15 ms·
Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
- nahnahg 3y ago[dead]
- thx-2718 3y ago"Our plants require less land than other techniques. E.g., on a land area of 0.42 acres, our Orca plant can remove 4,000 tons of CO₂ from the air every year, which is almost 1,000 times more effective than trees. The same land would host around 220 trees with an estimated capacity of 22kg each" How much land, in solar panels for example, is required to power this? Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it?
- themanmaran 3y ago> Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it? I've wondered the same about these carbon capture plants. Is this literally just elemental carbon in some kind of dust/sand at the end of the day? Could this be a raw material input for carbon fiber production?
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoElemental carbon is a valuable industrial material -- and even low-quality carbon, like "carbon black" soot, ain't cheap! Nah, separating carbon from oxygen in CO2 and CO is too expensive and energetically demanding. To simplify things a little bit, what they do here is inject CO2 into water at high pressure, which results in highly acidic H2CO3. They then pump H2CO3 into basalt rock, which chemically reacts with the acid -- in fact, it is partially dissolved. Then there's a second stage reaction between the partially-dissolved basalt and the remnant HCO3-, and it recrystallizes as carbonate minerals, e.g. FeCO3 or CaCO3. So they're turning CO2 into a liquid acid, and then injecting it into rock where it reacts with basalt and crystallizes as carbonates.
- themanmaran 3y agoGreat explanation that I've never seen on any of these carbon capture sites. Thanks.
- shipman05 3y ago> How much land, in solar panels for example, is required to power this? It says "The CO₂ can then be safely and permanently stored underground by our storage partners — Carbfix in Iceland." So my assumption was that the collectors are located there as well and using Iceland's abundant geothermal electricity.
- usrusr 3y agoIn other words: it definitely will not scale.
- hef19898 3y agoBut it looks good on a pitch deck. I just wonder if it cannot be combined with those particle emitting start-up that wantsbto creat artifical clouds. Both ideas sound like they are ment to be combined in the same company just before an ICO or a SPAC.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoI remember watching something about Carbfix on TV: they inject the CO2 into underground magma and it is then incorporated in the rock formation (carbonate rocks?) So, yes, it would make sense to use local geothermal electricity or even to produce it at the same time as the CO2 injection process if that's possible.
- nabla9 3y ago>The energy usage: We're committed to driving down energy consumption as much as possible. We only use renewable energy, energy-from-waste, or other waste heat to power our plants. They make it impossible to do the math. Energy consumption, lifetime capital cost per ton, are what make or break this scheme.
- hef19898 3y agoUnit economics are so unsexy, they died with e-scooter rentals and fresh food deliveries.
- candiddevmike 3y agoHow much carbon is produced by the transportation and storage of the carbon that is captured? I want to see their carbon math for the whole process (including electricity) to prove this is all truly carbon neutral, seems like something that should be front and center on their website but they only vaguely discuss the carbon footprint of the plants. Having a business saying their product is carbon negative when the actual end to end process isn't seems par for the course, especially one with VC backing...
- thinkcontext 3y agoThere is no transportation, they site the plant where they are going to store it. That's one of the advantages of capturing from the atmosphere.
- usrusr 3y agoAnd the land for the solar panels that substitute the energy you'd harvest from the trees while turning them into highly concentrated CO2 for storage. And the land for the batteries you'd have to add to achieve the same dispatchability as the burn trees (or faster-growing plants!) and work on that CO2 alternative. DAC is a joke.
- Mizza 3y agoFor context, 4000 tons of CO2 is roughly the emissions of a full 777 flying from San Francisco to London and back twice.
- pilaf 3y agoThat doesn't sound right, 4000 tons is more than 10 times the maximum takeoff weight of a 777.
- jackweirdy 3y agoIt looks about right to me (I used https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/ https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/) It’s about 850 US tons per full leg * 4 legs to make up the two round trips (388 pax in a -300ER)
- alhw 3y agoJet fuel is comprised mostly of hydrocarbons with 8 to 16 C atoms, and a large fraction of these hydrocarbons are straight-chain alkanes. Combustion of dodecane (a C12 straight-chain alkane) makes 12 CO2 molecules. A 747 jet consumes about 4 L of jet fuel per second when in flight. Based on the density and molecular weight of dodecane and the stoichiometry of its combustion reaction, you'd arrive at something like 0.01 ton of CO2 emitted per second of flight time. 4000 tons is a good estimate. Back of the envelope...
- mabbo 3y agoAh, so you're saying (if I'm reading this correctly) that the plane only carries the carbon portion of the CO2, and the oxygen comes from the air itself. That's how it's emitting more CO2 then it's fuel mass. Is that right?
- Tuxer 3y agoCorrect. Fuel is around 16/36th of the CO2 mass it emit when being burnt. A 777 carries around 120 tons of fuel for a SF/LON flight, so that's around 300 tons of emissions per flight.
- yodelshady 3y agoIt's such an easy, relevant question to ask that it boggles the mind that investors don't have their own engineers to ask it. I know you're money people not tech, but how do you know you're not being ripped off if you can't check figures that basic? Anyway, apparently 3 MWh/tonne is a not-unrealistic claim, so they're only demanding 1.5 MW (on average, though if solar-powered it would make sense to oversize) and a km2 of solar panels could reasonably generate 50-100 MW on average (this is conservative for most places, though not for Iceland). A km2 of tress, by their calculations, gets 1,000 tonnes, so DAC comes out ahead, although you're right to observe that trees do have a synergistic use for the carbon they capture.
- jackmott42 3y agoWelcome to planet Earth. If you can do napkin math, and bother to do it, you can be an extremely successful in engineering domains, because almost everyone else is completely useless.
- maigret 3y agoNapkin math is an underestimated skill indeed.
- hef19898 3y agoEarly investors, it seems, don't care. All they care about is whether or not they can sell their shares to some greater idiot down the line. Heck, those money people don't even care about money questions. Examples of non-existing due dilligence include: WeWork, Theranos, Nikola, FTX. Just from top of my head.
- z3t4 3y agoPlants/trees waste product is oxygen. And plants only need water and sun. Plants can also reproduce themselves. What we should concentrate on is to make artificial systems that get water to areas where it doesn't rain.
- mchannon 3y ago1000 kWh/ton (found it on google): 166 kW/ton in a sunny place: 1000 square meters/ton in a sunny place: 4 million square meters = ~1000 acres of PV to power. One unit. Yeah, that’s going to happen. /s “We’re too ashamed of our energy requirements to post them on our page and are well aware they’re dooming this technology until cold fusion comes out” is what I read between the lines on their fluff page.
- stavros 3y ago1000 kWh/ton to sequester, and how many tons per kWh to generate? EDIT: Apparently, one ton of CO2 is released by 1000 kWh of electricity: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 So you have a coal plant generating energy and emitting CO2 just for this factory next to it to capture all that CO2 again. Seems more efficient to just not run the coal factory. It seems like this idea will be worthwhile when the last coal factory closes.
- cogman10 3y agoIt'll always be more efficient not to emit carbon. Imagine you have a teaspoon of salt and a cup of water. Adding salt into the water is dead simple and requires little energy. Now how hard is it to remove that teaspoon of salt? That's effectively what's happening with the atmosphere.
- wolfram74 3y agotwo comments: they claim to sequester 1000 tons (1e6 kg) vs 22kg, so the sequestration space difference is on the order of 200000 difference. They may include the solar panel area in their stated efficiency calculation. Secondly, the solar panels are a bit more liquid than a comparable area of trees, when industrial demand is high, you can route it there, when it's low, it can be working on sequestration. There are some advantages there. Especially considering the atmosphere is fairly homogeneous, but soil in proper condition for forests is less so.
- adammarples 3y agoTheir plant is in Iceland and runs on geothermal
- jvanderbot 3y agoA better use of CO2 is generating fuel, I suggest. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/
- hef19898 3y ago4000 tons of CO2 removal per year is at best a proof of concept. If it was one of the industrial giants, with the muscle and budget to scale it and the sales channels to sell it, I would be more optimistic about that. But than I became so jaded regarding start-ups, especially "ddep" tech ones, lately that I tend to see even more negatively than I already do in general.
- tenthirtyam 3y agoUmmm, seems to me that 0.42 acres of trees would sequester a lot more that 22kg of CO2 per year. Let me guesstimate from my typical annual hedge clipping - we have a (appx) 1.5m wide hedge that is (appx) 120m long equal to (appx.) 180m^2=0.044 acres. The annual clipping produces 10 hefty bags (the big bags used to carry e.g. 1 ton of gravel or stones), so maybe a total of 300-400kg for my hedge. Multiply by ten for 0.42 acres, yields about 3000-4000kg. Sanity check anyone?
- silisili 3y agoUnless it was edited...that sentence says 22kg per year each. So it's 22*220.
- haizhung 3y agoThe way I see it is that we are way beyond all reasonable bounds already, concerning co2 ppm in the air. Even if we stop all emissions this very moment, there’s still way too much already in the atmosphere. So, we are going to need co2 removal either way if there shall be any hope of ever returning to a world climate similar to before 1980. I am no expert in the field, but this is an area that at least gives me some positive outlook on the future. I could imagine, for example, that we start over provisioning electricity with renewables; and instead of scaling them down when there is no energy demand, we will redirect the superfluous energy into carbon capture.
- justinzollars 3y ago[flagged]
- nforgerit 3y agoSuperfluous renewable energy already has to go to hydrolysis to produce hydrogen to be saved for times whenever renewables don't produce energy.
- boringg 3y agoActually battery storage and stored hydro work. As does long duration battery storage options that are in the works now.
- Sinidir 3y agoThey don't work nearly as well enough or in the case of hydro storage are available in enough quantity to cover a month of weak wind. For example. The US would consume its entirety of pumped hydro storage in a third of a day.
- oezi 3y agoSuperfluous energy should go to the consumer which otherwise would consume the most CO2. We do not need to use hydrogen when renewables aren't available (if such a situation should arise). We can continue to use fossils for these (rare) situations. The only thing which matters is to use energy in the most CO2 efficient way to achieve goals overall.
- kmeisthax 3y agoLots of information about land usage, not so much about power usage beyond "it'll run on renewables". I imagine their cost benefit analysis boils down to "governments will pay for it to not die", which sounds rather optimistic.
- michaelt 3y agoThey can also get cash from big oil and car companies, who will offer this to regulators as an argument to let them keep polluting. For this application it doesn’t matter if it works or not.
- somedude895 3y agoAnd then wouldn't all that renewable energy production better be used to replace fossil fuel production? Maybe once we've replaced all possible CO2 emitting power generation it would make sense to start building out more to power these things?
- lillecarl 3y agoThis is the scheduling problem, you can't schedule all renewables, so using them inefficiently is better than not at all.
- doikor 3y agoI think a part of it is waiting for the point of time when overproduction from renewables is to the point that we regularly hit 0 (or negative) prices for some parts of the day. Then you basically only run it during those times when electricity is almost free. This is already happening on windy days in the summer in northern Europe (Finland and northern parts of Sweden/Norway).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- unwind 3y agoSo there are filters that simply collect CO2 by trapping the molecules directly? Wow, TIL.
- flakeoil 3y agoI'm curious what happens with all the bugs that get stuck in the filters. I imagine a huge amount of air has to pass through everyday and bugs have no chance to escape these giant fans and they will get stuck and die in the different levels of filters. It's great if this technology works, but side effects have to be studied as well before they are put in use at scale.
- i2cmaster 3y agoI don't see how these are improvements over algae bioreactors. Capturing the CO2 without reducing it will lead to less oxygen in the atmosphere as well. Also at least with bioreactors you get useful products/energy. This just generates more waste products and consumes energy.
- mchannon 3y agoRemoving ALL the CO2 in the atmosphere would be 1-2% the partial pressure of O2 in the atmosphere (barometric pressure where you live swings more than that). Of all the concerns, this one’s low on the list.
- i2cmaster 3y agoThe justification for these things is that the oxygen is being converted to CO2 faster than CO2 is being reduced back to oxygen. So if you capture CO2 at a high rate eventually this would lead to you capturing all of the oxygen.
- mchannon 3y agoWe’ll run out of CO2 through the natural version of this process (weathering) long before the O2 encounters this problem. At that point all the plants die, still with plenty of O2 in the air. In other words, it’s the carbon content that’s more endangered over the next billion years than the oxygen. The problem with this technology isn’t side effects like this, it’s prohibitive power requirements.
- fwlr 3y agoTheir subscription page is currently offering a rate of about $1.35 USD per kg of CO2 removed, and they promise to complete your order within 6 years. It’s nice to have some hard numbers on end-stage or “gold standard” CO2 offset (no doubt there are cheaper carbon credit options but this directly solves the hardest problem, CO2 that’s diffused into the atmosphere.
- thinkcontext 3y agoThat's an order of magnitude more expensive than capturing from a point source.
- masklinn 3y agoFor reference we’re producing about 60Gte/year globally. For pure CO2, developed countries produce about 5t/year/person on the low end (Switzerland, Sweden, Italy) and >15 on the high end (Luxembourg, Australia). To the surprise of no one, the US is on the high end (15.5), so are petrostates (Saudi Arabia 16, Brunei 18, UAE 23, and Qatar takes the top at 37).
- marvin 3y agoFor reference, Charm Industrial offers $0.6/kg. https://charmindustrial.com/plans?planName=consumer&budget=600 https://charmindustrial.com/plans?planName=consumer&budget=6... Charm's pricing is actually approaching reasonable to offset a single person's net CO2 emissions if you're comfortably middle class; in the low 4 digits per month. Add a tax benefit and get the costs a bit lower, and it starts to look doable.
- gus_massa 3y agoFor comparison, 1 gallon of gasoline release 9kg of CO2, so it's $0.15 USD more per gallon to be carbon neutral. I think that number is too low to be real.
- jlund-molfese 3y agoWouldn’t you multiply rather than divide, to get +$12.15/gallon?
- lom 3y agoThe article says that the plant can remove 4000 tons of co2 per year. If you look up what’s the equivalent of that, just under 900 average vehicles less on the road per year. Or the equivalent co2 savings of building one wind turbine to replace polluting forms of energy production. What a joke.
- rtpg 3y agoIf the vehicle numbers were a _bit_ better, there might be an idea behind forcing car companies to build one for each couple thousand vehicles it puts out into the world. But 900... yeesh.
- j16sdiz 3y agoif the process is linear scalable (hint: it is not), I don't see any problem.
- mabbo 3y agoBoth techs are important. We need to reduce our production of greenhouse gasses, but that only gets us to break even. We then need to quickly undo the damage we caused, which needs tech like this. But you're right: first we need to prioritize reducing our carbon output.
- bcrosby95 3y agoAfter we quickly undo the damage, I wonder what these companies will lobby for so they don't go out of business. Who decides when we should stop sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere?
- throw0101b 3y agoSomewhat related, see Tom Scott's video "Why Australia bottles up its air": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5-VERN3XY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5-VERN3XY
- jonplackett 3y agoExplain like I’m 5: Why is this better than just growing trees and then cutting them down and burying them so the co2 never gets back into the atmosphere?
- j16sdiz 3y agoYour plan don't have the ecological and geological risk of pumping acid into the ground. You cant get VC funding without risk.
- mchannon 3y agoOne reason, and not a very compelling one, is that trees in certain latitudes exacerbate global warming by absorbing more heat than naturally occurring grasses (which tend to be more reflective). In sum, it’s not better.
- pojzon 3y agoIts not, but we are slowly becoming desperate and rich ppl feel like they have to have a plan B in case Earth becomes unhabitable.
- thinkcontext 3y agoBurying trees is too unwieldy to be practical. Burning the trees and capturing the resulting co2 is more feasible. It's an example of BECCS, bio energy carbon capture and sequestration, some argue it's a practical solution.
- Bellend 3y agoDo that but with spent nuclear fuel. A few million trees compressed into a barrel.
- goethes_kind 3y agoThis is a luxury service sold to people you should not be friends with. They are not price competitive with other DAC technologies.
- tjpnz 3y agoHow will this address the public health issues which relate to the burning of fossil fuels? Isn't it just going to make it easier for polluters to pollute more?
- avmich 3y agoIt's like "don't have police, the people become careless and it increases temptation to steal from those careless people. Instead, train everybody to always be alert, sleep with an axe, then it will be hard to steal". Of course we need to address the public health issues related to burning fossil fuel. But in addition to that we should also clean up what we already polluted - even if that seems like an invitation to pollute more, it's not.
- tourgen 3y ago[dead]
- shafyy 3y agoClimate scientist David Ho has a good thread on CDR: https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of #carbon #dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ #removal (CDR) like a #time #machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example: Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million #trees take us? A: If one mature tree takes up an average of 25 kg of CO₂ per year, then 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back 33 minutes and 6 seconds in a year. It's not a lot. The bottom line being: 99.999% of today's efforts need to focus on cutting emissions. This is like if you want to lose weight: It won't help you if you keep eating 5k kcalories a day and work out for 2 hours a day. Cut the intake, and then do some workout for the rest.
- jvanderbot 3y agoMy friend runs this amazing ASCII website which also happens to be the news feed for their Carbon-capture-to-fuel devices. Like top comment suggests, it doesn't make sense to just capture, you have to get off carbon positive processes entirely. This company aims to do both, effectively. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThe numbers don't look right, they would imply human CO2 generation of over 100 million tons per day.
- jvanderbot 3y agoMy friend runs this amazing ASCII website which also happens to be the news feed for their Carbon-capture-to-fuel devices. Like top comment suggests, it doesn't make sense to just capture, you have to get off carbon positive processes entirely. This company aims to do both, effectively. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/
- foverzar 3y agoEvery time I see technology like this, I wonder why there so much effort and publicity in capturing carbon from thin air, but no one seems to be interested in capturing carbon directly out of exhaust pipe?
- jackmott42 3y agoIf you have any practical idea for either, please let us know.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoBecause this fantasy allows fossil fuel companies to continue selling their products. Capturing CO2 in ppm quantities out of air is ridiculously difficult. Capturing at point of emission is easier/better. But it’s even better if you don’t produce it in the first place. See: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/12/chevrons-fig-leaf-part-1-carbon-engineering-burns-natural-gas-to-capture-carbon-from-the-air/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/12/chevrons-fig-leaf-part-...
- dmbche 3y agoYou might be interesting in reading about catalysors - that's what they do. Blocking more out of exhausts would choke the engine - although I'm sure there could be better set ups.
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoThere are attempts at this, Stockholm's district heating operator has a pilot project[1]. [1]: https://www.stockholmexergi.se/en/environment-and-sustainability/negative-emissions/ https://www.stockholmexergi.se/en/environment-and-sustainabi... Disclosure: I used to work with them, though not on that project, and my current employer still works with them
- marcosdumay 3y agoBecause what you should do with a large static exhaust pipe is to turn it off. And after you do that, you will still need capture from air. But on the company's side, it's probably because the companies that own large static exhaust pipes aren't interested on helping cleaning anything up.
- Etrnl_President 3y ago[dead]
- idlewords 3y agoA similar technology (bed of amines that absorbs CO2 from ambient air) is being tested on the International Space Station, so it's worth reviewing how this stuff breaks: 1. Pipes and bearings clog up or corrode. 2. Trace contaminants irreversibly react with the sorbent material. 3. Stuff in the beds shifts around in unexpected ways, aided by the heat cycling. 4. The problem gets harder the more dilute the gas is. The older zeolite beds on ISS struggle to keep CO2 levels below 5000 ppm, vs. 400 ppm ambient on Earth. Submarines (which use amine sorbents) have the same problem getting below 5000 ppm. I have no idea how Climeworks addresses these challenges, but they are kind of unavoidable when you're trying to remove a trace gas with a reversible process in thermodynamically unfavorable conditions. They will have to move vast quantities of air, and everything that is in it, through the system, and heat and cool the components thousands of times. I'm sure the problems are surmountable, but are they surmountable in a way that keeps total carbon used in the process (including manufacturing and repair) negative?
- aftbit 3y agoWow I didn't realize that submarines and the ISS had such a high level of CO2. I feel noticeably worse when CO2 is above 2000ppm in my house. I've always wanted to have an artificial CO2 scrubber for when the windows are closed, but energetically I would probably be better off opening the windows and heating or cooling the air to compensate. Do submariners and astronauts have impacts to their cognitive abilities from this elevated rate?
- idlewords 3y agoWhether there are cognitive effects is not clear, but it definitely affects their mood and their sleep. It's a touchy subject since astronauts don't like to publicly complain. Scott Kelly talks about it pretty openly in his book; reading between the lines of tech papers on next-generation life support you get the impression that crews insist levels need to get below 2000 ppm for long-duration missions.
- the_third_wave 3y agoIf you insist on capturing CO₂ then capture it somewhere it is available in abundance instead of ~400 parts per million: at the source. Capture it at gas turbine exhausts, at coal-burning power station smoke stacks, maybe on board ships if the power is available to do so. Use some other process for capturing atmospheric CO₂, e.g. lime stone capture. Trying to actively capture airborne CO₂ is like creating needle-in-haystack-finding factories, it is possible but a waste of resources.
- culopatin 3y agoWould it be simpler to attempt to capture and compress the total of the exhaust of turbines, co2 or not, than to attempt to separate the co2?
- the_third_wave 3y agoNo, that would just postpone whatever problem existed in the first place since you'd be left with a huge mass of compressed exhaust gases which do not have any use. Since those exhaust gases consist mostly of nitrogen (due to it forming ~80% of the atmosphere) this would also entail a massive waste of energy expended in compressing that nitrogen. Separating out the CO₂ would make it possible to either use it in some form where it replaces CO₂ otherwise produced by other means - e.g. for welding, cooling, carbonation of liquids etc. - or to sequester it in some way.