the chain effect is probably a bit less economical than tackling the problem. But I'll be dead so whatever. Live your best life.
elihu 7y ago
> The higher the bar, the greater the cost. McKinsey’s analysis defines an upper cost threshold of €60 per tonne avoided (i.e. the chart only shows alternatives that are ‘cheaper’ than €60 per tonne). 60 Euros per ton doesn't seem terribly bad. Burning a gallon of gas generates about 20 pounds of CO2 (hydrogen from the gas bonds with oxygen from the air, resulting in CO2 emissions that weight about 3 times as much as the weight of the original gasoline). So, every time you refill a 15 gallon gas tank, that's about 300 pounds of CO2. I'm not sure if the chart uses metric tons (about 2200 pounds, let's say it does. It looks like most of the CCS options on that chart are in the range of about 40 to 60 euros per ton. 60 euros * (300 pounds / 2200 pounds) is about 8.18 euros, or about 9 US dollars. That's significant; people would complain. It's not insurmountable though. People would still keep driving. It's worth noting that the carbon capture options listed are specifically carbon capture from existing fossil fuel power plants. There may well be other carbon capture options that are cheaper, like sequestering carbon from plant biomass. (I didn't read the paper, maybe it goes into that.)
MChristopherson 7y ago
That is an important point that struck home with me when I came to realize just how minuscule the amount of carbon dioxide is in the air relative to other gases: it's nigh-on a rounding error. I think many of us just haven't internalized the percentages of gasses, and probably, like myself, often have it all backwards. An alien doing a fly-through of our solar system would describe our planet as a nitrogen atmosphere. In descending order: Nitrogen: 78 percent Oxygen: 21 percent Argon: .9 percent CO2: a measly 0.04 percent Groking that last value really helps frame the challenges that CCS has to deal with (and also gives one an appreciation of just how powerful of a greenhouse gas CO2 is).

dx7tnt 7y ago

Very helpful advice coming from a country that has run its whole economy off its oil reserves since the 80s.

himinlomax 7y ago

Is there even just a small scale production implementation of carbon capture? Last I checked it wasn't even working in the lab beyond trivial scale.

williesleg 7y ago

Nice, let's start with China and India. HOW DARE YOU CHINA AND INDIA!

egberts1 7y ago

Plant a billion trees; problem solved.