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What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil?
- OneGuy123 6y agoOne funny thing could come out of this: too much of it could be removed. Once a company is working on this they might accidentaly or through greed start to see "TOO MUCH CARBON" everywhere.
- elric 6y agoI've seen people make this comment before, and I usually just dismiss it because it seems so absurdly unlikely. But is there any grounds to that fear?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Nasrudith 6y agoTechnically if it expands and runs in a carbon dioxide surplus for long enough and they maintained it for as long as thr process was viable. But it is currently a facepalm worthy seriously bad extrapolation. Like looking at carbon nanotube production assuming extrapolating exponential growth rates indefinitely and concluding that there will be a serious carbon shortage when production rises so high that every year mass equivalent to entire world's biomass is produced.
- agumonkey 6y agowhat about a cycling synergy between digging oil and reclaiming it. A kind of circular two sided market.
- 98Windows 6y agoPutting carbon into the atmosphere much easier than removing it, I don't see how this could ever happen
- perfunctory 6y agoI can't see how CCS (carbon capture and storage) can ever be viable economically. It's pure expense. Why would anyone agree to pay for it. And if we mandate it wouldn't it make fossil products way too expensive and therefore uncompetitive? They are already losing to renewables in some regions. edit: I just don't see the logic in shitting around and then paying somebody to clean up the shit. It's much easier to just stop shitting.
- prawn 6y agoI'm not pretending it's a massive industry, but carbon offset partner for airlines and other companies is something that people pay for?
- perfunctory 6y agoThis is a good point. However, everything I read about air travel offset schemes suggests that the current price is way too low and does not reflect the true cost of offsetting. If people were pay the true price to offset their flights, the question is whether they would still choose to fly as much.
- skummetmaelk 6y agoIf you cannot pay the price for sustainable flights you should not fly. The era of unsustainable consumption at the expense of future generations is coming to an end.
- thesumofall 6y agoThat seems a dangerous argument to make. Where do we stop? What other luxuries will we only allow to those who can afford the sustainable version of it? Warm water? Having a fulfilling job that unfortunately requires commuting? Edit: to be clear: I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything, I’m just saying the solution cannot be to make disparity between rich and poor even larger
- wcerfgba 6y agoArchive link to bypass paywall: https://archive.is/buUjn https://archive.is/buUjn
- tosser0001 6y agoI wonder about future generations who will see their then-average temperatures as the new normal. There will be people complaining: “do you really want colder Winters?”
- 88840-8855 6y agoI guess the question they will ask will be "do you want the flooding out of the cities that is occurring every second summer and costs billions?". Fact is; even you "cool down" the earth, the equilibrium wont be restored easily, hence, we will experience weather extremes and must learn to live with them.
- ImaCake 6y agoSomeone downvoted this, but this is a real and legitimate thing. It is happening continually with conservation; people don't notice the decline in animals and decrease in plant diversity because it happens over generations. In fact we even have a name for this; "shifting baselines". This is why measurement is so important, we wouldn't know about climate change without it. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
- bufferoverflow 6y agoI noticed the insects disappearing. It happened to quickly, like in 10 years we went from cars needing to be washed after a drive to now, when I don't get any insects smashed for weeks.
- Dumblydorr 6y agoThe problem is their summers will be much longer and more brutally hot. By 2100, we could have 20-30% of the current populace living in actually uninhabitable locales because they'll be at 120F average in the summer. Who's going to care about mild winters when you can't go outside or breathe in summer?
- missedthecue 6y agoThis would require an enormous increase in temperature. Far in excess that the models are projecting.
- dredmorbius 6y agoAnynindustrial process would have to compete with biological sequestration, with tropical, shallow seas (as with past petrogenisis), and forests being prime contenders. The likelihood of industrial operations at this scale proving cost effective seems low.
- specialist 6y agoAlgae converts sunshine into hydrocarbons. I'm hoping we figure out how to industrialize this process.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThat's proved highly difficult. And reaquired scales remain vast.
- hedora 6y agoThe entire capacity of existing biological reservoirs only turns the clock back a year or so. Also, the oceans are already over capacity as a carbon sink, so we need to sequester that CO2 somehow as well. If we don’t, the oceans will die, and we’ll eventually have an even bigger terraforming problem to solve.
- dredmorbius 6y agoWetlands included? Keep in mind that thse are natural capture-and-bury systems many times more effective than forests by unit area. Shallow seasdon't function by dissolving CO2 but by growing byomaass (plankton or plants typically) which dies and sinks. This is thought to have been a major past mechanism and explains virtually all petroleum and natural gas fields. Yes, CO2 saturation (carbonic acid and bicarbonate IIRC) of seawater is both finite and a major risk itself via acidification.
- notabee 6y agoI'm guessing you're talking about Azolla[1]. That process was still on the scale of thousands or millions of years. The real problem that humanity is facing here is the rate of increase. Even during what was probably the worst extinction event during the Permian-Triassic boundary, where the ppm of CO2 was eventually in the thousands, it still happened orders of magnitude slower than what we are doing artificially releasing the masses of geologically stored carbon. So, Azolla or other natural carbon sinks may simply not work fast enough to counter the rate of increase, let alone the existing extra carbon backlog in the atmosphere. Even if we manage to break even and stop the increase, the planet will continue warming because we've already exceeded the equalibrium that was in place for at least the entire length of existence of our species previously. There would still be ecosystem disruption and ice loss and flooding, but hopefully on a manageable timescale. The sheer quantities here are daunting. 1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-the-fern-that-cooled-the-planet-do-it-again/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-the-fern-that...
- lazyjones 6y agoIf it does, we’re screwed. Below 140ppm most life on Earth will die.
- inspector-g 6y agoDo you have a source for this?
- hedora 6y agoI’d guess photosynthesis shuts down if CO2 falls far enough. At 180ppm, we’d be looking at an ice age: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...
- habanany 6y agoYou fix it
- hurxnid 6y agoPrediction: The will blacken the skies with nanoparticles to cool the Earth.
- fsloth 6y agoIsn't 'Nanoparticles' in this case just a fancier word for 'soot'?
- lucb1e 6y agoWikipedia> Soot forms during incomplete combustion from precursor molecules such as acetylene. It consists of agglomerated nanoparticles with diameters between 6 and 30 nm. So yes, soot are nanoparticles, but that doesn't mean all nanoparticles are soot.
- tpnCC 6y agoThe relationship between soot aerosol and warming is complex. Black Soot may dim the sunlight,but may increase the warming by warming the snow. "A new study found that emissions of soot, or black carbon, alters the way sunlight reflects off snow and may be responsible for as much as 25 percent of observed global warming over the past century." https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/Black_Soot.html https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/Black_Soot.... Ash from the volcanoes on the other hand,can cause cooling depending on,among other factors,their composition. https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/183/ https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/183/ For example, the cooling observed due to Mount Pinatubo is due to Sulphuric Acid aerosol particles. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects-of-mount-pinatubo https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...
- wigl 6y agoCould be a reference to "geoengineering" patents like Myhrvold's StratoShield, but he is a huge patent troll so I doubt that development is far along.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoReforestation and preservation/restoration of natural environments, including the oceans, will accomplish the same results.
- chinathrow 6y agoHow about we do all of that?
- jellicle 6y agoCan you explain how we could preserve or restore natural environments in a world with ever-increasing CO2 concentrations?
- Dumblydorr 6y agoThe top thing we can do to prevent climate change is stop the deforestation of the amazon. Poor people there are logging to make way for farmland, which is sad, we could just ship them money or goods so they leave the biggest carbon sink in the world alone.
- therealdrag0 6y agoAlso the Boreal Forests I’m a Canada/Russia which hold a lot of carbon in the soil. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/shelley-vinyard/issue-tissue-20 https://www.nrdc.org/experts/shelley-vinyard/issue-tissue-20
- sandworm101 6y agoStop killing whales. Not kidding. Whale poop is the bedrock of c02 sequestration in the oceans.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoOcean algae, or more properly phytoplankton, produce 80% of the world's oxygen.[1] We are experiencing a slight decline in phytoplankton[2], which if it accelerates could become catastrophic for life on Earth. It's not clear why, but some theories exist suggesting that climactic change is resulting in the release of acidic substances sequestered in the oceans. As acidity of the oceans rise, they become less hospitable to phytoplankton. How are humans contributing to the decline of the oceans? Over-fishing, whaling, plastics pollution, acidic rain... these are all directly caused by humans, and they all damage the ecosystem. Plastics are breaking down into microparticles floating in the oceans that cannot be cleaned up, and we are only beginning to understand what and how much damage it may be causing. Studies suggest that plankton eat plastic particles, with deadly results.[3] The second largest producer of oxygen is the Amazon forests and jungles of South America. This vast region is shrinking by thousands of acres a year, as loggers and farmers develop the land. Unfortunately, this is reducing carbon sequestration as well, though farming does counteract that trend to some extent. Also, destruction of the Amazon rain forests is reducing biodiversity, with unknown but likely significant effects on the continent, and on the world. Humans have grown so numerous that we are literally destabilizing the planet, and we need to rein in our excessive industrial processes before we reach a point of no return that will take the planet millions of years to recover from. 1. https://eos.org/research-spotlights/worlds-biggest-oxygen-producers-living-in-swirling-ocean-waters https://eos.org/research-spotlights/worlds-biggest-oxygen-pr... 2. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceanic-phytoplankton-declines-in-northern-hemisphere https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceani... 3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653518310270 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
- orwin 6y agoI've read three articles talking about it on HN, but the science and models especially are shacky at best. Great models that will probably never work as intended. Oxydes are really, really stable, and CO2 is one. Destroying an oxyde will cost at least as much energy as creating one, but in reality it's about 3 time the expense for C02. The chemical/mechanical solution i've seen on HN[0] with olivine and tidal energy is quite interesting (that how ocean keep themselves from turning too acidic with CO2 capture), but while i'm pretty sure the chemestry bit is true, their paper is not peer-reviewed and i'm a bit skeptic about how fast the carbon will be absorbed. It feel like it's nearly as much a silver bullet as fusion and ambiant temperature supra-conductor. So not big oil. [0]https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/
- gridlockd 6y agoIt will of course be cheaper to pump hydrocarbons out of the ground for a long time to come, but we have recognized that there's a problem with that. "Energy use" is the wrong way to look at it, because energy costs vary massively. A lot of renewable energy effectively goes to waste because there is no economical way to capture and store it.
- cwhiz 6y agoI don’t think there is a single viable climate model that doesn’t rely on massive carbon capture. Carbon capture is one of many things we will have to do to avoid mass extinction.
- lucb1e 6y agoIndeed. It won't be fast enough, but neither will we be fast enough stopping to emit. We have to do both. I'm not sure it's possible to reach the goal of staying below 2°C warming anymore, but the degree to which we incur change and damage the existing ecosystems can still be limited. Seeing how little we've managed to reduce carbon emissions by, and given that there will always be some emissions, we indeed need capture methods; heck, even if it's just trees, we need something. We need some way to recapture the remaining emissions, whatever reduced amount we'll be left with in the end. If you want to fund that sort of work today, Climeworks has a product where you can choose how many kg of CO2 you want to capture per year and pay for it. They have machines that indeed remove that actual amount for you, turning it into stone rather than something re-consumable. What they don't say is how much CO2e the building and operating of those machines emits and whether that'll be offset with said machines, but I'm happy to fund their technology either way. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way except having the subscription for about 1.5 years.) https://climeworks.com https://climeworks.com Other than tree planting organisations (which never seem to be able to convincingly promise that the trees won't be uprooted or burned for farmland before they captured the promised amount, especially given that the offerings are usually dirt cheap), I'm not aware of any other organisation offering products for consumers, so that's also why I'm arguing for people to give Climeworks money: if there's money to be made with it, more companies will start capturing carbon.
- ghthor 6y agoI dont agree with you, and there is a body of scientific evidence that is building that doesn't agree with you[1]. This evidence points to the most likely cause of mass extinction being changes to the sun and the environment of the solar system. In my opinion based on my research, if we are to avoid mass extinction, we need to be acknowledging the sun as the main driver of climate change on earth now and in the near future, not the emissions of our activity on earth. [1] https://otf.selz.com/item/pre-order-weathermans-guide-to-the-sun-third-edition https://otf.selz.com/item/pre-order-weathermans-guide-to-the...
- coronadisaster 6y agomake diamonds out of this carbon and maybe you got something that will take care of the problem forever
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- macspoofing 6y agoIs carbon removal even capable of making a dent? Is it even worth discussing? CO2 is a tiny component of air, meaning that we would have to move vast quantities air through some sort of a filter to get tiny amounts of carbon out (i.e. 1 million particles of air, to filter out 400 of CO2).
- hedora 6y agoWith current technology, it costs between $30-90 per ton to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. A gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2 (most of the weight is from O2 from the atmosphere). A ton is 2000 pounds, so 100 gallons of gas produces a ton of CO2. A $1/gallon (25-33%) carbon recapture tax on gasoline would be enough to make cars carbon negative. Global warming is a political, not technical, problem.
- hedora 6y agoI also wish there was an easy way to buy and shut down oil producers. There are 8.3 million millionaires in the US, so they control 8.3T. Chevron is worth 180B. If the millionaires banded together to control 50.1% of Chevron, they could oust the board, permanently destroy all of its oil production and distribution capabilities, and convert its oil fields into a permanently undrillable status. Then, they could sell off the remaining assets (except the mineral rights), and only lose most of their money. Heck, the resulting shuttered corporation would probably be eligible for carbon credits. Even better, instead of buying the oil reserves, they could buy out the corporations that own patents and factories for things like fracking equipment and critical car components. Anti-trust would probably get in the way, but the global airbag industry has revenue in the single-digit billions. A band of 100,000 millionaires could easily acquire them all and charge $80,000 extra (per car) for bags headed to gas powered vehicles.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoMillionaires/billionaires wouldn’t act against their own interest or class interests. There is one way to achieve what you are dreaming of: democratic control of industry.
- hedora 6y ago8.3M is the top 2-3% of the population. It’s a very diverse group of people. I imagine many would chip in 10-100K if it meant crashing global CO2 emissions. Also, on its own, the money it would save in flood or fire insurance would make it a rational investment for a big chunk of them.
- meiraleal 6y agothe other way is communism
- gre 6y agoThat's the exact situation right now except they aren't shutting it down.
- elamje 6y ago
- jackfoxy 6y agoStopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available. Deforestation rivals fossil fossil fuels for greenhouse gas emissions (up to 30% of anthropic emissions) yet it rarely gets talked about. Could it be because there is no money to be made in halting deforestation? https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-greenhous... https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671 https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671 On the fossil fuel side what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient. If such a breakthrough happens we could build gas turbine farms at gas fields and pipe the CO2 to industrial centers. Modern gas turbines are the most efficient form of electricity generation. The emissions consist almost entirely of H2O and CO2, some collateral NO2, and trace amounts of other stuff from combusted impurities.
- api 6y agoThere's not much money to be made in fossil fuel phase out either... some, but overall it is a cost. Halting deforestation and reforesting aggressively would be a lot cheaper at the macroeconomic level.
- beervirus 6y agoGreen energy is big business. There isn’t really a corresponding industry that would profit from halting/reversing deforestation.
- MiroF 6y ago> overall it is a cost What does this mean? Seems like it is a cost from some perspectives and a positive from other perspectives. From the perspective of green businesses, likely a positive. From the perspective of society, removing the negative externality is likely a positive. The only cost it imposes is on those who were previously externalizing their costs on to society.
- topher515 6y agoMy understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful, simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem. All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb 8 years of greenhouse gas emissions. This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests “compressed” into oil / gas.
- unixhero 6y agoMongstad! Mongstad! Mongstad!
- GekkePrutser 6y agoI wonder if carbon capture actually makes sense, not from an economic perspective but from an energy perspective. One way or another you're spending a lot of energy doing it. Using fossil fuel would not make sense as it would add to the problem you're trying to solve. Considering there's not enough renewable energy for all our current uses, wouldn't it be simpler to just reduce, and convert more things to renewable as they come available, which we'll need to do anyway? Once we have a big surplus of renewable in the future we could look at this again. It sounds to me like a pipe dream, a promise of a 'quick fix' for a problem that has no quick fixes. And to be honest in order to actually reverse global warming and prevent some of the future effects we're already locked in to, we'll have to extract so much carbon that I don't see this happening in the next hundreds of years.
- chiefofgxbxl 6y agoIf you have excess energy you cannot use at that moment, it may as well be spent removing carbon from the atmosphere. For example, if there's a giant field of wind turbines that are experiencing more wind energy than can be consumed, and there also aren't enough batteries to store it for later. Having a more connected electrical grid so that you don't end up in this situation would probably be ideal, like what you're suggesting with using green energy to replace carbon sources.
- mmarvick 6y agoI am by no means an expert here, but a couple thoughts back from my limited knowledge: 1) I don't think all carbon capture necessarily requires a lot of energy input. Planting trees is a more obvious example of this - of course, the trees rely on the sun's energy so it's not "low energy" in that sense, but we weren't going to harvest that energy any other way anyways. It's possible there are other solutions that are like that. 2) If we have an abundance of zero or low-carbon energy in the future that doesn't exist now, it might not matter that taking carbon out of the atmosphere uses more energy than the energy we got from putting carbon into the atmosphere to begin with. To be clear, I really wish we'd just spend the money and take the sacrifice to use a lot less carbon right now. It certainly seems like a much easier problem to solve than trying to suck it back out later, and relying on it to work seems like a dumb risk. Even if we're confident that we'll inevitably need some amount of carbon capture and that the R&D will happen to develop it at scale, there's a good chance that it'd be easier and cheaper to put less carbon in the air now than to do more capture later.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/Q9b6b https://archive.is/Q9b6b
- anonymousiam 6y agoAs soon as we figure out how to make money or create value by removing carbon, then it will have a chance of actually becoming a business.
- renewiltord 6y agoSure. Similar to how so much of Tesla's revenue is in offset emissions. But unless you carbon tax everyone you're not going to b get it. And let's be honest: most middle and lower class Americans and Europeans are burning the planet alive. Btw, it doesn't even cost that much. I'm under $1k a year in carbon offsets to be negative.
- agf 6y agoUnfortunately both parts of your comment are incorrect. Upper class Americans and Europeans generate more emissions per capita than lower / middle class people. They consume more, so they emit more. I don't know your specific situation, but in general the carbon offsets you buy aren't actually priced to the real cost of reduction, and your estimate of your carbon footprint is likely low. So the real price would likely be significantly higher. If you're living in a large (and so heat / cooling efficient) building in the bay area where those costs are minimized anyway, and don't have a car, then you're an outlier, and you can't extrapolate accurately from your situation.
- renewiltord 6y agoSure, they generate more, but the lower/middle class Westerners can't afford what they generate but the rich guys can. The price of the offset doesn't matter because for climate change locality effects are not big on this scale. I double the estimate from Terrapass so I'm pretty certain it's good.
- LatteLazy 6y agoLikely the greatest threat to our species is that the new big oil, is big oil.
- jtlienwis 6y agoBack of the envelope calculation says that one gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs of CO2 when burned. One hundred gallons of gas per ton of CO2. I have seen sequestration costs of $200-$500 a ton for current CO2 sequestration or conversion to fuel hydrocarbons. This would work out to a $2 to $5 dollar tax for gallon of gas. So this would take us to $4 to $7 per gallon gas to create a sustainable CO2/hydrocarbon economy. For a lot of people, this would be better than spending an extra $20K+ for an EV. Twenty thousand dollars buy a LOT of gas. Ten to 15 years worth for a typical computer driving 10k a year even with the added taxes. Plus, this might make some places like New York, more politically open to oil/gas pipelines and fracking etc to increase supplies because gas/oil would now be green.
- kapuasuite 6y agoTurning 8(?) pounds of gasoline into 20 pounds of CO2 makes absolutely zero sense.
- slavik81 6y ago2 C8H18 + 25 O2 = 16 CO2 + 18 H2O Don't forget the weight of the oxygen that goes into the reaction.
- dan-robertson 6y agoOne thing that I think is overlooked in this thread (though I didn’t read it all) is that carbon capture/sequestration is not incompatible with burning fossil fuels. You get the energy by breaking bonds of (somewhat) complex hydrocarbons, but it takes less energy than is released to capture/sequester the resulting carbon (at least theoretically/for some methods). Therefore there is a possible future where energy could come from fossil fuels without CO2 release. There are other reasons one may not want energy from fossil fuels, however.
- SEJeff 6y agoNon-paywall version: https://outline.com/FeJyEM https://outline.com/FeJyEM This is a good hypothetical.
- tuatoru 6y ago"What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil?" What if rainbow-horned unicorns become the new automobiles? What if my wife finally succeeds in inventing dehydrated water? What if zero point energy becomes the new electricity? What if ... meh. Someone once pointed out that if you wait six months to read it, the Economist magazine reads like pure comedy. But this ... this is just Kubler-Ross denial. Very sad.
- alex_young 6y agoCarbon tax paired with a tax refund to every person would both save us from the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it. Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/episode-472-the-one-page-plan-to-fix-global-warming https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis... They did a followup 5 years later: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/episode-472-the-one-page-plan-to-fix-global-warming-revisited https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis... It seems like there are too many entrenched players to make this a reality unfortunately.
- pfdietz 6y agoThere's an interesting electrochemical hydrogen technology from Greg Rau and coworkers. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180625192825.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180625192825.h... http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0038955.html http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0038955.html As I understand it, it exploits the separation of acid and base in membrane electrolysis cells, and neutralizes the acid with various minerals. This ends up producing an output stream that can add CO2-absorbing capacity to the ocean. At the stated CO2 absorption capacity, producing the world's current H2 production using this would allow the oceans to absorb an addition 3 Gt of CO2 per year. Rau has a company, Planetary Hydrogen, that looks like it's trying to commercialize this.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]