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Facing brutal climate math, US bets billions on direct air capture
- civilized 4y agoIt seems like the discussion of carbon capture at the source of emission has gone down and discussion of this has gone up. Why is that?
- slackfan 4y agoMore money to be made from government contract bidding.
- catchnear4321 4y agoCapture at the source is a product. Maybe with a maintenance contract. Capture elsewhere is a service. Possibly a public service. The financial math is different.
- jakear 4y agoAs with everything else, production happens in china consumption happens in USA. The system works.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoBecause most sources of CO2/GHG have alternatives powered by renewable electricity that are cheaper than the old way which involves generating than capturing the CO2. e.g. burn gas to generate electricity and capture CO2, or just use renewables. burn gas to heat things, or just use renewables and heat pumps Still good to capture unavoidable ones like methane from pre-existing coal mines, wells and landfills.
- hraedon 4y agoCoal plants aren't profitable to run if they're required to retrofit for carbon capture, not many new coal plants are going to be built in countries that care about climate change (so requiring CCS on new builds has minimal utility), and there are a lot of political obstacles to shutting existing plants down or mandating these sorts of improvements. Given those constraints, centralized capture is at least a plausible option that doesn't involve starting big fights with entrenched interests in coal-reliant states. Is it more efficient or more likely to work than direct capture? No. It is, however, politically possible and worth exploring.
- Paul-Craft 4y agoBecause "we can just capture carbon from the air" is a narrative that makes it sound like we don't have to sacrifice any part of our lifestyle to accomplish the goal of mitigating climate change. It's propaganda, pure and simple.
- mrguyorama 4y agoEssentially, the people in US politics who are willing to act on climate change are an extreme minority, regardless of what americans in general want. Go ahead and try to make a law that makes coal less profitable without Manchin's support. If you have a problem with that, welcome to the club. Unfortunately, if you want to change the game to make it such that it's easier to do the right thing, you ALSO have to get Manchin's support. In fact, to do some things would require the other party's support as well, and their SOP is to kill anything you push for, and has been since 2012.
- slashdev 4y agoHow about we stop burning coal first. That’s not unproven and is much effective. This is just silliness.
- catchnear4321 4y agoWhere is the money in that?
- peteradio 4y agoHow bout stop flying. It's easy to take away other peoples needs and wants.
- slashdev 4y agoThere are alternatives to coal.
- cies 4y agoThere are alternatives to anything.
- yoyohello13 4y agoWith the cost of flights these days, I've already stopped.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drekk 4y agoChina implemented a nationwide high speed rail network while California debated maybe building a segment. It's possible to satisfy transit (and other) needs in a way that sustains growth and scales efficiently. Building more parking lots and highways doesn't really scale; Americans have so many domestic flights as a result. Of course, if the goal is to profit from moving people around you get perverse rent-seeking and $15 cling wrap turkey sandwiches in a CIBO kiosk. I would argue moving people around easily and efficiently is intrinsically good the same way building a well-utilized library is. The US has an incredibly successful geography that it has strategically not fully tapped. I'm just spitballing here but sending 70% of domestic freight via trucks is excremental. Having transit routes that run slower today than they did in the 20th century is unacceptable. Complete and utter lack of imagination or political willpower
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoThis smells a lot like pork barrel spending.
- catchnear4321 4y agoThat’s because the mammoth facility image is just a render. You should stop smelling it once the facility is online. By the way, let’s talk payment plans…
- WakoMan12 4y ago[dead]
- waynenilsen 4y agoEnergy production, distribution and storage seem to be much more pressing issues. This seems like a misallocation of resources from outside. I wonder how spending money on this can be justified in the presence of the current energy mix.
- Faaak 4y agoFollowing [0], L-DAC (liquid direct air capture) consumes 6GJ/tCO₂. That's 600g CO₂/kWh of electricity. A bit more than what I though. It would be interesting to see the global lifecycle analysis though; I'm interested to know if it even breaks even [0]: https://www.iea.org/reports/direct-air-capture https://www.iea.org/reports/direct-air-capture
- peteradio 4y agoHas anyone done the math to see if this technology is ever going to be feasible? It seems really hard (best plant to date does 4000 tonnes/year) and you can't cheat physics.
- Zigurd 4y agoIt could be a stalking horse for geoengineering: "Carbon capture numbers don't work, but iron in the seas, etc. is much cheaper."
- adrianmonk 4y agoI'm perfectly fine with it as long as we don't count on it working or let up on the things we know will work. Many times when I've had a difficult problem and haven't been able to gain much ground against it, the point when I started to see success was when I started to attack it from every angle I could think of. Not one after another, but all at once. Part of that is about figuring out what works, but it's also about the combined effect of everything. (And I'm sure part of it was that it was the same moment when I decided to get serious.) If this is that, then I support it. If this is an excuse not to do the other things, then obviously I don't.
- criddell 4y agoWhat are the things we know will work? If it hurts business or can be framed as a left vs right issue in any way, it has no chance of making any progress in the near future. US politics would need to be fixed first. While we wait for the public to become more rational and for politicians to focus less on themselves and more on serving, we might as well throw a little money at stuff like carbon capture.
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoI've said it before, and I'll say it again, our best climate outcomes from the IPCC all rely on DAC; a tech still in it's infancy, deployed to a wider extent than any other technology we've ever developed. This will fail. Our world will keep getting hotter and we'll resort to stratospheric sulfide injection as a temporary stopgap, but that will have consequences.
- throw_away1525 4y ago%s/tech/magick
- johnchristopher 4y agoPoliticians and leaders are betting on tech solutions because no one is ready or willing to implement massive reduction in CO2 production and bear the societal consequences. Once we get to sulfide injection we'll just factor it into acceptable levels of CO2 production, to keep things running until nothing can be done about adapting to climate change anymore. If anything, Covid convinced me that's the kind of scenario to expect. Of course I hope for something else but better be prepared for the worst.
- Cardinal7167 4y agoIronically enough Covid showed us how fast emissions could be curbed and how quickly nature started to reclaim space when it was given room to breathe. The canals in Venice flowed clear for the first time in decades, air quality the world over improved drastically, etc… we all saw it, and nobody gave a fuck. Everyone is too concerned with their bottom dollar and it’s gonna be too late to change once the collapse starts.
- gtop3 4y agoWe're on the path for stratospheric sulfide injection to be the utilitarian choice, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Effective Altruism groups discussing it as a very cost effective way to save lives in 30 years. The primary effects are relatively short lived (a few decades) and fast-acting (months). It will reduce global temperatures. Sulfide is cheap, the cost is mostly in fighting gravity. It probably won't happen until there is a stronger narrative around human life lost due to climate change. A bad summer with lots of catastrophes hitting the front page. The global political environment is setup so a non-superpower might act alone or with few allies. While it sounds great on paper, the secondary order effects will last longer than primary and are very hard to quantify. It's clearly 10x-1000x cheaper to cut CO2 emissions now than to try to block out the sun with geoclimate engineering in a few decades.
- juujian 4y agoThis is so incredibly dump, I think I am getting an aneurysm. Producing coal energy is already more expensive than renewables, now they are burning coal and then capturing that CO2 elsewhere? And in a manor that is less efficient than simply growing trees or plants? All while cutting down trees and sacrificing more and more green space to suburbs? Am I missing anything, or is that the extent of the idiocy? Idiocracy?
- krunck 4y agoWhat are you missing? Capitalism. People need to reap massive profits saving the world or die trying. Our so-called leaders are in on it too.
- consumer451 4y ago> I think I am getting an aneurysm. Changes in temperature affect the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25350929/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25350929/
- johnea 4y agowhat bullshit...
- dadjoker 4y agoWow, that is supposedly a straight news article?
- dauertewigkeit 4y agoWhy don't we just build DAC plants in the middle of nowhere, where energy is super cheap? Like we can use geothermal in places were no human civilization exists, or solar in otherwise barren desserts. Yes it is still going to be expensive, but DAC can be done anywhere on the globe, so why not take advantage of this and seek places with very cheap energy sources?
- goda90 4y agoTotally autonomous systems are extra work. Putting it where there are qualified workers to run and maintain the system is easier and creates jobs.
- jefftk 4y agoYes: start with experimental systems where people are, and then at some point when the tech is mature and really optimizing for costs you get into moving it out for cheap land and power.
- rayiner 4y agoDirect air capture should be a Manhattan Project. We should spend a trillion dollars on it like we did with the atom bomb. Preaching climate piety is not going to work. The world is not going to conservation its way to mitigating climate change, not when there are billions of people in China, India, and Africa who dream of living like people in Texas.
- Paul-Craft 4y ago> not when there are billions of people in China, India, and Africa who dream of living like people in Texas. You've got that right, but the solution isn't to dump money into DAC. It's to convince people in Texas that they need to be living more like people in China, India, and Africa. But it's not politically feasible to tell people they have to make sacrifices.
- JamesBarney 4y ago"We should to convince a bunch of people we are certain are unconvinceable" doesn't really sound like a solution to me at all.
- Paul-Craft 4y agoIt doesn't matter what it sounds like. It's literally the only solution. Western standards of living will, and must decline over the next several decades, either to mitigate climate change or because we've just made it so much worse.
- JamesBarney 4y agoI don't know what makes you think that's the only solution? You're not going to convince 7 billion people to live like the Amish. We're more likely to colonize another world than for that to happen.
- Paul-Craft 4y ago
- outside1234 4y agoOr we could just ban gigantic pickup trucks and SUVs. But no, let's build magic air capture BS
- yourusername 4y agoAll of transportation is only 27% of CO2 emissions. Personal SUVs and trucks can't possible be more than a few percent. Banning them will at best buy us a year or so if you can get the entire world on board.
- Paul-Craft 4y agoCorrection: It will buy us a year or so, if we can get the entire world on board, and immediately take all those vehicles off the road. Any policy that lets people keep driving their gas guzzlers just doesn't do enough.
- goda90 4y agoAre there any valuable economic outputs of direct air capture? Things like growing trees and soil can augment the output of existing industries. For example, plant tree > tree captures carbon > cut down tree and use wood for durable goods and structures. It captures carbon in a profitable way. Likewise, growing the soil can improve farm yields and reduce reliance on chemical inputs.
- burkaman 4y agoThere are some ideas for using the captured CO2, but they're all pretty early and unproven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Application...
- bryanlarsen 4y agoSome DAC startups (like terraformindustries.com) believe it is economically viable to produce methane / natural gas from air captured CO2. They obviously cannot take credit for CO2 reduction, but can sell the methane as carbon-neutral. Another potentially useful product besides the two you already mentioned is plastic.
- Aperocky 4y agoIt should be like recharging a battery. in this case, CO2 -> gas would be most useful. That gas will turn to CO2 again, but the benefit is we don't have to drill for it, which will introduce more carbon into the atmosphere.
- throw_away1525 4y agoDAC makes no sense from an energy accounting perspective. Simple argument: DAC requires energy. In some places, that energy is stranded. Think of the DAC plant in Iceland using geothermal. Fine. In that case, DAC makes a meaningful contribution. If the energy used for DAC is not stranded and could instead be used to offset fossil fuels, it would be far better to offset the fossil fuel use. This is trivially proven true when you consider the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Better to prevent the entropy increase from adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the first place. Therefore, attempting to use DAC to mitigate climate change while fossil fuels are still being burned is pointless. If you can build the energy infrastructure you will need to power DAC, you would be far better off just using it to offset and eliminate fossil fuel use. Once you have eliminated the use of fossil fuels, sure, DAC makes sense. But the idea that DAC will save or even help us without complete decarbonization as a prerequisite is just nonsense in my opinion.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoI don't think any of the realistic models have DAC providing a significant percentage of the carbon reduction. For example, 99% of the reduction from green electrification, and 1% from DAC. DAC is still in the research phase, and is probably a decade a way from widespread use. Solar power, wind power and electric transportation are already well into the production phase and are happening today.
- tzs 4y agoThe atmosphere does a pretty good job of mixing, with the CO2 concentration uniform to within +/- 1% around most of the world so if there are enough places with stranded energy just building DAC plants there could help the whole world. If there aren't enough places with stranded energy maybe we can make more. All that takes is installing more solar in some place than there is infrastructure to transport the electricity out. That excess is stranded. The amount of energy available for solar is insane. To illustrate how ridiculously abundant solar power if you wanted to build a solar farm whose output during the day matched the power use of the entire world you'd only need about 500 000 km^2 worth of panels. At night the power falls to near zero, but so what? If all it is doing is running a DAC plant it doesn't need to run overnight. I'm sure there are hundreds of places around the world with good daytime sunlight, enough room for a DAC plant and a solar farm to power it, and limited grid infrastructure.
- MilStdJunkie 4y agoCan anyone explain, how, exactly, DAC stores more carbon than it uses? Even if you turn the entire SW region into solar panels to power a gigantic DAC factory, the opportunity cost of not wiring that same titanic generation into the grid vastly, vastly outscales the gains you get from burying carbon. L1 orbital mirrors, that's the ticket. Reversible, adjustable, no sloppy gas exchange problems like with the particulates.
- syngrog66 4y agoThis reminds me again that the carbon climate crisis is tangled up with democracy itself and cannot be separated. Our best chance to do the massive changes needed requires national gov level buy-in by all the world's biggest nations. Which requires a sane party to be dominant in each of them, controlling the levers. And that means we need to ensure enough voter buy-in to put them in those seats. As much as one would love to avoid politics its become impossible now to remain on the sidelines if you truly want to save our future. Our lives, and those of all our children and grandchildren are clearly at stake.
- jnmandal 4y agoThis is a complete waste of time and resources. There are many, many more ideas that are essentially "low hanging fruit" which could be implemented today. Government is kicking the can by throwing excessive cash at an issue because its perceived as an easier sell that wont require reforms that hurt powerful interests.
- Proven 4y ago[dead]
- voisin 4y agoSome low-hanging fruit: - Regulate away the ability for utilities to implement policies that discourage solar. Legislate maximum PTO approvals. - Standardize the payback for Solar so that net credits at the end of the year are compensated in a manner that is predictable. Predictability will bring way more investment.
- RecycledEle 4y agoIf climate change were going to cause sea levels to rise, Al Gore would not have bought an ocean-front house, and banks would not be giving 30+ year mortgages on ocean-front real estate. So either climate change is not real, or it is not causing sea levels to rise.
- revelio 4y agoAs one of HN's resident climate doomerism skeptics, here is what's what: 1. Climate change is genuinely real. Some of it is probably human caused. That isn't likely to be a problem though as the climate has always changed, including in relatively recent history; i.e. it's not the case that the climate is stable if not for fossil fuels, and the evidence that this change is serious is of garbage quality. It's not serious and could easily go into reverse in the coming years even without any changes in human behavior. Additionally the assumption that change will continue in one direction forever is wrong, as is the assumption of exponential feedback loops. 2. Sea levels are genuinely rising. However they are rising very slowly, by tiny amounts, and this rise is so small it can be easily be offset by other factors like the land rising. This is why the Pacific islands have been growing over time instead of sinking, as we were assured for decades was a 100% dead cert outcome of climate change. The key theme here is that whilst underlying changes may be real, the size, extent, confidence and expected duration are all exaggerated to the level that the conclusions become merely fashionable doomerism. And deep down people know it, hence why all the most vocal doomers act like they don't believe it: Al Gore buys ocean front property, climatologists fly around the world to international conferences at a greater rate than many other fields, the Pacific islanders build tourist resorts on the beaches, Greta Thunberg takes a boat across the Atlantic but the crew takes flights, etc.
- greggyb 4y agoYou know what's really good at direct air capture of carbon? Trees. And other plants. The cellulose structure of plants is very carbon-heavy. This carbon comes primarily from the air. Wood used in construction lasts at least decades longer than the time it took to grow the tree. Timber framed construction can stand for centuries. Any organic matter can also pyrolyze: the release of volatile, flammable organic compounds when exposed to heat. If pyrolysis occurs in the absence of oxygen, the carbon does not burn. The gases can be burned very cleanly. The carbon is very stable and also forms the basis of excellent soil amendments (think fertilizer). When used as a soil amendment, it is often called biochar, but it is the same thing as charcoal. It is stable for centuries to small millenia in the soil. When used as a soil amendment, the carbon is not pulled into the growing plant life. Remember, plants get their carbon from the air. 1. Plant fast-growing stuff. Some trees are ridiculously fast, but bamboo probably wins for growth speed. 2. Create biochar (use the heat for something useful) 3. Bury biochar (actually mix with compost or some other carrier, don't just plant lumps of charcoal) 4. Plants grow faster