14 ms·

So you want to build a carbon capture company

194 points by _Microft 5y ago

wazoox 5y ago
TL,DR: What are the problems to solve for efficient CC? Answer that's missing in the article: CO2 is one of the stablest elements in the atmosphere. Removing it will require humongous amounts of energy (as a rule of the thumb, more energy than the energy-producing process that generated this CO2 in the first place). Therefore CC at scale is probably a pipe dream and will remain so, because thermodynamics.
- AyrtonB 5y ago
  Most of the energy used in CO2 capture through amine absorption is in the form of heat. Luckily, most processes where point-source CCS could be used produce waste gas streams at very high temperatures which can significantly reduce the additional energy that needs to be added.
mothsonasloth 5y ago
Tangential thought; aren't compressed gas companies who bottle CO2/Nitrogen etc. technically carbon capturing? Surely they have optimised their industrial processes, which could be repurposed into a large storage unit rather than a cast iron gas bottle?
- berkes 5y ago
  As the author points out: they are. But you have to look at the CO2 emitted for compressing that gas and creating the containers and so on.
- sunshineforever 5y ago
  Isn't all that co2 re-released relatively quickly? It gets fizzed and burped right back into the air.
  - saberdancer 5y ago
    It does, but you could store them underground and capture carbon. Not sure if it scales.
- nxpnsv 5y ago
  But are they carbon negative? I don't think so
- Beltiras 5y ago
  Industrial CO2 is produced by burning natural gas as a byproduct to produce ammonia. DAC is way too expensive.
andelu 5y ago
I have an idea about genetically modifying algae to continuously synthesize and excrete cellulose or similar. In theory would only need sunlight and water to operate, and cellulose could sink to the bottom and collected. Anyone knows if this has been explored?
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Algae biofuel has definitely been a thing that people have tried over and over again and it hasn’t happened after a few decades so presumably there is some issue with commercialization. Wikipedia claims algae has very high water requirements (>600L of water for 1L of fuel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
  - BelenusMordred 5y ago
    > 600L of water for 1L of fuel Is this actually the problem or is there other factors? A lot more is needed for 1kg of beef or certain crops. I live in the tropics and water usage is just never an issue and if it was they'd actually store some of what falls from the sky. Truly doubt that water is the real bottleneck here. edit: From the wiki page Among algal fuels' attractive characteristics are that they can be grown with minimal impact on fresh water resources, can be produced using saline and wastewater
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      "Can be" != commercially viable.
  - sunshineforever 5y ago
    Im proposing a conspiracy theory here, but the basically all of the world's most profitable companies are involved in fossil fuel production. They definitely have an incentive to not want this technology to thrive and their leaders have a lot of influence and money. The retort to this theory would be that a company with a lot of resources could simply invest in the new technology. But with the level of lazy corruption in the world it seems possible that these entities might be suppressing the technology somehow.
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
Has the author heard of photosynthesis? He is making valid point that we would need more energy to capture but we have lot of energy we could use in daytime near equator. Fossil fuel are burnt just because they are easy to work with and could produce energy all the time, but we have lot of solar energy that is wasted.
- berkes 5y ago
  A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals.
  - WJW 5y ago
    They also need massive amounts of water when planted at scale and die after anything between 1-100 years (some hardwood trees live longer but capture carbon relatively slowly compared to faster growing plants), after which they release the carbon back into the ecosystem. Energy efficiency of photosynthesis is also really low. Just planting a lot of plants and expecting they will efficiently capture a lot of carbon out of the air is going to lead to disappointment.
    - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
      We could create mechanical replacement which works with sea water and doesn't require us to wait for a decade to get result and likely more optimized for just one task.
      - WJW 5y ago
        Aren't technological plant replacements usually just called solar panels?
        YetAnotherNick 5y ago
        I was talking about carbon capture using sunlight.
benkoller 5y ago
As someone currently dabbling in the space, this is great reality checklist for a majority of research papers (and, unfortunately, a large majority on commercial endeavours, too) on the topic. The author makes a solid delivery on his outset promise. It just might help to shed some light on something akin to the blockchain/machine learning hypecycle bubbles amongst startups.
- WJW 5y ago
  This checklist would (with a few minor adaptations) also work great for many other types of "so you want to start an X company". Very thorough indeed.
godmode2019 5y ago
Here is a untested idea, probably unworkable. Solar has a problem that consumers tend to need more energy during the night. So the solution is to pipe electricity from somewhere east so everyone's electricity is piped in from say a location east where its still light. I got the idea when I heard Singapore wants to run a cable to Australia to get solar because they are too small for renewables. If if could work for those planners it might work elsewhere. People are talking about pumped hydro as batteries, that's good for storage but this is more of a on demand system. Cool idea, probably unrealistic.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Long distance high voltage DC inter ties are a thing (there is one running from Washington to southern california), but very costly to build. If you have a truly ridiculous amount of free or almost free photovoltaics somewhere, you could theoretically crack hydrogen from seawater and compress it into tanks, ship it elsewhere (using hydrogen powered ships, hopefully) to be run through giant proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Right now its economics are prohibitively bad. But do the math if the electricity to run the cracking process was far under 1 cent per kWh...
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    With anything involving seawater, you'll run into the same issues as any desalination plant - where to put the enormous amounts of brine? Potable water is bad enough to electrolyze as there are lots of minerals in it, but salt water is a whole lot worse - and there are massive concerns about the toxicity of brine.
  - yc-kraln 5y ago
    This is more-or-less what the EU will be doing along the northern coast of Africa in the future.
  - danpalmer 5y ago
    In some cases even more than costly to build, they're an area of cutting edge research. The public assume that it's just a matter of building a "big wire", but the "big" here has to be so big to be effective that we're actually into the realm of new materials science. The idea of solar panels in Africa powering homes in Europe is probably unlikely to happen for a long time, and even if it did history has shown us time and again that a distributed network is far more resilient than a centralised one, and so the best solutions look a lot more like putting solar panels on every house.
punnerud 5y ago
Norway have been doing CC since 1996 from natural gas and pumping the CO2 back into the well. The first commercial reservoir (Northern light project) for pumping CO2 back into old oil wells will open in 2024. The drilling is finished and the capacity is estimated to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year for this first project. There is not any capacity left now for new contracts, but they are planning for additional wells. https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/environment-and-technology/carbon-capture-and-storage/ https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/environment-and-technology/...
- nosianu 5y ago
  It would be far more efficient (since additional energy is used for all the actions around it all) to not bring up carbon from below ground in the first place. As long as Norway brings up new oil those actions are just marketing. See the article we are talking about here. First you spend energy to bring up carbon. Then you spend more energy to get it back down again. The math does not check out. Not bringing up the carbon in the first place would have been far more beneficial for atmospheric CO2 levels. Worse, they plan to do more of the oil-digging: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-oil-environment-idUSKBN28W104 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-oil-environment-id... (this is dated Dec 2020) "Norway wants to lead on climate change. But first it must face its legacy of oil and gas." -- "An expert explains Norway’s climate change paradox." -- https://www.vox.com/22227063/norway-oil-gas-climate-change https://www.vox.com/22227063/norway-oil-gas-climate-change
  - p1mrx 5y ago
    It might be possible to pull hydrogen from the ground, leaving the carbon in place. https://proton.energy/ https://proton.energy/ claims to be trying.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    As a Norwegian I agree we should phase out oil sooner. Like you say, not releasing the CO2 to begin with is the best option. However Norway is not the sole oil producer. If demand is not reduced and other producers compensate for our reduction, then that won't really help the planet at all. As such it seems reducing demand would be the best way. Not that easy to achieve on a global scale though, it would seem.
rasputnik6502 5y ago
Very sobering article. But startups are not about building a carbon concentration machine, they need money concentration machine. Thermodynamics don't apply directly here.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  Is this a joke?
supernova87a 5y ago
He acknowledges helpfully at the outset that he's not a CCS expert. He's just posing questions by which you could evaluate whether a company is doing anything remarkable, isn't that correct? This isn't a proposal for a CCS company or anything -- more of a guide on how to poke holes in a proposal for such a company. A side note, I had never heard of Casey Handmer before seeing this. I'm wondering how he appears to be a software developer at JPL but markets himself as some CEO-for-hire on only interesting problems...
- __sy__ 5y ago
  Then I suggest you start following his blog :) Casey's writing is second to none on doing engineering analysis. A few of my favs: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-sta... https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/supersonic-electric-flight/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/supersonic-ele...
  - supernova87a 5y ago
    I will definitely read some more of his posts.
- algo_trader 5y ago
  > CEO-for-hire on only interesting problems This is a nice (side) job if u can get it. Where do u see any marketing like that in his blog? As a side note. The blog seems very knowledgable and technical. So good for him.
  - supernova87a 5y ago
    It's on his Linkedin.
legulere 5y ago
There are a few areas where I see carbon capture viable: - Catching CO2 of unavoidable CO2 emitting processes, namely burning trash. In Europe we decided that we do not want landfills anymore, and what cannot be recycled has to be burned. We already start with a higher CO2 concentration, and have energy that is created while burning. Seems like a perfect opportunity for catching CO2. - Natural processes that catch CO2: Trees, olivine, ... - Systems for better indoor air with controlled home ventilation systems: I guess you will find people willing to pay for air with a lower CO2 content.
- kolinko 5y ago
  I’m tackling the last one - if anyone’s interested let me know :)
pelorat 5y ago
Not sure why he talks about the financial side. CC on scale will be a government driven operation, paid via taxing the population and it will cost whatever it costs, like many other things.
- WJW 5y ago
  Of course costs matter. If it costs 100x more to capture the carbon than building higher levees, we will build higher levees and (hopefuly) use the leftover money to evacuate people in very low and/or poor countries to higher ground.
  - deleted 5y ago
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Tepix 5y ago
Would planting a lot of trees and them putting them into flooded mines work?
de6u99er 5y ago
How about producing less CO2 in the first place and planting trees to reduce CO2 concentration
- corty 5y ago
  Planting trees uses too much land that is increasingly needed to support the growing population. Not an option.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  Some numbers: The US Forest Service estimates that 1 acre of forest stores about 80 tons of carbon. You could store about 180 billion tons of carbon onto that area if it were all a forest. CO2 makes up about 3 trillion tons of the atmosphere. ~27% of it is carbon, therefore there is roughly 800 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere. It seems plausible that if we somehow planted a forest on the entire Sahara desert, that we could reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by a significant amount. I hope I didn't make any errors in my calculations.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    The reduced albedo effect from the no longer radiant Sahara would cause a significant amount of heat absorption. While it would remove CO2, for a while, the increased heat would be enough to almost offset the entire benefit from the project.
    - Aerroon 5y ago
      This is not something I considered at all! If this impact is so large, then would having more clouds significantly help with warming?
lokischild 5y ago
I have a hunch that there is no artifical process that could possibly compete with what nature already has. The answer is plants. So the solution would be a way to sustainably grow a lot of plants in a short time. But another main factor is the destruction of the densest of those ecosystems, the rain forest on a large scale. That is my answer, stop humans/companies/countries from destroying the rain forest on a large scale (I'm looking at brazil and neighbors) and think of ways to rebuild lost rainforest in an efficient way. I am going to wager, from the knowledge and experience I gathered in my years of living, there is no other solution that is sustainable.
- boldslogan 5y ago
  my understanding from watching that crazy netflix sea documentary is that algae is the go to for oxygen production / carbon capture...anyone have ideas on which is the more important case?
  - BLanen 5y ago
    Algea is only a co2 battery unless you can capture it and store the algea without it fermenting. If you just grow it in the Ocean, you need to increase the Ocean's algea carrying capacity and form it thus into a battery because dead algea gets fermented by bacteria into co2 and methane again. Also the ocean's carrying capacity for algea is currently ever decreasing due to oceanic acidity increasing from co2. Artificially growing algea in pools and using that to make fuel/ pump it underground so the fermentation products don't get released is not nearly efficient enough to be viable. Ironically this usually also uses fertilizers which are dependent on the fossil fuel industry.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  The ecosystem is more or less in a balance. Forests that are cut down will become forests again. Plants already grow pretty much everywhere where they can grow. It's still not enough. We've spent over 200 years pumping carbon into the atmosphere from a source we can't return it to. No amount of growing forests is going to fix this issue without being able to turn those forests into carbon that's in the ground. We need to get carbon out of the carbon cycle. The natural life of plants doesn't do that. Edit: we might be able to do it, if we can somehow turn land where forests don't grow into forests.
Gravityloss 5y ago
You could intercept coal trains... ;)
yc-kraln 5y ago
Have been evaluating CCS/CCU companies as part of https://one.five.ventures/ https://one.five.ventures/ and the blog post hits most of the major points--especially around purity vs contamination, miracles of scale, etc. If you are interested in founding something in the space, please reach out!
deleted 5y ago
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LeanderK 5y ago
I literally don't know anything about those processes beside super basic knowledge. But maybe somebody can explain to me why we can't use something like bio-inspired photosynthesis to extract co2? I bet plants are not co2 throughput optimised. The technology may not be there, but would it be feasible in theory without using too much energy?
- fock 5y ago
  plants are nifty little machines, which - while their efficeny might not be optimal - also produce all their parts. Go look at one of the papers doing Re-based CO2-dissociation and shop for the chemicals!
- Beltiras 5y ago
  I don't know of any technology where you get both the desired effect as well as an in-built mechanism for cloning the machine using locally sourced materials, often without human intervention.
kubanczyk 5y ago
Died, so https://web.archive.org/web/20210504090615/https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/so-you-want-to-build-a-carbon-capture-company/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210504090615/https://caseyhand...
senko 5y ago
Armchair strategizing on the topic I know nothing about (but it's fun to think about!): Constraints: - C removal requires lots of energy (can't avoid thermodynamics) - electricity on that scale is either expensive, dirty, or both Additional concerns: - cheap/clean energy is intermittent (and still a small percentage) - excessive electricity is as bad as not enough electricity Solution: - build lots of new (safe and cheaper) nuclear power plants - hook them up to the grid and use them as peakers (!), and using them for C removal on off-times This: - provides cheap and clean (from the perspective of C footprint) energy - solves the intermittency problem of wind/solar - provides abundant energy for C removal Assumption: that safe nuclear fission power plants (using Thorium, MSR, .. reactors) are feasible and can be built on the cheap (for some value of "cheap")
- cagenut 5y ago
  I really like your idea on a personal 'neat' would-be-nice level, but it makes one of the most common mistakes in the nuclear<->climate-change discussion: time. The development of next-gen/thorium/msr/whatever from first-commercial-success to repeatable-and-therefore-cheaper is, even in a highly optimistic scenario, a 30+ year proposition. I fervently believe we should fund and invest in that r&d, but even if it pans out (which I bet it would, but you have to acknowledge its our guess), its simply not a part of our "it is time to act now" timeline. I do this all the time too, its largely a part of the fact that many of us are middle aged men now. We were taught to think of, and mentally frame this as, an "over the course of the next several decades" type of problem. In which case a nuclear solution was fairly obviously the best path available. The problem is we didn't take that path. And the decades have passed. So while we should start down that path now ASAP from an r&d/investment perspective, it is almost completely a distraction today from a "net-zero in 20-30 years" perspective. I guess what I'm mostly trying to say is, whenever engaging in the climate-change/energy-generation-mix "debate" these days, try to mentally factor in time as one of the top constraints in your model. Here's an IPCC chart of four example scenarios that show you what the slope of the curves need to look like: 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...
  - 5y ago
freddealmeida 5y ago
Trees? am I not seeing the obvious here? A forest sounds nice. Also algae? Eats tons of carbon, generates most of our o2.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  I can't find the reference but a study I read recently said that afforestation could only satisfy 30% of what we need for carbon removal. Here's a result in Wikipedia that says something similar: > A 2019 study of the global potential for tree restoration showed that there is space for at least 9 million km2 of new forests worldwide, which is a 25% increase from current conditions. This forested area could store up to 205 gigatons of carbon or 25% of the atmosphere's current carbon pool by reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and introducing more O2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afforestation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afforestation
  - DennisP 5y ago
    And the direct air capture machines capture about a thousand times as much CO2 for the same amount of land.
bradleyjg 5y ago
What ever happened to seeding algae blooms by dumping iron in the ocean? That was getting a lot of press several years back.
seeny 5y ago
what about phytoplankton?
jrnvs 5y ago
Burn biomass (plants) in a power plant to generate electricity, then store the carbon dioxide in empty gas fields. This is called BECCS, Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage [0]. Unfortunately, carbon capture and storage is not economical (yet). Let's hope it will be soon, with EU CO2 prices already reaching 50 euros / ton this week [1]. If I understand this International Energy Agency report[2] correctly, many forms of carbon capture become economical if these price levels subsist in the EU (and other economic blocs impose similar prices on their industry). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-carbon-price-tops-50-euros-first-time-2021-05-04/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-carbon-price-tops... [2] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/is-carbon-capture-too-expensive https://www.iea.org/commentaries/is-carbon-capture-too-expen...
- cogman10 5y ago
  Alternative, make charcoal, bury the charcoal, extract whatever useful thing you can from the not-charcol that comes from that process. Charcoal is pretty much pure carbon and that's what we should be putting into the ground. Putting CO2 into the ground runs into problems because you have to deal with the fact that you are burying a gas (gasses don't like to be contained). So skip that, and instead focus on burying pure carbon.
  - gonzo41 5y ago
    This is a good idea, But getting the biomass will be difficult. I dream about large lakes of algae that can be skimmed and then sundried, and cooked in solar ovens to create essentially a solar powered only capture process. This sort of operation would need a stable cap and trade or carbon tax system to be profitable. I should also add, I think China or somewhere in the hot parts of Africa would be a a good place for this as it would be a large area operation. Sadly as an Australian we suffer from regulatory capture and a carbon tax won't be back on the cards for some time.
    - cogman10 5y ago
andyxor 5y ago
what about trees, the cheapest and most efficient "carbon capture machine". with that prize money one can plant a whole lot of forests https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/how-many-trees-to-plant-to-stop-climate-crisis/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/how-many-trees-to-plant-to-s... https://edenprojects.org/ https://edenprojects.org/
WhompingWindows 5y ago
Why not use reduced space-flight costs to lift giant solar reflectors to prevent our poles and ice-caps from being melted? It wouldn't affect insolation at agricultural centers and it would slow warming enough for us to get carbon capture cheaper.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Isn't polar orbit hard?
- wildmanx 5y ago
  Global climate is more than just average temperature. Or even "prevent ice caps from melting". It's an insanely complex system that we have only started to understand. There are currents in the oceans and the air, they have complex interdependencies, even with vegetation. If you change this, you may end up screwing up the climate even more.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    The reduction of the albedo effect from the disappearing ice at the poles is a considerable cause of global warming.
barathr 5y ago
If a machine were invented that scrubbed carbon from the atmosphere and turned it into useful food, construction materials, animal feedstocks, and fibers, all while rebuilding topsoil, it would be on the cover of every tech magazine in the world and its inventor would be a celebrity millionaire. Yet I’ve never seen a tree on the cover of Wired. https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab-grown-meat-have.html https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab... Sometimes we overlook the simplest approaches. We should plant trees. Lots of them. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the simplest, can be adapted to every environment, has costs that are relative to local economies, doesn't depend upon global supply chains, doesn't require human maintenance after initial planting, etc.
- hh3k0 5y ago
  > Sometimes we overlook the simplest approaches. We should plant trees. Lots of them. It's not a perfect solution That's because it's not a solution at all: https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-climate-change/ https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-c...
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    Trees alone might not be. However, photosynthesis is the answer. Plants exude sugars and carbohydrates, made from atmospheric CO2, into the soil feeding massive amounts of bacteria and fungi(carbon). The bulk of carbon in the soil comes from plant exudates, not plant matter. As long as this ecosystem is healthy the carbon stays in the soil. When the soil ecosystem is healthy plants are healthier which makes everything up the food chain healthier. The majority of our crop and pasture land soil is dead. The previous year's carbon that was pumped into the soil by plants is released when tilling happens in the spring. We need to stop tilling and grow diverse, more than 8, species wherever we can. Five tenants of soil health https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A NASA CO2 https://youtu.be/x1SgmFa0r04 https://youtu.be/x1SgmFa0r04
    - PicassoCTs 5y ago
      Could creating algea flowering allow for large scale photosynthesis binding?
Valgrim 5y ago
My favorite carbon-capture solution is to breed whales: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/12/natures-solution-to-climate-change-chami.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/12/natures-s... Whales act as a nutrient pump in the ocean; beside the 30-tons of carbon they capture and sink over their lifetime in their own biomass, they eat in the deepest parts of the ocean and come back to the surface to breathe, where they release a large amount of nitrate, phosphorus and iron every time they defecate, causing a lot of algal growth. restoring whales population to their pre-industrial levels could have the same effect as planting several billion trees.
- qayxc 5y ago
  > restoring whales population to their pre-industrial levels could have the same effect as planting several billion trees. I would like to see the maths on that :D Whales usually don't create their own microclimate or provide a habit for a number of species. They also don't rebuild and support topsoil, can't be harvested for fibres and are not very suitable as building materials. In other words, trees are more versatile than whales.
  - surfearth 5y ago
    Ideally we would have more of both trees and whales as part of a comprehensive approach to climate change mitigation.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Seems like the main competition to carbon capture is reduction in carbon release. Can it ever compete with finding the thing that currently emits the most fossil carbon and replacing it with something that doesn't do that as much? Seems like a lot of the carbon capture funding has historically came from Industries that did not want to stop emitting fossil carbon, since that was a key part of their main business, and so needed something that was at least vaguely-plausible as a future solution so they could keep emitting carbon today. A carbon price, as mentioned in the article, would also pit these two things against each other directly. Generate carbon and pay someone to bury it, or just don't emit it in the first place.

194 points by _Microft 5y ago

TL,DR: What are the problems to solve for efficient CC? Answer that's missing in the article: CO2 is one of the stablest elements in the atmosphere. Removing it will require humongous amounts of energy (as a rule of the thumb, more energy than the energy-producing process that generated this CO2 in the first place). Therefore CC at scale is probably a pipe dream and will remain so, because thermodynamics.

AyrtonB 5y ago
Most of the energy used in CO2 capture through amine absorption is in the form of heat. Luckily, most processes where point-source CCS could be used produce waste gas streams at very high temperatures which can significantly reduce the additional energy that needs to be added.

mothsonasloth 5y ago

Tangential thought; aren't compressed gas companies who bottle CO2/Nitrogen etc. technically carbon capturing? Surely they have optimised their industrial processes, which could be repurposed into a large storage unit rather than a cast iron gas bottle?

berkes 5y ago
As the author points out: they are. But you have to look at the CO2 emitted for compressing that gas and creating the containers and so on.
sunshineforever 5y ago
Isn't all that co2 re-released relatively quickly? It gets fizzed and burped right back into the air.
- saberdancer 5y ago
  It does, but you could store them underground and capture carbon. Not sure if it scales.
nxpnsv 5y ago
But are they carbon negative? I don't think so
Beltiras 5y ago
Industrial CO2 is produced by burning natural gas as a byproduct to produce ammonia. DAC is way too expensive.

andelu 5y ago

I have an idea about genetically modifying algae to continuously synthesize and excrete cellulose or similar. In theory would only need sunlight and water to operate, and cellulose could sink to the bottom and collected. Anyone knows if this has been explored?

bobthepanda 5y ago
Algae biofuel has definitely been a thing that people have tried over and over again and it hasn’t happened after a few decades so presumably there is some issue with commercialization. Wikipedia claims algae has very high water requirements (>600L of water for 1L of fuel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel
- BelenusMordred 5y ago
  > 600L of water for 1L of fuel Is this actually the problem or is there other factors? A lot more is needed for 1kg of beef or certain crops. I live in the tropics and water usage is just never an issue and if it was they'd actually store some of what falls from the sky. Truly doubt that water is the real bottleneck here. edit: From the wiki page Among algal fuels' attractive characteristics are that they can be grown with minimal impact on fresh water resources, can be produced using saline and wastewater
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    "Can be" != commercially viable.
- sunshineforever 5y ago
  Im proposing a conspiracy theory here, but the basically all of the world's most profitable companies are involved in fossil fuel production. They definitely have an incentive to not want this technology to thrive and their leaders have a lot of influence and money. The retort to this theory would be that a company with a lot of resources could simply invest in the new technology. But with the level of lazy corruption in the world it seems possible that these entities might be suppressing the technology somehow.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

Has the author heard of photosynthesis? He is making valid point that we would need more energy to capture but we have lot of energy we could use in daytime near equator. Fossil fuel are burnt just because they are easy to work with and could produce energy all the time, but we have lot of solar energy that is wasted.

berkes 5y ago
A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals.
- WJW 5y ago
  They also need massive amounts of water when planted at scale and die after anything between 1-100 years (some hardwood trees live longer but capture carbon relatively slowly compared to faster growing plants), after which they release the carbon back into the ecosystem. Energy efficiency of photosynthesis is also really low. Just planting a lot of plants and expecting they will efficiently capture a lot of carbon out of the air is going to lead to disappointment.
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    We could create mechanical replacement which works with sea water and doesn't require us to wait for a decade to get result and likely more optimized for just one task.
    - WJW 5y ago
      Aren't technological plant replacements usually just called solar panels?
      - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
        I was talking about carbon capture using sunlight.

benkoller 5y ago

As someone currently dabbling in the space, this is great reality checklist for a majority of research papers (and, unfortunately, a large majority on commercial endeavours, too) on the topic. The author makes a solid delivery on his outset promise. It just might help to shed some light on something akin to the blockchain/machine learning hypecycle bubbles amongst startups.

WJW 5y ago
This checklist would (with a few minor adaptations) also work great for many other types of "so you want to start an X company". Very thorough indeed.

godmode2019 5y ago

Here is a untested idea, probably unworkable. Solar has a problem that consumers tend to need more energy during the night. So the solution is to pipe electricity from somewhere east so everyone's electricity is piped in from say a location east where its still light. I got the idea when I heard Singapore wants to run a cable to Australia to get solar because they are too small for renewables. If if could work for those planners it might work elsewhere. People are talking about pumped hydro as batteries, that's good for storage but this is more of a on demand system. Cool idea, probably unrealistic.

walrus01 5y ago
Long distance high voltage DC inter ties are a thing (there is one running from Washington to southern california), but very costly to build. If you have a truly ridiculous amount of free or almost free photovoltaics somewhere, you could theoretically crack hydrogen from seawater and compress it into tanks, ship it elsewhere (using hydrogen powered ships, hopefully) to be run through giant proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Right now its economics are prohibitively bad. But do the math if the electricity to run the cracking process was far under 1 cent per kWh...
- mschuster91 5y ago
  With anything involving seawater, you'll run into the same issues as any desalination plant - where to put the enormous amounts of brine? Potable water is bad enough to electrolyze as there are lots of minerals in it, but salt water is a whole lot worse - and there are massive concerns about the toxicity of brine.
- yc-kraln 5y ago
  This is more-or-less what the EU will be doing along the northern coast of Africa in the future.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  In some cases even more than costly to build, they're an area of cutting edge research. The public assume that it's just a matter of building a "big wire", but the "big" here has to be so big to be effective that we're actually into the realm of new materials science. The idea of solar panels in Africa powering homes in Europe is probably unlikely to happen for a long time, and even if it did history has shown us time and again that a distributed network is far more resilient than a centralised one, and so the best solutions look a lot more like putting solar panels on every house.

punnerud 5y ago

Norway have been doing CC since 1996 from natural gas and pumping the CO2 back into the well. The first commercial reservoir (Northern light project) for pumping CO2 back into old oil wells will open in 2024. The drilling is finished and the capacity is estimated to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year for this first project. There is not any capacity left now for new contracts, but they are planning for additional wells. https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/environment-and-technology/carbon-capture-and-storage/ https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/environment-and-technology/...

nosianu 5y ago
It would be far more efficient (since additional energy is used for all the actions around it all) to not bring up carbon from below ground in the first place. As long as Norway brings up new oil those actions are just marketing. See the article we are talking about here. First you spend energy to bring up carbon. Then you spend more energy to get it back down again. The math does not check out. Not bringing up the carbon in the first place would have been far more beneficial for atmospheric CO2 levels. Worse, they plan to do more of the oil-digging: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-oil-environment-idUSKBN28W104 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-oil-environment-id... (this is dated Dec 2020) "Norway wants to lead on climate change. But first it must face its legacy of oil and gas." -- "An expert explains Norway’s climate change paradox." -- https://www.vox.com/22227063/norway-oil-gas-climate-change https://www.vox.com/22227063/norway-oil-gas-climate-change
- p1mrx 5y ago
  It might be possible to pull hydrogen from the ground, leaving the carbon in place. https://proton.energy/ https://proton.energy/ claims to be trying.
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- magicalhippo 5y ago
  As a Norwegian I agree we should phase out oil sooner. Like you say, not releasing the CO2 to begin with is the best option. However Norway is not the sole oil producer. If demand is not reduced and other producers compensate for our reduction, then that won't really help the planet at all. As such it seems reducing demand would be the best way. Not that easy to achieve on a global scale though, it would seem.

rasputnik6502 5y ago

Very sobering article. But startups are not about building a carbon concentration machine, they need money concentration machine. Thermodynamics don't apply directly here.

canadianfella 5y ago
Is this a joke?

supernova87a 5y ago

He acknowledges helpfully at the outset that he's not a CCS expert. He's just posing questions by which you could evaluate whether a company is doing anything remarkable, isn't that correct? This isn't a proposal for a CCS company or anything -- more of a guide on how to poke holes in a proposal for such a company. A side note, I had never heard of Casey Handmer before seeing this. I'm wondering how he appears to be a software developer at JPL but markets himself as some CEO-for-hire on only interesting problems...

__sy__ 5y ago
Then I suggest you start following his blog :) Casey's writing is second to none on doing engineering analysis. A few of my favs: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-sta... https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/supersonic-electric-flight/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/supersonic-ele...
- supernova87a 5y ago
  I will definitely read some more of his posts.
algo_trader 5y ago
> CEO-for-hire on only interesting problems This is a nice (side) job if u can get it. Where do u see any marketing like that in his blog? As a side note. The blog seems very knowledgable and technical. So good for him.
- supernova87a 5y ago
  It's on his Linkedin.

legulere 5y ago

There are a few areas where I see carbon capture viable: - Catching CO2 of unavoidable CO2 emitting processes, namely burning trash. In Europe we decided that we do not want landfills anymore, and what cannot be recycled has to be burned. We already start with a higher CO2 concentration, and have energy that is created while burning. Seems like a perfect opportunity for catching CO2. - Natural processes that catch CO2: Trees, olivine, ... - Systems for better indoor air with controlled home ventilation systems: I guess you will find people willing to pay for air with a lower CO2 content.

kolinko 5y ago
I’m tackling the last one - if anyone’s interested let me know :)

pelorat 5y ago

Not sure why he talks about the financial side. CC on scale will be a government driven operation, paid via taxing the population and it will cost whatever it costs, like many other things.

WJW 5y ago
Of course costs matter. If it costs 100x more to capture the carbon than building higher levees, we will build higher levees and (hopefuly) use the leftover money to evacuate people in very low and/or poor countries to higher ground.
- deleted 5y ago
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Tepix 5y ago

Would planting a lot of trees and them putting them into flooded mines work?

de6u99er 5y ago

How about producing less CO2 in the first place and planting trees to reduce CO2 concentration

corty 5y ago
Planting trees uses too much land that is increasingly needed to support the growing population. Not an option.
Aerroon 5y ago
Some numbers: The US Forest Service estimates that 1 acre of forest stores about 80 tons of carbon. You could store about 180 billion tons of carbon onto that area if it were all a forest. CO2 makes up about 3 trillion tons of the atmosphere. ~27% of it is carbon, therefore there is roughly 800 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere. It seems plausible that if we somehow planted a forest on the entire Sahara desert, that we could reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by a significant amount. I hope I didn't make any errors in my calculations.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  The reduced albedo effect from the no longer radiant Sahara would cause a significant amount of heat absorption. While it would remove CO2, for a while, the increased heat would be enough to almost offset the entire benefit from the project.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    This is not something I considered at all! If this impact is so large, then would having more clouds significantly help with warming?

lokischild 5y ago

I have a hunch that there is no artifical process that could possibly compete with what nature already has. The answer is plants. So the solution would be a way to sustainably grow a lot of plants in a short time. But another main factor is the destruction of the densest of those ecosystems, the rain forest on a large scale. That is my answer, stop humans/companies/countries from destroying the rain forest on a large scale (I'm looking at brazil and neighbors) and think of ways to rebuild lost rainforest in an efficient way. I am going to wager, from the knowledge and experience I gathered in my years of living, there is no other solution that is sustainable.

boldslogan 5y ago
my understanding from watching that crazy netflix sea documentary is that algae is the go to for oxygen production / carbon capture...anyone have ideas on which is the more important case?
- BLanen 5y ago
  Algea is only a co2 battery unless you can capture it and store the algea without it fermenting. If you just grow it in the Ocean, you need to increase the Ocean's algea carrying capacity and form it thus into a battery because dead algea gets fermented by bacteria into co2 and methane again. Also the ocean's carrying capacity for algea is currently ever decreasing due to oceanic acidity increasing from co2. Artificially growing algea in pools and using that to make fuel/ pump it underground so the fermentation products don't get released is not nearly efficient enough to be viable. Ironically this usually also uses fertilizers which are dependent on the fossil fuel industry.
Aerroon 5y ago
The ecosystem is more or less in a balance. Forests that are cut down will become forests again. Plants already grow pretty much everywhere where they can grow. It's still not enough. We've spent over 200 years pumping carbon into the atmosphere from a source we can't return it to. No amount of growing forests is going to fix this issue without being able to turn those forests into carbon that's in the ground. We need to get carbon out of the carbon cycle. The natural life of plants doesn't do that. Edit: we might be able to do it, if we can somehow turn land where forests don't grow into forests.

Gravityloss 5y ago

You could intercept coal trains... ;)

yc-kraln 5y ago

Have been evaluating CCS/CCU companies as part of https://one.five.ventures/ https://one.five.ventures/ and the blog post hits most of the major points--especially around purity vs contamination, miracles of scale, etc. If you are interested in founding something in the space, please reach out!

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LeanderK 5y ago

I literally don't know anything about those processes beside super basic knowledge. But maybe somebody can explain to me why we can't use something like bio-inspired photosynthesis to extract co2? I bet plants are not co2 throughput optimised. The technology may not be there, but would it be feasible in theory without using too much energy?

fock 5y ago
plants are nifty little machines, which - while their efficeny might not be optimal - also produce all their parts. Go look at one of the papers doing Re-based CO2-dissociation and shop for the chemicals!
Beltiras 5y ago
I don't know of any technology where you get both the desired effect as well as an in-built mechanism for cloning the machine using locally sourced materials, often without human intervention.

kubanczyk 5y ago

Died, so https://web.archive.org/web/20210504090615/https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/so-you-want-to-build-a-carbon-capture-company/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210504090615/https://caseyhand...

senko 5y ago

Armchair strategizing on the topic I know nothing about (but it's fun to think about!): Constraints: - C removal requires lots of energy (can't avoid thermodynamics) - electricity on that scale is either expensive, dirty, or both Additional concerns: - cheap/clean energy is intermittent (and still a small percentage) - excessive electricity is as bad as not enough electricity Solution: - build lots of new (safe and cheaper) nuclear power plants - hook them up to the grid and use them as peakers (!), and using them for C removal on off-times This: - provides cheap and clean (from the perspective of C footprint) energy - solves the intermittency problem of wind/solar - provides abundant energy for C removal Assumption: that safe nuclear fission power plants (using Thorium, MSR, .. reactors) are feasible and can be built on the cheap (for some value of "cheap")

cagenut 5y ago
I really like your idea on a personal 'neat' would-be-nice level, but it makes one of the most common mistakes in the nuclear<->climate-change discussion: time. The development of next-gen/thorium/msr/whatever from first-commercial-success to repeatable-and-therefore-cheaper is, even in a highly optimistic scenario, a 30+ year proposition. I fervently believe we should fund and invest in that r&d, but even if it pans out (which I bet it would, but you have to acknowledge its our guess), its simply not a part of our "it is time to act now" timeline. I do this all the time too, its largely a part of the fact that many of us are middle aged men now. We were taught to think of, and mentally frame this as, an "over the course of the next several decades" type of problem. In which case a nuclear solution was fairly obviously the best path available. The problem is we didn't take that path. And the decades have passed. So while we should start down that path now ASAP from an r&d/investment perspective, it is almost completely a distraction today from a "net-zero in 20-30 years" perspective. I guess what I'm mostly trying to say is, whenever engaging in the climate-change/energy-generation-mix "debate" these days, try to mentally factor in time as one of the top constraints in your model. Here's an IPCC chart of four example scenarios that show you what the slope of the curves need to look like: 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...
- 5y ago

freddealmeida 5y ago

Trees? am I not seeing the obvious here? A forest sounds nice. Also algae? Eats tons of carbon, generates most of our o2.

guerrilla 5y ago
I can't find the reference but a study I read recently said that afforestation could only satisfy 30% of what we need for carbon removal. Here's a result in Wikipedia that says something similar: > A 2019 study of the global potential for tree restoration showed that there is space for at least 9 million km2 of new forests worldwide, which is a 25% increase from current conditions. This forested area could store up to 205 gigatons of carbon or 25% of the atmosphere's current carbon pool by reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and introducing more O2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afforestation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afforestation
- DennisP 5y ago
  And the direct air capture machines capture about a thousand times as much CO2 for the same amount of land.

bradleyjg 5y ago

What ever happened to seeding algae blooms by dumping iron in the ocean? That was getting a lot of press several years back.

seeny 5y ago

what about phytoplankton?

jrnvs 5y ago

Burn biomass (plants) in a power plant to generate electricity, then store the carbon dioxide in empty gas fields. This is called BECCS, Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage [0]. Unfortunately, carbon capture and storage is not economical (yet). Let's hope it will be soon, with EU CO2 prices already reaching 50 euros / ton this week [1]. If I understand this International Energy Agency report[2] correctly, many forms of carbon capture become economical if these price levels subsist in the EU (and other economic blocs impose similar prices on their industry). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-carbon-price-tops-50-euros-first-time-2021-05-04/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-carbon-price-tops... [2] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/is-carbon-capture-too-expensive https://www.iea.org/commentaries/is-carbon-capture-too-expen...

cogman10 5y ago
Alternative, make charcoal, bury the charcoal, extract whatever useful thing you can from the not-charcol that comes from that process. Charcoal is pretty much pure carbon and that's what we should be putting into the ground. Putting CO2 into the ground runs into problems because you have to deal with the fact that you are burying a gas (gasses don't like to be contained). So skip that, and instead focus on burying pure carbon.
- gonzo41 5y ago
  This is a good idea, But getting the biomass will be difficult. I dream about large lakes of algae that can be skimmed and then sundried, and cooked in solar ovens to create essentially a solar powered only capture process. This sort of operation would need a stable cap and trade or carbon tax system to be profitable. I should also add, I think China or somewhere in the hot parts of Africa would be a a good place for this as it would be a large area operation. Sadly as an Australian we suffer from regulatory capture and a carbon tax won't be back on the cards for some time.
  - cogman10 5y ago

andyxor 5y ago

what about trees, the cheapest and most efficient "carbon capture machine". with that prize money one can plant a whole lot of forests https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/how-many-trees-to-plant-to-stop-climate-crisis/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/how-many-trees-to-plant-to-s... https://edenprojects.org/ https://edenprojects.org/

WhompingWindows 5y ago

Why not use reduced space-flight costs to lift giant solar reflectors to prevent our poles and ice-caps from being melted? It wouldn't affect insolation at agricultural centers and it would slow warming enough for us to get carbon capture cheaper.

tomrod 5y ago
Isn't polar orbit hard?
wildmanx 5y ago
Global climate is more than just average temperature. Or even "prevent ice caps from melting". It's an insanely complex system that we have only started to understand. There are currents in the oceans and the air, they have complex interdependencies, even with vegetation. If you change this, you may end up screwing up the climate even more.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  The reduction of the albedo effect from the disappearing ice at the poles is a considerable cause of global warming.

barathr 5y ago

If a machine were invented that scrubbed carbon from the atmosphere and turned it into useful food, construction materials, animal feedstocks, and fibers, all while rebuilding topsoil, it would be on the cover of every tech magazine in the world and its inventor would be a celebrity millionaire. Yet I’ve never seen a tree on the cover of Wired. https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab-grown-meat-have.html https://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/06/vertical-farms-and-lab... Sometimes we overlook the simplest approaches. We should plant trees. Lots of them. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the simplest, can be adapted to every environment, has costs that are relative to local economies, doesn't depend upon global supply chains, doesn't require human maintenance after initial planting, etc.

hh3k0 5y ago
> Sometimes we overlook the simplest approaches. We should plant trees. Lots of them. It's not a perfect solution That's because it's not a solution at all: https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-climate-change/ https://www.wired.com/story/trees-regenerative-agriculture-c...
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Trees alone might not be. However, photosynthesis is the answer. Plants exude sugars and carbohydrates, made from atmospheric CO2, into the soil feeding massive amounts of bacteria and fungi(carbon). The bulk of carbon in the soil comes from plant exudates, not plant matter. As long as this ecosystem is healthy the carbon stays in the soil. When the soil ecosystem is healthy plants are healthier which makes everything up the food chain healthier. The majority of our crop and pasture land soil is dead. The previous year's carbon that was pumped into the soil by plants is released when tilling happens in the spring. We need to stop tilling and grow diverse, more than 8, species wherever we can. Five tenants of soil health https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A NASA CO2 https://youtu.be/x1SgmFa0r04 https://youtu.be/x1SgmFa0r04
  - PicassoCTs 5y ago
    Could creating algea flowering allow for large scale photosynthesis binding?

Valgrim 5y ago

My favorite carbon-capture solution is to breed whales: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/12/natures-solution-to-climate-change-chami.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/12/natures-s... Whales act as a nutrient pump in the ocean; beside the 30-tons of carbon they capture and sink over their lifetime in their own biomass, they eat in the deepest parts of the ocean and come back to the surface to breathe, where they release a large amount of nitrate, phosphorus and iron every time they defecate, causing a lot of algal growth. restoring whales population to their pre-industrial levels could have the same effect as planting several billion trees.

qayxc 5y ago
> restoring whales population to their pre-industrial levels could have the same effect as planting several billion trees. I would like to see the maths on that :D Whales usually don't create their own microclimate or provide a habit for a number of species. They also don't rebuild and support topsoil, can't be harvested for fibres and are not very suitable as building materials. In other words, trees are more versatile than whales.
- surfearth 5y ago
  Ideally we would have more of both trees and whales as part of a comprehensive approach to climate change mitigation.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Seems like the main competition to carbon capture is reduction in carbon release. Can it ever compete with finding the thing that currently emits the most fossil carbon and replacing it with something that doesn't do that as much? Seems like a lot of the carbon capture funding has historically came from Industries that did not want to stop emitting fossil carbon, since that was a key part of their main business, and so needed something that was at least vaguely-plausible as a future solution so they could keep emitting carbon today. A carbon price, as mentioned in the article, would also pit these two things against each other directly. Generate carbon and pay someone to bury it, or just don't emit it in the first place.