11 ms·

Scaling Carbon Capture

79 points by joak 5y ago

joak 5y ago
"As solar power gets cheaper and oil becomes more scarce, at some point this decade it will be cheaper to extract carbon from the air than to drill mile-deep holes in the crust on the other side of the world." I don't know if it's in this decade but at some point making kerosene from CO2, water and electricity is going to become cheaper than making it from fossil fuels...
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Unless you have a way of using kerosene that doesn't involve burning it, then the maximum amount of CO2 this process could remove from the atmosphere is 0.
  - joak 5y ago
    Exactly, we are talking about carbone capture. Not carbon burying.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
> That is, it’s very difficult to imagine any set of policies that keep fuel cheap enough for the 99% while also driving sufficiently large reductions in use over a meaningful timescale. I don't think this is true. We don't need "fuel" to be cheap, we need transport, food, heating etc. to be cheap, and a carbon fee returned as a dividend provides a lot of opportunity for people to make simple decisions that add up.
iamthemonster 5y ago
Interestingly the article didn't really talk about scaling carbon capture. I'm still working on building my knowledge in this area, but I just cannot understand how you get significant cost reduction in carbon capture and storage. Capture: amine absorption columns are mid-20th century technology and remain more or less state of the art. Economies of scale work up to a point; you can't just make individual columns bigger and bigger, but you can make multiple trains so that you can share the "balance of plant" costs. If you made 20% CAPEX savings this way, you'd be happy. Transport: pipelines. I just don't see huge innovation here, but maybe improved materials such as internal coatings? The economy of scale here is in getting many plants together into a pipeline network. Maybe in the most generous assumption you could halve the pipeline and storage costs (but not the capture costs) this way? Storage: this is the weak point currently in terms of risk. The Gorgon project in Western Australia has struggled with injectivity, and I think several other carbon storage projects have had subsurface struggles. I don't know much about this - I'm not sure if it's due to CO2 storage itself or if it's just the inherent risks of subsurface. Whatever it is, we clearly haven't even achieved reliable storage yet, so talk of cost reduction via scaling might be premature - maybe we actually underinvested on the reservoir side in the past and it just needs more. So about the only big opportunity for cost reduction is to make a hub of capture projects all feed into a pipeline network rather than individual pipeline/reservoir. You'll have to excuse me if I'm not excited. And yet you constantly hear the mantra that carbon capture is "not yet proven at scale". Well I'm afraid to say, scaling doesn't look like it'll be a game changer like it was for solar. Thermodynamics does not obey Wright's Law. (I work in the oil and gas industry, I have worked on a CCS project in the past and I would personally benefit hugely if CCS were viable)
- joak 5y ago
  The scaling comes for the fact that if you can make fuel from atmospheric CO2 cheaper than fossil fuels there will be high economic incentives to capture CO2. The kind of money that goes into oil/gas exploration, transport, refineries, etc... will be instead invested into carbon capture. The green kerosene will soon become cheaper than the dirty fossil fuel one effectively killing the oil industry. So carbon capture (we are not talking about storage) won't be something we have to pay for to save the planet, it will become big business and will draw costs down, not up.
  - gmuslera 5y ago
    If you capture the carbon to shortly after that burn it again you are not reducing the carbon in the atmosphere, you may be only reducing how much you add (maybe, if actually fossil carbon stops to be extracted). And the problem is that how much is released already is what made global average temperature rise for 1+ºC already, and knowing how much time it remains in the atmosphere, will keep increasing that temperature. So what is needed is to capture the carbon, at a rate bigger than the 50Gt a year that we are emitting it, according to the article, and not burning it again. Of course, that doesn't mean that what will be done is what is really needed.
    - lambdatronics 5y ago
      Synthetic fuels not only displace the emissions, they simultaneously develop the technology that is needed to actually go negative. Battery tech reduces emissions too, but it can't take us negative. If synthetic fuel can be cheaper than fossil fuel, soon enough plastics can be made from carbon capture, and to the extent that those plastics go into the ground rather than being incinerated, that's a net carbon sink that could have positive economics.
- japanuspus 5y ago
  Completely agree that CCS is fundamentally challenged by thermodynamics. You say that storage currently is the weak point. What are your thoughts on the plans to pump into North Sea sand formations via depleted oil wells (e.g. the Norwegian "Longboat"-project [0])? [0]: https://www.regjeringen.no/en/historical-archive/solbergs-government/Ministries/smk/Press-releases/2020/the-government-launches-longship-for-carbon-capture-and-storage-in-norway/id2765288/ https://www.regjeringen.no/en/historical-archive/solbergs-go...
driest 5y ago
Aside from not delivering on the topic promised in the title, this article contains several inaccuracies and false claims that are unlikely to be accidental given the author is an industry professional. this looks like a cheap opinion piece promoting a cover story for the fossil fuel industry (CCS). electricity in Germany does not cost 30 c/kWh, but roughly 7 c/kWh. the rest is taxes and fees for consumers, and the fact that the linked source makes this transparent indicates that it is deliberately mis-cited for drama. the article severely understates the efficiency of power to gas processes and claims a maximum efficiency of 35%. however, even the 10 year old megawatt scale demonstrator in Falkenhagen Germany reaches roughly 50% efficiency [1]. modern research projects have achieved 76% efficiency in a shipping container sized prototype, and research is ongoing [2]. [1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/erneuerbare-energien-power-to-x-fuer-die-energiewende-100.html#:~:text=Nach%20allem%2C%20was%20ich%20im,dort%20nur%20schlappe%2050%20Prozent https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/erneuerbare-energien-power-to.... [2] http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publishable_summary.pdf http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publisha...
- hannob 5y ago
  > [2] http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publisha http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publisha... I've been seen exactly this link thrown at me multiple times when discussing synthetic methane, yet it comes with a fatal flaw: It doesn't consider the process to get the CO2 in the first place. If this is supposed to produce (close to) climate neutral methane it needs to include Direct Air Capture to gather the CO2. It also needs almost perfect avoidance of methane leaks. Luckily none of that matters very much: Most people agree that synthetic methane isn't very useful to begin with. We can do storage and many industry applications (like steel) simply with hydrogen and avoid the whole CO2 handling and the methane handling, and the few applications that absolutely need methane can be done with biogas.
  - leoedin 5y ago
    As far as I can see the only practical widespread carbon capture process we have is plant growth (and pyrolisis). That might be possible for some fraction of global emissions (maybe 5-10%), but once you get above that you have to be cutting down quite significant amounts of forest. It all seems like a lot more work than just not extracting the carbon from the ground in the first place.
xnx 5y ago
Capturing carbon from the air makes boiling the ocean look easy.
- gonzo41 5y ago
  The effort broadly works out to be along the lines of: Take all the energy expended from the start of the industrial revolution and then double it for all the losses you'll have. And that is about the size of the energy you'll need to expend just to capture and condense carbon out the the atmosphere. We don't just need to scale CCS, we need to scale up our ability to generate electricity because, we will for a long time have a new expense to pay. ie CCS! I wonder if nuclear as baseload, we could shed power at night into some capture technology. But there's still the sifting problem of trying to extract 440ppm molecules out of a million other harmless molecules.
  - kragen 5y ago
    That would be true if we wanted to convert the carbon dioxide back into carbon, which inherently costs 394 kJ/mol, plus whatever losses you have. But actually we just need to convert it into something that isn't in the atmosphere. My suggestion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 only requires 178 kJ/mol, much of which can probably be recaptured, and the currently popular scrubber processes using things like triethanolamine require still less energy than that. It's true that there's an inherent "refrigeration cost" associated with decreasing the entropy in the system. Do you know how to calculate it? How much entropy do you need to shed to concentrate 440 ppm CO2 up to 1,000,000 ppm CO2, and how much energy does that inherently cost? I'm pretty ignorant about thermodynamics.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
It never really occurred to me until just now, but capturing carbon will be our next gold rush. Vast amounts of money are about to be thrown around. Whether is direct carbon capture, huge vats of algae, or massive forests, governments are going to throw money at it all. It would be nice to be in a position to have some of it land in my pocket.
- kragen 5y ago
  It's possible, but it might not happen.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    Even governments that don't want to throw their own money at the problem will put carbon trading schemes in place so that polluters can buy carbon credits and help meet international obligations.
    - kragen 5y ago
      It's possible. Or they might just keep paying lip service to their treaty obligations and figure they'll all be retired in Switzerland by the time things get really bad.
joak 5y ago
The main point of this blog post is: 1. Energy costs are going down This is undeniable: photovoltaic costs are going down at fast pace and soon (in one or two decades?) fusion power is going to kick in 2. As soon as energy is cheap enough, making methane (and kerosene and plastic and ...) from air+water will become cheaper than extracting it from the ground (extraction + transformation + transport) When this happens it will be the end of fossil fuels Then carbon capture will be a very profitable business, with investments at the scale of fossil fuel industry. This is how carbon capture will scale, by investing trillions of dollars year after year. The controversy should be on the timeline, on the threshold the energy costs need to cross for that to happen. I'm not sure it will happen, as claimed, in the next 10 years, but I'll be surprised if it does not happen in the next 30 years Sorry, the usual "not if but when"...
bob331 5y ago
lol no it won't be scaled and yes we are doomed as a species. nevermind

79 points by joak 5y ago

joak 5y ago

"As solar power gets cheaper and oil becomes more scarce, at some point this decade it will be cheaper to extract carbon from the air than to drill mile-deep holes in the crust on the other side of the world." I don't know if it's in this decade but at some point making kerosene from CO2, water and electricity is going to become cheaper than making it from fossil fuels...

denton-scratch 5y ago
Unless you have a way of using kerosene that doesn't involve burning it, then the maximum amount of CO2 this process could remove from the atmosphere is 0.
- joak 5y ago
  Exactly, we are talking about carbone capture. Not carbon burying.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

> That is, it’s very difficult to imagine any set of policies that keep fuel cheap enough for the 99% while also driving sufficiently large reductions in use over a meaningful timescale. I don't think this is true. We don't need "fuel" to be cheap, we need transport, food, heating etc. to be cheap, and a carbon fee returned as a dividend provides a lot of opportunity for people to make simple decisions that add up.

iamthemonster 5y ago

Interestingly the article didn't really talk about scaling carbon capture. I'm still working on building my knowledge in this area, but I just cannot understand how you get significant cost reduction in carbon capture and storage. Capture: amine absorption columns are mid-20th century technology and remain more or less state of the art. Economies of scale work up to a point; you can't just make individual columns bigger and bigger, but you can make multiple trains so that you can share the "balance of plant" costs. If you made 20% CAPEX savings this way, you'd be happy. Transport: pipelines. I just don't see huge innovation here, but maybe improved materials such as internal coatings? The economy of scale here is in getting many plants together into a pipeline network. Maybe in the most generous assumption you could halve the pipeline and storage costs (but not the capture costs) this way? Storage: this is the weak point currently in terms of risk. The Gorgon project in Western Australia has struggled with injectivity, and I think several other carbon storage projects have had subsurface struggles. I don't know much about this - I'm not sure if it's due to CO2 storage itself or if it's just the inherent risks of subsurface. Whatever it is, we clearly haven't even achieved reliable storage yet, so talk of cost reduction via scaling might be premature - maybe we actually underinvested on the reservoir side in the past and it just needs more. So about the only big opportunity for cost reduction is to make a hub of capture projects all feed into a pipeline network rather than individual pipeline/reservoir. You'll have to excuse me if I'm not excited. And yet you constantly hear the mantra that carbon capture is "not yet proven at scale". Well I'm afraid to say, scaling doesn't look like it'll be a game changer like it was for solar. Thermodynamics does not obey Wright's Law. (I work in the oil and gas industry, I have worked on a CCS project in the past and I would personally benefit hugely if CCS were viable)

joak 5y ago
The scaling comes for the fact that if you can make fuel from atmospheric CO2 cheaper than fossil fuels there will be high economic incentives to capture CO2. The kind of money that goes into oil/gas exploration, transport, refineries, etc... will be instead invested into carbon capture. The green kerosene will soon become cheaper than the dirty fossil fuel one effectively killing the oil industry. So carbon capture (we are not talking about storage) won't be something we have to pay for to save the planet, it will become big business and will draw costs down, not up.
- gmuslera 5y ago
  If you capture the carbon to shortly after that burn it again you are not reducing the carbon in the atmosphere, you may be only reducing how much you add (maybe, if actually fossil carbon stops to be extracted). And the problem is that how much is released already is what made global average temperature rise for 1+ºC already, and knowing how much time it remains in the atmosphere, will keep increasing that temperature. So what is needed is to capture the carbon, at a rate bigger than the 50Gt a year that we are emitting it, according to the article, and not burning it again. Of course, that doesn't mean that what will be done is what is really needed.
  - lambdatronics 5y ago
    Synthetic fuels not only displace the emissions, they simultaneously develop the technology that is needed to actually go negative. Battery tech reduces emissions too, but it can't take us negative. If synthetic fuel can be cheaper than fossil fuel, soon enough plastics can be made from carbon capture, and to the extent that those plastics go into the ground rather than being incinerated, that's a net carbon sink that could have positive economics.
japanuspus 5y ago
Completely agree that CCS is fundamentally challenged by thermodynamics. You say that storage currently is the weak point. What are your thoughts on the plans to pump into North Sea sand formations via depleted oil wells (e.g. the Norwegian "Longboat"-project [0])? [0]: https://www.regjeringen.no/en/historical-archive/solbergs-government/Ministries/smk/Press-releases/2020/the-government-launches-longship-for-carbon-capture-and-storage-in-norway/id2765288/ https://www.regjeringen.no/en/historical-archive/solbergs-go...

driest 5y ago

Aside from not delivering on the topic promised in the title, this article contains several inaccuracies and false claims that are unlikely to be accidental given the author is an industry professional. this looks like a cheap opinion piece promoting a cover story for the fossil fuel industry (CCS). electricity in Germany does not cost 30 c/kWh, but roughly 7 c/kWh. the rest is taxes and fees for consumers, and the fact that the linked source makes this transparent indicates that it is deliberately mis-cited for drama. the article severely understates the efficiency of power to gas processes and claims a maximum efficiency of 35%. however, even the 10 year old megawatt scale demonstrator in Falkenhagen Germany reaches roughly 50% efficiency [1]. modern research projects have achieved 76% efficiency in a shipping container sized prototype, and research is ongoing [2]. [1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/erneuerbare-energien-power-to-x-fuer-die-energiewende-100.html#:~:text=Nach%20allem%2C%20was%20ich%20im,dort%20nur%20schlappe%2050%20Prozent https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/erneuerbare-energien-power-to.... [2] http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publishable_summary.pdf http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publisha...

hannob 5y ago
> [2] http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publisha http://www.helmeth.eu/images/joomlaplates/documents/Publisha... I've been seen exactly this link thrown at me multiple times when discussing synthetic methane, yet it comes with a fatal flaw: It doesn't consider the process to get the CO2 in the first place. If this is supposed to produce (close to) climate neutral methane it needs to include Direct Air Capture to gather the CO2. It also needs almost perfect avoidance of methane leaks. Luckily none of that matters very much: Most people agree that synthetic methane isn't very useful to begin with. We can do storage and many industry applications (like steel) simply with hydrogen and avoid the whole CO2 handling and the methane handling, and the few applications that absolutely need methane can be done with biogas.
- leoedin 5y ago
  As far as I can see the only practical widespread carbon capture process we have is plant growth (and pyrolisis). That might be possible for some fraction of global emissions (maybe 5-10%), but once you get above that you have to be cutting down quite significant amounts of forest. It all seems like a lot more work than just not extracting the carbon from the ground in the first place.

xnx 5y ago

Capturing carbon from the air makes boiling the ocean look easy.

gonzo41 5y ago
The effort broadly works out to be along the lines of: Take all the energy expended from the start of the industrial revolution and then double it for all the losses you'll have. And that is about the size of the energy you'll need to expend just to capture and condense carbon out the the atmosphere. We don't just need to scale CCS, we need to scale up our ability to generate electricity because, we will for a long time have a new expense to pay. ie CCS! I wonder if nuclear as baseload, we could shed power at night into some capture technology. But there's still the sifting problem of trying to extract 440ppm molecules out of a million other harmless molecules.
- kragen 5y ago
  That would be true if we wanted to convert the carbon dioxide back into carbon, which inherently costs 394 kJ/mol, plus whatever losses you have. But actually we just need to convert it into something that isn't in the atmosphere. My suggestion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 only requires 178 kJ/mol, much of which can probably be recaptured, and the currently popular scrubber processes using things like triethanolamine require still less energy than that. It's true that there's an inherent "refrigeration cost" associated with decreasing the entropy in the system. Do you know how to calculate it? How much entropy do you need to shed to concentrate 440 ppm CO2 up to 1,000,000 ppm CO2, and how much energy does that inherently cost? I'm pretty ignorant about thermodynamics.

jay_kyburz 5y ago

It never really occurred to me until just now, but capturing carbon will be our next gold rush. Vast amounts of money are about to be thrown around. Whether is direct carbon capture, huge vats of algae, or massive forests, governments are going to throw money at it all. It would be nice to be in a position to have some of it land in my pocket.

kragen 5y ago
It's possible, but it might not happen.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  Even governments that don't want to throw their own money at the problem will put carbon trading schemes in place so that polluters can buy carbon credits and help meet international obligations.
  - kragen 5y ago
    It's possible. Or they might just keep paying lip service to their treaty obligations and figure they'll all be retired in Switzerland by the time things get really bad.

joak 5y ago

The main point of this blog post is: 1. Energy costs are going down This is undeniable: photovoltaic costs are going down at fast pace and soon (in one or two decades?) fusion power is going to kick in 2. As soon as energy is cheap enough, making methane (and kerosene and plastic and ...) from air+water will become cheaper than extracting it from the ground (extraction + transformation + transport) When this happens it will be the end of fossil fuels Then carbon capture will be a very profitable business, with investments at the scale of fossil fuel industry. This is how carbon capture will scale, by investing trillions of dollars year after year. The controversy should be on the timeline, on the threshold the energy costs need to cross for that to happen. I'm not sure it will happen, as claimed, in the next 10 years, but I'll be surprised if it does not happen in the next 30 years Sorry, the usual "not if but when"...

bob331 5y ago

lol no it won't be scaled and yes we are doomed as a species. nevermind