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Heirloom Carbon: Absorbing CO2 from the air using crushed rocks
- walnutclosefarm 3y agoIt's interesting that discussions of this process don't mention the potential to combine the carbon sequestration with, say, nuclear power generation. This process basically requires a lot of heat. So, maybe build high temperature gas cooled reactors to provide process heat for this process (which is inherently highly interruptible), used to offset continued use of petroleum in applications where electricity just doesn't work (commercial aviation, e.g.), with the option to switch to electrical generation when renewables fall short.
- SimianLogic 3y agoi want a small scale version of this to scrub CO2 out of my office (not too different than what they do on submarines). i already dump out a dehumidifier every day, could imagine swapping the "carbon brick" along with it (yes yes -- fresh air exchanger on the HVAC system would also do this, but i want gadgets)
- anon84873628 3y agoWell, you could grow algae as a CO2 sink! https://youtu.be/64cEmjtwRgw?si=QmRd716sgFmjaM-0 https://youtu.be/64cEmjtwRgw?si=QmRd716sgFmjaM-0
- crazygringo 3y agoI realize your suggestion is surely not practical, but at the same time it's got my curiosity now. How big would such a brick have to be to absorb all of somebody's CO2 for a day? I just have no intuition whatsoever around it. (Also you'd need a carbon filter for all of the VOC's as well.)
- p0w3n3d 3y agoJust plant trees. Not in monocultures
- thesausageking 3y agoMost tree planting projects fail to capture the CO2 spent on planting them. There maybe ways to use trees to capture carbon efficiently and at scale, but it's still an unsolved problem.
- az226 3y agoI was thinking bamboo. But you need like 900 pounds of bamboo to offset one passenger flying from SF to NYC.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoThis is nonsense. Start with limestone. Cool, there's lots of that. Cook it - using energy - which you'd otherwise have to do other stuff. That drives off CO2. Put it somewhere. You get something nastier that would indeed absorb CO2 from the air. The sketchy parts are the "put it somewhere" and the energy going into the process. Thermodynamics is a harsher mistress than lifecycle analysis. Not a chance this is a net decrease in atmospheric CO2.
- BenoitP 3y agoI wish these articles would publish an energetic tally. It's pretty tough to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (an inert and pretty stable molecule at trace quantities), but that becomes easy with infinite energy. Does the energy for mining and crushing the rock come from oil, and coal for example. In short: what does it look like when you close the system loop?
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoI trust the chemistry but it's the source of the energy to power the furnaces and where to pump away the co2 that are the critical limiting factors. Also, are they going to just grind it into a nanometer powder and mix it with air in a hyperboloid flue?
- kderbyma 3y agoReverse Fracking.....baking soda pumps...
- matthewdgreen 3y agoThis sounds really interesting, but I'm a little nervous about the "baking produces pure CO2 that can be pumped underground" part. Is that really happening, or is that CO2 just going to get used for industrial processes and then dumped back into the atmosphere?
- throwaway4aday 3y agoYou wouldn't want to not recycle the quicklime otherwise you would have to release the CO2 from it first, then absorb the same amount of CO2 and then throw it away so you'd only be emitting CO2 in that case.
- breadwinner 3y agoThey have "transparent methods for verification". "Developing and adopting scientifically rigorous and transparent methods for monitoring, reporting, and verification is essential for permanent carbon removal." See: https://www.heirloomcarbon.com/news/heirloom-joins-carbon-removal-alliance https://www.heirloomcarbon.com/news/heirloom-joins-carbon-re...
- crazygringo 3y agoDoes it really matter if the CO2 in your SodaStream or your favorite beer comes from this or an industrial process that generates CO2 (such as from ammonia)? I mean, even if this all went to industry, if it was removing new CO2 that would have been generated otherwise, then it would still reducing atmospheric CO2 by the same amount from what it would have been otherwise -- right? (Assuming this doesn't magically provide so much CO2 that it depresses prices and leads to new/increased CO2 uses, but that seems unlikely since this seems to be a much more expensive method than existing ones.)
- mordechai9000 3y agoIndustrial and food service CO2 is mostly captured from power plants right now, as I understand it. Besides that, most of that CO2 is only very temporarily stored - it's going right back into the atmosphere as soon as possible.
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- notatoad 3y agothere's a good podcast here talking about one of their partnerships for storing the carbon in concrete https://www.volts.wtf/p/taking-carbon-out-of-the-air-and#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/taking-carbon-out-of-the-air-and#det...
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoI'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. David Roberts's Volts podcast is one of the best resources around for really weedsy discussions on clean energy and decarbonization.
- marricks 3y agoMaybe there's a good reason to have articles on this but the title just makes it sound like pure PR. 200 million isn't remarkably big for a trillion dollar company.
- datavirtue 3y agoIt's also a speculative investment in a tech company. This does not sound viable, but if it is I'm sure Microsoft has first dibs at the table.
- iinnPP 3y ago200million is the estimated cost to capture just "75%" of Microsoft's carbon footprint in 2022. A footprint that is going to increase by more than 7.5% of the 2022 carbon footprint year over year("Bing" chat). How about disabling all the spyware and garbageware. Then get to fixing the monstrosity that is Win11. Some Googling and math suggests about 100,000,000 tonnes of CO2 is coming from the bloat on Windows(per year). Microsoft claims there are 1.4billion devices using Windows. *Napkin math
- scottcha 3y agoMicrosoft's officially reported carbon numbers don't include the impact of their software on devices sold by other OEMs. This is a gray area of the GHG protocol on how to account for SW carbon emissions; some companies count it some don't. [https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW15mgm https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW... pp 11.]
- hinkley 3y agoIt always amazes me how we can sweat bullets trying to get page load times down and then someone slaps google’s and someone else’s tracking shit onto it and everything grinds to a halt, but that’s okay.
- jimnotgym 3y agoIt sounds to me like the problem there is that Google is the gatekeeper, in that your ranking depends on their page speed metric, and also inserting their own tracking code which they get to decide to exclude from the metric
- hinkley 3y agoSEO matters, but so does customer experience and they’ve begun to diverge. With SaaS, which we are, I occasionally catch customers who have managed to get two or three copies of analytics in their pages, with different ids. It’s just… Exasperating. I think I need to switch disciplines. Nobody who has tried to fix this one has made large inroads.
- zeisch 3y agoHow this compare cost wise to other solutions for carbon capture like planting trees? Looking at its cost per ton of CO2 it seems quite expensive for a normal consumer trying to go net-zero.
- zdragnar 3y agoMineral weathering is reasonably predictable in terms of what it will be capable of capturing. Planting trees is anywhere from very good (cutting the trees down and burying it so deep it doesn't rot back to the atmosphere) to very bad (the tree doesn't grow or burns in a fire, effectively adding CO2 equal to the cost of planting).
- Aloha 3y agoMaybe we can plant fields of new coal to be found in a million years ;-)
- nostromo 3y agoI'd disagree with "very bad" being the bottom end of the scale. The cost to plant a tree is not very resource intensive and many trees lost would be made up for a single successful tree. It's almost all upside.
- zdragnar 3y agoThe problem is you haven't actually offset anything, and by the time you find out that you have offset nothing, the carbon you were hoping to sequester is back again. There's other not good (carbon-wise) uses of trees, like harvesting for firewood, or culling to prevent the spread of diseases like oak wilt or bugs like the emerald ash borer. Compared to chemically weathering minerals, trees are at best a gamble. Most people aren't stuffing dead ones in really deep holes; the best we can hope for now is they get cut up into quality furniture or building materials that will last decades or more. There's really very little long-term upside to randomly planting trees and hoping for the best, aside from the fact that trees are really nice things and intrinsically good to have. Just not a super effective carbon sequestration scheme by comparison.
- squokko 3y ago$200 million, only paid upon delivery, is not a "remarkably big bet" for a company with $73 billion in net income.
- az226 3y agoNah dude. It’s totally fair to not pay for snake oil. Microsoft is doing a good thing here and you’re just shitting on it. It’s easy to sit on your high horse here, but how much have you paid into carbon sequestering? And would you pay some unproven company a huge stack of money up front on a pinky swear?
- squokko 3y agoI'm not saying it's bad, I agree that it's a good thing! It's just nothing even close to a "remarkably big bet."
- giantg2 3y agoDon't we want to leave those calcium compounds in the ocean to counteract the acidification of the ocean from CO2?
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoAnother post and some more discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37430323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37430323
- datavirtue 3y agoHmmm...I would just spend the money planting trees and lobbying for legislation that makes people get permits to cut them down.
- kajumix 3y agoit'll take roughly 1.5 million mature trees to sequester 315,000 metric tons of CO2 over 10 years. The "Billion Tree Tsunami" in Pakistan aimed to plant a billion trees from 2014-2017 and surpassed its goal. Similarly, India set a record in 2016 by planting more than 66 million trees in a single day.
- mc32 3y agoHow many will survive and make it to maturity? Planting saplings is easy. Having them mature is more difficult.
- tclancy 3y agoThere's also a question of how good these plans are for the ecosystem as they tend to plant all the same tree in tight spaces so they wind up competing for resources and driving out other parts of the system.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoI think surveys for five years survival are still being done, but an earlier survey by WWF found 70-85% survival rates for earlier stages in the life of the trees [1]. Regarding your point, yes, there is a lot of problems in the project with monocultures being planted, especially comprising non-local ones. This is a complex political problem because you want to incentivize planting, but cost of planting "multi"-cultures is much higher. [1] https://d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/btap_monitoring_report_phase_ii.pdf https://d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/btap_monitor...
- rcme 3y agoWow 315,000 metric tons. That’s the yearly CO2 output of 21,000 Americans!
- bcrosby95 3y agoYeah, tree planting is mostly feel good unsustainable crap. People keep trying to get around this problem without taking a hit to lifestyle, but I don't see how that happens.
- rdiddly 3y agoUsing energy to free up CO2, so that you can bind CO2 that was produced by using energy - do I have that right? Anybody see any trouble with that plan? If you're being charitable you can assume the whole thing is 100% efficient like in a physics textbook. Don't worry about the CO2 we freed-up in the first step; we'll just use more energy to drill and pump it underground from where it'll escape, or inject it into one of the most energy-intensive building materials, concrete, which would of course continue to be produced in kilns and used. Speaking of kilns, this one is electric, meaning the fossil fuels are burned elsewhere, not on our premises! What an elaborate arbitrage.
- p0w3n3d 3y agoMost important is to show on paper that your company is green. Other things don't matter
- az226 3y agoYou’d hope the kiln is powered by nukes or renewables.
- walnutclosefarm 3y agoThere are no energy free ways to resequester atmospheric CO2. If you accept that we will have to do so to meet the world's climate change goals, then the question is really, how energy efficient can you make your process, and where can you get carbon-free energy. This company has a credible approach, although as soon as you look at any of the mechanisms being considered, the scaling problem is daunting.
- natch 3y agoThe CO2 in the limestone was already sequestered by nature. They are freeing it, which is the opposite of what is needed. Leave the limestone alone and that CO2 remains sequestered, no additional energy needed. This sounds like a way to just capture CO2 on paper.
- walnutclosefarm 3y ago
- ziknard 3y ago315,000 tons of CO2 over 10 years, so 31,500 tons per year. 40 billion tons of CO2 per year will be created globally by 2030. So Microsoft's deal will remove 0.00007875 percent of globally emitted CO2 on an annual basis. This process would have to be scaled up by 1,269,841 times to capture all emitted CO2, neglecting the increased CO2 emissions associated with the scaling itself. That seems like a lot of work just to enable humans to increase our numbers and consumption on a finite planet. Can someone please remind me why more people consuming more resources is a given?
- az226 3y agoAbout $25T, about a third of global GDP to scale up to full offset. Even more to offset the last century. We need massive innovation in this space. Even if we make reliable and scalable fusion we are still far away because we need enough batteries to offset all other carbon emissions in planes, cars, and other vehicles.
- DennisP 3y agoEven if we stopped all emissions tomorrow, we would probably need to do stuff like this because the CO2 level is already too high.
- Vecr 3y agoBecause nature existing in a vaguely pre-human state is only a means to an end. Climate change is only a problem so far as the problems it creates get in the way of humans and their actual goals. Humanity first.
- karaterobot 3y agoHow does this compare to olivine weathering, a much cheaper technology that seems rather similar, and is already being used in many projects? Is it more effective, longer term, what?
- ianburrell 3y agoIt sounds like the advantage is that can repeat the process storing CO2 underground. It sounds like a weird way to store CO2, like they are trying to do the same thing as direct capture. When storing underground was one of the big flaws with direct capture. But I would think it would be an advantage to dump the crushed olivine in the ocean where it would be sequestered for a long time. It isn't like trees where have to worry about the CO2 being released from fire or decay.
- ConanRus 3y ago[dead]
- fghorow 3y agoSpeaking as a geophysicist who worked in the research end of the Australian mining industry, just the fracturing of rock itself already consumes a LOT of energy. Thermodynamically, think of all the fracture surface area being created. If you ever studied fracture mechanics, it's essentially the same as requiring that the elastic potential energy being released by creation of new fracture surface needs to come via work from somewhere (Griffith theory). I think this approach needs significant "lifecycle analysis" before it can be declared to be a net positive. Just my two cents. (Edit: typo.)
- crazygringo 3y agoBut if I'm understanding correctly, that's only a one-time cost. Then the already-fractured rocks are used (forever?) to absorb CO2, heat to release, and repeat. (Do they somehow lose that capacity over time?) But also this seems to be assuming that all the energy comes from renewables in the first place, including the energy for crushing the rocks...
- eppp 3y agoWe are also in need of sand for concrete. Can we not crush the rock until suitable for concrete and then entomb it in buildings and structures?
- ttyprintk 3y agoOlivine-supplemented cement actually absorbs CO2 in low-pH environments, healing cracks.
- tuatoru 3y agoThere's been quite a bit of work on enhanced weathering (google the phrase). Even powered by coal and diesel, it's entirely feasible at global scale, provided we are willing to blanket a fairly large area of sea with rock flour. Heirloom's approach, turn limestone into quicklime and then let the quicklime turn itself back into limestone, is different, and I don't know how the energy economics work out for it.
- 3y ago