11 ms·

The carbon capture crux: Lessons learned

43 points by tpc3 4y ago

tpc3 4y ago
From the report: Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate solution.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  And also much natural gas comes out of the ground with a lot of CO2 in it and has to be removed to be saleable. In fact, there are places you can drill in Texas where you get almost pure CO2 and when people started doing EOR with CO2 that is where they got the CO2.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  What if it is? If we can make oil carbon neutral or even slightly carbon negative.. why not?
  - usrusr 4y ago
    You seem to assume that the amount of carbon pushed down is roughly identical to the amount of additional carbon brought up. Is that just a hopeful symmetry reflex or do you know any numbers? (I don't)
    - Fiahil 4y ago
      Carbon capture requires power. It’s never ever gonna be carbon neutral nor carbon negative. Unless you grow trees. They are - by far away - the most efficient and effective CC device that exists.
      - idiotsecant 4y ago
        Except for all those pesky lignin and cellulose decomposing fungi this would be a perfect plan.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Trees are a temporary store of carbon. When they die and rot, the carbon is re-released. (Turning them into building materials makes this overall process take longer, of course.)
        abdullahkhalids 4y ago
        A properly managed newly grown forest will continue to be net-carbon-negative for at least 4-5 decades or more, and after that net-zero if not burned or reduced in size. We need to sequester large amounts of carbon in the next two decades to avoid falling off the cliff of greater than 2 or 2.5 degree warming. Ergo, planting well-thought out forests in large quantities, which has no known downsides, and large upsides is one of the actions we must do. Not to mention that trees have excellent effects on local climate, on local pollution, on local human health, which are all great reasons besides carbon capture for planting more trees.
      - robocat 4y ago
        Trees have their limitations: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/05/carbon-climate-change-trees-afforestation/ https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/05/carbon-climate-change-tree...
        Fiahil 4y ago
        This article is a complete farce ! Everything they wrote is neither backed by facts nor by "experts" who don't have a project to sell.
      - usrusr 4y ago
        This entire topic isn't about direct air capture (which I consider mockworthy myself, what if we had a field of science studying self-repairing, self-replicating capture devices - oh wait, botany!) but about burn site sequestration which isn't remotely as bad (but still bad I think: hydrocarbon leftovers have a long term storage problem just as bad as nuclear, it's just happens to be even better at hiding in plain sight)
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        Run carbon capture off renewables. Use oil for gas for vehicles. We don't care if carbon capture stops at midnight or doesn't run on a still day. As long as the average yearly carbon capture is slightly greater than carbon production. Millions of vehicles could still be used and not replaced. We still have real and meaningful issues with electric vehicles that may not be resolvable. Battery chemistry is extremely reliant on very gnarly chemicals with their own environment issues. The thing we want to fix is global warming.
  - outside1234 4y ago
    It won't work because it doesn't scale. About 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol. About 22.38 pounds of CO2 are produced by burning a gallon of diesel fuel. Just think of the numbers involved to scale this to the planetary usage of fossil fuels.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Burning 2kg of coal and injecting 100g of oil worth of carbon to extract and burn 1kg of oil is barely even greenwashing.
MobiusHorizons 4y ago
The uses for a technology are largely driven by the people who initially pay money for it. Here, clearly, carbon capture has been paid for by oil and gas companies and no one else. It feels like they have given up on the technology simply because some companies have used it for purposes they don't approve of. As I see it, no one is willing to pay the cost to purchase and dispose of the CO2, so more profitable uses needed to be found. This is something we could solve simply with funding it seems. If it's really too expensive to collect and dispose of CO2, that would be a different (much more compelling) argument, but one which the article fails to make.
andrewmutz 4y ago
I don't know why it matters that the existing users of carbon capture are oil companies. Sure, that means it hasn't yet been used to sequester carbon in other contexts, but there's no reason it can't be. It's like trying to discredit nuclear fission in 1950 by saying that it's a poor source of energy because all existing users of fission tech are weapons designers.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  From OP > Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate solution. > Using carbon capture as a greenlight to extend the life of fossil fuels power plants is a significant financial and technical risk: history confirms this. Also from OP > Some applications of CCS in industries where emissions are hard to abate (such as cement) could be studied as an interim partial solution with careful consideration. Unlike nuclear fission in 1950, we don't have twenty years to continue extracting oil and gas. Most oil and gas extraction should have been hard stopped twenty years ago.
  - andrewmutz 4y ago
    Yes I read the article, but none of this discredits carbon capture. It discredits burning oil and gas. You don't need to capture carbon to pump out the oil and gas, and you don't need to pump oil and gas to capture and sequester the carbon. Just because that's what oil companies are doing at the moment, doesnt mean that that's the best way to use carbon capture tech. Let's keep doing the carbon capture and stop burning the oil and gas.
    - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
      This is just a first-order analysis of the problem. Just because the things don't need to happen in an ideal world, doesn't discredit the fact that in our complex econo-political system, oil/gas companies can lobby to change laws and get out of legal cases, use loop holes in laws, and in particular engage in greenwashing to continue doing net harmful actions. In this case, carbon capture is being used to enhance oil production, i.e. doing more net harm to our world. The second-order analysis here is that unless one has a credible way, that has been demonstrated to work in real life, of stopping oil/gas companies from greenwashing, there is little point in supporting carbon capture technology. Or to make a general point, a technology is worth supporting that when deployed in the real world results in almost immediate and permanent reduction in climate-change effects. If not, don't let the fossil fuel/capitalism lobbies distract you.
outside1234 4y ago
The reality is that carbon capture is no where near sufficient as a wholesale solution. It can help on the margins -- in terms of perhaps airplanes and other weight bearing users of fossil fuel that are not super well addressed with electrification -- but otherwise is a distraction from real solutions.
osigurdson 4y ago
Here is an example of a successful CCS project in the most offensive industry (coal). https://www.saskpower.com/our-power-future/infrastructure-projects/carbon-capture-and-storage/boundary-dam-carbon-capture-project https://www.saskpower.com/our-power-future/infrastructure-pr...
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  Uh, this CCS system uses the CO2 to produce oil, which would be quite an own goal if it wasn't for the fact they are brazen enough to pretend that "out of sight out of mind" is a real strategy when dealing with CO2 emissions. Also the use of gas in oil extraction also means a sizeable amount of that CO2 you just paid for in energy to capture goes back into the atmosphere anyway.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    Actually, you are right. I would downvote my own comment I’d that was possible. Apologies.
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      There is a project in Canada in which they are legitimately trying to learn about carbon sequestration. They have an army of phds working on this and spend a lot of money on monitoring. I’d thought that this was associated with this particular coal fired plant. Anyway, here is a thread. https://ptrc.ca/projects/co2-eor-and-storage/aquistore https://ptrc.ca/projects/co2-eor-and-storage/aquistore
apatheticonion 4y ago
Could we plant trees as a means of capturing carbon? How does it stack up to the existing highest tech forms of carbon capture?
- xnx 4y ago
  Not really. Trees only temporarily sequester carbon before dying/decaying and releasing their carbon or burning.
  - apatheticonion 4y ago
    What if we turned them into charcoal through resistive heating ovens then buried them? It'll cost money, obviously - but more than the current method?
    - xnx 4y ago
      Definitely possible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Scootwilli90 4y ago
[flagged]
FunnyBadger 4y ago
The two elements I see: 1. CO2 is ONLY useful if the CO2's next use is profitably useful - the fossil fuel industry is the only economically viable user of CO2 that can "make it disappear because they inject it into wells. Any others will always re-release it (e.g. make sodas, triple-point extraction, etc). 2. CO2 extraction is probably marginal economically because you are already starting from the disadvantage of having to extract it from the air - where you first must "pay" in energy for the entropy which is always going to be costly and unavoidable.

43 points by tpc3 4y ago

tpc3 4y ago

From the report: Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate solution.

PaulHoule 4y ago
And also much natural gas comes out of the ground with a lot of CO2 in it and has to be removed to be saleable. In fact, there are places you can drill in Texas where you get almost pure CO2 and when people started doing EOR with CO2 that is where they got the CO2.
vorpalhex 4y ago
What if it is? If we can make oil carbon neutral or even slightly carbon negative.. why not?
- usrusr 4y ago
  You seem to assume that the amount of carbon pushed down is roughly identical to the amount of additional carbon brought up. Is that just a hopeful symmetry reflex or do you know any numbers? (I don't)
  - Fiahil 4y ago
    Carbon capture requires power. It’s never ever gonna be carbon neutral nor carbon negative. Unless you grow trees. They are - by far away - the most efficient and effective CC device that exists.
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      Except for all those pesky lignin and cellulose decomposing fungi this would be a perfect plan.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Trees are a temporary store of carbon. When they die and rot, the carbon is re-released. (Turning them into building materials makes this overall process take longer, of course.)
      - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
        A properly managed newly grown forest will continue to be net-carbon-negative for at least 4-5 decades or more, and after that net-zero if not burned or reduced in size. We need to sequester large amounts of carbon in the next two decades to avoid falling off the cliff of greater than 2 or 2.5 degree warming. Ergo, planting well-thought out forests in large quantities, which has no known downsides, and large upsides is one of the actions we must do. Not to mention that trees have excellent effects on local climate, on local pollution, on local human health, which are all great reasons besides carbon capture for planting more trees.
    - robocat 4y ago
      Trees have their limitations: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/05/carbon-climate-change-trees-afforestation/ https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/05/carbon-climate-change-tree...
      - Fiahil 4y ago
        This article is a complete farce ! Everything they wrote is neither backed by facts nor by "experts" who don't have a project to sell.
    - usrusr 4y ago
      This entire topic isn't about direct air capture (which I consider mockworthy myself, what if we had a field of science studying self-repairing, self-replicating capture devices - oh wait, botany!) but about burn site sequestration which isn't remotely as bad (but still bad I think: hydrocarbon leftovers have a long term storage problem just as bad as nuclear, it's just happens to be even better at hiding in plain sight)
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      Run carbon capture off renewables. Use oil for gas for vehicles. We don't care if carbon capture stops at midnight or doesn't run on a still day. As long as the average yearly carbon capture is slightly greater than carbon production. Millions of vehicles could still be used and not replaced. We still have real and meaningful issues with electric vehicles that may not be resolvable. Battery chemistry is extremely reliant on very gnarly chemicals with their own environment issues. The thing we want to fix is global warming.
- outside1234 4y ago
  It won't work because it doesn't scale. About 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol. About 22.38 pounds of CO2 are produced by burning a gallon of diesel fuel. Just think of the numbers involved to scale this to the planetary usage of fossil fuels.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Burning 2kg of coal and injecting 100g of oil worth of carbon to extract and burn 1kg of oil is barely even greenwashing.

MobiusHorizons 4y ago

The uses for a technology are largely driven by the people who initially pay money for it. Here, clearly, carbon capture has been paid for by oil and gas companies and no one else. It feels like they have given up on the technology simply because some companies have used it for purposes they don't approve of. As I see it, no one is willing to pay the cost to purchase and dispose of the CO2, so more profitable uses needed to be found. This is something we could solve simply with funding it seems. If it's really too expensive to collect and dispose of CO2, that would be a different (much more compelling) argument, but one which the article fails to make.

andrewmutz 4y ago

I don't know why it matters that the existing users of carbon capture are oil companies. Sure, that means it hasn't yet been used to sequester carbon in other contexts, but there's no reason it can't be. It's like trying to discredit nuclear fission in 1950 by saying that it's a poor source of energy because all existing users of fission tech are weapons designers.

abdullahkhalids 4y ago
From OP > Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate solution. > Using carbon capture as a greenlight to extend the life of fossil fuels power plants is a significant financial and technical risk: history confirms this. Also from OP > Some applications of CCS in industries where emissions are hard to abate (such as cement) could be studied as an interim partial solution with careful consideration. Unlike nuclear fission in 1950, we don't have twenty years to continue extracting oil and gas. Most oil and gas extraction should have been hard stopped twenty years ago.
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  Yes I read the article, but none of this discredits carbon capture. It discredits burning oil and gas. You don't need to capture carbon to pump out the oil and gas, and you don't need to pump oil and gas to capture and sequester the carbon. Just because that's what oil companies are doing at the moment, doesnt mean that that's the best way to use carbon capture tech. Let's keep doing the carbon capture and stop burning the oil and gas.
  - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
    This is just a first-order analysis of the problem. Just because the things don't need to happen in an ideal world, doesn't discredit the fact that in our complex econo-political system, oil/gas companies can lobby to change laws and get out of legal cases, use loop holes in laws, and in particular engage in greenwashing to continue doing net harmful actions. In this case, carbon capture is being used to enhance oil production, i.e. doing more net harm to our world. The second-order analysis here is that unless one has a credible way, that has been demonstrated to work in real life, of stopping oil/gas companies from greenwashing, there is little point in supporting carbon capture technology. Or to make a general point, a technology is worth supporting that when deployed in the real world results in almost immediate and permanent reduction in climate-change effects. If not, don't let the fossil fuel/capitalism lobbies distract you.

outside1234 4y ago

The reality is that carbon capture is no where near sufficient as a wholesale solution. It can help on the margins -- in terms of perhaps airplanes and other weight bearing users of fossil fuel that are not super well addressed with electrification -- but otherwise is a distraction from real solutions.

osigurdson 4y ago

Here is an example of a successful CCS project in the most offensive industry (coal). https://www.saskpower.com/our-power-future/infrastructure-projects/carbon-capture-and-storage/boundary-dam-carbon-capture-project https://www.saskpower.com/our-power-future/infrastructure-pr...

SiempreViernes 4y ago
Uh, this CCS system uses the CO2 to produce oil, which would be quite an own goal if it wasn't for the fact they are brazen enough to pretend that "out of sight out of mind" is a real strategy when dealing with CO2 emissions. Also the use of gas in oil extraction also means a sizeable amount of that CO2 you just paid for in energy to capture goes back into the atmosphere anyway.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Actually, you are right. I would downvote my own comment I’d that was possible. Apologies.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    There is a project in Canada in which they are legitimately trying to learn about carbon sequestration. They have an army of phds working on this and spend a lot of money on monitoring. I’d thought that this was associated with this particular coal fired plant. Anyway, here is a thread. https://ptrc.ca/projects/co2-eor-and-storage/aquistore https://ptrc.ca/projects/co2-eor-and-storage/aquistore

apatheticonion 4y ago

Could we plant trees as a means of capturing carbon? How does it stack up to the existing highest tech forms of carbon capture?

xnx 4y ago
Not really. Trees only temporarily sequester carbon before dying/decaying and releasing their carbon or burning.
- apatheticonion 4y ago
  What if we turned them into charcoal through resistive heating ovens then buried them? It'll cost money, obviously - but more than the current method?
  - xnx 4y ago
    Definitely possible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Scootwilli90 4y ago

[flagged]

FunnyBadger 4y ago

The two elements I see: 1. CO2 is ONLY useful if the CO2's next use is profitably useful - the fossil fuel industry is the only economically viable user of CO2 that can "make it disappear because they inject it into wells. Any others will always re-release it (e.g. make sodas, triple-point extraction, etc). 2. CO2 extraction is probably marginal economically because you are already starting from the disadvantage of having to extract it from the air - where you first must "pay" in energy for the entropy which is always going to be costly and unavoidable.