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A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
- qeternity 6y agoAlright HN domain experts. I’m prepared. What’s the rub?
- adammunich 6y agoIt’s only practical on mixtures with high co2 gas concentrations
- mdf 6y agoWould inside a chimney work?
- extropy 6y agoFrom the abstract it seems to be very applicable to combustion exhausts (coal/gas plants) and consuming 5-10% of the combustion energy to recapture the CO2. Hard to tell what is the required CO2 concentration without the full article. Typical combustion exhaust seems to be ~10% of CO2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue_gas Edit: spelling.
- raverbashing 6y agoI wonder how research is doing to concentrate CO2 from the PPM amounts we have "in regular air" There are at least two low-hanging fruits that make it "easier": CO2 is heavier than other important gases and mildly polar.
- magicalhippo 6y agoPlant lots of trees or similar, then burn them for electricity and capture the CO2 from the smoke. Compared to a lot of the other proposals out there it almost sounds plausible.
- lostapathy 6y agoOr skip a step. Turn the trees into lumber and build something with it. Long-lived wooden structures sequester carbon until they are abandoned and rot.
- marcusverus 6y agoWhy not just do a partial burn and reduce the remainder to charcoal? It would be much cheaper, require no chemicals, and the end product is pure carbon, which would be easier to store. You could literally dump it in a pile and deal with it later.
- idiotsecant 6y agoMaking charcoal is not energy-positive and still only results in about 50% carbon capture, best case scenario. Burning it in a biomass plant with good carbon capture does better and displaces carbon-emitting generation processes at the same time. As an added bonus biomass plants are excellent 'baseload' type plants, a feature that wind, solar, etc are missing without expensive storage and complex management schemes.
- AyrtonB 6y agoSuch as flue gases from fertiliser, cement, steel and power plants ... which make up a sizeable chunk of our emissions. We should be targeting CO2 capture at point-sources wherever possible. Why wait until it's diffused into the atmosphere before trying to capture it?
- chobeat 6y agoLike with every other solution, under the current political and economic systems, there's no incentive to scale it up quickly enough to make a dent in global warming and it will just live in small local prototypes and in the dreams of techno-solutionists.
- adammunich 6y agoThat too
- chr1 6y agoThat's not a techno solution worth to dream about, the real techno solution is a fine grained control of weather (like https://viento.ai https://viento.ai) and in that case the extra CO2 in atmosphere will be naturally sequestered in fields and farms in Sahara.
- neolog 6y agoThat "leadership team" doesn't seem qualified to be working in this area.
- dalbasal 6y agoAubrey de Grey, heh? IDK... now I like it more. What he is qualified for is running this sort of effort. I just don't know what to call this sort of effort. Viento is a ‘moonshot’ nonprofit pioneering targeted weather security... by combining big data, forecasting breakthroughs and AI directed weather interventions... framed as "break glass in case of climate emergency." So... I don't like the idea. I do however, like the way he puts together moonshot projects, generally. Maybe this will evolve into something better. It's useful to have 0.X% of people working on tech, to be doing it in an environment that isn't standard academia or big tech.
- pineaux 6y agoElon musk wasn't qualified to build a rocket company. Still pretty succesful though.
- stephanheijl 6y agoI've been looking at the use of algae with regards to sequester img CO2 from the atmosphere. This seems to have some remarkable advantages: single molecules which make mass production easier, presumably less finicky operating procedure and way more straightforward to pump into disused oil wells. From the abstract it does seem to need CO2 being supplied to it as opposed to drawing it from the atmosphere actively. I assume this could be used in exhausts of some kind? Definite benefit is the fact that the CO2 is captured immediately as opposed to over a years long timeline, like trees.
- galangalalgol 6y agoI'm interested in causing algae blooms near the equator with iron sulfide. Not for co2 capture, most of that would get released on decomposition, but for the albedo effect. It also has the failsafe that if it gets too cold the algae will die preventing a snowball earth. They did some tests for salmon production, and scaling that linearly for area covered it would be less than a $1.5 billion project. Also we get salmon.
- sargun 6y agoWould you get enough salmon to offset the cost? What’s the net cost of this approach?
- galangalalgol 6y agoI wouldn't count on any savings from the $1.5B. You would get more salmon than we know what to do with and you have to harvest them or the overpopulation would mess with the ecosystem.
- jtolmar 6y ago> more salmon than we know what to do with Bury them in the ground as fertilizer? Requires people to fish them up, but maybe we can redirect some of the effort that goes into overfishing to that.
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- GekkePrutser 6y agoFor making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions of tonnes of this "N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine (2-EEMPA)" stuff.. I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? We can't just dump that stuff in the sea. I wonder if CO2 capture does not cause more problems than it solves. Even if we magically could capture CO2 as pure carbon and let the O2 back into the air, we'd end up with enough carbon to fill all the mines we've emptied over the years. Where are we going to leave all that without making a huge environmental mess? And how do we transport all that there? And that's not even considering the energy usage and possible reagents. I think we should really reduce our energy usage instead. Every tonne of CO2 not emitted does not have to be captured, and the effects of not producing it are positive for the environment in more ways than just global warming. Of course we're already on a path for significant global warming, but I think we'll just have to deal with that as we go. I don't think we'll manage to do significant CO2 capture before the effects are irreversible anyway.
- grodes 6y agobut we must capture de one we already emitted to balance the CO2 cicle
- iamthemonster 6y ago1. The solvent in carbon capture runs in a closed loop. You typically heat it, and it releases the CO2 so you can compress it and inject it below ground. 2. You don't necessarily need a depleted natural gas reservoir to inject CO2 subsurface (though they sure are convenient) and there is plenty of room for CO2 subsurface. It also doesn't creep to the surface on any meaningful timescale. 3. How do we transport it there? Pipelines. I feel like CO2 sequestration is second only to nuclear in the amount of unfounded concerns. There's one very well founded concern directly in the article - they estimate $50 per tonne of CO2 just to capture, let alone to store. My experience on a 2009 carbon capture plant design was that approx $100 per tonne of CO2 was the lowest carbon price that would really make carbon sequestration highly attractive and widespread. I also happen to think a $100 per tonne carbon price is not such a bad idea. But it is possible that other technologies would beat carbon sequestration at that carbon price point. I don't know.
- cryptica 6y agoI don't see what is the point to try to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. I don't even understand the fuss around global warming.Why is global warming a bad thing? The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the additional heat. There will be natural selection as usual. New variants of plants will evolve which can absorb more CO2. All species on earth will find a new equilibirum as they always had in the past. The fear of global warming is only a human concern. The planet and the animals don't give a crap - Each individual specimen just tries the best they can to adapt to whatever the universe morphs into. The problem with trying to manage global situations is that evolution is cleverer than you are. To quote George Carlin: “We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. 'Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.' And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet." "The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, 'Why are we here?'" Full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-important-everybody-s-going-to-save-something-now-save https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-import...
- GekkePrutser 6y agoTrue. Some areas will become uninhabitable or flooded but others will become more habitable (like permafrost/tundra regions). Nature will indeed adapt though there will be reduced biodiversity for a while. Especially because this effect normally happens on a much longer timescale. I think the problem is more that the regions that will become uninhabitable are currently mostly inhabited by people. And often pretty poor ones. It will cause millions to billions of people having to be relocated, causing many societal issues on its own, with a serious potential of societal collapse or war. Especially because the source and destination of these mass-migrations will often lay in different countries. See how refugees from wars in e.g. Africa or Syria are currently not really welcome anywhere, and multiply their numbers by 1000. That's the kind of disruption we're talking. Migrants will get more desperate while on the other side of the fence anti-migrant feelings will grow more and you have an explosive situation just waiting for a spark. And war itself is a major destructor not just of humans but of the planet itself. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons.
- sradman 6y agoScienceMag summarizes this research in an article named New generation of carbon dioxide traps could make carbon capture practical: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/new-generation-carbon-dioxide-traps-could-make-carbon-capture-practical https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/new-generation-carbo...
- seesawtron 6y agoThis [0] AMA from the research group answers most of the questions I am seeing here in the thread. "Technologies range from aqueous amines - the water-rich solvents that run through modern, commercially available capture units - to energy-efficient membranes that filter CO2 from flue gas emitted by power plants. Our newest solvent, EEMPA, can accomplish the task for as little as $47.10 per metric ton - bringing post-combustion capture within reach of 45Q tax incentives." [0] reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mdouzu/askscience_ama_series_hi_reddit_we_are_scientists/
- londons_explore 6y ago$47.10 per ton smells like someone has calculated the cost of the reagents and cited that as the price... Any estimate of this process cost would never be to 3 Sig fig.
- CharlesW 6y agoI don't know why $47.10 is any less credible than $47, but here's more detail on what the estimate represents from TFAMA: "For the $47.10/metric ton carbon capture cost, 48% comes from CAPEX while the remaining is OPEX. The equipment life of a carbon capture unit would be similar to that of a power plant, about 20-30 years. The $47.10/metric ton cost is just for carbon capture, and does not include transportation and sequestration costs."
- eitland 6y agoIt is still suspicious to use so exact numbers for a technology that has not yet been tested out at scale at all.
- phreeza 6y agoIn my experience, the obsession with correct significant figures is an american high school thing. Why should you deliberately have to choose a number that is not your best guess? Ideally you should include confidence bounds, but if you don't, it shouldn't imply that you are confident to that level.
- matthewmorgan 6y agoNow let's start charging $50 a ton to release CO2
- heipei 6y agoThe EU is charging ~ $47 (USD) per ton right now.
- freeone3000 6y agoHuh, that's a convenient and familiar looking price.
- hedora 6y agoAre they spending the money on carbon capture?
- GistNoesis 6y agohow much co2 is released each year ? -> "The world emits about 43 billion tons of CO2 a year (2019)" This article -> 50$ per ton of capture. product = $2,15 trillion to capture the whole year emissions. US GDP 2020 -> $20.93 trillion Only a few plants and ~10% of GDP from a single country could solve it. Does this mean that global warming is almost a non-issue, but merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot the bill ?
- pjc50 6y ago> merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot the bill ? This was always the real problem.
- Aachen 6y agoWell, as another person said, it only works with high concentrations. You'd have to have this country of choice go and install the devices on all exhausts everywhere. There's still a percentage getting past the exhaust, there will still be emissions from fertilizer and the like, methane/nox/refrigerants are still a thing, and so we'd reduce the amount of emissions by, say, 75%. That would be amazing and hugely helpful, but not the solution. In the end we'll need something around 100% (bit more due to overshooting, more likely than not).
- GistNoesis 6y agoOk, I hadn't understood, that this new solution was only applicable only to the CO2 produced by combustion for which we can easily install an exhaust filter. You quote this fraction at 75% : With some efforts we can get 75% reduction at 50$ per ton. What is the cost per ton to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere for the remaining 25%, and for the CO2 we already have emitted in the past ?
- hannofcart 6y ago> ~10% of GDP from a single country The 'single' nation you mentioned has many times the GDP of others. 2.15 trillion is most (over 70%) of the fifth largest economy.
- jules-jules 6y agoIs there a way this could be used in a home-setting by private individuals or too dangerous/costly?
- LatteLazy 6y agoYou could even use the waste heat from a power plant to drive the co2 back out...
- dennis_jeeves 6y agoGiven that CO2 in the air is a tiny fraction of air (0.03%) and it's absolutely critical for plants, plants would have evolved to utilize CO2 as much as possible, in the one of most energy efficient and safe manner that will be really hard to beat by 'artificial' means. Point being, that besides reducing consumption (the best being is by reducing population I think, rather than doing the, feel-good recycling etc. ) allow more forests to flourish. Side note - the fixation on CO2 as the devil or enemy number one, has connotations of a lynch mob or the intellectual who indulges in intellectual masturbation by crunching numbers, i.e a modern day religion.
- samlosodesign 6y agoIf we do this we also need to build Snowpiercer
- vbezhenar 6y agoJust plant trees, cut them and bury in the oceans. Nature already have all the necessary mechanisms to capture carbon. On the plus side it'll serve as an energy reserve for future civilizations should ours collapse.
- worldofmatthew 6y agoWe have a lot of spare space for mangroves. That will store most of the carbon in the soil for up to 1,000 years.
- acje 6y agoI can’t imagine an industrial approach that won’t fail on scale, lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve the problem these are strategies to get rich. The only kind of strategy that seems capable of delivering on both scale and lifecycle is one where we enhance the environment to capture the CO2 for us and store it in the organic food chain simply by scaling it up to hold the extra mass. Most likely we would have to enhance plains and deserts to become forests. Use regenerative agricultural practices and eat less meat. The big opportunity is in the oceans. There are wast “sea deserts” that could be transformed into more biological active habitats by using our industrial base to build some kind of structure to protect small life. Perhaps also disperse nutrients to accelerate biological processes.
- acje 6y agoWow the downvotes.. was this really that controversial? Are we still trying to solve the problem with the same mindset we created it?
- Ensorceled 6y agoThis is not an argument against the solution proposed: > I can’t imagine an industrial approach that won’t fail on scale, lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve the problem these are strategies to get rich. Neither this this: > Are we still trying to solve the problem with the same mindset we created it? I don't know if this solution is at all useful, but climate change is massive threat to a large percentage of humanity and discarding solutions because you don't like the "mindset" isn't going to get it done.
- mrpopo 6y ago> I don't know if this solution is at all useful, but climate change is massive threat to a large percentage of humanity and discarding solutions because you don't like the "mindset" isn't going to get it done. Climate change is not the only massive threat to a large percentage of humanity, and the mindset that "building large-scale processes with monetary incentives and no after-thoughts needed is good" is what's causing all of them.
- williesleg 6y agoNice! A tree!
- gwern 6y agoFulltext mirror: https://www.gwern.net/docs/science/2020-zheng.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/science/2020-zheng.pdf
- tim333 6y agoFor comparison I was looking back at the "Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches" thing. There were estimates of $10-$25 a ton for olivine rock https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415138
- thechao 6y agoI don't know why the Democrats, in particular, don't turn this into political hay: it's literally the perfect counter to the coal issue. 1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings from huge defunct coal mines; 2. All of the mining & transportation infrastructure is already in mining country; 3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue collar work; and, 4. Mining country already has expertise in ... mining. Instead of rolling in and telling mine workers that "their livelihood is destroying the world, please go find something else to do", the Fed could roll in and say: "now it's your turn to ~save the world~; go dig!"
- aardvarkr 6y agoJust a side note, as I don’t know a thing about olivine, but wouldn’t they be able to pull the material from the waste piles instead of mining new material? I remember this popping up in a discussion about thorium (super abundant in coal mining waste) and that was one of the points brought up
- thechao 6y agoYep; straight from the tailings. It's all the transport & digging parts of mining, without any of the dangerous "going into a hole" parts of mining. Obviously, this is just a form of strip-mining so there's definite downsides.
- BurningFrog 6y ago1. The tech isn't ready to deploy. 2. There are hardly any Democrat leaders left who care about or can talk to blue collar workers.
- xyzzy21 6y agoWhat's the energy consumption to make this moderately complex organic compound? If it takes more energy (largely generated from fossil fuels - and generating CO2 itself) than it removes... it's not going to be viable. You must have >1:1 otherwise you are better off doing nothing at all.
- jjk166 6y agoThe compound is a solvent, you reuse it repeatedly, so there is no need for it to be >1:1.
- centimeter 6y agoI really doubt that any industrial-chemical process will have a net better environmental or economic impact than, say, re-foresting desert areas.
- kylewatson 6y agoI'm sure in 20 years we'll learn this causes cancer. And someone will be posting an article on how to remove this from the water supply.
- worik 6y agoAt ~$50/Tonne, that is more than than current carbon prices, as far as I can tell. The cheapest way is to not produce it in the first place. Deepening topsoil is my favourite way of sequestering carbon.
- teabee89 6y agoIn addition to price, I would like to see, for any CO2 capture tech, the estimated CO2 emission amount with scope 3 accounting (i.e., including the CO2 emitted in the entire supply chain, amortized by the estimated non-infinite lifetime).
- robomartin 6y agoEvery time something like this comes up I think exactly the same thing: Did everyone flunk first year Physics? Someone please explain how nobody seems to care about the fact that you cannot violate conservation of energy. How much energy will it take to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm? Never mind time and resources. Let's just talk energy. How much? The simple answer is: More than the energy that went into creating the problem in the first place. How much more? A lot more. Because these processes are not efficient at all when looked into in their entirety. A number? OK. How did we get the CO2? By burning oil. What did it take to create this oil. Billions of years of plants and biological matter being crushed and cooked by...solar energy. Massive amounts of energy falling on this planet. The end result being a highly concentrated source of energy. When we burn a gallon of oil we are releasing the culmination of what took unimaginable time and energy to produce. You are not going to make an impact without expending an equally massive amount of energy and resources. Let's say I burn a pile of lumber inside a large sealed warehouse. Say, 100K square feet (about 10K square meters) and very high. Large volume. Smoke, particles, gases disperse throughout the volume. You are tasked with cleaning it. You can't open windows, etc. That would be cheating. There is not "and then a miracle occurs" scenario. It would take an immense amount of energy and resources (relative to what it took to create the mess) to go find every particle and clean-up the noxious gases in that warehouse. If we can't clean a warehouse, what makes anyone think we can magically deal with a planetary-scale problem? We already know this. There are research papers that explain just how it is that even the idea of converting the entire planet to renewable energy sources is an exercise in futility. My point is: If we could just stop lying to ourselves maybe we can devote brain power towards dealing with the reality of the problem rather than the fantasies of non-existing solutions. I am not saying "let's be filthy and do nothing". I am simply saying we are not facing reality, which means we are wasting valuable time and resources "solving" a problem we cannot possibly solve without risking killing everything on this planet. All you need in order to understand this is the atmospheric CO2 data from ice core samples going back 800,000 years. We know that if humanity was not around it would take about 50K years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2. In other words, with the ultimate "solution" --if we left this planet-- it would take 50K years. What makes people actually believe we can solve the problem in a generation or two if we stick around? That's not hubris, that's a delusion. Sorry. If anyone disagrees. Great. I would like to learn how I am wrong. Kindly explain how you are going to achieve a rate of change between 500 and 1,000 times greater than what could be achieved if humanity --and all of our technology-- got erased from this planet. That's the challenge. No magical technology can do better than the absence of humanity and all of our toys. That should be self evident. And yet, without us around, the timeline is in the 50K year range. Take your time, show how this 1000x improvement in rate-of-change will happen without at least 1000x the energy deployed at a planetary scale by natural processes.
- hedora 6y agoUseful conversion: At $47/ton, it costs $0.47/gallon of gasoline burnt to capture the CO2 the gasoline would release. This fact that you divide by 100 to go from ton of CO2 to gallon of gasoline equivalent is a useful coincidence. It also means that a dollar per gallon gasoline tax for carbon capture would be enough to make cars carbon negative (cars have a lot of embodied carbon; the factor of two covers that).
- sircastor 6y agoIf you could attach that as a tax successfully to the cost of gas, you might have a beneficial side effect of reducing vehicle driving.