8 ms·

Gasoline made of carbon sucked from the air (2018)

49 points by guerrilla 4y ago

jebronie 4y ago
They will get crushed by a newfangled invention called "plants".
- ccozan 4y ago
  Heh. But good point. What is the most efficient plant that can sequestrate the carbon at the same rate?
  - the_sleaze9 4y ago
    Same rate? Well hard to say, but micro algal reactors can get pretty efficient, albeit at high cost - but that's a moot point in this scenario.
- roryisok 4y ago
  Ah but we need to eat the plants. We can put factories that create fuel out of nothing in the middle of the ocean, where we can't grow corn.
toto444 4y ago
We're in 2023 so my question is : what happened to this since then ? It should be mainstream by now.
- alex_duf 4y ago
  Here's a wild guess: it probably makes no economical sense in the current context
- jorge-d 4y ago
  The reason it's not mainstream is most probably that the energy ratio between production and the output is terrible. Also, technically, all hydrocarbons are made from Carbon sucked from the air.
  - edhelas 4y ago
    This
  - narrator 4y ago
    There are other ways besides biology that hydrocarbons can be produced. Pure water placed between diamond anvils at high temperature and enormous pressure will spontaneously produce hydrocarbons. Titan's atmosphere is mostly hydrocarbons that didn't come from living things. "Diamond dissolution and the production of methane and other carbon-bearing species in hydrothermal diamond-anvil cells" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016703709004785 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00167...
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    The energy ratio and cost being terrible doesn't matter for some PR usecases. Imagine being able to sell Formula 1 this fuel so the whole industry can claim to be green and try and try to re-attract young crowds who are turned away by un-greenness? The fuel could cost 100x as much, and it still wouldn't be a big issue.
    - williamscales 4y ago
      Formula 1 is going to move to “sustainable fuel” in 2026, so you’re exactly right
    - shanebellone 4y ago
      "Imagine being able to sell Formula 1 this fuel so the whole industry can claim to be green and try and try to re-attract young crowds who are turned away by un-greenness?" I loled. They could use ground unicorn for fuel, and I still wouldn't be interested.
      - prewett 4y ago
        I'm thinking that the demographic allegedly being turned away for "un-greenness" would be downright appalled at using ground up unicorn for fuel...
- wongarsu 4y ago
  They state "It costs more than a barrel of oil right now, but in places with a price on carbon of $200 a ton, like what’s enabled through California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, we’re competitive". Today, the carbon price in the European cap-and-trade scheme is $81 per ton, and in California it's $29 per ton. So unless they've greatly improved efficiency, they don't have a profitable market. The EU price is also only that high since about a year ago, two years ago it was about $23 per ton. Even if they were profitable at about $80 per ton, there was little time to scale up production.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    "like what’s enabled through California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, we’re competitive" That is not competitive, that is using government moopoly on violence to artificially raise the price of alternative product... Competition would be done with out government force
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      From a theoretical standpoint you can argue that the "fair" price of fuel would include the costs of any environmental and economical damage done by burning that fuel: the cost of health issues from particulates, the infrastructure costs to deal with sea level rise, the costs from droughts that are worse because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, etc. Just because those happen to somebody else than the person burning the fuel doesn't mean that the costs don't happen. And the best way we currently have to price in those externalities is artificially rising the price of the offending product, to give alternatives a better chance to compete.
    - orra 4y ago
      > that is using government [monopoly] on violence to artificially raise the price of alternative product A less dramatic summary is the government is partially factoring in the negative externalities of carbon, through taxation or minimum pricing. You call that violence, whilst downplaying the very real harm (actual death and destruction) caused by excess carbon in the atmosphere.
manigandham 4y ago
This article is about Carbon Engineering: https://carbonengineering.com/ https://carbonengineering.com/ There's also Prometheus Fuels which is a YC company doing the same thing: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ The science is sound, but whether the process is economically viable remains to be seen.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  I’ve been mulling entering carbon sequestration space using biochar but what’s mainly stopping me is the fact that no amount of industrialization can even put a dent in how much new carbon is being introduced every year when now in terms of burning newly pumped fossil fuel.
  - rswskg 4y ago
    Isn't biochar more a play for soil protection?
    - ramraj07 4y ago
      Given that it’s pretty hard to reclaim carbon from it I’m thinking it’ll be a great way to just bury it and sell carbon sequestration credits (as a more legitimate sister to carbon credits).
      - saalweachter 4y ago
        What's your charring methodology?
      - gdudeman 4y ago
        I believe Charm industrial is using the biochar process, but producing oil and pumping it into the ground. Even in fields, it’s a solid idea. And like you said, it’s recognized as being a very stable store of carbon for a very long time. The trick is getting feedstock nearby so you aren’t pumping tons of CO2 into the air to acquire, move and process it.
- 4y ago
paganel 4y ago
I had a similar realisation recently when comparing the house building industry in the US to that from here in Europe. Because the US builds most of its residential housing out of wood it means that the Sun does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to "creating" the building materials out of which most of the US residential houses are built. The biggest cost related to energy when it comes to the US residential market is the opportunity cost of not having those trees back in the forrest still producing oxygen, plus the loss of forrest habitat as a result of ever-expending suburbias. Meanwhile, in Europe most of the residential houses are built using cement, concrete and even bricks, all of these activities very energy intensive, you can't rely on the Sun's goodwill as the Americans do. Granted, you don't incur the opportunity costs of having to cut down trees/forests, but I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house. There's also a discussion to be made about costs related to house insulation and the loss of energy, where, I agree, European houses perform much better compared to the US houses made of wood. All in all I think we need to "rediscover" economists like Georgescu-Roegen [1], people who had built almost all of their intellectual careers talking about this sort of stuff. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen
- magnuspaaske 4y ago
  It's worth noting here that the root system of the tree remains and also that different trees/plantation systems have different carbon uptake profiles. There are ways to tune a production forest to have a lot of carbon uptake while allowing you to remove trees for production continuously, even to the extend where managed land is takes up more carbon than unmanaged land. Deserts are technically unmanaged land but they don't store more carbon and similarly a forest will stop being a carbon sink when the trees start decaying or the big trees stop growing while still outcompeting all the smaller, still growing, trees
- sosull 4y ago
  I say this as someone living in Northern Europe in a wooden house: there’s a fairly good reason that the building industry uses brick rather than lumber here. The combination of humidity, temperature, and often densely-packed housing created both a skills base and a supply chain that has, over time, made it needlessly costly to build with lumber. And, a lot of our historic architectural styles prioritise brick, which is a huge pull factor when people are deciding on styles for new buildings.
amelius 4y ago
Isn't all gasoline made of carbon sucked from air?
- Neil44 4y ago
  Reminds me of a little nugget I heard once, that trees grow out of the air not the ground, since they're mostly carbon-y foam which comes from CO2
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    Plants can often be understood as pumps that pull water from the ground to combine with atmospheric CO2 and sunlight to make sugars that they recombine to make more of themselves.
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    Part of Richard Feynman's "Fun to Imagine" series, I think. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    I felt somehow betrayed when I learned that the oxygen trees release comes off the water that's used for photosynthesis, and not the carbon dioxide directly. (Of course, the oxygen in the carbon dioxide ends up in new water molecules in a later step of photosynthesis, and that water either immediately or eventually finds itself in another photosynthesis reaction, so that carbon dioxide oxygen finds itself released into air sooner or later, but still.)
  - hoseja 4y ago
    And when you lose weight it's mainly in the form of exhaled gas.
    - Neil44 4y ago
      I like that a lot! I will remember it next time I’m willing myself not to stop.
hannob 4y ago
It should be noted that this company is backed by major fossil fuel funders and companies, even with connections to some of the dirtiest fossil fuel productions on earth (tar sands): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering While I do think there is a need to develop DAC and e-fuels technologies, everything about Carbon Engineering feels like this is an effort by fossil fuel interests to give the impression of an easy solution that doesn't require too much change.
- danuker 4y ago
  Indeed. For as long as it costs more than fuel, only greenwashers will buy it. This is a red herring distracting you from the fact that oil is subsidized when it should be taxed.
  - pif 4y ago
    > oil is subsidized when it should be taxed. Our economy is based on oil. What you are proposing is an immediate economic collapse of whatever country decides to go that way.
    - danuker 4y ago
      I am not proposing it to be immediate. I am merely asking for a commitment to gradually reduce greenhouse emissions. Thankfully the US rejoined the Paris agreement.
    - flandish 4y ago
      For sure, however… look at the direction of this logic. For fear of an economic change, one is willing to place more burden on the planet and its humans/occupants. Economic change largely means “less profit for corporations” and “more bailout for corps.” The poor are still poor just more poor-er… Which usually translates to: “harder hits for consumers” as under capitalism, the profit is protected more than the people. A good direction, imho, may be to edict (from gov) a directional change with a temporal bound, and financial hit for failing to meet that goal. So: “implement X by date or get fined and shut down.” … ignoring that most nations have allowed corporations inroads to government halls making it virtually impossible to make any real changes that will help the people. We’re screwed without drastic changes, it’s our fault, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.
guerrilla 4y ago
I posted this for a couple of reasons. I'd like to know, why is it still not economical? Has any progress been made? How much progress can be made (like how does this compare to plants? Maybe we're just better off going the algae route or whatever)? In any case, maybe it's just a pipe dream but it would be really convenient if our needs for energy storage (that's how I see this) could be met with something that incentivizes cleaning up the environment. I don't see why it matters that oil companies are involved if they have the resources and power to do this. The fact that they obviously need to be reined in is as far as I can tell entirely orthogonal.
- pif 4y ago
  > why is it still not economical? Entropy and energy. - Entropy: dispersing is easy, collecting is hard. - Energy: burning releases energy, putting it back together requires energy.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    No, this is not a useful or interesting response. We have in many places at many times of the day extreme excesses energy (with free electricity and often negative prices in some regions), especially in places with high winds at night (when industry isn't consuming as much.) In many of these situations, our biggest problem is a lack of energy storage rather than power. There comes a point where the cost in losses becomes low enough, what is that point and what factors are involved.
    - prewett 4y ago
      I think the fact that unburning CO2 requires input of energy is a salient factor. You can get 12 g of carbon for 22.4 L of CO2. 1 L (liquid) of gasoline weighs about 750 g. So to get 1 L of gasoline you will need to process at least 63 L of CO2, and since there are about 400 ppm of CO2 in air (that is, 400 / 1e6 = 0.0004), you will need to process 158,000 L of air for one L of gasoline. Assuming 100% efficiency. A box fan can do 70,000 L of air in a minute, so 26.6 L of gasoline/hr (7.0 gal/hr). At a price of $4/gal, this is $28/hr, if electricity is free, you have 100% efficiency, and you can sell the gasoline for retail prices without transporting it. Obviously, you'll need to scale this up. But how long does this take to recoup your capital investment in the equipment and R&D? And would it be more profitable just to buy some KO/AAPL/BERK/QQQ stock? Or buy some real-estate, or whatever other investment possibilities there are? But is electricity really free? And for how long, in what location? What are the transport costs from that location? If you can only profitably produce 8 hours of the day (e.g. night, as hypothesized), it takes three times as long to pay back your investment. Multiply that by at least 2, since I think 100% efficiency is unlikely (I think 50% is unlikely, too, but I'll be generous). There is also the problem of how do you ensure that you aren't "polluting" the area around your intake with CO2-free air.
reportgunner 4y ago
Sounds funny, kind of recycling emissions - we burn gasoline, put carbon into the air, then we take carbon out and make gasoline that we burn again and the process restarts.
drewcon 4y ago
I get that this isn’t cost competitive on the energy side alone with a barrel of oil, but what about energy PLUS storage cost competitive to solar/wind? Feels like if we didn’t have to invent new batteries but instead just turned excess solar and wind into carbon neutral gas “batteries” that would be a win.
- aaronax 4y ago
  Yes, storage is hugely expensive. A barrel of oil is about 1,700 kWh. If we have an optimistic cost (https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_battery_storage https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_battery_...) of $300 per kWH capacity that is $510,000. Divide by say 5000 cycles that you can get out of a battery: it costs $102 in what is capital depreciation/wear to store one barrel of oil. Of course projections show that reducing to 1/3 of that...eventually.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
It's all about the cost equation - cost of producing this stuff where it's needed, when it's needed. Vs the cost of drilling, hauling, refining, shipping, storing ordinary fuels. Trouble is, we've raised the scale on all those things to the point it's hard to compete with small local carbon-fuel plants. Small will always struggle to complete with huge.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
It's hard to see how 'sucking carbon from the air' will be cheaper than producing it from the much carbon richer renewable waste and bio materials being used elsewhere. "Sustainable Aviation Fuel"/SAF has already dropped to just over twice as expensive as traditional fuel (or less depending on the current price of oil) https://simpleflying.com/saf-cost-competitive-jet-fuel/ https://simpleflying.com/saf-cost-competitive-jet-fuel/
- DennisP 4y ago
  Biofuel isn't just from "waste," it's a significant percentage of our grain production. Making carbon-neutral fuels without agriculture would be a big reduction in our land usage, fertilizer runoff, and pesticide use, all of which are major environmental issues of their own.
  - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    There are no carbon neutral fuels 'with' agriculture. Afaik, no bio-fuel scheme, including ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil, is carbon negative. I might be wrong or out of date, but my last dive into this resulted in an understanding that we'd be better off just using turning the carbons required to grow the things we would eventually turn back into energy and using it. Agriculture as it currently stands globally is a carbon source from an LCA perspective, and that includes biofuels.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      A bio-fuel can not be carbon negative, by definition. At most it can be neutral. And yes, none is neutral either. > my last dive into this resulted in an understanding that we'd be better off just using turning the carbons required to grow the things But this is a huge jump, without subsidizing evidence, and known to be false. Just because the fuel emits carbon, it doesn't mean it emits as much carbon as natural gas. Only corn ethanol fails at this and emits more than the original fuel.
      - 4y ago
black_13 4y ago
[dead]
blamestross 4y ago
Even in the far flung magical fusion driven mckendree cylinder spinning future, we will have gasoline. It will be expensive to make, messy, but it is some of the most shelf stable, energy dense, and human handlable energy storage in existence. The jerrycan will be a tool in the human toolbox forever and this is probably how it will get made.
bilsbie 4y ago
Check out terraform industries if you find this interesting. They just released an interesting white paper detailing a lot of good progress: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-industries-whitepaper-2-0/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo... I think it’s interesting because they’re focusing on the cheapest and easily manufactured technologies instead of efficiency.
tomxor 4y ago
> A carbon price is a cost applied to industries that emit carbon pollution. British Columbia has a carbon price of C$35 a ton, and all of Canada will have a $10 price in September that will rise to C$50 in 2022. Interesting, this is a seemingly proven? way of levelling the temporal playing field. If the future costs of processing and burning oil could be accurately calculated. It could be the case that synthetic fuel is already cost competitive. A tax could attempt to represent that discrepancy. Like a sugar tax or a tobacco tax, for which there are real personal, societal, and ultimately economic costs beyond the sticker price - these costs are accumulated and deferred, so it's hard to intuitively judge for the individual. Taxes against these poor choices help make the cost more intuitive, hypothetically they could even be proportional and immediate if those funds were used to treat those issues though e.g health care spending.
- r0uv3n 4y ago
  IIRC current estimations of a carbon price accurate to the social costs of a ton of CO2 are near US$185 [1]. It is probably unrealistic to assume that such a price is politically achievable within the next 10 years (even if all the income from such a tax is redistributed). Making gas more expensive is really not popular. Another option is emissions trading, where a fixed amount of CO2 certificates are issued over some timespan (with the amount calculated to fit some emissions goal). The price is then determined by the market. Of course this should also lead to high CO2 prices, which will be unpopular, but with proper protections against future changes to the system in place, politicians might be able to absolve themselves of responsibility and more or less put the blame on the market. I think that might make this more politically achievable (especially since possibly the effects on consumer prices might only appear a while after the relevant political decisions are already made). [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05224-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05224-9
- danbolt 4y ago
  > Interesting, this is a seemingly proven? way of levelling the temporal playing field. British Columbia generally uses the Carbon Tax revenue to offset other government revenues (eg: lowering income taxes; a Conservative candidate campaigned on this federally in 2017 [1]), while the federal policy provides a flat rebate to taxpayers. They both attempt to be "neutral" in one way or another. I'm not sure which is better. That said, the Carbon Tax is a bit of a wedge issue (federally) in Canada, as different regions are more suburban and car-dependent than others as well as other provinces historically have produced oil. Your lifestyle and outlook to climate change policy often influences your feelings on the topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Canada_leadership_election#Michael_Chong/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Canada_leadership_election#Michael_Chong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Can...
sobkas 4y ago
Only one question, does it produce more CO2 than it captures?
entropicgravity 4y ago
Even if gasoline was free and didn't cause global warming it would still lose out to electric vehicles. Why? Because of the poisonous gases they exhaust. Almost every one alive has been habituated these gases and think "that's just the way it is." But EV's emit no poisonous gases. With EV's you could make a parking garage that's completely enclosed and heated with no problem. Downtown cores with only EV's will smell like springtime all year long. There is no going back to ICE vehicles in the cities of the world.

49 points by guerrilla 4y ago

jebronie 4y ago

They will get crushed by a newfangled invention called "plants".

ccozan 4y ago
Heh. But good point. What is the most efficient plant that can sequestrate the carbon at the same rate?
- the_sleaze9 4y ago
  Same rate? Well hard to say, but micro algal reactors can get pretty efficient, albeit at high cost - but that's a moot point in this scenario.
roryisok 4y ago
Ah but we need to eat the plants. We can put factories that create fuel out of nothing in the middle of the ocean, where we can't grow corn.

toto444 4y ago

We're in 2023 so my question is : what happened to this since then ? It should be mainstream by now.

alex_duf 4y ago
Here's a wild guess: it probably makes no economical sense in the current context
jorge-d 4y ago
The reason it's not mainstream is most probably that the energy ratio between production and the output is terrible. Also, technically, all hydrocarbons are made from Carbon sucked from the air.
- edhelas 4y ago
  This
- narrator 4y ago
  There are other ways besides biology that hydrocarbons can be produced. Pure water placed between diamond anvils at high temperature and enormous pressure will spontaneously produce hydrocarbons. Titan's atmosphere is mostly hydrocarbons that didn't come from living things. "Diamond dissolution and the production of methane and other carbon-bearing species in hydrothermal diamond-anvil cells" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016703709004785 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00167...
- londons_explore 4y ago
  The energy ratio and cost being terrible doesn't matter for some PR usecases. Imagine being able to sell Formula 1 this fuel so the whole industry can claim to be green and try and try to re-attract young crowds who are turned away by un-greenness? The fuel could cost 100x as much, and it still wouldn't be a big issue.
  - williamscales 4y ago
    Formula 1 is going to move to “sustainable fuel” in 2026, so you’re exactly right
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    "Imagine being able to sell Formula 1 this fuel so the whole industry can claim to be green and try and try to re-attract young crowds who are turned away by un-greenness?" I loled. They could use ground unicorn for fuel, and I still wouldn't be interested.
    - prewett 4y ago
      I'm thinking that the demographic allegedly being turned away for "un-greenness" would be downright appalled at using ground up unicorn for fuel...
wongarsu 4y ago
They state "It costs more than a barrel of oil right now, but in places with a price on carbon of $200 a ton, like what’s enabled through California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, we’re competitive". Today, the carbon price in the European cap-and-trade scheme is $81 per ton, and in California it's $29 per ton. So unless they've greatly improved efficiency, they don't have a profitable market. The EU price is also only that high since about a year ago, two years ago it was about $23 per ton. Even if they were profitable at about $80 per ton, there was little time to scale up production.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  "like what’s enabled through California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, we’re competitive" That is not competitive, that is using government moopoly on violence to artificially raise the price of alternative product... Competition would be done with out government force
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    From a theoretical standpoint you can argue that the "fair" price of fuel would include the costs of any environmental and economical damage done by burning that fuel: the cost of health issues from particulates, the infrastructure costs to deal with sea level rise, the costs from droughts that are worse because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, etc. Just because those happen to somebody else than the person burning the fuel doesn't mean that the costs don't happen. And the best way we currently have to price in those externalities is artificially rising the price of the offending product, to give alternatives a better chance to compete.
  - orra 4y ago
    > that is using government [monopoly] on violence to artificially raise the price of alternative product A less dramatic summary is the government is partially factoring in the negative externalities of carbon, through taxation or minimum pricing. You call that violence, whilst downplaying the very real harm (actual death and destruction) caused by excess carbon in the atmosphere.

manigandham 4y ago

This article is about Carbon Engineering: https://carbonengineering.com/ https://carbonengineering.com/ There's also Prometheus Fuels which is a YC company doing the same thing: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ The science is sound, but whether the process is economically viable remains to be seen.

ramraj07 4y ago
I’ve been mulling entering carbon sequestration space using biochar but what’s mainly stopping me is the fact that no amount of industrialization can even put a dent in how much new carbon is being introduced every year when now in terms of burning newly pumped fossil fuel.
- rswskg 4y ago
  Isn't biochar more a play for soil protection?
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    Given that it’s pretty hard to reclaim carbon from it I’m thinking it’ll be a great way to just bury it and sell carbon sequestration credits (as a more legitimate sister to carbon credits).
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      What's your charring methodology?
    - gdudeman 4y ago
      I believe Charm industrial is using the biochar process, but producing oil and pumping it into the ground. Even in fields, it’s a solid idea. And like you said, it’s recognized as being a very stable store of carbon for a very long time. The trick is getting feedstock nearby so you aren’t pumping tons of CO2 into the air to acquire, move and process it.
4y ago

paganel 4y ago

I had a similar realisation recently when comparing the house building industry in the US to that from here in Europe. Because the US builds most of its residential housing out of wood it means that the Sun does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to "creating" the building materials out of which most of the US residential houses are built. The biggest cost related to energy when it comes to the US residential market is the opportunity cost of not having those trees back in the forrest still producing oxygen, plus the loss of forrest habitat as a result of ever-expending suburbias. Meanwhile, in Europe most of the residential houses are built using cement, concrete and even bricks, all of these activities very energy intensive, you can't rely on the Sun's goodwill as the Americans do. Granted, you don't incur the opportunity costs of having to cut down trees/forests, but I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house. There's also a discussion to be made about costs related to house insulation and the loss of energy, where, I agree, European houses perform much better compared to the US houses made of wood. All in all I think we need to "rediscover" economists like Georgescu-Roegen [1], people who had built almost all of their intellectual careers talking about this sort of stuff. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen

magnuspaaske 4y ago
It's worth noting here that the root system of the tree remains and also that different trees/plantation systems have different carbon uptake profiles. There are ways to tune a production forest to have a lot of carbon uptake while allowing you to remove trees for production continuously, even to the extend where managed land is takes up more carbon than unmanaged land. Deserts are technically unmanaged land but they don't store more carbon and similarly a forest will stop being a carbon sink when the trees start decaying or the big trees stop growing while still outcompeting all the smaller, still growing, trees
sosull 4y ago
I say this as someone living in Northern Europe in a wooden house: there’s a fairly good reason that the building industry uses brick rather than lumber here. The combination of humidity, temperature, and often densely-packed housing created both a skills base and a supply chain that has, over time, made it needlessly costly to build with lumber. And, a lot of our historic architectural styles prioritise brick, which is a huge pull factor when people are deciding on styles for new buildings.

amelius 4y ago

Isn't all gasoline made of carbon sucked from air?

Neil44 4y ago
Reminds me of a little nugget I heard once, that trees grow out of the air not the ground, since they're mostly carbon-y foam which comes from CO2
- dsr_ 4y ago
  Plants can often be understood as pumps that pull water from the ground to combine with atmospheric CO2 and sunlight to make sugars that they recombine to make more of themselves.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Part of Richard Feynman's "Fun to Imagine" series, I think. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA
- saalweachter 4y ago
  I felt somehow betrayed when I learned that the oxygen trees release comes off the water that's used for photosynthesis, and not the carbon dioxide directly. (Of course, the oxygen in the carbon dioxide ends up in new water molecules in a later step of photosynthesis, and that water either immediately or eventually finds itself in another photosynthesis reaction, so that carbon dioxide oxygen finds itself released into air sooner or later, but still.)
- hoseja 4y ago
  And when you lose weight it's mainly in the form of exhaled gas.
  - Neil44 4y ago
    I like that a lot! I will remember it next time I’m willing myself not to stop.

hannob 4y ago

It should be noted that this company is backed by major fossil fuel funders and companies, even with connections to some of the dirtiest fossil fuel productions on earth (tar sands): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering While I do think there is a need to develop DAC and e-fuels technologies, everything about Carbon Engineering feels like this is an effort by fossil fuel interests to give the impression of an easy solution that doesn't require too much change.

danuker 4y ago
Indeed. For as long as it costs more than fuel, only greenwashers will buy it. This is a red herring distracting you from the fact that oil is subsidized when it should be taxed.
- pif 4y ago
  > oil is subsidized when it should be taxed. Our economy is based on oil. What you are proposing is an immediate economic collapse of whatever country decides to go that way.
  - danuker 4y ago
    I am not proposing it to be immediate. I am merely asking for a commitment to gradually reduce greenhouse emissions. Thankfully the US rejoined the Paris agreement.
  - flandish 4y ago
    For sure, however… look at the direction of this logic. For fear of an economic change, one is willing to place more burden on the planet and its humans/occupants. Economic change largely means “less profit for corporations” and “more bailout for corps.” The poor are still poor just more poor-er… Which usually translates to: “harder hits for consumers” as under capitalism, the profit is protected more than the people. A good direction, imho, may be to edict (from gov) a directional change with a temporal bound, and financial hit for failing to meet that goal. So: “implement X by date or get fined and shut down.” … ignoring that most nations have allowed corporations inroads to government halls making it virtually impossible to make any real changes that will help the people. We’re screwed without drastic changes, it’s our fault, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.

guerrilla 4y ago

I posted this for a couple of reasons. I'd like to know, why is it still not economical? Has any progress been made? How much progress can be made (like how does this compare to plants? Maybe we're just better off going the algae route or whatever)? In any case, maybe it's just a pipe dream but it would be really convenient if our needs for energy storage (that's how I see this) could be met with something that incentivizes cleaning up the environment. I don't see why it matters that oil companies are involved if they have the resources and power to do this. The fact that they obviously need to be reined in is as far as I can tell entirely orthogonal.

pif 4y ago
> why is it still not economical? Entropy and energy. - Entropy: dispersing is easy, collecting is hard. - Energy: burning releases energy, putting it back together requires energy.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  No, this is not a useful or interesting response. We have in many places at many times of the day extreme excesses energy (with free electricity and often negative prices in some regions), especially in places with high winds at night (when industry isn't consuming as much.) In many of these situations, our biggest problem is a lack of energy storage rather than power. There comes a point where the cost in losses becomes low enough, what is that point and what factors are involved.
  - prewett 4y ago
    I think the fact that unburning CO2 requires input of energy is a salient factor. You can get 12 g of carbon for 22.4 L of CO2. 1 L (liquid) of gasoline weighs about 750 g. So to get 1 L of gasoline you will need to process at least 63 L of CO2, and since there are about 400 ppm of CO2 in air (that is, 400 / 1e6 = 0.0004), you will need to process 158,000 L of air for one L of gasoline. Assuming 100% efficiency. A box fan can do 70,000 L of air in a minute, so 26.6 L of gasoline/hr (7.0 gal/hr). At a price of $4/gal, this is $28/hr, if electricity is free, you have 100% efficiency, and you can sell the gasoline for retail prices without transporting it. Obviously, you'll need to scale this up. But how long does this take to recoup your capital investment in the equipment and R&D? And would it be more profitable just to buy some KO/AAPL/BERK/QQQ stock? Or buy some real-estate, or whatever other investment possibilities there are? But is electricity really free? And for how long, in what location? What are the transport costs from that location? If you can only profitably produce 8 hours of the day (e.g. night, as hypothesized), it takes three times as long to pay back your investment. Multiply that by at least 2, since I think 100% efficiency is unlikely (I think 50% is unlikely, too, but I'll be generous). There is also the problem of how do you ensure that you aren't "polluting" the area around your intake with CO2-free air.

reportgunner 4y ago

Sounds funny, kind of recycling emissions - we burn gasoline, put carbon into the air, then we take carbon out and make gasoline that we burn again and the process restarts.

drewcon 4y ago

I get that this isn’t cost competitive on the energy side alone with a barrel of oil, but what about energy PLUS storage cost competitive to solar/wind? Feels like if we didn’t have to invent new batteries but instead just turned excess solar and wind into carbon neutral gas “batteries” that would be a win.

aaronax 4y ago
Yes, storage is hugely expensive. A barrel of oil is about 1,700 kWh. If we have an optimistic cost (https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_battery_storage https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_battery_...) of $300 per kWH capacity that is $510,000. Divide by say 5000 cycles that you can get out of a battery: it costs $102 in what is capital depreciation/wear to store one barrel of oil. Of course projections show that reducing to 1/3 of that...eventually.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

It's all about the cost equation - cost of producing this stuff where it's needed, when it's needed. Vs the cost of drilling, hauling, refining, shipping, storing ordinary fuels. Trouble is, we've raised the scale on all those things to the point it's hard to compete with small local carbon-fuel plants. Small will always struggle to complete with huge.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

It's hard to see how 'sucking carbon from the air' will be cheaper than producing it from the much carbon richer renewable waste and bio materials being used elsewhere. "Sustainable Aviation Fuel"/SAF has already dropped to just over twice as expensive as traditional fuel (or less depending on the current price of oil) https://simpleflying.com/saf-cost-competitive-jet-fuel/ https://simpleflying.com/saf-cost-competitive-jet-fuel/

DennisP 4y ago
Biofuel isn't just from "waste," it's a significant percentage of our grain production. Making carbon-neutral fuels without agriculture would be a big reduction in our land usage, fertilizer runoff, and pesticide use, all of which are major environmental issues of their own.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  There are no carbon neutral fuels 'with' agriculture. Afaik, no bio-fuel scheme, including ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil, is carbon negative. I might be wrong or out of date, but my last dive into this resulted in an understanding that we'd be better off just using turning the carbons required to grow the things we would eventually turn back into energy and using it. Agriculture as it currently stands globally is a carbon source from an LCA perspective, and that includes biofuels.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    A bio-fuel can not be carbon negative, by definition. At most it can be neutral. And yes, none is neutral either. > my last dive into this resulted in an understanding that we'd be better off just using turning the carbons required to grow the things But this is a huge jump, without subsidizing evidence, and known to be false. Just because the fuel emits carbon, it doesn't mean it emits as much carbon as natural gas. Only corn ethanol fails at this and emits more than the original fuel.
    - 4y ago

black_13 4y ago

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blamestross 4y ago

Even in the far flung magical fusion driven mckendree cylinder spinning future, we will have gasoline. It will be expensive to make, messy, but it is some of the most shelf stable, energy dense, and human handlable energy storage in existence. The jerrycan will be a tool in the human toolbox forever and this is probably how it will get made.

bilsbie 4y ago

Check out terraform industries if you find this interesting. They just released an interesting white paper detailing a lot of good progress: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-industries-whitepaper-2-0/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo... I think it’s interesting because they’re focusing on the cheapest and easily manufactured technologies instead of efficiency.

tomxor 4y ago

> A carbon price is a cost applied to industries that emit carbon pollution. British Columbia has a carbon price of C$35 a ton, and all of Canada will have a $10 price in September that will rise to C$50 in 2022. Interesting, this is a seemingly proven? way of levelling the temporal playing field. If the future costs of processing and burning oil could be accurately calculated. It could be the case that synthetic fuel is already cost competitive. A tax could attempt to represent that discrepancy. Like a sugar tax or a tobacco tax, for which there are real personal, societal, and ultimately economic costs beyond the sticker price - these costs are accumulated and deferred, so it's hard to intuitively judge for the individual. Taxes against these poor choices help make the cost more intuitive, hypothetically they could even be proportional and immediate if those funds were used to treat those issues though e.g health care spending.

r0uv3n 4y ago
IIRC current estimations of a carbon price accurate to the social costs of a ton of CO2 are near US$185 [1]. It is probably unrealistic to assume that such a price is politically achievable within the next 10 years (even if all the income from such a tax is redistributed). Making gas more expensive is really not popular. Another option is emissions trading, where a fixed amount of CO2 certificates are issued over some timespan (with the amount calculated to fit some emissions goal). The price is then determined by the market. Of course this should also lead to high CO2 prices, which will be unpopular, but with proper protections against future changes to the system in place, politicians might be able to absolve themselves of responsibility and more or less put the blame on the market. I think that might make this more politically achievable (especially since possibly the effects on consumer prices might only appear a while after the relevant political decisions are already made). [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05224-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05224-9
danbolt 4y ago
> Interesting, this is a seemingly proven? way of levelling the temporal playing field. British Columbia generally uses the Carbon Tax revenue to offset other government revenues (eg: lowering income taxes; a Conservative candidate campaigned on this federally in 2017 [1]), while the federal policy provides a flat rebate to taxpayers. They both attempt to be "neutral" in one way or another. I'm not sure which is better. That said, the Carbon Tax is a bit of a wedge issue (federally) in Canada, as different regions are more suburban and car-dependent than others as well as other provinces historically have produced oil. Your lifestyle and outlook to climate change policy often influences your feelings on the topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Canada_leadership_election#Michael_Chong/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Canada_leadership_election#Michael_Chong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Can...

sobkas 4y ago

Only one question, does it produce more CO2 than it captures?

entropicgravity 4y ago

Even if gasoline was free and didn't cause global warming it would still lose out to electric vehicles. Why? Because of the poisonous gases they exhaust. Almost every one alive has been habituated these gases and think "that's just the way it is." But EV's emit no poisonous gases. With EV's you could make a parking garage that's completely enclosed and heated with no problem. Downtown cores with only EV's will smell like springtime all year long. There is no going back to ICE vehicles in the cities of the world.