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You can run carbon capture by burning natural gas and still capture more carbon than you release because compressed CO2 + H2O is a lower energy state than O2 +
by elil17 4y ago
You can run carbon capture by burning natural gas and still capture more carbon than you release because compressed CO2 + H2O is a lower energy state than O2 + hydrocarbon compounds.
- bamboozled 4y agoWow, interesting
- beachy 4y agoIs this true? Sounds exciting if so.
- thot_experiment 4y agoIt's true in a naive sense but the natural gas must also be extracted, refined, transported and the infrastructure to convert it into electricity and to perform the carbon capture must be built. So yes carbon capture using fossil fuels isn't outright impossible because of physics, but practically speaking it's not real because the rest of the chain lowers the already marginal efficiency.
- elil17 4y agoIt's not really marginal efficiency. It's ~60% efficiency for a natural gas system, higher for a system with point-source capture on that natural gas. I'm not sure how exactly it pans out with the inefficiency of extraction but as I understand it those are fairly minor. That's not to say that I think DAC is a silver bullet or something - it's obviously not because the CAPEX costs are huge at the moment.
- thot_experiment 4y agoYeah for sure, you're right that I shouldn't have said marginal as the situation wrt natural gas is decent (though that is the best case fossil fuel). It's important to be accurate about these things.