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> The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground, where a chemical r

by Alupis 4y ago

> The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground, where a chemical reaction converts it to rock. I'm really worried we have no idea what we're doing, and will find out down the road things like this only made things worse, or caused other unforeseen problems. I do not subscribe to the philosophy that "doing something is better than nothing", particularly when we likely don't fully understand what it is we're doing or actually trying to achieve. Doing the wrong thing can be, and often is, worse than doing nothing. > Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, that’s equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars). That's some hand-wavy numbers there. 790 of what type of car? 1970 muscle car without a catalytic converter and modern fuel injection system? Or a 2022 Prius? One outputs a huge amount of CO2 and other gases, and the other hardly any at all. Car emissions are really good on average. As technology progresses, it might be fathomable that 7,900 cars, or eventually 79,000 cars produce the same amount of emissions as today. This "metric" sounds impressive, but it's useless. > DAC’s energy usage, particularly when it’s considered in conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 it’s capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from renewable sources helps, but it’s still not unlimited nor free. So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering this thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes? > Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year. 36,000 tons (the quantity of CO2 that will be captured by the Mammoth facility) is a negligible fraction of that total. Is it even worth the energy usage, construction and maintenance costs, and frankly, the effort? Or would the geothermally-generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars? Ah, they even mention this in the article. Of course the CEO hand waves this away... I'm not convinced this is the future - seems more like a get rich quick scheme if anything. Sort of like those companies you can pay to "offload" your emission burden and supposedly they plant trees or something and you get to claim your carbon neutral. Scams... all of them.

tito 4y ago
I hear you! What do you propose is the future instead? Curious to hear about what you're working on, we need people working across all areas of planetary solutions.
- Alupis 4y ago
  I don't personally know, and frankly, I don't think anyone actually knows. What we have here is a "Carbon Rush" and everyone who gets in early will get rich but likely end up accomplishing nothing (or make things worse in unforeseeable ways). Sorry to be so blunt, but the numbers and schemes that come out of these things are woefully unrealistic. In addition, none of these schemes make any difference so long as developing nations (and some developed nations) continue to produce emissions at staggering rates. All the efforts here are wasted if, say China, builds even one new coal plant. So, a best guess at a solution is to stop wasting time trying to extract and hide emissions, and instead work to further pursue technology that produces less emissions from the start. Manufacturing would be a great place to start, because even this DAC machine is going to produce a massive amount of emissions during production... all the way down to the trucks mining the raw materials for the forge. But those are hard, difficult problems to solve... and aren't "sexy", which denies quick VC money and grants.
  - tito 4y ago
    Reducing emissions from the start, manufacturing, all sound like important parts of the solution! If you're looking for resources to get started, I linked Project Drawdown and others in another comment in this thread.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      These are not things just anyone can just jump into. Making it sound like so just diminishes how truly difficult these problems really are. These solutions require deep industry knowledge and buy-in, deep understanding of the problem space, and deep pockets to front unproven technology that nobody will adopt until it solves their problems better than the current solutions. ie. you are not going to revolutionize mining just because you want it to be more green. It doesn't matter how much money have, and how many domain-novices you employ. The mining/farming/manufacturing/whatever industry will not even entertain your product unless it's objectively better. No industry actually cares about being more environmentally friendly at the trade off of reduced production and efficiency, or increased costs - all things that come along with unproven technology developed by people that had little-to-zero understanding of that industry's problems in the first place.
datadata 4y ago
> Car emissions are really good on average. As technology progresses, it might be fathomable that 7,900 cars, or eventually 79,000 cars produce the same amount of emissions as today. This "metric" sounds impressive, but it's useless. Thankfully that's why the article first gave the metric in tons of carbon, which has no such ambiguity. > So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering this thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes? My understanding is that there is generally an over supply of renewable energy in Iceland. Historically it attracted location agnostic consumers like aluminum smelting and bitcoin mining as consumers of this energy, because there wasn't any other demand for the renewable energy in Iceland.
- Alupis 4y ago
  > Thankfully that's why the article first gave the metric in tons of carbon, which has no such ambiguity. Not so quick. Does a layman have any reference point to what is considered "a lot" of carbon? Is there a way to readily measure my vehicle and see what it produces? No... and the article even attempts to provide some sort of "scale" metric, and only succeeds in making this DAC seem underwhelmingly useless, less than a drop in the bucket. > My understanding is that there is generally an over supply of renewable energy in Iceland. That may be so, but this still doesn't make this a good use of that surplus.
  - datadata 4y ago
    > Not so quick. Does a layman have any reference point to what is considered "a lot" of carbon? I don't think a comparison to another producer of carbon would actually help a layman. Whether that is a lot or not would depend on the cost and energy used by the plant itself, which isn't really given in this article. > That may be so, but this still doesn't make this a good use of that surplus. Why? Suppose there is no other demand for that energy. What is actually wasted in that case? How do you measure what is "good"?
    - Alupis 4y ago
      Things that are inevitably built and require lots of power and/or cooling and/or heating are prime for this surplus. Things like Data Centers (which many have already been built from my understanding), manufacturing plants, scientific research, etc. Or work on ways to "package" the produced energy and export it to other nations efficiently. Regardless, this DAC is consuming lots of energy and producing very little (if any, likely no) benefit at all, and in the process of merely being brought into existence releases a lot of emissions. It would quite literally be better to not even build it in the first place it seems... given the lofty-but-insignificant numbers the article provides.
al_hag 4y ago
The radiative forcing from anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (if the negative forcing of aerosols is accounted for) amounts to up to 1000 Terawatts (TW). This compares to 20 TW of annual human energy production. CO2 removal using heat engine technology is destined to be a drop in the bucket. https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=615&v=88LQsE1oEww https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=615&v=88LQsE1oEww

by Alupis 4y ago

tito 4y ago

I hear you! What do you propose is the future instead? Curious to hear about what you're working on, we need people working across all areas of planetary solutions.

Alupis 4y ago
I don't personally know, and frankly, I don't think anyone actually knows. What we have here is a "Carbon Rush" and everyone who gets in early will get rich but likely end up accomplishing nothing (or make things worse in unforeseeable ways). Sorry to be so blunt, but the numbers and schemes that come out of these things are woefully unrealistic. In addition, none of these schemes make any difference so long as developing nations (and some developed nations) continue to produce emissions at staggering rates. All the efforts here are wasted if, say China, builds even one new coal plant. So, a best guess at a solution is to stop wasting time trying to extract and hide emissions, and instead work to further pursue technology that produces less emissions from the start. Manufacturing would be a great place to start, because even this DAC machine is going to produce a massive amount of emissions during production... all the way down to the trucks mining the raw materials for the forge. But those are hard, difficult problems to solve... and aren't "sexy", which denies quick VC money and grants.
- tito 4y ago
  Reducing emissions from the start, manufacturing, all sound like important parts of the solution! If you're looking for resources to get started, I linked Project Drawdown and others in another comment in this thread.
  - Alupis 4y ago
    These are not things just anyone can just jump into. Making it sound like so just diminishes how truly difficult these problems really are. These solutions require deep industry knowledge and buy-in, deep understanding of the problem space, and deep pockets to front unproven technology that nobody will adopt until it solves their problems better than the current solutions. ie. you are not going to revolutionize mining just because you want it to be more green. It doesn't matter how much money have, and how many domain-novices you employ. The mining/farming/manufacturing/whatever industry will not even entertain your product unless it's objectively better. No industry actually cares about being more environmentally friendly at the trade off of reduced production and efficiency, or increased costs - all things that come along with unproven technology developed by people that had little-to-zero understanding of that industry's problems in the first place.

datadata 4y ago

> Car emissions are really good on average. As technology progresses, it might be fathomable that 7,900 cars, or eventually 79,000 cars produce the same amount of emissions as today. This "metric" sounds impressive, but it's useless. Thankfully that's why the article first gave the metric in tons of carbon, which has no such ambiguity. > So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering this thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes? My understanding is that there is generally an over supply of renewable energy in Iceland. Historically it attracted location agnostic consumers like aluminum smelting and bitcoin mining as consumers of this energy, because there wasn't any other demand for the renewable energy in Iceland.

Alupis 4y ago
> Thankfully that's why the article first gave the metric in tons of carbon, which has no such ambiguity. Not so quick. Does a layman have any reference point to what is considered "a lot" of carbon? Is there a way to readily measure my vehicle and see what it produces? No... and the article even attempts to provide some sort of "scale" metric, and only succeeds in making this DAC seem underwhelmingly useless, less than a drop in the bucket. > My understanding is that there is generally an over supply of renewable energy in Iceland. That may be so, but this still doesn't make this a good use of that surplus.
- datadata 4y ago
  > Not so quick. Does a layman have any reference point to what is considered "a lot" of carbon? I don't think a comparison to another producer of carbon would actually help a layman. Whether that is a lot or not would depend on the cost and energy used by the plant itself, which isn't really given in this article. > That may be so, but this still doesn't make this a good use of that surplus. Why? Suppose there is no other demand for that energy. What is actually wasted in that case? How do you measure what is "good"?
  - Alupis 4y ago
    Things that are inevitably built and require lots of power and/or cooling and/or heating are prime for this surplus. Things like Data Centers (which many have already been built from my understanding), manufacturing plants, scientific research, etc. Or work on ways to "package" the produced energy and export it to other nations efficiently. Regardless, this DAC is consuming lots of energy and producing very little (if any, likely no) benefit at all, and in the process of merely being brought into existence releases a lot of emissions. It would quite literally be better to not even build it in the first place it seems... given the lofty-but-insignificant numbers the article provides.

al_hag 4y ago

The radiative forcing from anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (if the negative forcing of aerosols is accounted for) amounts to up to 1000 Terawatts (TW). This compares to 20 TW of annual human energy production. CO2 removal using heat engine technology is destined to be a drop in the bucket. https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=615&v=88LQsE1oEww https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=615&v=88LQsE1oEww