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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 thoug
by 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 agoHi! 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 agoAppreciate the perspective!
- worldsayshi 5y agoMy 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 agoAgreed, 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 agoWould be interesting to see a comparison between a perceived prohibitively expensive carbon-free alternative, and the use of carbon capture in order to offset the pollution of cheaper technology that is not carbon-free. Like, would a coal power plant combined with carbon capture be more economical viable than a nuclear plant?
- worldsayshi 5y ago> Like, would a coal power plant combined with carbon capture be more economical viable than a nuclear plant? Yeah it's an interesting line of thought but is it really possible to ask that? If you scale up one technology you will hopefully find incremental improvements that will turn that initial calculation on its head. My guess is that any such calculation would be so speculative it wouldn't give you any actionable information. So my guess is that the best we can do is try scaling up all possibilities until we have a clear winner? (Although in your example nuclear should already be scaled up enough to give us some idea.)
- mattgrice 5y agoCarbon removal is generally regarded as a scam, like 'clean coal,' something to distract people from actual carbon emission reductions. It would be great if it worked, but so far the only thing carbon capture technology has been successful at capturing is money.
- tito 5y agoIndeed, massive carbon emissions reductions are necessary, carbon removal is not a replacement. Marcius Extavour from XPRIZE gave a great keynote at AirMiners talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTTqeEEhym4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTTqeEEhym4
- akie 5y agoWhy the pessimism, really? In my opinion we need both a severe reduction in carbon output AND carbon removal technologies. Any progress in either of those is a step forward. Don't be so dismissive, this is a young technology that can really make a difference, provided we invest enough money into the problem.
- iSnow 5y agoHi, European here Yes, Carbon sequestering and storage underground is something that brings out all the usual tin-foil hatters from Greenpeace to the alt-right who fantasize about "gassing the population". What I am wondering is why we are not planting billions of trees, harvest them, make charcoal and stuff it underground. Or grow algae on roofs and use them to harvest carbon.
- tito 5y agoI like those solutions! We aren't doing that because few people are working on solutions. About 1,000 people work in carbon removal worldwide. The solution space is large. Lots to work on.
- inglor_cz 5y agoReforesting is a complicated task, it is nothing like for (int i = 0; i<= 100000000; i++) { Tree t = new Tree(); t.plant(); } You need specific types of trees for specific microclimates, otherwise they won't thrive and might die. You need a healthy species mixture, otherwise you are creating monocultures vulnerable to mass pest infestation. You need the right amount of rain. You should not reforest good arable land, because we are almost 8 billion now and everyone wants to eat. Israelis are very good at reforestation, but it took them over 100 years to recreate some modest forests there.
- gitanovic 5y agowe should just stop cutting, burning, and remove forest space... trees are very good at replanting themselves, they had hundred of million of years to perfect it
- ddoolin 5y agoJust a night owl Californian. They seem like a fine idea, but there's a lot of doom and gloom in places, even here, about being able to make an impact due to our current and trending rate of carbon pollution. Not so much a question, but it makes me sad, and a bit wonderous.
- tito 5y agoAgreed! If of interest, I gave a talk on carbon removal and doom/gloom here: https://www.ted.com/talks/tito_jankowski_take_carbon_out_of_the_air_and_make_useful_things_with_it https://www.ted.com/talks/tito_jankowski_take_carbon_out_of_...
- thow-58d4e8b 5y agoEnergy engineering nerd here - naturally I've heard about it. Question that Vaclav Smil had raised as a potentially fatal obstacle to large scale carbon capture. All is nice and well when we're trying to sequester 1000 tons of CO2 per year as a pilot project. But once we scale up to ~100Mtons or even ~Gton per year - we'll very quickly run out of places to safely store it. How much is this a real physical constraint vs. Smil's skepticism being cranked up to 11/10?
- teruakohatu 5y agoThe solution would be to convert it to fuel, burn it again, then capture it again. Thereby creating carbon neutral fuel for air, shipping and road transport (as long as the energy going into the system is itself carbon neutral).
- dTal 5y agoAtmospheric carbon capture is a horribly inefficient way to convert clean energy into transportation fuel.
- teruakohatu 5y agoBut if you are capturing huge quantities already, the capture cost/efficiency is a sunk cost.
- KaiserPro 5y agoI mean it sounds great. however I have grave concerns. This facility removes 4000 tons of carbon a year. Great, but how much power does that take? save for france, iceland and bits of sweden, most places emit >200grams of co2 per kwhr. In the uk 1kw for a year is ~2.5 tons of carbon.
- FranksTV 5y agoWe need to remove gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, and we don't have anywhere to put that much stuff. It's a bit of a pipe dream. The only real path to avoiding the worst effects of climate change is stopping emissions.
- FooHentai 5y agoWe certainly need to do both - Simply stopping all carbon emissions tomorrow still locks us into historical carbon emissions that will have unpleasant effects on the global climate. Sucking carbon out of the air while also pumping it up there doesn't make too much sense unless the cost of carbon capture drops well below the cost of de-carbonizing.
- locuscoeruleus 5y agoCarbon removal from the air sounds like paying of credit card debt by aquiring additional credit cards. Is it not the case that it will always take more energy to get carbon out of the air than it does to put it in the air in the first place? If that's the case, we will have to not only replace our current energy consumption by renewable sources, but add a lot of extra energy to drain the atmosphere. And we have to do that within decades. This is probably a naive take, but that's what it feels like.
- tylerFowler 5y agoThe idea for most implementations of this I've seen are to colocate relatively "easy" sources of carbon neutral energy with the machines actively processing air - since you can theoretically remove CO2 from anywhere. In the case of Climeworks, their plants are often (or all of them?) positioned on or near a geothermal energy plant, which isn't something that's convenient to access in most locations.