27 ms·

Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky is moving from science fiction to reality

164 points by webmaven 3y ago

ezconnect 3y ago
Trees have been doing this since forever.
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
[dead]
melling 3y ago
How much energy does it take to remove CO2? We’re still burning record amounts of coal for energy. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/09/04/global-coal-consumption-returns-to-record-levels/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/09/04/global-coal-... Will these processes need to wait until we can get the proper amount of renewable energy?
- jandrese 3y ago
  If you want to turn it back into an oil like substance you will need to expend more energy than you originally got out of it thanks to thermodynamics. In practice it is even worse than that since separating the CO2 from the N2, O2, and everything else in the atmosphere is also energy intensive. The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration. This is why people are so angry at NEM 3.0, it's cutting the excess energy production we need as a prerequisite for saving the environment off at the knees.
  - panzi 3y ago
    And then you need to pump these giant amounts of CO2 sludge (or whatever form it will have) back where you drilled oil out of, hoping it will stay down. That will cost a lot of energy too.
  - tzs 3y ago
    > The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration Or you build solar and wind plants specifically for carbon sequestration. Then you don't have to worry about coordinating with the needs of the grid. You don't even need the plants to be on the grid. That frees you up to put them places where there is plenty of wind or solar but no infrastructure transporting electricity which would otherwise by useless for solar and wind currently.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      California currently gets much of its electricity from a 500 mile long intertie to the Pacific Northwest. There are plenty of plausible places to put a big solar farm which are less than that distance from civilization, e.g. Arizona or Nevada. At which point you want any of its output during peak consumption hours to go to decarbonizing the grid, regardless of what you do with the off-peak.
  - elil17 3y ago
    No, this is incorrect. You can absolutely burn hydrocarbons, use the energy to do carbon capture, and end up with less CO2 in the air than when you started. Compressed CO2 is still a lower energy state than the hydrocarbons, so you can get net energy out. You couldn't end up with the same hydrocarbon that you started with, of course - that would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
    - blkhawk 3y ago
      There is no place to store all that - and don't say depleted gas and oil wells since those are ruined as long term storage by whats been done to them to get the oil or gas out. So you need to build the structures to keep 20km³ of liquefied CO2 each year (liquefying also takes energy).
- api 3y ago
  It must take at least what coal releases when burned, but there are two catches… The first is that it could use intermittent renewable energy. Solar PV during the day is already cheaper than coal. Just run CO2 removal when renewables generate surplus. The second is that coal plants are heat engines. Most of the energy released burning coal is rejected as heat. CO2 removal might in theory be made more efficient than this. So it might not be quite as bad as it appears at first glance. That being said I still doubt this technology could make a dent in the problem without massively cheap energy. It would require either solar panels that are as cheap as vinyl siding or something like practical high yield fusion.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    We will need more wind and solar than required for load to cover cloudy and calm days. I have seen 3x to 5x overcapacity. This should be cheaper than long-term storage, at least with current storage prices, and better to have more power than storage. The result is there will be extra capacity for running intermittent stuff like capture. I haven't seen anyone address how we will pay for carbon capture. By the time we start doing real capture, the CO2 produced should be low so carbon tax will be low.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > We will need more wind and solar than required for load to cover cloudy and calm days. I have seen 3x to 5x overcapacity. The theory being that power would be essentially free most of the time because there would be a surplus. But then wouldn't people just use more? It's only "free" until people come up with other uses for inconsistently available large amounts of power, at which point you have to outbid them.
      - staunton 3y ago
        This assumes that what people pay for power is determined by how much it costs to produce. That's already not the case in most countries. Energy prices are determined by taxes and subsidies.
- gmuslera 3y ago
  It costs orders more than extracting it in the first place. Unless you take into account the long term cost of keep extracting oil, then is infinite vs a finite cost, no matter how high is it.
- tzs 3y ago
  I did some calculations on this a while back, using the energy requirements of direct air capture (DAC) CO2 removal that we currently know how to produce and deploy. The results I got where that if we built a very large solar farm (500 000 km^2) operating at the efficiency of current commercial solar farms and used all its output to power DAC CO2 removal, that would be enough to remove about half as much CO2 as we currently emit each year. In effect it would be as if we had cut emissions back to 1970 levels. Note that since the solar farm would just be used to power DAC, it would not need electrical infrastructure outside the farm itself. We just need a place where we can put in 500 000 km^2 of solar panels and a bunch of DAC facilities. The atmosphere does a good job of distributing CO2 so the solar/DAC facility doesn't need to be near any heavy CO2 emitters either. BTW, the output of a 500 000 km^2 solar farm per year is about equal to the total yearly energy use of humanity, which shows just how insane the amount of solar energy available is. Let's call this one Human Energy Unit (HEU). Build two HEU's worth of solar/DAC and we are effectively carbon neutral. Of course you wouldn't have to build these as 500 000 km^2 facilities. 500 facilities of 1000 km^2 would do, or any other combination that gives us 1 HEU total of energy that is all used for DAC. How far could we take this? The 5 largest subtropical deserts in the world have enough room to hold 30 HEUs worth of solar farms. If we built all those and turned them all on at once it would take one year to remove enough CO2 to get us down to 320 ppm, which is around the levels we had in 1960. Two years would take us back to levels last seen around 1800. 6 years would get us down to pre-industrial levels. That was all using technology that we have today. It would be a huge project, but it does not require any new science or new engineering. Just a lot of money, politics, manufacturing, and construction.
  - bwestergard 3y ago
    I'm curious, did you try to calculate the mass of ores that would need to be mined?
    - tzs 3y ago
      No, I just wanted to know if we covered some large deserts with solar panels could that power enough DAC to make a difference. A quick Googling to find current worldwide solar panel production suggests that it would take about 90 years of current production for the panels for a 500 000 km^2 solar farm, so to build enough to just cancel out current emissions would need about 180 times the resources that currently go annually into solar panel production. So we'd probably need to increase mining (and several other things) by about 20x if we wanted to use this approach to get enough DAC to bring emissions to net zero. I think that's about as far as I can go. I don't know enough about the availability of various resources to figure out if the various things needed are abundant enough and accessible enough that we could increase production by 20x.
- elil17 3y ago
  You actually end up with net negative carbon if you burn natural gas and use the energy to do CO2 capture (albeit just barely). This is because the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds of a hydrocarbon have more energy in them than the carbon-oxygen bonds in the CO2 that is released from combustion.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    This is an interesting factoid!
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      I'm not sure if you meant to do this on purpose but... Factoid actually means something that sounds true but isn't, which is exactly the case with the post you're referring to because they didn't account for the extra losses on top of the base thermodynamics.
      - bmacho 3y ago
        The word 'factoid' means what the communicating parties agree it means. As per my observation, on HN it currently means something like "a small probably unimportant but interesting fact" (wiki definition for factlet[0]). I don't like it, but HN is not the place to cultivate our own language, dang will shadowban and eventually ban us :\ Best we can do is using the word factlet, and hope people will switch to it. [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid#Versus_factlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid#Versus_factlet
  - alexey-salmin 3y ago
    No, because capturing the CO2 from the atmosphere at 0.04% concentration takes much more energy.
  - appplication 3y ago
    What you’re describing is the reason combustion is exothermic, but doesn’t really have much bearing on the efficiency of carbon capture as a process.
- rayiner 3y ago
  No, because energy isn’t fungible and the world isn’t a single country. Using nuclear to do CO2 extraction in the developed world will still help even as China and India continue to use coal.
  - ant6n 3y ago
    This isn’t the first comment in this thread that implies that we need carbon capture to „help out“ those developing countries become carbon neutral.but developing countries are contributing less to the problem than developed ones, have used up only a fraction of the carbon budget of the industrial countries and are also more likely to emit less in the future. China will likely become carbon neutral before the US, current coal plants notwithstanding.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      China is the world’s largest CO2 emitter. India and Africa will join them as they develop in terms of standard of living. It’s irrelevant to climate change who contributed more to the problem in the past.
- cactusfrog 3y ago
  This is all from memory: Diethyl-ammonia works but is energy intensive to regenerate. Zeolites require less energy to regenerate but also absorb water. Some zeolite crystal structures might exist that are less hydroscopic, but have yet to be discovered. MOFs are like zeolites, but easier to fine tune and some good CO2 absorbers that are also not too hydroscopic have been identified. MOFs have some serious stability issues.
deleted 3y ago
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blueflow 3y ago
Instead of supplying any energy to these facilities, one should reduce the production of some coal plant by the same amount of wattage. That would have a better carbon balance.
- ru552 3y ago
  How are you going to decide who doesn’t get any power after you reduce the output of the coal plant?
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    The point is the carbon capture plant shouldn't get any power. For sure there is no point in running direct air capture from carbon-emitting power sources. (It may, but very unlikely, be worth running it from some fossil fuel station with carbon sequestration of its own, but these in effect don't really exist outside of a handful of not particularly successful test projects. Though direct air capture is kind of in the same position at the moment, so it's all basically just experimenting with the technology at the moment.)
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      This might make sense if there were a single big but scarce global bucket of instantaneously available energy. But that's not how it works. The availability of energy is incredibly skewed across location and time.
      - rcxdude 3y ago
        Indeed. I wasn't insinuating it never made sense to power something like this today, just that it only makes sense when there is excess renewables available.
        sanderjd 3y ago
        Yes but there are excess renewables available, in many places at many times. So it's already the case that it makes sense to power something like this, in many places at many times.
raffraffraff 3y ago
Uh, we just weren't recording the amounts of carbon dioxide that were being removed from the sky in the past, by green stuff that we've killed off. The sad reality is that we're (net) emitting record amounts of carbon dioxide.
- blkhawk 3y ago
  the Sad thing is those were not sucking CO2 out of the Atmosphere for a long time - they were just carbon neutral because trees and wood does not last forever and decaying wood releases the CO2 back in to the air. That means you cannot plant yourself out of climate change in any reasonable time frame.
outside1234 3y ago
This is just a distraction from solving the root cause so this company can keep wrecking the environment.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
Chemical reactions suck the carbon out of the sky and then store it underground We used to call this swamps back when we thought wetlands were useless and were busily filling them in to create "productive" land, like farmland, thereby losing 85 percent of our global wetlands since the 1700s.
- windthrown 3y ago
  And in the US in 2023, we're still busy whittling down what little regulatory protections our wetlands still have (Sackett v. EPA)
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    I'm fond of the saying "That government is best which governs least." I would like to see a wetlands version of Temple Grandin's guidelines for the beef industry that got widely adopted because McDonald's de facto enforced it. They give you a list of goals or standards and don't micromanage how to achieve it. https://www.grandin.com/RecAnimalHandlingGuidelines.html#:~:text=Authored%20by%20Temple%20Grandin%2C%20Ph.D.%2C%20of%20Colorado%20State,how%20to%20move%20non-ambulatory%20animals%20while%20minimizing%20stress https://www.grandin.com/RecAnimalHandlingGuidelines.html#:~:.... Excellence requires some flexibility. Top-down dictates tend to set a minimum standard but frequently also de facto undermine the ability to hit a higher bar.
    - awestroke 3y ago
      How about just reinstating the protections for the wetlands?
otterley 3y ago
Mother Nature has provided us with this "technology" all along, in the form of plant life. It'd be imagined in science fiction if it didn't already exist! And it's self-reproducing and only needs water and minerals in the soil to survive. It's miraculous! We just need to stop destroying it, plant more, and let the problem solve itself. There are so many other productive uses of our wealth, like housing people.
- mrzv 3y ago
  Isn't the plant life carbon neutral? I thought whatever carbon a tree extracts during its lifetime, it releases when it decomposes. Unless we chop it down and store it (and plant a new tree!), the tree doesn't remove much carbon from the atmosphere (long term, on average). Do I misunderstand how this works?
  - karthikkolli 3y ago
    Plants also help increase in rainfall, which reduces CO2 in air by converting it into acid.
  - quantified 3y ago
    Basically all the coal we have burnt was at one point peat bogs. They seem to have been a great success at sequestering carbon for us to eventually release. We've done so, proving your point, but it took a while.
    - mrzv 3y ago
      So what's the "natural" solution? Create swamps all over the place? How quickly do they remove CO2 per surface area?
      - coderenegade 3y ago
        Reforestation, with controlled logging of mature trees to sequester the carbon. Most likely as a building material, given that our current demand for wood is higher than what existing forests can sustainably supply.
ianburrell 3y ago
One thing I haven't seen is analysis if carbon capture from air or weathering rocks is better. Carbon capture has been promoted as way to make fossil fuel plants green, and does have advantage of working better on concentrated exhaust. But carbon capture will really be needed once fossil fuel plants are gone. I think weathering rocks may be the better option. It doesn't require any new technology. It would be similar to mining but with steps to crush the rock and either spread it or dump in ocean. We could use electrified version of existing equipment.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  My take from reading and listening to things about this is: the jury is still out. All of these ideas are very early in their learning curves, so it seems the relative slopes of those curves is still a very open question.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    Luckily, we have a couple of decades before need to do carbon capture. For now, it is better to focus on retiring fossil fuels.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      I've said this in a couple other comments, but my perspective on this is: That's why it's awesome people are working on it now! When you still have a couple decades to travel up the learning curve is exactly the right time to work in earnest on a nascent technology. It's a great thing that people started working on wind and solar power a few decades ago!
- hedora 3y ago
  Direct air carbon capture refers to pulling the carbon out of the atmosphere, regardless of the process (weathering rocks, using catalysts, etc). Most processes perform better with a higher percentage of CO2 in the intake, so most could be stuck on a smokestack (or in an urban center).
lucidguppy 3y ago
The best way to sequester carbon is to leave it in the god damn ground. Please go google climate town talking about clean coal. Carbon capture is a scam.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam. There's already more CO2 in the air than we want. Even after we get to net zero emissions, we'll want to suck some of it back out. It's reasonable to question whether it makes sense to be focusing resources on it right now, when it is not the lowest hanging fruit toward reaching net zero, but personally I think it is, because it takes many years for technologies to mature, so it makes sense to get that flywheel spinning on these technologies now. I think what you're responding strongly to is capturing emissions from point sources where fossil fuels are being burned. I don't think that's a scam either - I'd characterize it as an unfortunate necessity due to path dependency - but it's a very different thing than direct air capture.
  - brightlancer 3y ago
    > > Carbon capture is a scam. > Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam. Yes, folks do. points up Two more examples in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452761 As a general rule, "nobody thinks that" or "nobody is saying that" are false -- there are always folks who do, sometimes very vocally. We must stop pretending extremists aren't out there.
    - awestroke 3y ago
      And you need to stop referring to people who disagree with you as "extremists"
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      I thought it would be clear from context that I meant "nobody who seriously works on this problem" rather than "no internet randos". People on social media believe all kinds of dumb things. But there is an actual and notable difference of opinion between point-source carbon capture and direct air capture among people who work in the space.
malikolivier 3y ago
Is there anything I can do at a small scale on my own to sequestrate carbon dioxide? For example, I could install solar panels and use them to power a machine that sequestrate carbon dioxide. Does such technology exist? After trying to reduce our emissions as much as possible, what kind of "best" choice to we have next?
- hosh 3y ago
  The global ecosystem is a living, complex, adaptive system, and will recover with or without human intervention. Whether humans survives as part of that adaptation remains to be seen. Rather than looking at this as if we are separate from the ecosystem we live in, and try to sequester carbon, I think the better approach is to develop deeper relationships with local ecosystem. The problem isn’t carbon. The problem is that the carbon is not moving through the ecosystem. Probably one of the more practical things is to separate the local hydrological cycle from the local carbon cycle — that is, plant more stuff; feed onsite composting to the plants; make greater use of greywater, even blackwater; design dwellings and sites with sun and shade and more passive heating and cooling in mind.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    The carbon being put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels wasn't part of the ecosystem for millions of years. Simply moving it around the cycle isn't really going to solve the excess (though whether the air is the best place to try to remove it from the cycle is an important question).
    - hosh 3y ago
      Pollution, desertification, ocean acidification, habitat destruction are as great, if not greater concerns, and yet here we are, picking a single metric as if changing that alone will solve everything.
      - rcxdude 3y ago
        Well, a lot of those are being driven in large part by climate change. I don't think I was saying that reducing CO2 back to pre-industrial would solve all environmental problems, just that reducing it is an important part to improving a lot of them.
superq 3y ago
[flagged]
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  It also requires a minuscule amount of Novichok to kill a person. Humans are really bad at understanding very large and very small numbers intuitively.
- stubish 3y ago
  We have know for a long, long time just how important a ratio that minuscule amount makes. As you yourself just stated, if you cut the current minuscule amount to a lower minuscule amount, some plant species would die. And similarly, if you raise the current minuscule amount to a higher minuscule amount, the planet heats up and many animal and plant species will die. The balance required for the ecosystem that includes us took a long time to develop and stabilize. The huge rise in this extremely sensitive number has taken a minuscule amount of time (2 hundred years, not 2 hundred thousand or 2 million). A minuscule number making a huge shock to a huge ecosystem with a lot of inertia, the full effects of which have not yet been felt. But even without our help, I'm sure a new balance will eventually stabilize. And it will likely include humans. Our civilization is a little more fragile though, itself only having been around for a minuscule amount of time and only a global famine away from collapsing.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Would you let me inject 0.02% of your blood volume worth of hydrogen cyanide into your body and we see if it's a "miniscule amount" that can't do anything? Of course not, that's well enough to kill someone! Discounting something because the number looks small must be the laziest bad-faith argument one can make... And of course nobody wants to remove all the CO2 in the atmosphere. Another silly, bad-faith diversionary argument...
  - superq 3y ago
    > laziest, .. silly, bad-faith, diversionary argument
johgoy 3y ago
Isn't it what plants do?
- kadoban 3y ago
  Basically, yes. But at scale, most ecosystems of plants reach an equilibrium where old plants die and rot, releasing as much CO2 as the growing ones are taking in.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Not at the scale they'd need t. The sun evaporates water from the sea, but nobody is expecting the whole sea to have evaporated by the end of today - because atmospheric sunlight is too small in scale to boil the ocean.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Is this like the in vogue political talking point these days or something. You're like the fifth person across a couple different articles that I've seen make this "point" today.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    [flagged]
sharp11 3y ago
There is an open source effort to do carbon removal: https://openaircollective.cc/ https://openaircollective.cc/
jl2718 3y ago
Please stop. This is the environmental engineering version of “not even wrong”. There are so many problems it’s hard to know where to start.
wilburTheDog 3y ago
Occidental's first DAC facility has a goal of removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry were 37.12 billion metric tons (GtCO₂) in 2021 So we'd only need about 38,000 of these plants to remove the carbon we release into the atmosphere every year. Then there's also the over 2 trillion tons of CO2 we've already released that's currently overheating the planet.
- hedora 3y ago
  The main problem is that it’s unclear if these plants are carbon negative. They’re displacing liquid oil with an equal volume of compressed CO2 gas, so I’m guessing they are emitting way more carbon than they are capturing.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    Net negative carbon emissions requires money. Somebody will have to pay a lot of money to capture and sequester that carbon. Their plan is to have the oil pay for it, but eventually it will have to be us. Their solution doesn't solve the problem, but it's a step on the path towards a solution.
- oezi 3y ago
  I found the napkin math for getting green hydrogen to 1 USD per kg pretty interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37155241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37155241 The primary assumption is that solar energy is going to be almost free within a decade because we will massively overprovision it to balance yearly variation. Then you need to find a cheap industrial process which uses electricty to do something which has a positive climate impact.
nonethewiser 3y ago
I cant wait until we manage to fuck things up while trying to fix things.
tsimionescu 3y ago
Literally all ideas about carbon capture are quickly revealed to be cynical greenwashing if you think about one simple thing: how much CO2 do we need to store to offset global emissions? The answer is that we need to store almost 40B tonnes of CO2, or around 10B tonnes of C if we break that down, every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year. Unless and until emissions are reduced to a tiny minuscule fraction of current ones, carbon capture will not do even one iota to help with global warming.
- jakeinspace 3y ago
  In terms of mass, that’s not a crazy number. It’s probably unrealistic chemically, but 1500 Gizas/year is not an image that would scare me off.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Imagine how long it actually takes to build one structure like that, even with modern techniques. You're perhaps thinking of how long it took to build more modern mega-buildings like the Empire State Building or Burj Khalifa. But those are much lighter weight than the great pyramid (365k tonnes and 500k tonnes respectively, compared to the 6M tonnes of the great pyramid). Building even one such pyramid per year would be a huge project for a wealthy industrial state. And there aren't 1500 wealthy industrial states in the world to help with the others.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      I would suggest we bury the carbon instead of building pyramids from it. That seems a lot simpler.
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        Sure (and that is crucial for various reasons, mostly related to fire hazards). But for the same reasons building roads is cheaper than building tunnels, burying carbon is harder than stockpiling it on the ground. At a minimum, you have to move a similar volume of soil to the carbon you're going to bury, and then move some of it back. And of course, a volume of soil equal to a certain volume of carbon is almost certainly heavier, since carbon isn't all that dense. So yes, building 1500 great pyramids of Giza is actually a low ball estimate. The right image is burying 1500 great pyramids of Giza - which is much harder and more expensive.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky A.k.a. plants?
- matthews2 3y ago
  A problem with plants is that when they die, they decompose and release the CO2 again.
  - marginallen 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Aerroon 3y ago
      >How do you think the “carbon” got into the ground in the first place. You’re being gaslit. When the carbon deposits formed some parts of plants/animals did not break down, because a microorganism that could break them down hadn't evolved yet. They essentially just piled up for millions of years. Eventually such microorganisms did appear and that's why wood rots. Commercial growers add CO2 to their greenhouses because plants grow bigger when the CO2 in the atmosphere is in higher concentrations. But when the plant dies all that CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. Our problem isn't oxygen, our problem is too much carbon.
casenmgreen 3y ago
I may be completely wrong, but I have read that the underlying chemistry is endothermic, which is to say, requires energy to occur. In other words, you have to generate energy to remove CO2 from the air. Problem is, how do you generate that energy - on the civilizational scale required - in a way which produces less CO2 than you're removing from the air? Right now we're already failing, globally, to replace dirty energy with clean. India IIRC has an aspirational goal to be off coal by 2070...! How do we manage to produce a purely green civilizational-level energy supply, doing it all a second time over as well, and now or soon, to start producing the energy to remove CO2 from the air on a scale which will matter?
- TapWaterBandit 3y ago
  It would have to be nuclear, I imagine. Doesn't seem like any other method would have the juice required while simultaneously being able to power all the other stuff we want (and not also creating emissions). I can't believe the cosmic irony that probably the biggest "success" of the environmental movement and arguably its motivating raison d'etre might be the one thing that would destroy the earth's environment. Imagine an alternate reality where nuclear uptake continued at rates of 50s/60s and where we'd be today.
  - m_mueller 3y ago
    History has shown various times[1] that our timeline is the one to bet on when it comes to narrowly avoiding the extinction of much of human life. My bet is thus that one or several of the many ideas how to avoid a total climate crisis will prevail, in a soft-quantum-immortality kinda way. [1] examples: Hitler‘s halt before Dunkirk and his various other silly mistakes (resulting in them not being able to develop the bomb first), Vasili Arkhipov‘s abort to launch a nuclear torpedo during Cuban Crisis, Stanislav Petrov not reporting what their systems indicated to be a nuclear attack…
    - concordDance 3y ago
      The idea that Nazi Germany invading Britain would result in the extinction of most human life is utterly absurd. Even a full nuclear exchange at the height of the cold war wouldn't have bumped off human civilization.
terrybingus 3y ago
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- null_onset 3y ago
  [dead]
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  You are in a minority now, the evidence is overwhelming.
mrjin 3y ago
Wow, wasn't preventing it from getting into the air easier?
jl6 3y ago
Clearly this technology isn’t an alternative to curtailing emissions, but we do still need carbon in our post-fossil future (e.g. for steel making, and as an input to liquid fuel synthesis). It would be nice to get this from the air.
paulsutter 3y ago
The best use for carbon capture is to make kerosene for aircraft, because that’s the best way to store solar power for flight Terraform is starting out making methane (natural gas) but will move on to kerosene https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/ You could also ban flight but this seems more practical
- blueflow 3y ago
  I think the two thirds of the worlds population that are too poor for plane tickets would prefer banning flights.
  - david-gpu 3y ago
    People are not the only thing that travels by air.
    - blueflow 3y ago
      How much % of the worlds population are financially able to afford international shipping?
      - petesergeant 3y ago
        > How much % of the worlds population are financially able to afford international shipping? Another way of looking at that is: what percentage of the world regularly consumes products that went from one country to another by plane and I think it's probably reasonably high?
  - rtz121 3y ago
    Any why does their opinion matter?
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    With world citizen hat on I prefer to have a carbon neutral flight infra than no flight infra.
zaroth 3y ago
[flagged]
dgan 3y ago
The entire thought process of "Occidental Petroleum": "So we are using C02 to push oil out of the ground, but it's kinda expensive, can we make it so government pays for it? Totally, call the Media Relationships department". The whole thing is green washing theater. It doesn't even address how the "sucking CO2 from the air" is going to be ecologically viable, just a hand-waivy "Think giant fans. Chemical reactions suck the carbon out of the sky and then store it underground." lol
- jackdeansmith 3y ago
  EOR oil is lower carbon than non-EOR oil. Greenwashing seems excessive, there is no fraud here, everyone is very upfront about what they are doing.
k__ 3y ago
Are machines really the appropriate solution? Shouldn't we use something plant based that is able to grow exponentially?
- GOONIMMUNE 3y ago
  Plants are a temporary solution at best, as they decompose and catch fire which puts their carbon back in the atmosphere. We need to be sequestering CO2 into more permanent forms
Renaud 3y ago
Thunderf00t has a great video about how maddening distracting (read: stupid) these carbon capture project are: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mCnr0HwW28w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mCnr0HwW28w Not everyone likes his delivery, but he’s right more often than not.
- mesebrec 3y ago
  I just want to point out how efficient your last sentence is in deflecting criticism about him. You start with a strawman: "people dislike him because of his delivery instead of his message". This way you immediately dismiss critics of him as "focussing on the tone instead of the content". But if that didn't convince the reader, you immediately follow up with an argument against people who dislike the content, by saying that flaws in content also don't really matter as long as he's more than 50% right.
bobse 3y ago
Don't worry. Nuclear war with China and India will solve the issue.
phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
I hope it's trees.
gumby 3y ago
I am working on greenhouse gas removal. There are two problems, only one of which is discussed here. We need to remove the last century's emissions, and yes, that can be, and initially will be an excuse to pollute further. I see that as a transient problem: eventually we will start to structure things against it by internalizing other externalities (e.g. other pollution) and expanding the emissions scope (not just oil). It's reality that we can't decarbonize overnight (we could't replace all the passenger cars by Monday, and how many peoples' pensions depend on oil stocks?), so funding cleanup technology on the backs of oil pollution helps get it going. The second, bigger problem is that the thermodynamics of these plants that suck the atmosphere through a straw is absurd, a trivial calculation that is obvious upon reflection. The atmosphere is f'ing huge, and you need to attack the problem at scale, which means, like it or not, physical chemistry and biology powered by sunlight.
hkt 3y ago
Lime - which absorbs carbon dioxide as it cures - is as old as construction. Hardly science fiction!
jtaft 3y ago
Plant more trees
msh 3y ago
If it works I think its hard to call it greenwashing. It might be a bad allocation of resources, if the resources could be spend on more efficient solutions. It might also be greenwashing if presented as a solution in it self, but as a supplement in the transition it might make sense.
thelastgallon 3y ago
Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-capture-and-storage/ https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...
fastneutron 3y ago
CO2 removal and sequestration will be a net energy sink no matter what you do, since it amounts to “unburning” some portion of fossil fuel combustion that’s already been committed. The question is what methods are the least bad in terms of thermodynamics, and how much renewable and nuclear energy capacity are we willing to divert?
trickstra 3y ago
Why are we even trying to suck it out of the sky, if we could much easier suck it out of the oceans, where it is 150 times more concentrated, and then let the oceans suck it out of the sky as they have done for the whole time. This paper https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-co2-in-atmosphere https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-... two years ago said that it would need solar plants worth less than the COVID stimulus bill, and it would produce H2, soft water and limestone, all of which can be sold and can displace fossil sources.
kaiusbrantlee 3y ago
[flagged]
gigel82 3y ago
I think we should fund more research for converting the CO2 into usable products instead of just storing it (stuff like carbon fixation or chemical conversion). Who knows, perhaps we find a carbon negative (energy wise) solution to just convert it on site, and we can place these "factories" around the world where there's an excess of energy (near nuclear power plants, desert solar installations, etc.)
replete 3y ago
0.04% Life dies at 0.02% OK
pleb_nz 3y ago
Sounds like we're trying to put the cart before the horse with some of these ideas. Yeah they might help, but let's ask more why questions and then solve that.
ken22000 3y ago
[flagged]
ken22000 3y ago
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164 points by webmaven 3y ago

ezconnect 3y ago

Trees have been doing this since forever.

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

[dead]

melling 3y ago

How much energy does it take to remove CO2? We’re still burning record amounts of coal for energy. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/09/04/global-coal-consumption-returns-to-record-levels/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2023/09/04/global-coal-... Will these processes need to wait until we can get the proper amount of renewable energy?

jandrese 3y ago
If you want to turn it back into an oil like substance you will need to expend more energy than you originally got out of it thanks to thermodynamics. In practice it is even worse than that since separating the CO2 from the N2, O2, and everything else in the atmosphere is also energy intensive. The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration. This is why people are so angry at NEM 3.0, it's cutting the excess energy production we need as a prerequisite for saving the environment off at the knees.
- panzi 3y ago
  And then you need to pump these giant amounts of CO2 sludge (or whatever form it will have) back where you drilled oil out of, hoping it will stay down. That will cost a lot of energy too.
- tzs 3y ago
  > The general idea is that you grossly overbuild your renewable energy production (solar and wind mostly) and during the middle of the day when the grid is fully saturated and all of the storage systems are filled up you dump the excess energy into carbon sequestration Or you build solar and wind plants specifically for carbon sequestration. Then you don't have to worry about coordinating with the needs of the grid. You don't even need the plants to be on the grid. That frees you up to put them places where there is plenty of wind or solar but no infrastructure transporting electricity which would otherwise by useless for solar and wind currently.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    California currently gets much of its electricity from a 500 mile long intertie to the Pacific Northwest. There are plenty of plausible places to put a big solar farm which are less than that distance from civilization, e.g. Arizona or Nevada. At which point you want any of its output during peak consumption hours to go to decarbonizing the grid, regardless of what you do with the off-peak.
- elil17 3y ago
  No, this is incorrect. You can absolutely burn hydrocarbons, use the energy to do carbon capture, and end up with less CO2 in the air than when you started. Compressed CO2 is still a lower energy state than the hydrocarbons, so you can get net energy out. You couldn't end up with the same hydrocarbon that you started with, of course - that would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
  - blkhawk 3y ago
    There is no place to store all that - and don't say depleted gas and oil wells since those are ruined as long term storage by whats been done to them to get the oil or gas out. So you need to build the structures to keep 20km³ of liquefied CO2 each year (liquefying also takes energy).
api 3y ago
It must take at least what coal releases when burned, but there are two catches… The first is that it could use intermittent renewable energy. Solar PV during the day is already cheaper than coal. Just run CO2 removal when renewables generate surplus. The second is that coal plants are heat engines. Most of the energy released burning coal is rejected as heat. CO2 removal might in theory be made more efficient than this. So it might not be quite as bad as it appears at first glance. That being said I still doubt this technology could make a dent in the problem without massively cheap energy. It would require either solar panels that are as cheap as vinyl siding or something like practical high yield fusion.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  We will need more wind and solar than required for load to cover cloudy and calm days. I have seen 3x to 5x overcapacity. This should be cheaper than long-term storage, at least with current storage prices, and better to have more power than storage. The result is there will be extra capacity for running intermittent stuff like capture. I haven't seen anyone address how we will pay for carbon capture. By the time we start doing real capture, the CO2 produced should be low so carbon tax will be low.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > We will need more wind and solar than required for load to cover cloudy and calm days. I have seen 3x to 5x overcapacity. The theory being that power would be essentially free most of the time because there would be a surplus. But then wouldn't people just use more? It's only "free" until people come up with other uses for inconsistently available large amounts of power, at which point you have to outbid them.
    - staunton 3y ago
      This assumes that what people pay for power is determined by how much it costs to produce. That's already not the case in most countries. Energy prices are determined by taxes and subsidies.
gmuslera 3y ago
It costs orders more than extracting it in the first place. Unless you take into account the long term cost of keep extracting oil, then is infinite vs a finite cost, no matter how high is it.
tzs 3y ago
I did some calculations on this a while back, using the energy requirements of direct air capture (DAC) CO2 removal that we currently know how to produce and deploy. The results I got where that if we built a very large solar farm (500 000 km^2) operating at the efficiency of current commercial solar farms and used all its output to power DAC CO2 removal, that would be enough to remove about half as much CO2 as we currently emit each year. In effect it would be as if we had cut emissions back to 1970 levels. Note that since the solar farm would just be used to power DAC, it would not need electrical infrastructure outside the farm itself. We just need a place where we can put in 500 000 km^2 of solar panels and a bunch of DAC facilities. The atmosphere does a good job of distributing CO2 so the solar/DAC facility doesn't need to be near any heavy CO2 emitters either. BTW, the output of a 500 000 km^2 solar farm per year is about equal to the total yearly energy use of humanity, which shows just how insane the amount of solar energy available is. Let's call this one Human Energy Unit (HEU). Build two HEU's worth of solar/DAC and we are effectively carbon neutral. Of course you wouldn't have to build these as 500 000 km^2 facilities. 500 facilities of 1000 km^2 would do, or any other combination that gives us 1 HEU total of energy that is all used for DAC. How far could we take this? The 5 largest subtropical deserts in the world have enough room to hold 30 HEUs worth of solar farms. If we built all those and turned them all on at once it would take one year to remove enough CO2 to get us down to 320 ppm, which is around the levels we had in 1960. Two years would take us back to levels last seen around 1800. 6 years would get us down to pre-industrial levels. That was all using technology that we have today. It would be a huge project, but it does not require any new science or new engineering. Just a lot of money, politics, manufacturing, and construction.
- bwestergard 3y ago
  I'm curious, did you try to calculate the mass of ores that would need to be mined?
  - tzs 3y ago
    No, I just wanted to know if we covered some large deserts with solar panels could that power enough DAC to make a difference. A quick Googling to find current worldwide solar panel production suggests that it would take about 90 years of current production for the panels for a 500 000 km^2 solar farm, so to build enough to just cancel out current emissions would need about 180 times the resources that currently go annually into solar panel production. So we'd probably need to increase mining (and several other things) by about 20x if we wanted to use this approach to get enough DAC to bring emissions to net zero. I think that's about as far as I can go. I don't know enough about the availability of various resources to figure out if the various things needed are abundant enough and accessible enough that we could increase production by 20x.
elil17 3y ago
You actually end up with net negative carbon if you burn natural gas and use the energy to do CO2 capture (albeit just barely). This is because the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds of a hydrocarbon have more energy in them than the carbon-oxygen bonds in the CO2 that is released from combustion.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  This is an interesting factoid!
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    I'm not sure if you meant to do this on purpose but... Factoid actually means something that sounds true but isn't, which is exactly the case with the post you're referring to because they didn't account for the extra losses on top of the base thermodynamics.
    - bmacho 3y ago
      The word 'factoid' means what the communicating parties agree it means. As per my observation, on HN it currently means something like "a small probably unimportant but interesting fact" (wiki definition for factlet[0]). I don't like it, but HN is not the place to cultivate our own language, dang will shadowban and eventually ban us :\ Best we can do is using the word factlet, and hope people will switch to it. [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid#Versus_factlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid#Versus_factlet
- alexey-salmin 3y ago
  No, because capturing the CO2 from the atmosphere at 0.04% concentration takes much more energy.
- appplication 3y ago
  What you’re describing is the reason combustion is exothermic, but doesn’t really have much bearing on the efficiency of carbon capture as a process.
rayiner 3y ago
No, because energy isn’t fungible and the world isn’t a single country. Using nuclear to do CO2 extraction in the developed world will still help even as China and India continue to use coal.
- ant6n 3y ago
  This isn’t the first comment in this thread that implies that we need carbon capture to „help out“ those developing countries become carbon neutral.but developing countries are contributing less to the problem than developed ones, have used up only a fraction of the carbon budget of the industrial countries and are also more likely to emit less in the future. China will likely become carbon neutral before the US, current coal plants notwithstanding.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    China is the world’s largest CO2 emitter. India and Africa will join them as they develop in terms of standard of living. It’s irrelevant to climate change who contributed more to the problem in the past.
cactusfrog 3y ago
This is all from memory: Diethyl-ammonia works but is energy intensive to regenerate. Zeolites require less energy to regenerate but also absorb water. Some zeolite crystal structures might exist that are less hydroscopic, but have yet to be discovered. MOFs are like zeolites, but easier to fine tune and some good CO2 absorbers that are also not too hydroscopic have been identified. MOFs have some serious stability issues.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

blueflow 3y ago

Instead of supplying any energy to these facilities, one should reduce the production of some coal plant by the same amount of wattage. That would have a better carbon balance.

ru552 3y ago
How are you going to decide who doesn’t get any power after you reduce the output of the coal plant?
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The point is the carbon capture plant shouldn't get any power. For sure there is no point in running direct air capture from carbon-emitting power sources. (It may, but very unlikely, be worth running it from some fossil fuel station with carbon sequestration of its own, but these in effect don't really exist outside of a handful of not particularly successful test projects. Though direct air capture is kind of in the same position at the moment, so it's all basically just experimenting with the technology at the moment.)
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    This might make sense if there were a single big but scarce global bucket of instantaneously available energy. But that's not how it works. The availability of energy is incredibly skewed across location and time.
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      Indeed. I wasn't insinuating it never made sense to power something like this today, just that it only makes sense when there is excess renewables available.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Yes but there are excess renewables available, in many places at many times. So it's already the case that it makes sense to power something like this, in many places at many times.

raffraffraff 3y ago

Uh, we just weren't recording the amounts of carbon dioxide that were being removed from the sky in the past, by green stuff that we've killed off. The sad reality is that we're (net) emitting record amounts of carbon dioxide.

blkhawk 3y ago
the Sad thing is those were not sucking CO2 out of the Atmosphere for a long time - they were just carbon neutral because trees and wood does not last forever and decaying wood releases the CO2 back in to the air. That means you cannot plant yourself out of climate change in any reasonable time frame.

outside1234 3y ago

This is just a distraction from solving the root cause so this company can keep wrecking the environment.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

Chemical reactions suck the carbon out of the sky and then store it underground We used to call this swamps back when we thought wetlands were useless and were busily filling them in to create "productive" land, like farmland, thereby losing 85 percent of our global wetlands since the 1700s.

windthrown 3y ago
And in the US in 2023, we're still busy whittling down what little regulatory protections our wetlands still have (Sackett v. EPA)
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I'm fond of the saying "That government is best which governs least." I would like to see a wetlands version of Temple Grandin's guidelines for the beef industry that got widely adopted because McDonald's de facto enforced it. They give you a list of goals or standards and don't micromanage how to achieve it. https://www.grandin.com/RecAnimalHandlingGuidelines.html#:~:text=Authored%20by%20Temple%20Grandin%2C%20Ph.D.%2C%20of%20Colorado%20State,how%20to%20move%20non-ambulatory%20animals%20while%20minimizing%20stress https://www.grandin.com/RecAnimalHandlingGuidelines.html#:~:.... Excellence requires some flexibility. Top-down dictates tend to set a minimum standard but frequently also de facto undermine the ability to hit a higher bar.
  - awestroke 3y ago
    How about just reinstating the protections for the wetlands?

otterley 3y ago

Mother Nature has provided us with this "technology" all along, in the form of plant life. It'd be imagined in science fiction if it didn't already exist! And it's self-reproducing and only needs water and minerals in the soil to survive. It's miraculous! We just need to stop destroying it, plant more, and let the problem solve itself. There are so many other productive uses of our wealth, like housing people.

mrzv 3y ago
Isn't the plant life carbon neutral? I thought whatever carbon a tree extracts during its lifetime, it releases when it decomposes. Unless we chop it down and store it (and plant a new tree!), the tree doesn't remove much carbon from the atmosphere (long term, on average). Do I misunderstand how this works?
- karthikkolli 3y ago
  Plants also help increase in rainfall, which reduces CO2 in air by converting it into acid.
- quantified 3y ago
  Basically all the coal we have burnt was at one point peat bogs. They seem to have been a great success at sequestering carbon for us to eventually release. We've done so, proving your point, but it took a while.
  - mrzv 3y ago
    So what's the "natural" solution? Create swamps all over the place? How quickly do they remove CO2 per surface area?
    - coderenegade 3y ago
      Reforestation, with controlled logging of mature trees to sequester the carbon. Most likely as a building material, given that our current demand for wood is higher than what existing forests can sustainably supply.

ianburrell 3y ago

One thing I haven't seen is analysis if carbon capture from air or weathering rocks is better. Carbon capture has been promoted as way to make fossil fuel plants green, and does have advantage of working better on concentrated exhaust. But carbon capture will really be needed once fossil fuel plants are gone. I think weathering rocks may be the better option. It doesn't require any new technology. It would be similar to mining but with steps to crush the rock and either spread it or dump in ocean. We could use electrified version of existing equipment.

sanderjd 3y ago
My take from reading and listening to things about this is: the jury is still out. All of these ideas are very early in their learning curves, so it seems the relative slopes of those curves is still a very open question.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  Luckily, we have a couple of decades before need to do carbon capture. For now, it is better to focus on retiring fossil fuels.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I've said this in a couple other comments, but my perspective on this is: That's why it's awesome people are working on it now! When you still have a couple decades to travel up the learning curve is exactly the right time to work in earnest on a nascent technology. It's a great thing that people started working on wind and solar power a few decades ago!
hedora 3y ago
Direct air carbon capture refers to pulling the carbon out of the atmosphere, regardless of the process (weathering rocks, using catalysts, etc). Most processes perform better with a higher percentage of CO2 in the intake, so most could be stuck on a smokestack (or in an urban center).

lucidguppy 3y ago

The best way to sequester carbon is to leave it in the god damn ground. Please go google climate town talking about clean coal. Carbon capture is a scam.

sanderjd 3y ago
Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam. There's already more CO2 in the air than we want. Even after we get to net zero emissions, we'll want to suck some of it back out. It's reasonable to question whether it makes sense to be focusing resources on it right now, when it is not the lowest hanging fruit toward reaching net zero, but personally I think it is, because it takes many years for technologies to mature, so it makes sense to get that flywheel spinning on these technologies now. I think what you're responding strongly to is capturing emissions from point sources where fossil fuels are being burned. I don't think that's a scam either - I'd characterize it as an unfortunate necessity due to path dependency - but it's a very different thing than direct air capture.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > > Carbon capture is a scam. > Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam. Yes, folks do. points up Two more examples in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452761 As a general rule, "nobody thinks that" or "nobody is saying that" are false -- there are always folks who do, sometimes very vocally. We must stop pretending extremists aren't out there.
  - awestroke 3y ago
    And you need to stop referring to people who disagree with you as "extremists"
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I thought it would be clear from context that I meant "nobody who seriously works on this problem" rather than "no internet randos". People on social media believe all kinds of dumb things. But there is an actual and notable difference of opinion between point-source carbon capture and direct air capture among people who work in the space.

malikolivier 3y ago

Is there anything I can do at a small scale on my own to sequestrate carbon dioxide? For example, I could install solar panels and use them to power a machine that sequestrate carbon dioxide. Does such technology exist? After trying to reduce our emissions as much as possible, what kind of "best" choice to we have next?

hosh 3y ago
The global ecosystem is a living, complex, adaptive system, and will recover with or without human intervention. Whether humans survives as part of that adaptation remains to be seen. Rather than looking at this as if we are separate from the ecosystem we live in, and try to sequester carbon, I think the better approach is to develop deeper relationships with local ecosystem. The problem isn’t carbon. The problem is that the carbon is not moving through the ecosystem. Probably one of the more practical things is to separate the local hydrological cycle from the local carbon cycle — that is, plant more stuff; feed onsite composting to the plants; make greater use of greywater, even blackwater; design dwellings and sites with sun and shade and more passive heating and cooling in mind.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The carbon being put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels wasn't part of the ecosystem for millions of years. Simply moving it around the cycle isn't really going to solve the excess (though whether the air is the best place to try to remove it from the cycle is an important question).
  - hosh 3y ago
    Pollution, desertification, ocean acidification, habitat destruction are as great, if not greater concerns, and yet here we are, picking a single metric as if changing that alone will solve everything.
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      Well, a lot of those are being driven in large part by climate change. I don't think I was saying that reducing CO2 back to pre-industrial would solve all environmental problems, just that reducing it is an important part to improving a lot of them.

superq 3y ago

[flagged]

PlunderBunny 3y ago
It also requires a minuscule amount of Novichok to kill a person. Humans are really bad at understanding very large and very small numbers intuitively.
stubish 3y ago
We have know for a long, long time just how important a ratio that minuscule amount makes. As you yourself just stated, if you cut the current minuscule amount to a lower minuscule amount, some plant species would die. And similarly, if you raise the current minuscule amount to a higher minuscule amount, the planet heats up and many animal and plant species will die. The balance required for the ecosystem that includes us took a long time to develop and stabilize. The huge rise in this extremely sensitive number has taken a minuscule amount of time (2 hundred years, not 2 hundred thousand or 2 million). A minuscule number making a huge shock to a huge ecosystem with a lot of inertia, the full effects of which have not yet been felt. But even without our help, I'm sure a new balance will eventually stabilize. And it will likely include humans. Our civilization is a little more fragile though, itself only having been around for a minuscule amount of time and only a global famine away from collapsing.
stephen_g 3y ago
Would you let me inject 0.02% of your blood volume worth of hydrogen cyanide into your body and we see if it's a "miniscule amount" that can't do anything? Of course not, that's well enough to kill someone! Discounting something because the number looks small must be the laziest bad-faith argument one can make... And of course nobody wants to remove all the CO2 in the atmosphere. Another silly, bad-faith diversionary argument...
- superq 3y ago
  > laziest, .. silly, bad-faith, diversionary argument

johgoy 3y ago

Isn't it what plants do?

kadoban 3y ago
Basically, yes. But at scale, most ecosystems of plants reach an equilibrium where old plants die and rot, releasing as much CO2 as the growing ones are taking in.
Qwertious 3y ago
Not at the scale they'd need t. The sun evaporates water from the sea, but nobody is expecting the whole sea to have evaporated by the end of today - because atmospheric sunlight is too small in scale to boil the ocean.
sanderjd 3y ago
Is this like the in vogue political talking point these days or something. You're like the fifth person across a couple different articles that I've seen make this "point" today.
- rayiner 3y ago
  [flagged]

sharp11 3y ago

There is an open source effort to do carbon removal: https://openaircollective.cc/ https://openaircollective.cc/

jl2718 3y ago

Please stop. This is the environmental engineering version of “not even wrong”. There are so many problems it’s hard to know where to start.

wilburTheDog 3y ago

Occidental's first DAC facility has a goal of removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry were 37.12 billion metric tons (GtCO₂) in 2021 So we'd only need about 38,000 of these plants to remove the carbon we release into the atmosphere every year. Then there's also the over 2 trillion tons of CO2 we've already released that's currently overheating the planet.

hedora 3y ago
The main problem is that it’s unclear if these plants are carbon negative. They’re displacing liquid oil with an equal volume of compressed CO2 gas, so I’m guessing they are emitting way more carbon than they are capturing.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  Net negative carbon emissions requires money. Somebody will have to pay a lot of money to capture and sequester that carbon. Their plan is to have the oil pay for it, but eventually it will have to be us. Their solution doesn't solve the problem, but it's a step on the path towards a solution.
oezi 3y ago
I found the napkin math for getting green hydrogen to 1 USD per kg pretty interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37155241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37155241 The primary assumption is that solar energy is going to be almost free within a decade because we will massively overprovision it to balance yearly variation. Then you need to find a cheap industrial process which uses electricty to do something which has a positive climate impact.

nonethewiser 3y ago

I cant wait until we manage to fuck things up while trying to fix things.

tsimionescu 3y ago

Literally all ideas about carbon capture are quickly revealed to be cynical greenwashing if you think about one simple thing: how much CO2 do we need to store to offset global emissions? The answer is that we need to store almost 40B tonnes of CO2, or around 10B tonnes of C if we break that down, every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year. Unless and until emissions are reduced to a tiny minuscule fraction of current ones, carbon capture will not do even one iota to help with global warming.

jakeinspace 3y ago
In terms of mass, that’s not a crazy number. It’s probably unrealistic chemically, but 1500 Gizas/year is not an image that would scare me off.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Imagine how long it actually takes to build one structure like that, even with modern techniques. You're perhaps thinking of how long it took to build more modern mega-buildings like the Empire State Building or Burj Khalifa. But those are much lighter weight than the great pyramid (365k tonnes and 500k tonnes respectively, compared to the 6M tonnes of the great pyramid). Building even one such pyramid per year would be a huge project for a wealthy industrial state. And there aren't 1500 wealthy industrial states in the world to help with the others.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    I would suggest we bury the carbon instead of building pyramids from it. That seems a lot simpler.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      Sure (and that is crucial for various reasons, mostly related to fire hazards). But for the same reasons building roads is cheaper than building tunnels, burying carbon is harder than stockpiling it on the ground. At a minimum, you have to move a similar volume of soil to the carbon you're going to bury, and then move some of it back. And of course, a volume of soil equal to a certain volume of carbon is almost certainly heavier, since carbon isn't all that dense. So yes, building 1500 great pyramids of Giza is actually a low ball estimate. The right image is burying 1500 great pyramids of Giza - which is much harder and more expensive.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

> Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky A.k.a. plants?

matthews2 3y ago
A problem with plants is that when they die, they decompose and release the CO2 again.
- marginallen 3y ago
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  - Aerroon 3y ago
    >How do you think the “carbon” got into the ground in the first place. You’re being gaslit. When the carbon deposits formed some parts of plants/animals did not break down, because a microorganism that could break them down hadn't evolved yet. They essentially just piled up for millions of years. Eventually such microorganisms did appear and that's why wood rots. Commercial growers add CO2 to their greenhouses because plants grow bigger when the CO2 in the atmosphere is in higher concentrations. But when the plant dies all that CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. Our problem isn't oxygen, our problem is too much carbon.

casenmgreen 3y ago

I may be completely wrong, but I have read that the underlying chemistry is endothermic, which is to say, requires energy to occur. In other words, you have to generate energy to remove CO2 from the air. Problem is, how do you generate that energy - on the civilizational scale required - in a way which produces less CO2 than you're removing from the air? Right now we're already failing, globally, to replace dirty energy with clean. India IIRC has an aspirational goal to be off coal by 2070...! How do we manage to produce a purely green civilizational-level energy supply, doing it all a second time over as well, and now or soon, to start producing the energy to remove CO2 from the air on a scale which will matter?

TapWaterBandit 3y ago
It would have to be nuclear, I imagine. Doesn't seem like any other method would have the juice required while simultaneously being able to power all the other stuff we want (and not also creating emissions). I can't believe the cosmic irony that probably the biggest "success" of the environmental movement and arguably its motivating raison d'etre might be the one thing that would destroy the earth's environment. Imagine an alternate reality where nuclear uptake continued at rates of 50s/60s and where we'd be today.
- m_mueller 3y ago
  History has shown various times[1] that our timeline is the one to bet on when it comes to narrowly avoiding the extinction of much of human life. My bet is thus that one or several of the many ideas how to avoid a total climate crisis will prevail, in a soft-quantum-immortality kinda way. [1] examples: Hitler‘s halt before Dunkirk and his various other silly mistakes (resulting in them not being able to develop the bomb first), Vasili Arkhipov‘s abort to launch a nuclear torpedo during Cuban Crisis, Stanislav Petrov not reporting what their systems indicated to be a nuclear attack…
  - concordDance 3y ago
    The idea that Nazi Germany invading Britain would result in the extinction of most human life is utterly absurd. Even a full nuclear exchange at the height of the cold war wouldn't have bumped off human civilization.

terrybingus 3y ago

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null_onset 3y ago
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tonyedgecombe 3y ago
You are in a minority now, the evidence is overwhelming.

mrjin 3y ago

Wow, wasn't preventing it from getting into the air easier?

jl6 3y ago

Clearly this technology isn’t an alternative to curtailing emissions, but we do still need carbon in our post-fossil future (e.g. for steel making, and as an input to liquid fuel synthesis). It would be nice to get this from the air.

paulsutter 3y ago

The best use for carbon capture is to make kerosene for aircraft, because that’s the best way to store solar power for flight Terraform is starting out making methane (natural gas) but will move on to kerosene https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/ You could also ban flight but this seems more practical

blueflow 3y ago
I think the two thirds of the worlds population that are too poor for plane tickets would prefer banning flights.
- david-gpu 3y ago
  People are not the only thing that travels by air.
  - blueflow 3y ago
    How much % of the worlds population are financially able to afford international shipping?
    - petesergeant 3y ago
      > How much % of the worlds population are financially able to afford international shipping? Another way of looking at that is: what percentage of the world regularly consumes products that went from one country to another by plane and I think it's probably reasonably high?
- rtz121 3y ago
  Any why does their opinion matter?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  With world citizen hat on I prefer to have a carbon neutral flight infra than no flight infra.

zaroth 3y ago

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dgan 3y ago

The entire thought process of "Occidental Petroleum": "So we are using C02 to push oil out of the ground, but it's kinda expensive, can we make it so government pays for it? Totally, call the Media Relationships department". The whole thing is green washing theater. It doesn't even address how the "sucking CO2 from the air" is going to be ecologically viable, just a hand-waivy "Think giant fans. Chemical reactions suck the carbon out of the sky and then store it underground." lol

jackdeansmith 3y ago
EOR oil is lower carbon than non-EOR oil. Greenwashing seems excessive, there is no fraud here, everyone is very upfront about what they are doing.

k__ 3y ago

Are machines really the appropriate solution? Shouldn't we use something plant based that is able to grow exponentially?

GOONIMMUNE 3y ago
Plants are a temporary solution at best, as they decompose and catch fire which puts their carbon back in the atmosphere. We need to be sequestering CO2 into more permanent forms

Renaud 3y ago

Thunderf00t has a great video about how maddening distracting (read: stupid) these carbon capture project are: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mCnr0HwW28w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mCnr0HwW28w Not everyone likes his delivery, but he’s right more often than not.

mesebrec 3y ago
I just want to point out how efficient your last sentence is in deflecting criticism about him. You start with a strawman: "people dislike him because of his delivery instead of his message". This way you immediately dismiss critics of him as "focussing on the tone instead of the content". But if that didn't convince the reader, you immediately follow up with an argument against people who dislike the content, by saying that flaws in content also don't really matter as long as he's more than 50% right.

bobse 3y ago

Don't worry. Nuclear war with China and India will solve the issue.

phero_cnstrcts 3y ago

I hope it's trees.

gumby 3y ago

I am working on greenhouse gas removal. There are two problems, only one of which is discussed here. We need to remove the last century's emissions, and yes, that can be, and initially will be an excuse to pollute further. I see that as a transient problem: eventually we will start to structure things against it by internalizing other externalities (e.g. other pollution) and expanding the emissions scope (not just oil). It's reality that we can't decarbonize overnight (we could't replace all the passenger cars by Monday, and how many peoples' pensions depend on oil stocks?), so funding cleanup technology on the backs of oil pollution helps get it going. The second, bigger problem is that the thermodynamics of these plants that suck the atmosphere through a straw is absurd, a trivial calculation that is obvious upon reflection. The atmosphere is f'ing huge, and you need to attack the problem at scale, which means, like it or not, physical chemistry and biology powered by sunlight.

hkt 3y ago

Lime - which absorbs carbon dioxide as it cures - is as old as construction. Hardly science fiction!

jtaft 3y ago

Plant more trees

msh 3y ago

If it works I think its hard to call it greenwashing. It might be a bad allocation of resources, if the resources could be spend on more efficient solutions. It might also be greenwashing if presented as a solution in it self, but as a supplement in the transition it might make sense.

thelastgallon 3y ago

Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-capture-and-storage/ https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...

fastneutron 3y ago

CO2 removal and sequestration will be a net energy sink no matter what you do, since it amounts to “unburning” some portion of fossil fuel combustion that’s already been committed. The question is what methods are the least bad in terms of thermodynamics, and how much renewable and nuclear energy capacity are we willing to divert?

trickstra 3y ago

Why are we even trying to suck it out of the sky, if we could much easier suck it out of the oceans, where it is 150 times more concentrated, and then let the oceans suck it out of the sky as they have done for the whole time. This paper https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-co2-in-atmosphere https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-... two years ago said that it would need solar plants worth less than the COVID stimulus bill, and it would produce H2, soft water and limestone, all of which can be sold and can displace fossil sources.

kaiusbrantlee 3y ago

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gigel82 3y ago

I think we should fund more research for converting the CO2 into usable products instead of just storing it (stuff like carbon fixation or chemical conversion). Who knows, perhaps we find a carbon negative (energy wise) solution to just convert it on site, and we can place these "factories" around the world where there's an excess of energy (near nuclear power plants, desert solar installations, etc.)

replete 3y ago

0.04% Life dies at 0.02% OK

pleb_nz 3y ago

Sounds like we're trying to put the cart before the horse with some of these ideas. Yeah they might help, but let's ask more why questions and then solve that.

ken22000 3y ago

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ken22000 3y ago

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