7 ms·

The quest to trap carbon in stone

68 points by sam100 5y ago

wombatmobile 5y ago
> to grab a million tons of carbon, a direct air capture plant could devour on the order of 300 to 500 megawatts of energy per year—enough to power some 30,000 American homes.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Great insight as to why we shouldn’t stop ramping renewables deployments. You need not only cover current electrical demand, but demand growth over time, transportation, HVAC, and all of the energy needed to sequester excess atmospheric CO2 emitted during human industrialization (>1000 gigatonnes based on 280ppm atmospheric CO2 pre industrialization and 420ppm current state). Burning ancient sunlight is expensive.
  - lstodd 5y ago
    Maybe it's a better idea to release massive amounts of N2 and O2 rather than chasing a 100ppm of CO2 here and there. In, like, setting up petawatts of nuclear electrolysing plants that will split seawater into H2 and O2, where the gases will dilute the atmosphere enough that CO2 levels drop. This harebrained idea is on par with those CCS projects, but has the nice side effect that the nukes can sometime later be repurposed to more useful things.
    - chriswarbo 5y ago
      The nukes could run carbon capture plants. Or, even more directly, they could power homes, industry, charge electric cars, etc.
- Ratalala 5y ago
  Watts are not energy.
  - mynegation 5y ago
    Megawatts per year are.
    - sjdksndksn 5y ago
      No, a Megawatt-year (MWyr) is a measure of energy. A Megawatt per year (MW/yr) is not. It's the difference between multiplication and division. From Wikipedia: "Misuse of watts per hour Many compound units for various kinds of rates explicitly mention units of time to indicate a change over time. For example: miles per hour, kilometres per hour, dollars per hour. Power units, such as kW, already measure the rate of energy per unit time (kW=kJ/s). Kilowatt-hours are a product of power and time, not a rate of change of power with time. Watts per hour (W/h) is a unit of a change of power per hour, i.e. an acceleration in the delivery of energy. It is used to measure the daily variation of demand (e.g. the slope of the duck curve), or ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h. Other uses of terms such as watts per hour are likely to be errors."
victorbstan 5y ago
If you want a history of failed technologies just lol at a Wired back issues catalog.
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  And a treasure trove of ideas that weren’t ready for prime time but could be now/soon.
jeffrallen 5y ago
Climeworks' technology is the real deal, and needs to thrive. The only good CCS is 100% carbon negative and sequesters the carbon in chemically stable forms. This is it, and we need more. Petroleum industry CCS is a scam, but Climeworks is not that. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm Swiss and so is this technology.
- kornhole 5y ago
  We hackers like to believe there is a technological solution for everything. These projects feed that delusion. Massive reductions and degrowth are hard for us to accept. This article somewhat fairly explains how extremely impractical and unlikely carbon capture technologies will be. The investments in the technology and the PR around them serve more to feed the delusion and keep us burning as usual.
  - eikenberry 5y ago
    I think you can forgive people for wanting to look for solutions that don't require millions/billions of deaths, as that's the only way you'll see the level of change necessary. It will happen naturally over time as economic levels rise and reproduction rates drop below sustaining. But that will take centuries and lots of resources, so I'm doubtful that is what you are proposing.
    - brightstep 5y ago
      The solution you describe has already been found: stop burning and leave fossil fuels in the ground. Technological solutions are the opposite. They're an attempt to avoid the what everyone already knows is the answer.
      - lovecg 5y ago
        There are millions of people who are not in poverty right now because these fuels are being used. What you’re suggesting will immediately put them back into poverty. A lot of them will probably die of starvation and disease. I don’t think they’ll go down without a fight.
macanchex 5y ago
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/11/03/Tech-Will-Not-Save-Us-Shrinking-Consumption-Will/ https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/11/03/Tech-Will-Not-Save-Us...
- Dig1t 5y ago
  >"An economic contraction, or what Gaia theorist James Lovelock calls a “sustainable retreat,” Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist".. To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse. It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive that that is the case right now. Also it seems counterproductive and extremely short sighted to make the blanket statement that the problem is impossible to solve with technology when so many problems throughout history have been solved by technology.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the same change could've come with local co-working spaces), that has not hurt quality of life while having a great impact on co2 production. Other solutions exist that still allow us to live good lives, but the real barrier is entrenched and stubborn systems resistant to change. Even simple things like the urbanism movement being implemented would help a great deal, but getting American urban planning to change course is like trying to push a boulder up mount everest, it would seem. In my mind, we should aim to solve climate change however we can, while minimising lifestyle harm. But if its a choice between the irreversible destruction of the environment we live in and my lifestyle changing somewhat, I'll choose the latter.
    - kiba 5y ago
      I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the same change could've come with local co-working spaces), that has not hurt quality of life while having a great impact on co2 production. I hardly call that degrowth, That's just efficiency.
betwixthewires 5y ago
I've got a question, maybe a stupid one to those in the know, but why not just trap carbon in biomass?
- Gabriel_Martin 5y ago
  In the trend of questions we kinda know are dumb questions, why not just capture it where it comes out, at the powerplants?
  - GunnarSturla 5y ago
    We should do that too, but then the question becomes what to do with the carbon. It turns out that getting rid of it in a safe way is a pretty difficult problem. The solution that's described in the article needs a lot of freshwater and the right type of rock for it to flow through so it can't be done where most of the power plants are located. That leaves basically two solutions; capture the carbon from the air, which takes a lot of energy, or ship it with tankers. The first is being done (at a small scale) and the second is being worked on. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have power plants that release carbon, but that's another discussion :)
- GunnarSturla 5y ago
  If we trap it in biomass, it will escape if anything happens to the ecosystem storing the carbon (like a forest fire). The fundamental problem is that the earth was in a balance, with regards to carbon; a bunch was trapped in biomass, and cycled through the carbon cycle [1]. Then humanity did two things; we destroyed a lot of carbon stores (with agriculture, deforestation and setting off soil erosion), and (more importantly) dug up and released even more carbon into the carbon cycle. It will not be enough for us to only trap it in biomass, we need to permanently remove it from the cycle. We definitely need to do both, and storing carbon in biomass is probably more cost-effective currently, but if we're going to restore the balance, we'll need more than biomass. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
gtsop 5y ago
When I was a kid my teacher told me trees convert co2 to oxygen. If I had to suck co2 out of the atmosphere I would plant more trees and stop choping/burning down existing ones. It is cheap, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, but I guess this isn't tecky enough for today's world. Maybe if we add a wifi module on trees it would fix it.
- tunesmith 5y ago
  From what I understand, planting trees isn't sufficient, but it would sure help.
- mynegation 5y ago
  It will help a bit but not all the way. When trees die, CO2 is released again by fungi and bacteria in the process of making the wood rot.
- kgin 5y ago
  Trees are essential, but we've released into the atmosphere so much carbon that was previously trapped under the earth in liquid and solid form. Trees aren't enough, we need to get that carbon back into long term storage.
- downWidOutaFite 5y ago
  From a kid's level of understanding you could also deduce that the carbon must end up in the plant matter, and that a forest's plant matter density doesn't increase forever. Old forests reach a carbon-neutral equilibrium (decaying plants release carbon). New forests suck up carbon until they reach that equilibrium. Another idea you could deduce from this is that if we remove plant matter from the forest, and lock that carbon up so it doesn't go back into the atmosphere, it could become a long term carbon-sink. Even better if the plant matter can be useful. So vast lumber farms with the fastest growing trees you can get could be a good carbon capture technology.
  - gtsop 5y ago
    I think more information is needed as input here. In pwrticular, what is the ratio of consumed/stored co2 in the photosynthesis process. My super basic understanding is that co2 is being used as fuel to convert energy into tree-food. By that logic i would expect at least a portion of the co2 to be actually transformed to other elements rather than stored as-is into the tree.
splittingTimes 5y ago
"a system of solar-powered machines that would autonomously harvest raw materials from common dirt, use them to build more machines, and then perform useful tasks such as sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. The replico-bots didn’t pan out, because—well, do I really need to explain?" Back in the early 90ies, i can see that, but today/in 20 years it does not sound too ridiculous. Or am I missing something?
- lisper 5y ago
  No one has ever built a self-contained self-replicating hardware system. It's incredibly hard. It's also incredibly dangerous because if it actually works you have effectively built a competing life form.

68 points by sam100 5y ago

> to grab a million tons of carbon, a direct air capture plant could devour on the order of 300 to 500 megawatts of energy per year—enough to power some 30,000 American homes.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Great insight as to why we shouldn’t stop ramping renewables deployments. You need not only cover current electrical demand, but demand growth over time, transportation, HVAC, and all of the energy needed to sequester excess atmospheric CO2 emitted during human industrialization (>1000 gigatonnes based on 280ppm atmospheric CO2 pre industrialization and 420ppm current state). Burning ancient sunlight is expensive.
- lstodd 5y ago
  Maybe it's a better idea to release massive amounts of N2 and O2 rather than chasing a 100ppm of CO2 here and there. In, like, setting up petawatts of nuclear electrolysing plants that will split seawater into H2 and O2, where the gases will dilute the atmosphere enough that CO2 levels drop. This harebrained idea is on par with those CCS projects, but has the nice side effect that the nukes can sometime later be repurposed to more useful things.
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    The nukes could run carbon capture plants. Or, even more directly, they could power homes, industry, charge electric cars, etc.
Ratalala 5y ago
Watts are not energy.
- mynegation 5y ago
  Megawatts per year are.
  - sjdksndksn 5y ago
    No, a Megawatt-year (MWyr) is a measure of energy. A Megawatt per year (MW/yr) is not. It's the difference between multiplication and division. From Wikipedia: "Misuse of watts per hour Many compound units for various kinds of rates explicitly mention units of time to indicate a change over time. For example: miles per hour, kilometres per hour, dollars per hour. Power units, such as kW, already measure the rate of energy per unit time (kW=kJ/s). Kilowatt-hours are a product of power and time, not a rate of change of power with time. Watts per hour (W/h) is a unit of a change of power per hour, i.e. an acceleration in the delivery of energy. It is used to measure the daily variation of demand (e.g. the slope of the duck curve), or ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h. Other uses of terms such as watts per hour are likely to be errors."

victorbstan 5y ago

If you want a history of failed technologies just lol at a Wired back issues catalog.

Schiendelman 5y ago
And a treasure trove of ideas that weren’t ready for prime time but could be now/soon.

jeffrallen 5y ago

Climeworks' technology is the real deal, and needs to thrive. The only good CCS is 100% carbon negative and sequesters the carbon in chemically stable forms. This is it, and we need more. Petroleum industry CCS is a scam, but Climeworks is not that. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm Swiss and so is this technology.

kornhole 5y ago
We hackers like to believe there is a technological solution for everything. These projects feed that delusion. Massive reductions and degrowth are hard for us to accept. This article somewhat fairly explains how extremely impractical and unlikely carbon capture technologies will be. The investments in the technology and the PR around them serve more to feed the delusion and keep us burning as usual.
- eikenberry 5y ago
  I think you can forgive people for wanting to look for solutions that don't require millions/billions of deaths, as that's the only way you'll see the level of change necessary. It will happen naturally over time as economic levels rise and reproduction rates drop below sustaining. But that will take centuries and lots of resources, so I'm doubtful that is what you are proposing.
  - brightstep 5y ago
    The solution you describe has already been found: stop burning and leave fossil fuels in the ground. Technological solutions are the opposite. They're an attempt to avoid the what everyone already knows is the answer.
    - lovecg 5y ago
      There are millions of people who are not in poverty right now because these fuels are being used. What you’re suggesting will immediately put them back into poverty. A lot of them will probably die of starvation and disease. I don’t think they’ll go down without a fight.

macanchex 5y ago

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/11/03/Tech-Will-Not-Save-Us-Shrinking-Consumption-Will/ https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/11/03/Tech-Will-Not-Save-Us...

Dig1t 5y ago
>"An economic contraction, or what Gaia theorist James Lovelock calls a “sustainable retreat,” Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist".. To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse. It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive that that is the case right now. Also it seems counterproductive and extremely short sighted to make the blanket statement that the problem is impossible to solve with technology when so many problems throughout history have been solved by technology.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the same change could've come with local co-working spaces), that has not hurt quality of life while having a great impact on co2 production. Other solutions exist that still allow us to live good lives, but the real barrier is entrenched and stubborn systems resistant to change. Even simple things like the urbanism movement being implemented would help a great deal, but getting American urban planning to change course is like trying to push a boulder up mount everest, it would seem. In my mind, we should aim to solve climate change however we can, while minimising lifestyle harm. But if its a choice between the irreversible destruction of the environment we live in and my lifestyle changing somewhat, I'll choose the latter.
  - kiba 5y ago
    I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the same change could've come with local co-working spaces), that has not hurt quality of life while having a great impact on co2 production. I hardly call that degrowth, That's just efficiency.

betwixthewires 5y ago

I've got a question, maybe a stupid one to those in the know, but why not just trap carbon in biomass?

Gabriel_Martin 5y ago
In the trend of questions we kinda know are dumb questions, why not just capture it where it comes out, at the powerplants?
- GunnarSturla 5y ago
  We should do that too, but then the question becomes what to do with the carbon. It turns out that getting rid of it in a safe way is a pretty difficult problem. The solution that's described in the article needs a lot of freshwater and the right type of rock for it to flow through so it can't be done where most of the power plants are located. That leaves basically two solutions; capture the carbon from the air, which takes a lot of energy, or ship it with tankers. The first is being done (at a small scale) and the second is being worked on. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have power plants that release carbon, but that's another discussion :)
GunnarSturla 5y ago
If we trap it in biomass, it will escape if anything happens to the ecosystem storing the carbon (like a forest fire). The fundamental problem is that the earth was in a balance, with regards to carbon; a bunch was trapped in biomass, and cycled through the carbon cycle [1]. Then humanity did two things; we destroyed a lot of carbon stores (with agriculture, deforestation and setting off soil erosion), and (more importantly) dug up and released even more carbon into the carbon cycle. It will not be enough for us to only trap it in biomass, we need to permanently remove it from the cycle. We definitely need to do both, and storing carbon in biomass is probably more cost-effective currently, but if we're going to restore the balance, we'll need more than biomass. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
- betwixthewires 5y ago

gtsop 5y ago

When I was a kid my teacher told me trees convert co2 to oxygen. If I had to suck co2 out of the atmosphere I would plant more trees and stop choping/burning down existing ones. It is cheap, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, but I guess this isn't tecky enough for today's world. Maybe if we add a wifi module on trees it would fix it.

tunesmith 5y ago
From what I understand, planting trees isn't sufficient, but it would sure help.
mynegation 5y ago
It will help a bit but not all the way. When trees die, CO2 is released again by fungi and bacteria in the process of making the wood rot.
kgin 5y ago
Trees are essential, but we've released into the atmosphere so much carbon that was previously trapped under the earth in liquid and solid form. Trees aren't enough, we need to get that carbon back into long term storage.
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
From a kid's level of understanding you could also deduce that the carbon must end up in the plant matter, and that a forest's plant matter density doesn't increase forever. Old forests reach a carbon-neutral equilibrium (decaying plants release carbon). New forests suck up carbon until they reach that equilibrium. Another idea you could deduce from this is that if we remove plant matter from the forest, and lock that carbon up so it doesn't go back into the atmosphere, it could become a long term carbon-sink. Even better if the plant matter can be useful. So vast lumber farms with the fastest growing trees you can get could be a good carbon capture technology.
- gtsop 5y ago
  I think more information is needed as input here. In pwrticular, what is the ratio of consumed/stored co2 in the photosynthesis process. My super basic understanding is that co2 is being used as fuel to convert energy into tree-food. By that logic i would expect at least a portion of the co2 to be actually transformed to other elements rather than stored as-is into the tree.

splittingTimes 5y ago

"a system of solar-powered machines that would autonomously harvest raw materials from common dirt, use them to build more machines, and then perform useful tasks such as sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. The replico-bots didn’t pan out, because—well, do I really need to explain?" Back in the early 90ies, i can see that, but today/in 20 years it does not sound too ridiculous. Or am I missing something?

lisper 5y ago
No one has ever built a self-contained self-replicating hardware system. It's incredibly hard. It's also incredibly dangerous because if it actually works you have effectively built a competing life form.