8 ms·

I want to be excited about this, but it's capturing CO2 as CO2 gas, not sequestering CO2 in a form that keeps it out of the atmosphere. If you pay a lot of mon

by yodon 5y ago

I want to be excited about this, but it's capturing CO2 as CO2 gas, not sequestering CO2 in a form that keeps it out of the atmosphere. If you pay a lot of money in process and power to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere or out of exhaust gases and then use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid, liquid, or oceanic absorption form you're just burning money and power to make yourself feel good, you aren't actually denting the global climate change problem because all that CO2 will just end up back in the atmosphere once it's been used in the industrial processes. You also can't use storage of gaseous (or liquid) CO2 as a way to sequester climatically meaningful amounts of CO2. We've added around 600 billion tons of CO2 to that atmosphere since 2000. If we want to use sequestration to roll back the changes we've done to the atmosphere, we almost certainly need to sequester at least that much, if not more out of the atmosphere. Do a quick calculation on how big a set of storage tanks you need to hold that amount of gaseous or liquid CO2, and compare that volume to the volume of a mountain (or mountain range) near you. Then think about maintaining those tanks in perpetuity and you'll see why you have to get the CO2 stashed in solid or room temperature stable liquid form. I'm by no means critical or dismissive of this tech, it sounds great, but we're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed.

nsonha 5y ago
Capturing CO2 should be just that, capturing. Capturing and transforming is just costing more problem that other people have to deal with (creating more byproducts, consuming energy and other resources in the process). If it turns out that there is a market for CO2 gas then the product can be used as is, as opposed to burning coal back to CO2. If not, then you will have other companies solving the problem of turning it back to carbon. That's always been how problems are solved, divide an conquer
wuschel 5y ago
> use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid There are not many chemical reactions that 'fix' CO2. The compound is pretty low energy. Kind of a analogous to 'feed' bacteria with plastics. The Swiss start-up Climeworks [1] has a business model built around actually already is in operational mode when it comes to pumping CO2 into the ground in Iceland. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-plant-capturing-carbon-air-starts-iceland-2021-09-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...
PaulHoule 5y ago
Huge amounts of CO2 can be injected into Saline Aquifers https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR017609 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR01... Capturing CO2 from a power plant, biofuel factory, oil refinery, petrochemical plant or other point source and disposing of it underground is a developed technology. Very little of that is happening because the financial incentives aren't there and the financial incentives that do exist go to carbon sequestration schemes which are low-cost, low-quality and generally not measurable (pay us $ and we won't cut down these trees... for now, let's crush some rocks and apply sand to the beach and hope for the best, ...) With aquifer injection you can measure the gas going in but there are also questions such as: how long does the CO2 stay there? do you have seismic problems? This scheme is similar to aquifer injection but is more secure at the expense of requiring unusual rock formations and 25 tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix I think it gets way too much press but assuming energy is available you can build a direct air capture in a place where you have reactive rocks and water.
- samstave 5y ago
  Thats only 6,250 gallons of water.. less than a single 10K water truck you've seen everywhere. THe question is how many tons does this plan to produce over what period?
  - yodon 5y ago
    If you want to delay the impact of climate change by 1 year by sequestering one year of of CO2 added to the environment through saline sequestration, that's about 40 billion 10K water trucks worth of storage, or about 40 Lake Tahoes turned into saline storage ponds, and you need to add that much storage capacity every year just to keep atmospheric CO2 from getting worse than it is (you're not yet to the scale of reducing atmospheric CO2 at this rate). The oceans have enough volume for this, but most other containers are too small to be meaningful.
    - jamiek88 5y ago
samstave 5y ago
Could we put them into pods and throw them at Mars so we start dumping Co2 on Mars for Musk's Mars Mushroom Mart! too grow.
- deadbeeves 5y ago
  Could? Yes. It'd probably be the most expensive way to get rid of CO2, though.
  - worik 5y ago
    > Could? Yes. It'd probably be the most expensive way to get rid of CO2, though. So? I in this context that is a plus not a minus!
    - deadbeeves 5y ago
      How is that a plus? If it's more expensive it means you're pulling less CO2 out of the atmosphere than if had gone with a cheaper method.
      - samstave 5y ago
        WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU CONCERNED WITH EXPENSE RATHER THAN SURVIVAL? --- Serious question. -- musk. (and ppl like Thiel cooncerned with eternal life (Rocks, Roths, etc)....
- carapace 5y ago
  Lovelock (of the Gaia Hypothesis) had the bright idea to put all the CFCs onto all the old ICBMs and launch them at Mars to kick start the greenhouse effect there.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Ah yes, this was all planned from the start, we actually need that CO2! Wait a second... wouldn't it be more efficient to transport solids and burn them on mars? Okay, I only responded because of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. I watched a video about lovelock and Gaia Hypothesis yesterday.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
semi-extrinsic 5y ago
> We're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed. How so? The simple fact that natural gas and oil still exists, when it comes from 100 million year old biomass, proves beyond a shadow of doubt that geological sequestration holds its integrity at geological timescales. We have also been injecting CO2 at a rate of 1 million tonnes per year at the Sleipner field in the North Sea since 1996, and extensive 3D timelapse seismography shows the CO2 is permanently trapped. Think about that - we have been demonstrating CO2 storage at scale since before the launch of the first Palm Pilot.
- yodon 5y ago
  The existence of oil shows CO2 can be stored in solid or liquid form, but doesn't show we know how to convert CO2 into that stored form at scale or keep our hands off it once it's stored that way. It's easy to burn oil, it's hard to make it, and it's harder still to not burn it when you know it's readily available.
  - semi-extrinsic 5y ago
    CO2 is in the dense supercritical state at the temperature and pressure conditions in storage reservoirs. It's density is between 750 and 850 kg/m3 then (water is 1000). You just have to compress it and pump it down there, and it will stay like that. Honestly, the storage part is a solved problem from the feasibility side. The remaining challenges are mainly cost optimization, across all of capture, transport and storage. And the biggest hurdle is forcing businesses to actually pay for the currently externalized cost of CO2 emissions.
    - yodon 5y ago
      I agree with your thermodynamics, I'm just concerned about finding a volume big enough to store climatically meaningful amounts of CO2 in that form. 40 billion metric tons per year of CO2 in the form you describe is around 30 billion cubic meters, and you need to find that much storage volume every year just to keep things from getting worse. If you want to actually make a dent, like rolling things back to the year 2000 (which likely isn't enough, but is a real impact), that's more like 600 billion metric tons or 450 billion cubic meters. That's roughly equivalent to 400 mountains 5000 feet tall. It's a huge volume of material we're talking about finding a place to store if we're actually trying to make a real dent in climate change.
seizethecheese 5y ago
This is sort of crazy. Presumably industry will use liquid CO2 for the foreseeable future. Pulling it from the atmosphere instead of ground is a huge net benefit.
- yodon 5y ago
  Most of the gasses we pull from the ground are byproducts of oil and natural gas production. We don't pull them from the ground because we want them on their own, we just go ahead and capture them because they are coming up with the stuff we want for fuel - they'll still continue to be captured (or worse vented to the atmosphere) as long as we're pulling those fuel sources from the ground. Industrial CO2 also mostly comes not from the ground but from other industrial processes.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    We use so much CO2 (on beverages, inert atmospheres, cooling devices, fire extinguishers, etc). Does all of it come as side-product of some industrial process? Or do we burn extra fuels to get it?
    - markcyffka 5y ago
      Most all of it comes as a side product. The amount of CO2 used for the applications listed pales in comparison to the amount used for urea (fertilizer) production.
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        What is different is that urea requires a power source that creates more CO2 than the chemical process uses. So you will certainly (as long as you are using fossil fuels) have a source available. Those things I mentioned buy their CO2 on the market. I have no idea where it comes from.
        noselasd 5y ago
worik 5y ago
I am dismissive of this tech. On the face of it. CO2 stored underground, at huge expense? What could possibly go wrong with that?
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Yeah. It kinda smells like fracking 2.0 to me in terms of what the potential unforeseen consequences could be... and look what happened there.
DennisP 5y ago
Inject CO2 into basalt formations, and over the course of a year or so it will turn into rock. There are already several pilot programs doing this, and it's very scalable. Other projects apply energy to turn the CO2 into liquid fuel. Of course that returns the CO2 to the atmosphere, but it'll be a long time before we electrify long-haul jets so it'd be great if their fuel were carbon-neutral.
- markcyffka 5y ago
  There are a few startups exploring this and also PNNL is doing great public work on this topic as well. https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177
  - yodon 5y ago
    Thanks, Mark - do you (or anyone else reading this) happen to know offhand any of the startups targeting this approach?
    - subpar 5y ago
      https://www.carbfix.com/ https://www.carbfix.com/
    - markcyffka 5y ago
      We don't claim to be experts on this subfield & this is may not be an exhaustive list, but Carbfix, 44.01, and the Solid Carbon coalition are some that come to mind to check out. We don't speak for those companies but just want to point out some areas to check out. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1390435 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1390435 <-- a non-commercial study on this topic. https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 <-- a webinar that addresses this topic
- yodon 5y ago
  >Inject CO2 into basalt formations... Thanks for this comment - the calculations I'd been doing in the GP comment and elsewhere where pretty darn depressing and this approach you're mentioning is very exciting in that it bypasses the fundamental storage volume problems most other sequestration methods face by leveraging the interstitial spaces inside existing rock volumes, and also exciting in that it leverages undersea rock formations for even lower impact. Thanks for pointing me to this. For others interested in learning more you might hit [0] or [1]. [0]https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/19/solid-carbon-macarthur-foundation/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/19/solid-carbon-ma... [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0011-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0011-8
noselasd 5y ago
Isn't the idea to pump the captured co2 underground, where the proper reactions take place to turn this more or less into rock ? I'm not sure anyone was suggesting to actually store the co2 long term as a gas or liquid
amelius 5y ago
What happens if you bring CO2 to insane temperatures? Will that break C from O2? Could we reuse the stored heat somehow?

by yodon 5y ago

nsonha 5y ago

Capturing CO2 should be just that, capturing. Capturing and transforming is just costing more problem that other people have to deal with (creating more byproducts, consuming energy and other resources in the process). If it turns out that there is a market for CO2 gas then the product can be used as is, as opposed to burning coal back to CO2. If not, then you will have other companies solving the problem of turning it back to carbon. That's always been how problems are solved, divide an conquer

wuschel 5y ago

> use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid There are not many chemical reactions that 'fix' CO2. The compound is pretty low energy. Kind of a analogous to 'feed' bacteria with plastics. The Swiss start-up Climeworks [1] has a business model built around actually already is in operational mode when it comes to pumping CO2 into the ground in Iceland. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-plant-capturing-carbon-air-starts-iceland-2021-09-08/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...

PaulHoule 5y ago

Huge amounts of CO2 can be injected into Saline Aquifers https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR017609 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR01... Capturing CO2 from a power plant, biofuel factory, oil refinery, petrochemical plant or other point source and disposing of it underground is a developed technology. Very little of that is happening because the financial incentives aren't there and the financial incentives that do exist go to carbon sequestration schemes which are low-cost, low-quality and generally not measurable (pay us $ and we won't cut down these trees... for now, let's crush some rocks and apply sand to the beach and hope for the best, ...) With aquifer injection you can measure the gas going in but there are also questions such as: how long does the CO2 stay there? do you have seismic problems? This scheme is similar to aquifer injection but is more secure at the expense of requiring unusual rock formations and 25 tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbfix I think it gets way too much press but assuming energy is available you can build a direct air capture in a place where you have reactive rocks and water.

samstave 5y ago
Thats only 6,250 gallons of water.. less than a single 10K water truck you've seen everywhere. THe question is how many tons does this plan to produce over what period?
- yodon 5y ago
  If you want to delay the impact of climate change by 1 year by sequestering one year of of CO2 added to the environment through saline sequestration, that's about 40 billion 10K water trucks worth of storage, or about 40 Lake Tahoes turned into saline storage ponds, and you need to add that much storage capacity every year just to keep atmospheric CO2 from getting worse than it is (you're not yet to the scale of reducing atmospheric CO2 at this rate). The oceans have enough volume for this, but most other containers are too small to be meaningful.
  - jamiek88 5y ago

samstave 5y ago

Could we put them into pods and throw them at Mars so we start dumping Co2 on Mars for Musk's Mars Mushroom Mart! too grow.

deadbeeves 5y ago
Could? Yes. It'd probably be the most expensive way to get rid of CO2, though.
- worik 5y ago
  > Could? Yes. It'd probably be the most expensive way to get rid of CO2, though. So? I in this context that is a plus not a minus!
  - deadbeeves 5y ago
    How is that a plus? If it's more expensive it means you're pulling less CO2 out of the atmosphere than if had gone with a cheaper method.
    - samstave 5y ago
      WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU CONCERNED WITH EXPENSE RATHER THAN SURVIVAL? --- Serious question. -- musk. (and ppl like Thiel cooncerned with eternal life (Rocks, Roths, etc)....
carapace 5y ago
Lovelock (of the Gaia Hypothesis) had the bright idea to put all the CFCs onto all the old ICBMs and launch them at Mars to kick start the greenhouse effect there.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Ah yes, this was all planned from the start, we actually need that CO2! Wait a second... wouldn't it be more efficient to transport solids and burn them on mars? Okay, I only responded because of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. I watched a video about lovelock and Gaia Hypothesis yesterday.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

semi-extrinsic 5y ago

> We're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed. How so? The simple fact that natural gas and oil still exists, when it comes from 100 million year old biomass, proves beyond a shadow of doubt that geological sequestration holds its integrity at geological timescales. We have also been injecting CO2 at a rate of 1 million tonnes per year at the Sleipner field in the North Sea since 1996, and extensive 3D timelapse seismography shows the CO2 is permanently trapped. Think about that - we have been demonstrating CO2 storage at scale since before the launch of the first Palm Pilot.

yodon 5y ago
The existence of oil shows CO2 can be stored in solid or liquid form, but doesn't show we know how to convert CO2 into that stored form at scale or keep our hands off it once it's stored that way. It's easy to burn oil, it's hard to make it, and it's harder still to not burn it when you know it's readily available.
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  CO2 is in the dense supercritical state at the temperature and pressure conditions in storage reservoirs. It's density is between 750 and 850 kg/m3 then (water is 1000). You just have to compress it and pump it down there, and it will stay like that. Honestly, the storage part is a solved problem from the feasibility side. The remaining challenges are mainly cost optimization, across all of capture, transport and storage. And the biggest hurdle is forcing businesses to actually pay for the currently externalized cost of CO2 emissions.
  - yodon 5y ago
    I agree with your thermodynamics, I'm just concerned about finding a volume big enough to store climatically meaningful amounts of CO2 in that form. 40 billion metric tons per year of CO2 in the form you describe is around 30 billion cubic meters, and you need to find that much storage volume every year just to keep things from getting worse. If you want to actually make a dent, like rolling things back to the year 2000 (which likely isn't enough, but is a real impact), that's more like 600 billion metric tons or 450 billion cubic meters. That's roughly equivalent to 400 mountains 5000 feet tall. It's a huge volume of material we're talking about finding a place to store if we're actually trying to make a real dent in climate change.

seizethecheese 5y ago

This is sort of crazy. Presumably industry will use liquid CO2 for the foreseeable future. Pulling it from the atmosphere instead of ground is a huge net benefit.

yodon 5y ago
Most of the gasses we pull from the ground are byproducts of oil and natural gas production. We don't pull them from the ground because we want them on their own, we just go ahead and capture them because they are coming up with the stuff we want for fuel - they'll still continue to be captured (or worse vented to the atmosphere) as long as we're pulling those fuel sources from the ground. Industrial CO2 also mostly comes not from the ground but from other industrial processes.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  We use so much CO2 (on beverages, inert atmospheres, cooling devices, fire extinguishers, etc). Does all of it come as side-product of some industrial process? Or do we burn extra fuels to get it?
  - markcyffka 5y ago
    Most all of it comes as a side product. The amount of CO2 used for the applications listed pales in comparison to the amount used for urea (fertilizer) production.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      What is different is that urea requires a power source that creates more CO2 than the chemical process uses. So you will certainly (as long as you are using fossil fuels) have a source available. Those things I mentioned buy their CO2 on the market. I have no idea where it comes from.
      - noselasd 5y ago

worik 5y ago

I am dismissive of this tech. On the face of it. CO2 stored underground, at huge expense? What could possibly go wrong with that?

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Yeah. It kinda smells like fracking 2.0 to me in terms of what the potential unforeseen consequences could be... and look what happened there.

DennisP 5y ago

Inject CO2 into basalt formations, and over the course of a year or so it will turn into rock. There are already several pilot programs doing this, and it's very scalable. Other projects apply energy to turn the CO2 into liquid fuel. Of course that returns the CO2 to the atmosphere, but it'll be a long time before we electrify long-haul jets so it'd be great if their fuel were carbon-neutral.

markcyffka 5y ago
There are a few startups exploring this and also PNNL is doing great public work on this topic as well. https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177
- yodon 5y ago
  Thanks, Mark - do you (or anyone else reading this) happen to know offhand any of the startups targeting this approach?
  - subpar 5y ago
    https://www.carbfix.com/ https://www.carbfix.com/
  - markcyffka 5y ago
    We don't claim to be experts on this subfield & this is may not be an exhaustive list, but Carbfix, 44.01, and the Solid Carbon coalition are some that come to mind to check out. We don't speak for those companies but just want to point out some areas to check out. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1390435 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1390435 <-- a non-commercial study on this topic. https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 <-- a webinar that addresses this topic
yodon 5y ago
>Inject CO2 into basalt formations... Thanks for this comment - the calculations I'd been doing in the GP comment and elsewhere where pretty darn depressing and this approach you're mentioning is very exciting in that it bypasses the fundamental storage volume problems most other sequestration methods face by leveraging the interstitial spaces inside existing rock volumes, and also exciting in that it leverages undersea rock formations for even lower impact. Thanks for pointing me to this. For others interested in learning more you might hit [0] or [1]. [0]https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/19/solid-carbon-macarthur-foundation/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/19/solid-carbon-ma... [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0011-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0011-8

noselasd 5y ago

Isn't the idea to pump the captured co2 underground, where the proper reactions take place to turn this more or less into rock ? I'm not sure anyone was suggesting to actually store the co2 long term as a gas or liquid

amelius 5y ago

What happens if you bring CO2 to insane temperatures? Will that break C from O2? Could we reuse the stored heat somehow?