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The dream of carbon air capture edges toward reality

• ggm 5y ago
  In the abstract: major hurdles, including high costs, remain before this technology can be widely deployed and play a key role in tackling climate change. Major. Major, Major Challenges. CCS, (lets put the capture prt to one side and focus on Storage) is well proven as a gas field injection method to increase yield: Fugitive gas from fracking is a huge problem. Persisting injection, down into olivine or other rocks (basically, encouraging the CO2 to convert to carbonate solid) or into pressure depth as clathrate (I know methane clathrate is a thing, I assume CO2 does similar things but I could be wrong).. this is still really not at-scale simple. A major Australian CCS project has continually reported failure to meet its goals, such that its had to pay massive fines to the WA government because of un-met Carbon offset benefit... which I bet partly helped 'justify' the investment on the gas field.
  • rob_c 5y ago
    Given that the CO2 could easily be used to help pump more oil from underground I've never suspected actual storage is a problem. (Oil that isn't burnt or thrown away is still _crazy_ useful imo) I just doubt the seriousness of industry to invest in this in a significant and meaningful way...
• peytoncasper 5y ago
  The sense of scale is fascinating. Each facility will have a goal of scrubbing 1 million tons of CO2/yr. However, we currently emit 30+ Billion tons of CO2/yr.
  • msandford 5y ago
    If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. I would expect that the people who only care about profits to quickly allocate capital to this endeavor (if it's profitable) up until the point where diminishing returns makes it less profitable. Hopefully that doesn't happen until we're slowly decreasing CO2 versus slowly increasing. Even just cutting the growth rate by half would do a lot, and it would give international bodies like the UN some footing to establish a carbon price. Right now the carbon market is highly illiquid; nowhere near enough people are able to manufacture credits. If you could guarantee that it's always possible to make more credits that changes the political and perhaps even economic dynamic.
    • dataflow 5y ago
      > If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. That would just leave us where we're at right now, right? Even with emissions not increasing (unlikely...), we'd still need 60k just to decrease CO2 levels at the same rate... meaning it'd take several decades to bring them to acceptable levels. We'd probably need a few times that many facilities to be able to do this at the pace we need...
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Today is not a bad place to be, especially compared to many of the other potential outcomes.
      • pstuart 5y ago
        It beats the alternative that's likely to happen, which is "oops, nobody told me it was going to break!"
      • jjk166 5y ago
        If you held emissions constant, yes, but realistically you'd also be reducing emissions at the same time.
      • toomuchtodo 5y ago
        We'll have to build an assembly line for them.
      • gorkish 5y ago
        1 facility for every ~100k people isn't unreasonable. It's like building an air treatment plant for every water treatment plant there is. Anyway, while these plants are busy reprocessing the entire planet's atmosphere they can do other useful things besides removing CO2.
        • mikro2nd 5y ago
          Interested to know what those "other things" might be.
  • boplicity 5y ago
    If the cost of removal is a mere $100 per ton of carbon, the annual cost of removing 30 billion tons of C02 would be $3 Trillion. (3,000,000,000,000) The cost for most of these technologies right now is over $400 per ton, so that works out to $12 trillion. Yikes.
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      For comparison, the Gross World Product is about $90 Trillion, so a global sales tax of about 3% would cover the lower figure. Another way to look at it is that the GWP has an average growth rate of over 3%, so economic growth could continue even if the $3 Trillion spent per year was considered economically unproductive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
    • Edman274 5y ago
      So - twice the cost of the war in Afghanistan per year, after financing is calculated?
    • alkonaut 5y ago
      For comparison, estimates of the yearly costs created by 1.5 degree warming seems to be around 5T/year (e.g. [1]). [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66275-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66275-4
    • _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
      I actually thought that sounds kind of cheap. On average each German person emits roughly 10 tons of carbon per year. So for a $1000 dollars per year, I can be carbon neutral without any additional changes? Sounds pretty good to me.
      • missedthecue 5y ago
        I feel like just letting the climate change over the next 100 years and adapting as needed would be cheaper than spending $1.2 quadrillion on a global geo-engineering project.
  • tito 5y ago
    Yes the scale is fascinating! 2018 per capita emissions in the USA are 15 tons of carbon dioxide per person. So 1 million tons is the yearly emissions for 66,666 people. Still early days. We need to get 2x better at carbon removal every 12 months for the next decade to get to gigaton scale carbon removal. See my note about AirMiners Boot Up below http://bootup.airminers.org http://bootup.airminers.org
  • perrygeo 5y ago
    30 billion+ and growing at roughly 5% annually. That means 1.5 billion tons CO2/yr, or 1,500 new facilities coming online this year and every year after... just to maintain our current (devastatingly high) CO2 levels. All this talk about scaling the technology to fully draw down carbon feels like an fantasy if we can't even proven the concept of keeping pace with our year-over-year growth.
• multiplegeorges 5y ago
  From the article: > As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up. This is really the key. Once this is implemented, loads of effort/money/research will flow into this field. It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays". But in any case, it seems obvious that DAC is required to avoid bad outcomes. We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. We could just leave it there and deal with the problems, but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago.
  • zug_zug 5y ago
    Exactly. I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less. In turn consumers will be incentivized to buy products that create less pollution. Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing. -- To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? [Please double-check my math]
    • Supermancho 5y ago
      > I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.
      • Ericson2314 5y ago
        That doesn't take away the incentive, though. Anyone that can pass on less cost because of a better process now has a real competitive advantage, whereas today they can, what, virtue signal?
    • 5y ago
• rob_c 5y ago
  Can we just start building facilities to test this at scale based on targeted taxes. Worst case scenario is that we learn how to do a better job at improving our planet...
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    One challenge in fields where rapid advancements in tech are likely is that it can often not pay to deploy the first generation of something; if the second generation will arrive soon enough and be 25% better, building the first generation could be entirely wasteful. (Assuming you can learn enough in the lab to inform building the second generation at scale.)
    • rob_c 5y ago
      Very true, but my feeling on this is until the tech is scaled a lot of the advancements are either slowed or don't mature. It's annoyingly the argument made for covering the surface of the planet in photovoltaic cells, but in this case if the tech is already CO2 negative it can't be that bad to try to test it's longevity or scalability and reliability. Just need the equivalent got methane and were sorted ;)
    • mhh__ 5y ago
      Similarly, I think it's very likely that the only life to ever touch Voyager 1 and 2 will be future humans going to have a play with them
      • rob_c 5y ago
        Dam, I like to think of Star Trek as future historical records... Sometimes blue sky thinking helps us as we reach out into the cold lonely cosmos :)
    • jjk166 5y ago
      This is known as the Wait Calculation (sometimes referred to as the Wait/Walk problem) but it only applies to scenarios where a better option B, if done later, can overtake an inferior option A; for example a future spacecraft might be able to beat a less advanced craft to its destination, rendering the first a waste of resources. In the case of carbon capture though, the results are additive: whatever carbon an inneficient gen 1 plant removes before gen 2 is developed will remain removed when you go to implement gen 2, and any number X gen 2 plants plus Y gen 1 plants as well will always outperform just X gen 2 plants. Now if you were putting money (or some comparable resource) into escrow to be used for future carbon capture plants and the total resources allocated to carbon capture were fixed, it might make sense to save it for those better gen 2 plants, but for the moment no such system is in place.
• magwa101 5y ago
  Are there any scale numbers on DAC? On the face of it, it really looks ridiculous.
• captainredbeard 5y ago
  Hijacking trees for this purpose makes more sense in some ways, esp. if resulting lumber becomes CLT, which could sink carbon for a long time
• mrfusion 5y ago
  What’s the chemistry here? Is the sorbent reusable?
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Could this work on Venus?
  • ksd482 5y ago
    Putting the practicality of constructing such a facility on Venus aside, I presume geology of Venus' crust would be a big factor here. Another important factor would be the chemistry needed to separate CO2 from Venus' atmosphere. It may or may not be different from that required for Earth's atmosphere.
  • ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    No. Even if you built it floating in the clouds where the temperature and pressure aren't so bad, and powered it with a nuclear reactor, where would you put the captured carbon?
    • emkoemko 5y ago
      can't you split it into oxygen and carbon? then just dump the carbon? that way you have a supply of oxygen and over time couldn't you grow plants? can you then also get the hydrogen out of sulfuric acid and combine the hydrogen and oxygen to make water? use some of the hydrogen to run a nuclear fusion reactor? and if you did this on large scale and time span wouldn't the pressure start to lower? or is that just no possible?
      • iSnow 5y ago
        Chemically, it is very possible, but terraforming a whole planet takes an impossible amount of resources and man-hours. Who would pay for this and why?
        • magicalhippo 5y ago
          That's step 2, don't worry about that. Focus on step 3, the profit!
  • socialdemocrat 5y ago
• SantalBlush 5y ago
  I wonder why they didn't mention Carbfix [1], the Icelandic project that pulls CO2 from the air and flushes it underground. That's been going on for a few years now. edit: According to Carbfix's "Current Projects" [2] section, it looks like they actually collaborated with Climeworks on this Project Orca. [1] https://www.carbfix.com/ https://www.carbfix.com/ [2] https://www.carbfix.com/currentoperations https://www.carbfix.com/currentoperations
  • hanniabu 5y ago
    How is it kept underground? Would an earthquake release a bunch of it?
    • Ma8ee 5y ago
      They turn it into rock, so no.
    • Johnny555 5y ago
      From TFA: And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.
  • zug_zug 5y ago
    Great question - Carbfix seems to be saying they already achieve $30/ton, which is already more than 10x better 5-6 hundred per ton the article cited as a goal. I'm confused.
    • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      It seems to depend on basaltic bedrock for the reactions they mention. So you are probably limited in scaling this to other non volcanic regions in the world. Still maybe other countries could pay iceland to be a world air scrubber? Not sure.
• ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  I'm surprised this is even close to economical. In general you'd have a big chemical advantage with a higher concentration of CO2 (i.e. on top of a smokestack). But you also need to be close to a cheap source of clean power. I guess Iceland is one of the few places on earth where this can be done.
  • ec109685 5y ago
    Would running carbon capture during times of excess renewable power pencil out?
    • ProjectArcturis 5y ago
      Economically that might be a niche where energy is nearly free. Environmentally, it seems like a better use of that energy than what it's currently being used for, which is bitcoin mining.
• PeterHolzwarth 5y ago
  It's easy to forget why there is a bit of a challenge to getting C02 out of the air: there's so little of it, comparatively. In order, air is, broadly, made up of the following: Nitrogen: %78.084 Oxygen: %20.946 Argon: %00.934 C02: %00.042 The stuff is essentially beyond a rounding error - it really gives one an appreciation of the "either don't release it, or capture it at the point of release" sentiment, and for the difficulties in making carbon capture outside of these scenarios be even slightly cost-effective. It's great to see progress on this front.
  • stavros 5y ago
    Oh man, I didn't expect seeing it written "C-zero-two" to bug me that much :P
    • PeterHolzwarth 5y ago
      (I'm sorry - I have long since given in to this strange urge to type short alpha-numerics as hex. I can't justify it; it's habitual; and when I catch it, I always hope no-one is using a font that highlights it.)
      • stavros 5y ago
        Haha, no worries, it was just odd to see.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • this_was_posted 5y ago
    Could burning biofuel to generate highly concentrated co2 cheapen the process? This way there would also always be energy available for the capturing process and the capturing plants would be mostly just plots of land with plants on them.
    • iSnow 5y ago
• matmatmatmat 5y ago
  This is wildly optimistic, but personally, I'm looking forward to CO2 captured from the atmosphere, reformed into hydrocarbons on-site, and used as feedstock in the global plastics and fertilizer trades. Yes, balancing that equation is going to require energy input. Yes, probably gonna require some pretty smart chemists. But impossible? Well, I don't see why not. Edit: There's probably not that much utility in this. See comments below.
  • garmaine 5y ago
    Carbon isn't used in fertilizer, no?
    • matmatmatmat 5y ago
      My understanding is that synthetic fertilizers are (at least in part) made using crude oil. Would be interested to hear an expert chime in.
      • scoopertrooper 5y ago
        The only synthetic fertilizers that include hydrocarbons in their production chain are ammonia based, but all CO2 (or as much as is practicable) is removed from the end product. It's really only used on the way to producing hydrogen.
        • matmatmatmat 5y ago
          Thanks for the clarification!
          • garmaine 5y ago
            Furthermore the ammonia production processes use natural gas (not crude oil!) only as a source of hydrogen. They could split water instead, it’s just that the natural gas is cheaper.
    • robbiep 5y ago
• Johnny555 5y ago
  If they can get it down to $100/ton, that's kind of within reach for going carbon neutral, at least for the USA - we emit around 5 billion tons of CO2, so that's $500B/year to offset it all. (but ideally we'd reduce CO2 emissions so the cost to offset it all is lower). Could pay for it with a carbon tax, which would also help reduce CO2 since the heaviest sources of CO2 emission would be paying the most tax. But do we really have a place to pump all of this CO2 laden water?
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    The deep ocean is an option. Defer the problem for 10k years
    • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      Isn't that the whole problem of ocean acidification that everyone is intended on avoiding? Sounds like you would just accelerate the problem by moving CO2 from Air to ocean water.
      • goatlover 5y ago
        I think they mean dump containers of sequestered C02 into the deep ocean. The pressure will keep them at the bottom of the ocean.
  • neltnerb 5y ago
    Eh, sort of, but that'll be a whole other research effort. A lot of the maps exist already at least. But I think the way to encourage reducing waste and capturing waste to be in financial competition is that if capture costs $100/ton you charge a $90/ton tax so that your efforts are 90% funded already ($400B of the $500B) if they just paid the tax and changed nothing, while if they dropped their emissions in half they'd save $55/ton relative to a competitor that did nothing. But at least there is still an actual plan for the commons built in. But I like that it sets a benchmark for what carbon pricing needs to be to provide a real incentive to stop emitting it.
• iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
  Since reading about olivine beaches, I don’t understand why DAC makes any sense. Can anyone explain why we would want to build machines to slowly capture it from the air compared to letting natural processes capture it from the oceans?
  • wmf 5y ago
    For whatever reason the climate establishment isn't on the olivine train. Using DAC to create carbon-neutral jet fuel makes more sense than sequestration in the short term anyway.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • kisamoto 5y ago
    Speed which we don't have. DACS typically can sequester in a couple of years, Olivine can take up to a millennia to fully saturate. But these are not mutually exclusive. We should deploy a range of both natural and tech solutions as no single method is enough on its own.
  • elric 5y ago
    How would we get the CO2 onto the olivine beaches? Presumably these beaches already exist, and climate change is still a thing. Do we somehow need to increase the number of olivine beaches, or how would this work?
    • iamnotwhoiam 5y ago
      I meant the idea of spreading crushed olivine on particularly wavy beaches. The CO2 comes out of the ocean water. Still moving the olivine artificially, but relying on the ocean's natural mechanical energy and greater concentration of CO2 than the atmosphere.
      • elric 5y ago
        Aha, thanks for clarifying that! Been reading up about it and it seems like a pretty solid idea. Doesn't look like there are any major projects underway though.
• dfboyd 5y ago
  What really matters is how much carbon you can capture per unit electricity used. Presumably you're going to run the carbon-capture plant on renewable electricity. If it can't capture more carbon per watt-hour than your dirtiest non-renewable power plant, you might as well just use the renewable electricity directly and junk the non-renewable plant.
  • afiori 5y ago
    One thing I do not fully understand is whether the capture has a useful output or simply store the CO2 in some stable but useless form
    • CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
      >The extracted CO2 will then be piped from the collector boxes to a nearby processing facility, where it will be mixed with water and diverted to a deep underground well. And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again. The only use is in removing it from the atmosphere.
      • elric 5y ago
        That's not entirely true. IIRC, climeworks have also partnered with companies who can use the CO2 directly (in carbonated drinks, or in actual greenhouses). The majority of the CO2 in drinks will probably just end up the air again, unless some of it binds to calcium in the body or something?
        • Nition 5y ago
          > in carbonated drinks Wouldn't that just put it back in the atmosphere though? I suppose it's better than using CO2 from some other source, but still.
          • 5y ago
• blueblisters 5y ago
  I have a potentially stupid thermodynamic question. Since carbon air capture is essentially going from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, would it be dumping more in the form of waste heat into the environment than you would save from warming caused by CO2 in the atmosphere? I already have an answer to why this reasoning is wrong - CO2 acts like an insulator and traps heat in the atmosphere, and does not generate any heat directly. Just curious if that's right.
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    CO2 doesn't act like an insulator, nor does it trap heat per se. It absorbs infrared photons and re-emits in all directions simultaneously.
  • iSnow 5y ago
    But the waste heat would escape within minutes/hours whereas the greenhouse effect lasts for decades or even longer.
• tito 5y ago
  Those interested in learning about carbon removal technology are encouraged to check out the AirMiners Boot Up, a 5-week program to learn about the world of carbon removal: http://bootup.airminers.org http://bootup.airminers.org You can also study the materials on your own under the "Resources" menu.
• tito 5y ago
  Context: I work on carbon removal Interesting seeing this thread at midnight PST on HN -- assuming this is the Europe crowd, hello! Curious for people's thoughts about perception of these technologies around the world. Have you heard about carbon removal outside of this article?
  • mettamage 5y ago
    Hi! European here. No I haven't heard of carbon removal at all. I guess I'll have to start reading the article, without immediately resorting to comments ;-)
    • tito 5y ago
      Appreciate the perspective!
  • worldsayshi 5y ago
    My feeling that I get from reading comment sections on these things is that it will be prohibitively expensive to scale up to a size that matters and no-one will want to foot the bill. That, and the idea that it's a pipe dream that is sold as an excuse not to make some really tough choices about decarbonising other things seems to be the prevailing thought about from cynical environmentalists. Personally I can only feel that those arguments make some sense but I don't understand the potential enough. Also, a more personal thought is that it seems really hard to collect such a diluted chemical from thin air?
    • tito 5y ago
      Agreed, those 2 are common concerns carbon removal needs to address better. Working in the industry there are other concerns that seem more pressing (i.e. can we even make it work? can we grow it 2x per year for the next decade needed?). As Alan Kay says, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Learn more about building carbon removal solutions at: http://bootup.airminers.org http://bootup.airminers.org
    • belorn 5y ago
• wiz21c 5y ago
  FTA: > At Orca, this task is accomplished with a blast of heat, which is sourced from a nearby hydrothermal vent What do they do if there's no hydrothermal vent ? Is the solution still efficient with other energy sources (for example a wind turbine) ?
• IvanK_net 5y ago
  This facility will remove 4,000 tons of CO2 a year. An average person produces 5 tons of CO2 a year. So it will be removing the CO2 produced by 800 people. I think it would be cheaper to pay people not to fly for holidays, etc.
  • mepiethree 5y ago
    Tech has to start somewhere. How much RAM did the first supercomputer have? Might’ve been easier to use pen and paper.
    • maelito 5y ago
      Comparing miniaturization / advances in computers to the energy industry is quite misleading. They're not garanteed to follow the same route.
      • mepiethree 5y ago
        Of course I agree and was just being rhetorical! I just think it’s better to applaud the progress here than fault it for not having yet solved all the world’s problems
    • FranksTV 5y ago
      The law of conservation of energy applies here. You can't make a gigaton of CO2 weigh any less than a billion tons.
• coolgaming 5y ago
  nice
• lolive 5y ago
  Off-topic but I really need a clarification on that: I was told that we have already switched from a situtation where the most alarming greenhouse effect gas in the atmosphere was CO2, to a situation where the atmosphere is hot enough to hold much more H2O (as water vapour), making it the (vastly) most dangerous greenhouse effect gas. So the greenhouse effect is now self-inducting itself mainly via H2O. Anyone is aware of that, and can comment?
• pfortuny 5y ago
  Subscribed to Orca 7€/month. Not much but every gr counts.
• raffraffraff 5y ago
  ... Along with fusion, it's always gonna be "20 years away"
  • goatlover 5y ago
    However, if we did have a breakthrough in fusion, that energy source could be used to make carbon capture a reality.
    • FranksTV 5y ago
      It's a nice dream.
  • DennisP 5y ago
    DAC is available now. Like most things, the more of it we build, the cheaper it will get.
• plater 5y ago
  What happens to the insects passing through these things? If many or all of them die then this would be a big issue as a huge amount of air will have to pass through these things.
  • deepsun 5y ago
    There's not that much insects (Iceland has no trees for starting), and it should be easier to put a filter in front of it to get rid of bugs.
• Glench 5y ago
  > Only #IPCC AR6 Socioeconomic pathway SSP1-1.9 keeps warming at 1.5°, but assumes a flow of gigatons of CO2 into the ground as large as the current gigaton flow of all fossil fuels out of the ground. https://twitter.com/GriffithSaul/status/1429912590218575881 https://twitter.com/GriffithSaul/status/1429912590218575881
• deepsun 5y ago
  Isn't it easier to plant lots of quick-growing plants (e.g. bamboo), then wait a few years, cut them down, bury underground as well, and repeat? Or make it a liquid process to minimize moving parts -- grow bacteria in water solution, filter, and direct underground.
  • CodeGlitch 5y ago
    I was thinking the same - the issue of course is that farm-able land is valuable, and we generally want to use that for food production. This is one of the reasons why we don't grow biofuels to power our cars. I do like your idea of a custom bacteria in water solution, I think algae has been engineered for biofuel production (not sure how well that turned out though).
  • deegles 5y ago
    What if there was a genetically engineered bamboo that was denser than seawater, so that you could grow it and just dump it in the deep ocean... you could have trains of barges taking it to the coast and dumping it. Bamboo is also highly regular so its growth could probably be mechanized/automated to a degree.
    • john_yaya 5y ago
      There are some tropical fast-growing trees that are denser than water. In Costa Rica, there are rivers with logs on the bottom as a result of poorly-planned logging expeditions. The trees are so heavy partially because they take up silica from the soil - which is why they're also difficult to cut down.
• bob229 5y ago
  A waste of time. We’re too stupid as a species to halt this mad path of destruction we are set on. I doubt we’ll even survive the century. Good riddance tbh
• brightstep 5y ago
  We really just need to leave fossil fuels in the ground starting right now. Capture is good, and probably necessary, but we'll be fighting a losing, impossible battle until we stop emitting. Non-damaging energy technology is right there, we only need to use it.
  • dTal 5y ago
    This x1000. The one thing that absolutely must happen is the one thing that nobody seems to want to discuss. All oil wells, coal mines, and natural gas extractors must be shut down immediately. Hardly anything else is worth worrying about. As long as it is being extracted, it will be burned and anything else is rearranging Titanic deck chairs. Shut it down. People will find alternative energy sources.
• jl2718 5y ago
  Where is the analysis that shows this to be of greater benefit than the total environmental cost?
• lanzelot 5y ago
  How much higher are CO2 ratios in/on smoke stacks? Wouldn't it be better to put treatment where the ratios are higher than 0.042%?
• garyrichardson 5y ago
  I have a gas powered boiler that heats my home and makes my hot water. Based on my gas bill, it’s incredibly efficient. But it still emits co2. Is there a “home scale” scrubber I can plug into its exhaust port? Can I do my own DAC?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• deegles 5y ago
  AskHN: what's the best carbon capture service that I can subscribe to? "Best" as in: does CO2 removal (not planting trees or trading credits), is reasonably cost-efficient, and is audited?
  • bamboozled 5y ago
    I’ve seen this around, https://climeworks.com/ https://climeworks.com/ hope it’s good ! Be curious to hear opinions on it.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  Super inefficient, energy-wise. So how much carbon is PRODUCED to make it work. You can't cheat chemsitry/physics.
• clownpenis_fart 5y ago
  what would be really cool is a self maintaining and self replicating carbon air capture device powered by solar energy perhaps some day when nanobots become a thing
• zackbloom 5y ago
  My dream is to use carbon capture as 1/3 of a full plan to fix climate change. Once you have the carbon, rather than pumping it into the ground, I would love to use off-shore nuclear reactors to convert it into gasoline. It might sound a little strange to turn it into something which is just going to get burned, but I firmly believe carbon neutral gasoline and natural gas which was cheaper than drilled would drop carbon emissions much faster than anyone can afford to sequestrate it.
  • SamBam 5y ago
    That would be carbon neutral, but would not be carbon negative, which is the point of the project.
    • zackbloom 5y ago
      Correct, my point is I don't believe the quantity of carbon capture which can be deployed will get anywhere close to the amount of carbon being released without a different fundamental economic model.
    • dTal 5y ago
      Sequestering carbon while others are emitting it is not net carbon negative. It's just a highly elaborate and inefficient way of moving clean energy around. That's why it's in Iceland - wouldn't be much point in running the plant off fossil fuels would it? If you have clean energy, using it directly to not burn fossil fuels is strictly more efficient than trying to undo the damage done by burning fossil fuels.
      • SamBam 5y ago
        Clean energy isn't fungible. Energy created in Iceland can't easily be used in India. If you can create energy in Iceland, which is already nearly 100% renewable for electricity generation, then using it for carbon capture is carbon-negative. If you're claiming it isn't carbon negative because someone somewhere in the world is burning carbon, then the word is meaningless, because you may as well claim that every activity on Earth is generating the exact same amount of carbon -- the average of all the activities.
• mythrwy 5y ago
  Question about carbon capture: The C02 being released in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels was in the air initially before being tied up by photosynthesis. So as time goes on (since inception of life) more and more C02 is tied up in hydrocarbons and locked away in the ground. So here's the question. What happens to life on earth if this process keeps going for millions more years? At what point is there insufficient C02 for plants to function?
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    That point will like be arrived at within 500--900 million years through increases in solar luminosity, increased weathering, slowed plate tectonics, and loss of the Earth's oceans. This is among several substantial changes to the the ecosphere which would make much present life difficult or impossible. Ultimately all life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future