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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 t

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.
      - adrianN 3y ago
        Luckily we have technology like Bagger 288[1] to help us with that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow&pp=ygUKYmFnZ2VyIDI4OA%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow&pp=ygUKYmFnZ2VyI...
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        ...which runs on fossil fuels, probably generating about as much carbon as it can help bury.
        brazzy 3y ago
        Nope, it's entirely electrically powered, so can be run without generating carbon emissions.
        mcny 3y ago
        Which brings us to our original point, it is better if you are sincere to spend this money on electricity generation. In the US, we have over 20% of electricity coming from coal. Any money spent on anything else should first go toward pushing this down to zero.
        adrianN 3y ago
        I don’t think people suggest that carbon sequestration is an alternative to reducing emissions. It’s just that we have already emitted too much for net zero to be enough. We need to unburn a lot of coal to keep the planet comfortable.
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        Read this thread again. Plenty of people are suggesting it exactly for that purpose. Why do you think the biggest proponents and investors by far in the area are fossil fuel companies? The intended message, just like for geongnineering, is "keep burning oil, we'll figure it out another way".
    - javajosh 3y ago
      Burying carbon is a great idea. Similar to the great idea of preventing cells from reproducing without limit (cancer). The important question is, in both cases: how do you do it? With carbon there is an additional question: what is the demand? This is the interface with neoliberal capitalism: what is the demand? For cancer drugs, it's obvious. For carbon sequestration, it's less obvious. Currently we require individual consumers to prefer carboon negative products. But that's clearly not sustainable. Assuming we have a technical solution, what then is the political solution?
      - esarbe 3y ago
        Instead of burying carbon, why not just not dig it up in the first place? Prohibiting fossil fuels seems like a much simper way than trying to somehow let the market regulate that.
        concordDance 3y ago
        You need to prohibit them worldwide, which requires plenty of coercion of other countries. While carbon capture can be unilateral.
        esarbe 3y ago
        > You need to prohibit them worldwide, which requires plenty of coercion of other countries. That's easy for economic blocks like the US and the EU. There's plenty of other regulations they have coerced other nations to follow.
  - avar 3y ago
    > Imagine how long it actually takes to build one structure like that [...] 6M tonnes of the great pyramid. This one machine in Germany is already making the equivalent of ~15 great pyramids per year, by tons of material moved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 Carbon capture is difficult currently, but we'd have to problem dispensing with this amount of material per year on a global scale.
    - josefx 3y ago
      Your example runs through densely packed coal. No one would be insane enough to dig through random dirt with it in order to dig up 0.01% coal.
      - dash2 3y ago
        But the point of the machine was to move the carbon after it's been produced. I agree there's a separate question, how much air do we need to suck through carbon extraction machines.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    For context, we produce about 2000 great pyramids worth of concrete every year.
- jandrewrogers 3y ago
  Sequestering billions of tons of carbon every year requires billions of tons of chemical feedstock that we normally produce in the thousands of tons. That industrial capacity would have to be created. Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials. Many of the emission neutral DAC models I’ve looked at lose 10% — billions of tons — of their industrial chemistry inputs every year even assuming expansive recycling of the input components to the extent possible. The annual loss greatly exceeds current annual production for all purposes.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Not to mention the energy costs of all of that industrial activity!
    - barry-cotter 3y ago
      People talk about climate change as causing a 1m rise in sea levels. Averting that kind of economic and population dislocation makes the kind of energy costs being discussed seem like pissing into the ocean.
      - concordDance 3y ago
        1m rise is tiny cost wise compared tk the global economy, just look at the Netherlands, who have calculated[1] they'd need to spend under 0.1% of their GDP to get new barriers and flood control in place to counteract 1m sea level rise. The effects on agriculture are far more severe than sea level rise. [1] http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies
      - ilyt 3y ago
        Right but you when you can put all the industry and money into not producing that much CO2 in the first place I'd wager that's far more effective way to having less CO2 in atmosphere than trying to capture it post-factum. Or just slapping the same CO2 sequestering method at the end of industrial chain that creates CO2 rather than trying to catch it later.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Air is only about 0.04% CO2. A kg of air is about 820 liters. To get 1kg of CO2 out of that, you need to process about 2M liters of air. Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2. Assuming you can extract all of it of course. The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business. The goal with this is merely delaying that moment. The cynical bit is of course that they are using lots of government subsidies to pretend to capture tiny amounts of carbon. A significant portion of the IRA (1 trillion $) has been earmarked for, once more, fattening the pockets of oil and gas industry. All the carbon capture in the world to date doesn't add up to anywhere close to more than absolutely irrelevant token amounts of carbon relative to the amount we're continuing to put into the atmosphere. This amount btw. continues to grow year on year. We've merely slowed the pace at which the increase is growing. That growth is showing signs of maybe starting to decrease very soon. We'll still be putting out a larger amount of carbon every year though. We're decades away from turning that growth into actually net removing carbon. And we'll need to keep that up for centuries before it turns around current trends in global warming. But stopping the burning of oil and gas, which is now very doable, would be a nice start. That's billions of tonnes per year of co2 that we don't have to remove from the atmosphere. Orders of magnitude more than these companies will ever capture. The best way to capture carbon is to leave it in the ground and not burn it.
  - dash2 3y ago
    I found these numbers extremely helpful, but because I'm scientifically illiterate, I still don't really know how much 2bn liters of air is. I mean, for a comparison on roughly the same scale, how much air blows through a wind farm each day?
    - xxs 3y ago
      The point is that the mass of the air has to be moved through the system somehow - the energy required to pump it through would offset any capture
- lozenge 3y ago
  What about economically? Think of the huge investment required to extract fossil fuels and process them into something useful. Now imagine something similarly huge in scale, but the output product, instead of being incredibly valuable, is actually useless.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Captured carbon isn’t worthless. It represents an amount of damage that wasn’t done to the environment in the future. There’s no free lunch here. You either pay the cost now or you pay it later. Florida is already paying since their homes are quickly becoming uninsurable, and that’s not going to get better.
    - david-gpu 3y ago
      Lots of carbon have already been captured, in the form of the fossil fuels that remain underground. What we need to do is to stop releasing it into our atmosphere. Once that is largely done, we can start talking about the much more costly process of recapturing it from the atmosphere.
    - lozenge 3y ago
      Sure, carbon capture has a benefit to society. Society doesn't want to pay the bill though, which could be something like $90,000 per American. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0081648#s6 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
      - kaba0 3y ago
        I would rather pay that bill by fking not producing orders of magnitude more CO2 in the meanwhile.
        smoldesu 3y ago
        Let's see if the private sector agre- oops, they just lobbed a brick through our window with an invoice for $24,300,000,000,000 dollars.
evrimoztamur 3y ago
Is a great pyramid of Giza a volume or mass unit?
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Mass (it weighs about 6 millions tonnes).
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  The same mass of carbon is likely more voluminous because it is less dense than the stone used to build the pyramids.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Talking about quantity of CO2 in terms of volume doesn't really make sense since it's a compressible gas.
knodi123 3y ago
we don't need to offset them all. but your point stands.
theshrike79 3y ago
Al Gore gave a TED talk about this just a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgZC6da4mco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgZC6da4mco (What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Want You To Know) He says the same thing, with receipts. All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime. They spend X million on "solving" carbon capture while spending 2*X million telling people how hard they're working on solving carbon capture. This has been going on for decades with very very minimal progress. But the fossil fuel companies like to tout how they will increase their carbon capture by 500% by 2030. They do not mention how that increase brings them from 0.01% of their total carbon output to 0.05% in 10 years.
- nelox 3y ago
  Yep, the CO2 pumped into the well is to simply improve extraction of the existing resource.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  > All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime Aren't most of them startups? The point of the article is that this is the first time an oil company is doing it (and they're doing it to inject into fields, not for climate reasons). If Gore is really claiming all carbon capture projects are by oil firms then surely he is lying.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
    The propaganda works: they've made at least some people believe spending their own and other people's money on carbon capture is a good idea.
  - hannob 3y ago
    No. You're probably confusing carbon capture in general (which already exists in some quantities, although still small to what would be meaningful) with DAC. For the latter, Climeworks is kinda the leader, which is an independent startup. But even there, there's also carbon engineering, which is funded and owned by oil corps. (You may still call that a startup in the sense that it's a relatively young company trying something new, but well...) But for carbon capture in general, all the large players are fossil fuel corps. Equinor in Norway, Shell in Canada, etc., all big oil. The only meaningful player that is not fossil fuel associated is Carbfix in Iceland.
akira2501 3y ago
That's on the order of 3 million mi^2 of growing trees. Or a forest the size of the mainland United States.
- PicassoCTs 3y ago
  That then burns down, without the tokens refunded by the planter.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    Neat thing about trees is, you can cut them down, and then use them for things before that happens. Trees also provide ancillary benefits by just existing, such as reducing ground temperatures and acting as wind breaks. It's almost like the entire universe requires compromise and there are no perfect solutions.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  But please tell me how a solar panel park 1000x smaller is unfeasible
  - steeve 3y ago
    Because of “night”
acqq 3y ago
Yes. The emissions numbers everybody should know: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021 https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021 IEA Key World Energy Statistics 2021, pg 54: World CO2 emissions per year: 1973: 15 Gt of CO2 2019: 34 Gt of CO2 (Rounded and expressed in Gt to make it easier to think about them, the actual source numbers: 15461 Mt, 33622 Mt).
bambax 3y ago
Yes. It's so obvious we're completely doomed, I now find it kind of funny.
TekMol 3y ago
Literally all ideas about man made climate change are quickly revealed to be just fantasy if you think about one simple thing: how much CO2 do we need to produce to change the global climate? The answer is that we need to produce almost 10B tonnes of CO2 every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  I don't understand if this argument makes sense, but I feel it doesn't. Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon (hand-waving at thermodynamics here)? Also, don't all methods of carbon capture produce new emissions again because they need energy, resources etc? I don't claim to be able to do the hard science here, but the comparison you make seems a lot more far-fetched to me than that of the original comment. edit: sister comments already make the argument much more clear and I guess the self-doubt of people with responsible intention versus the chuzpe of climate denialists contributes even more to our dire outlook. If you were being sarcastic: oh well, not helpful. Quoting a sibling comment here: > The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business
  - TekMol 3y ago
    Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon That's the question. To burn coal, we have to dig it up from the ground. Is it possible that we one day find a way to "dig it up from the air" instead which is "less hard" than to dig it up from the ground? Or that we find some other process which has seperating carbon and oxygen as a byproduct? Like some form of photosynthesis? Trees already do this. The fastest bird can fly 200 mph. Apollo 10 flew at 25k mph. A factor of over 100. Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.
    - 3y ago
AndyMcConachie 3y ago
Everytime I hear about carbon capture tech all I can think of is, "Have these people heard about trees?"
- sfvisser 3y ago
  This is where you start explaining how trees capture carbon, how much, and where it is stored. Explain how we use trees in large quantities to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, where and how many? Who should do this and who is going to pay for it? Genuinely curious. But without those details your comment is just a poor quality and lazy attempt to disqualify people who are actually trying something.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    The problem is the majority of a tree's weight is water; to turn a Kg of carbon into tree requires about 1.8 Kg of water (that's from memory but it's order-of-magnitude right). This isn't necessarily a non-starter but it's a huge practical problem with trees in particular (IIRC bamboo is a better candidate).
- mhh__ 3y ago
  And you think the answer is no?
- concordDance 3y ago
  Growing trees then cutting them down and burying them is actually a decent carbon capture mechanism, except for the fact you're then depleting your soil and you'll need to burn even more CO2 making more fertilizer...
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  That works really well until the trees catch on fire, which has been happening more frequently in recent times.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
127 3y ago
A simple calculation of energy immediately reveals the entire endeavor as complete nonsense: more energy is spent producing and capturing the carbon than simply modifying the process to produce less carbon. Just calculate how much carbon you would have to capture to reach one average nuclear power plant replacing equivalent coal power plant(s).
- blueflow 3y ago
  Just from the energy levels of carbon (high, burns well) and carbon dioxide (low, inert gas) you can deduce, if there is an sequestration facility that is worth the power it consumes, its a perpetual motion machine and impossible.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    Nobody is claiming that removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is producing energy, it will always cost some energy. When we reached zero carbon dioxide emissions, then one can consider actively lowering the carbon dioxide level by pulling some out of the atmosphere. But until then it is essentially avoiding carbon dioxide emissions vs continuing them and then spending more money to undo them. In principle this could work, if avoiding emissions in one place was more expensive than undoing them in another place - if we only had really bad batteries, then it might make sense to keep combustion engines and capture the carbon dioxide in stationary facilities. In practice and at scale I neither see it necessary nor feasible.
- criddell 3y ago
  It doesn’t really matter if more nuclear is the smartest way to attack this problem if voters won’t go for it. Sadly, I think the situation won’t change until things get a lot worse than they are now. We’re too divided.
  - 127 3y ago
    To be darkly humorous, there is a probability that a very large recession looms in the horizon. Chinese property market crash, no replacement for driver of the world economy. Nosediving birth rates and population structures. Very soon global warming might solve itself: collapsing population and collapsing economy.
viraptor 3y ago
40B tonnes - if this is the only thing we tried to do and did not do any effort in reducing the usage. I don't know if any of those capture projects are ever going to be viable, but this specific opposition doesn't make sense. We're not stopping every other effort to try this thing, so "it won't solve the whole problem" is not a useful comment. No one thing is going to solve this whole problem and nobody is claiming it will.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  If you look around this thread, you'll see plenty of people suggesting exactly that - that it's actually better to focus on carbon capture, that it's more doable than reduction etc. The reality is just the opposite: the only option for stopping climate change is to reduce CO2 emissions completely. Now, if we were at a point where we're emitting some few tens of millions of tonnes instead of the 40B we emit today, maybe then carbon capture to help offset the last few trickles would make some sense - but not before then, not in any way shape or form.
  - mmiliauskas 3y ago
    > Galactic Federation President: Gentlemen, there's a solution here you are not seeing. > [Galactic Federation President blows his brains out]
    - znpy 3y ago
      Rick and Morty reference?
      - mmiliauskas 3y ago
        Yup :D
  - permo-w 3y ago
    there are a lot of people arguing strongly for one xor the other. reduction in harm and reduction in use are both good things. neither need to be prioritised more than the other. however, one is easier to legislate for
globular-toast 3y ago
Yep, it's all just delusion that allows people to sleep night after night while contributing to the catastrophe that is climate change. But hey, if it means a few old men didn't have to change their lifestyles then it's all good, right?
gibolt 3y ago
While this is true, we eventually need to go net negative. There is no other option. Energy curtailment (overproduction) will likely be a common reality in some seasons by 2030 and definitely in the following decade. Building plants that are the most efficient at using that otherwise wasted energy to 'fix' our past mistakes (plus desalination and other uses) are better than just wasting the energy completely.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > There is no other option. Geoengineering seems quite possible on paper.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    Geoengineering is like an emergency tracheotomy. It might keep us alive for a bit and we might end up needing it, but it isn’t a solution - just a desperate patch that buys us a little more time.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Depending on how extensive your geoengineering is you can buy as much time as you like... Reflect 10% of sunlight and you'll be experiencing an ice age.
      - creamyhorror 3y ago
        With the concurrent rise of reasoning AI, we'd be getting ready to launch the Second Renaissance! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animatrix#The_Second_Renaissance_Part_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animatrix#The_Second_Renai...
permo-w 3y ago
40B tonnes -> 8B people -> 5 tonnes per person per year -> 13.6kg a day per person is 40B including the offset from photosynthesis?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  To me that makes it sound more insurmountable than the pyramid comparison. Photosynthesis is cool but there are a lot of fires these days and also decomposition.
  - permo-w 3y ago
    if it's an accurate number
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Photosynthesis has recently stopped being CO2 negative, since biomass oxidation has increased.
steeve 3y ago
This. Once one runs the numbers, everything is much less sexy. There’s a reason IPCC explains what it explains.
DennisP 3y ago
In general, I think we should reserve the term "greenwashing" for fake projects. Lots of carbon offsets, for example, actually do nothing at all. If you're using those projects to offset your personal emissions, you're wasting your money. If you're a corporation, it's great because although it's not real, it's cheap and looks good. On the other hand, if you pay Climeworks then they will actually remove the CO2 from the air that you think they're removing, and bury it in deep basalt where it will turn into limestone. It will be quite expensive, and it's a woefully inadequate approach on its own, but it's real and measurable. For most corporations, it's worthless for greenwashing because it costs too much. (An oil company using captured CO2 to pump more oil out of the ground probably still counts as greenwashing, though.)
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > bury it in deep basalt where it will turn into limestone CO2 + Basalt !== Limestone Limestone is the fossilized remains of sea creatures. Wikipedia says: "Calcium released by basalts binds CO2 from the atmosphere forming CaCO3 acting thus as a CO2 trap." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt#Geochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt#Geochemistry CaCO3 is indeed the principal component of limestone, but not all Calcium Carbonate is limestone. I have no idea whether the process of basalt binding CO2 is efficient; WP doesn't detail the process. Nor does TFA; and I'm not surprised, because Oxy's goals are completely orthogonal to the production of CaCO3.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The majority of these projects are net carbon emitters, so they fit any definition of greenwashing. I also consider woefully small and unscalable, even if real, contributions to represent greenwashing. For example, the plastic straws craze, that attacked a problem that barely even constitutes a fraction of a fraction of a percent of plastic pollution, was pure greenwashing. And by this definition, literally all carbon capture initiatives, even the most well intentioned, are just greenwashing.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    They're only net carbon emitters if they're powered by fossil fuels. The Climeworks plant is powered by geothermal. Any renewable or nuclear power source would be fine. It's expensive but it's scalable. There is a vast supply of suitable basalt formations. In terms of land area, it absorbs a thousand times as much CO2 as planting trees. I have seen a lot of complaints about the sheer number of devices that would be required, but this is the sort of scale that civilization is accustomed to. We built enough hardware to put that CO2 in the air. We can build enough to take it out. The real question is whether it can be made cheap enough in mass production to make a difference. That will partly depend on clean energy costs, but they are dropping constantly. It's certain that reducing emissions will be more cost-effective in most cases, but for some applications, like long-distance jet travel, we probably can't get away from hydrocarbon fuels for the foreseeable future.
Condition1952 3y ago
Literally all ideas about carbon capture make sense when you think about the main goal of all urgent projects: draining public money from the taxpayers and storing it into offshore accounts
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Trying to derail the money train, are we?
ajuc 3y ago
> around 10B tonnes of C every year For comparison world uses around 97 000 000 barrels of oil per day, or about 3.5 billion tonnes of oil per year. Switching to synthetic oil (or any other hydrocarbon - I think methane is the easiest) would make a significant difference (and would make renewables much more viable, by solving the energy storage problem).
ilyt 3y ago
The tech is somewhat sensible when you slap it at end of the production chain, before CO2 gets to the atmosphere, but that's about it. Even if it "works" it would still require humongous amount of energy wasted to do it, just because it's separating tiny amount of CO2 per litre of air
migf 3y ago
Yep. We need massive new sources of green power generation, probably nuclear until fusion gets going. We need to build stable liquid hydrocarbons and inject them back into oil wells, and build new coal mountains to replace the ones we extracted. It's a completely insane amount of energy and effort, and every fossil fuel we burn makes it harder. I think it's possible and worthwhile. It isn't really any more cartoonish than the wastefulness of our current material culture.
SergeAx 3y ago
Bamboo. One hectare of bamboo captures approximately 50 tons of carbon per year. Seems like we need only 2M square kilometers of bamboo to offset all the carbon emission of humanity. It's a bit more than Alaska or less than a half of Sahara. It seems like a lot, but I think it is doable, given ease of bamboo planting. Of course we need to gene engineer variety of plants to capture the carbon for different locations. I believe in fast-growing pine or maple for that matter.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  At 50 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, to capture the 40B tonnes of CO2 emitted every year you'd need 800M hectares of bamboo (or 8M km²). So you'd have to plant almost the entirety of the Sahara desert (9.2M km²) with bamboo to get this. Also, you're saying 50 tonnes per year, but bamboo doesn't live for a very long time, and after it dies, it will relatively quickly decompose and release everything it captured back. So, in reality, you'd have to plant the whole of the Sahara with bamboo and then harvest it every year (or, to be fair, maybe every couple of years), storing all of the bamboo somewhere where it can't decompose, forever. So no, bamboo (nor any other plant) is not even close to a solution, not at the current rate of emissions.
xnx 3y ago
I've always assumed any adequate carbon capture solution would need to be roughly equal in scale to every bit of fossil fuel infrastructure (oil well, refinery, oil tanker, pipeline, coal mine, power planet, etc.) currently in use. That would be just to break even on current emissions, not reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
jackdeansmith 3y ago
Carbon in the atmosphere is a stock and flow problem, even if we get to net zero emissions, we have just stopped the problem from getting worse. At that point, we need carbon capture to be scaled up and efficient. I don't think it's premature or greenwashing for technologists to support early efforts to get this tech ready. I don't think many supporters of carbon capture think the goal is to offset all the current emissions. They mostly think of carbon capture as a way to eventually deal with historical emissions.
_hypx 3y ago
We are also reaching another point in this conversation. The "it doesn't matter how hard it is, it has to be done, period." And we are reaching that point with carbon capture. It does not matter how hard it seems. It still has to be done. There are no other options left.
mikewarot 3y ago
Regenerative agriculture can capture about 1/2 ton of carbon per acre/year. Given there are 4.62 billion acres of farmland in the world, that would be about 2 Billion tons of carbon captured per year. 1/5 of the total, it's not a fix, but it would help.

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.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      Luckily we have technology like Bagger 288[1] to help us with that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow&pp=ygUKYmFnZ2VyIDI4OA%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow&pp=ygUKYmFnZ2VyI...
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        ...which runs on fossil fuels, probably generating about as much carbon as it can help bury.
        brazzy 3y ago
        Nope, it's entirely electrically powered, so can be run without generating carbon emissions.
        mcny 3y ago
        Which brings us to our original point, it is better if you are sincere to spend this money on electricity generation. In the US, we have over 20% of electricity coming from coal. Any money spent on anything else should first go toward pushing this down to zero.
        adrianN 3y ago
        I don’t think people suggest that carbon sequestration is an alternative to reducing emissions. It’s just that we have already emitted too much for net zero to be enough. We need to unburn a lot of coal to keep the planet comfortable.
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        Read this thread again. Plenty of people are suggesting it exactly for that purpose. Why do you think the biggest proponents and investors by far in the area are fossil fuel companies? The intended message, just like for geongnineering, is "keep burning oil, we'll figure it out another way".
  - javajosh 3y ago
    Burying carbon is a great idea. Similar to the great idea of preventing cells from reproducing without limit (cancer). The important question is, in both cases: how do you do it? With carbon there is an additional question: what is the demand? This is the interface with neoliberal capitalism: what is the demand? For cancer drugs, it's obvious. For carbon sequestration, it's less obvious. Currently we require individual consumers to prefer carboon negative products. But that's clearly not sustainable. Assuming we have a technical solution, what then is the political solution?
    - esarbe 3y ago
      Instead of burying carbon, why not just not dig it up in the first place? Prohibiting fossil fuels seems like a much simper way than trying to somehow let the market regulate that.
      - concordDance 3y ago
        You need to prohibit them worldwide, which requires plenty of coercion of other countries. While carbon capture can be unilateral.
        esarbe 3y ago
        > You need to prohibit them worldwide, which requires plenty of coercion of other countries. That's easy for economic blocks like the US and the EU. There's plenty of other regulations they have coerced other nations to follow.
- avar 3y ago
  > Imagine how long it actually takes to build one structure like that [...] 6M tonnes of the great pyramid. This one machine in Germany is already making the equivalent of ~15 great pyramids per year, by tons of material moved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 Carbon capture is difficult currently, but we'd have to problem dispensing with this amount of material per year on a global scale.
  - josefx 3y ago
    Your example runs through densely packed coal. No one would be insane enough to dig through random dirt with it in order to dig up 0.01% coal.
    - dash2 3y ago
      But the point of the machine was to move the carbon after it's been produced. I agree there's a separate question, how much air do we need to suck through carbon extraction machines.
- concordDance 3y ago
  For context, we produce about 2000 great pyramids worth of concrete every year.
jandrewrogers 3y ago
Sequestering billions of tons of carbon every year requires billions of tons of chemical feedstock that we normally produce in the thousands of tons. That industrial capacity would have to be created. Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials. Many of the emission neutral DAC models I’ve looked at lose 10% — billions of tons — of their industrial chemistry inputs every year even assuming expansive recycling of the input components to the extent possible. The annual loss greatly exceeds current annual production for all purposes.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Not to mention the energy costs of all of that industrial activity!
  - barry-cotter 3y ago
    People talk about climate change as causing a 1m rise in sea levels. Averting that kind of economic and population dislocation makes the kind of energy costs being discussed seem like pissing into the ocean.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      1m rise is tiny cost wise compared tk the global economy, just look at the Netherlands, who have calculated[1] they'd need to spend under 0.1% of their GDP to get new barriers and flood control in place to counteract 1m sea level rise. The effects on agriculture are far more severe than sea level rise. [1] http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Right but you when you can put all the industry and money into not producing that much CO2 in the first place I'd wager that's far more effective way to having less CO2 in atmosphere than trying to capture it post-factum. Or just slapping the same CO2 sequestering method at the end of industrial chain that creates CO2 rather than trying to catch it later.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Air is only about 0.04% CO2. A kg of air is about 820 liters. To get 1kg of CO2 out of that, you need to process about 2M liters of air. Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2. Assuming you can extract all of it of course. The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business. The goal with this is merely delaying that moment. The cynical bit is of course that they are using lots of government subsidies to pretend to capture tiny amounts of carbon. A significant portion of the IRA (1 trillion $) has been earmarked for, once more, fattening the pockets of oil and gas industry. All the carbon capture in the world to date doesn't add up to anywhere close to more than absolutely irrelevant token amounts of carbon relative to the amount we're continuing to put into the atmosphere. This amount btw. continues to grow year on year. We've merely slowed the pace at which the increase is growing. That growth is showing signs of maybe starting to decrease very soon. We'll still be putting out a larger amount of carbon every year though. We're decades away from turning that growth into actually net removing carbon. And we'll need to keep that up for centuries before it turns around current trends in global warming. But stopping the burning of oil and gas, which is now very doable, would be a nice start. That's billions of tonnes per year of co2 that we don't have to remove from the atmosphere. Orders of magnitude more than these companies will ever capture. The best way to capture carbon is to leave it in the ground and not burn it.
- dash2 3y ago
  I found these numbers extremely helpful, but because I'm scientifically illiterate, I still don't really know how much 2bn liters of air is. I mean, for a comparison on roughly the same scale, how much air blows through a wind farm each day?
  - xxs 3y ago
    The point is that the mass of the air has to be moved through the system somehow - the energy required to pump it through would offset any capture
lozenge 3y ago
What about economically? Think of the huge investment required to extract fossil fuels and process them into something useful. Now imagine something similarly huge in scale, but the output product, instead of being incredibly valuable, is actually useless.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Captured carbon isn’t worthless. It represents an amount of damage that wasn’t done to the environment in the future. There’s no free lunch here. You either pay the cost now or you pay it later. Florida is already paying since their homes are quickly becoming uninsurable, and that’s not going to get better.
  - david-gpu 3y ago
    Lots of carbon have already been captured, in the form of the fossil fuels that remain underground. What we need to do is to stop releasing it into our atmosphere. Once that is largely done, we can start talking about the much more costly process of recapturing it from the atmosphere.
  - lozenge 3y ago
    Sure, carbon capture has a benefit to society. Society doesn't want to pay the bill though, which could be something like $90,000 per American. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0081648#s6 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
    - kaba0 3y ago
      I would rather pay that bill by fking not producing orders of magnitude more CO2 in the meanwhile.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        Let's see if the private sector agre- oops, they just lobbed a brick through our window with an invoice for $24,300,000,000,000 dollars.

evrimoztamur 3y ago

Is a great pyramid of Giza a volume or mass unit?

tsimionescu 3y ago
Mass (it weighs about 6 millions tonnes).
heavyset_go 3y ago
The same mass of carbon is likely more voluminous because it is less dense than the stone used to build the pyramids.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Talking about quantity of CO2 in terms of volume doesn't really make sense since it's a compressible gas.

knodi123 3y ago

we don't need to offset them all. but your point stands.

theshrike79 3y ago

Al Gore gave a TED talk about this just a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgZC6da4mco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgZC6da4mco (What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Want You To Know) He says the same thing, with receipts. All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime. They spend X million on "solving" carbon capture while spending 2*X million telling people how hard they're working on solving carbon capture. This has been going on for decades with very very minimal progress. But the fossil fuel companies like to tout how they will increase their carbon capture by 500% by 2030. They do not mention how that increase brings them from 0.01% of their total carbon output to 0.05% in 10 years.

nelox 3y ago
Yep, the CO2 pumped into the well is to simply improve extraction of the existing resource.
nvm0n2 3y ago
> All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime Aren't most of them startups? The point of the article is that this is the first time an oil company is doing it (and they're doing it to inject into fields, not for climate reasons). If Gore is really claiming all carbon capture projects are by oil firms then surely he is lying.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  The propaganda works: they've made at least some people believe spending their own and other people's money on carbon capture is a good idea.
- hannob 3y ago
  No. You're probably confusing carbon capture in general (which already exists in some quantities, although still small to what would be meaningful) with DAC. For the latter, Climeworks is kinda the leader, which is an independent startup. But even there, there's also carbon engineering, which is funded and owned by oil corps. (You may still call that a startup in the sense that it's a relatively young company trying something new, but well...) But for carbon capture in general, all the large players are fossil fuel corps. Equinor in Norway, Shell in Canada, etc., all big oil. The only meaningful player that is not fossil fuel associated is Carbfix in Iceland.

akira2501 3y ago

That's on the order of 3 million mi^2 of growing trees. Or a forest the size of the mainland United States.

PicassoCTs 3y ago
That then burns down, without the tokens refunded by the planter.
- akira2501 3y ago
  Neat thing about trees is, you can cut them down, and then use them for things before that happens. Trees also provide ancillary benefits by just existing, such as reducing ground temperatures and acting as wind breaks. It's almost like the entire universe requires compromise and there are no perfect solutions.
raverbashing 3y ago
But please tell me how a solar panel park 1000x smaller is unfeasible
- steeve 3y ago
  Because of “night”

acqq 3y ago

Yes. The emissions numbers everybody should know: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021 https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021 IEA Key World Energy Statistics 2021, pg 54: World CO2 emissions per year: 1973: 15 Gt of CO2 2019: 34 Gt of CO2 (Rounded and expressed in Gt to make it easier to think about them, the actual source numbers: 15461 Mt, 33622 Mt).

bambax 3y ago

Yes. It's so obvious we're completely doomed, I now find it kind of funny.

TekMol 3y ago

Literally all ideas about man made climate change are quickly revealed to be just fantasy if you think about one simple thing: how much CO2 do we need to produce to change the global climate? The answer is that we need to produce almost 10B tonnes of CO2 every year. That's something on the order of 1500 great pyramids of Giza (which weighs 6M tonnes) worth of carbon every year.

moritzwarhier 3y ago
I don't understand if this argument makes sense, but I feel it doesn't. Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon (hand-waving at thermodynamics here)? Also, don't all methods of carbon capture produce new emissions again because they need energy, resources etc? I don't claim to be able to do the hard science here, but the comparison you make seems a lot more far-fetched to me than that of the original comment. edit: sister comments already make the argument much more clear and I guess the self-doubt of people with responsible intention versus the chuzpe of climate denialists contributes even more to our dire outlook. If you were being sarcastic: oh well, not helpful. Quoting a sibling comment here: > The sad reality with carbon capture is that it's an excuse to put more carbon into the atmosphere than is actually being captured. The oil and gas companies pump billions into capturing carbon are not interested in efficiencies. They are merely interested in making many billions more on dumping more carbon in the atmosphere. If that ever gets close to what they produce, their cost will be so high that they will be out of business
- TekMol 3y ago
  Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon That's the question. To burn coal, we have to dig it up from the ground. Is it possible that we one day find a way to "dig it up from the air" instead which is "less hard" than to dig it up from the ground? Or that we find some other process which has seperating carbon and oxygen as a byproduct? Like some form of photosynthesis? Trees already do this. The fastest bird can fly 200 mph. Apollo 10 flew at 25k mph. A factor of over 100. Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.
  - 3y ago

AndyMcConachie 3y ago

Everytime I hear about carbon capture tech all I can think of is, "Have these people heard about trees?"

sfvisser 3y ago
This is where you start explaining how trees capture carbon, how much, and where it is stored. Explain how we use trees in large quantities to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, where and how many? Who should do this and who is going to pay for it? Genuinely curious. But without those details your comment is just a poor quality and lazy attempt to disqualify people who are actually trying something.
- bandrami 3y ago
  The problem is the majority of a tree's weight is water; to turn a Kg of carbon into tree requires about 1.8 Kg of water (that's from memory but it's order-of-magnitude right). This isn't necessarily a non-starter but it's a huge practical problem with trees in particular (IIRC bamboo is a better candidate).
mhh__ 3y ago
And you think the answer is no?
concordDance 3y ago
Growing trees then cutting them down and burying them is actually a decent carbon capture mechanism, except for the fact you're then depleting your soil and you'll need to burn even more CO2 making more fertilizer...
marcus0x62 3y ago
That works really well until the trees catch on fire, which has been happening more frequently in recent times.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

127 3y ago

A simple calculation of energy immediately reveals the entire endeavor as complete nonsense: more energy is spent producing and capturing the carbon than simply modifying the process to produce less carbon. Just calculate how much carbon you would have to capture to reach one average nuclear power plant replacing equivalent coal power plant(s).

blueflow 3y ago
Just from the energy levels of carbon (high, burns well) and carbon dioxide (low, inert gas) you can deduce, if there is an sequestration facility that is worth the power it consumes, its a perpetual motion machine and impossible.
- danbruc 3y ago
  Nobody is claiming that removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is producing energy, it will always cost some energy. When we reached zero carbon dioxide emissions, then one can consider actively lowering the carbon dioxide level by pulling some out of the atmosphere. But until then it is essentially avoiding carbon dioxide emissions vs continuing them and then spending more money to undo them. In principle this could work, if avoiding emissions in one place was more expensive than undoing them in another place - if we only had really bad batteries, then it might make sense to keep combustion engines and capture the carbon dioxide in stationary facilities. In practice and at scale I neither see it necessary nor feasible.
criddell 3y ago
It doesn’t really matter if more nuclear is the smartest way to attack this problem if voters won’t go for it. Sadly, I think the situation won’t change until things get a lot worse than they are now. We’re too divided.
- 127 3y ago
  To be darkly humorous, there is a probability that a very large recession looms in the horizon. Chinese property market crash, no replacement for driver of the world economy. Nosediving birth rates and population structures. Very soon global warming might solve itself: collapsing population and collapsing economy.

viraptor 3y ago

40B tonnes - if this is the only thing we tried to do and did not do any effort in reducing the usage. I don't know if any of those capture projects are ever going to be viable, but this specific opposition doesn't make sense. We're not stopping every other effort to try this thing, so "it won't solve the whole problem" is not a useful comment. No one thing is going to solve this whole problem and nobody is claiming it will.

tsimionescu 3y ago
If you look around this thread, you'll see plenty of people suggesting exactly that - that it's actually better to focus on carbon capture, that it's more doable than reduction etc. The reality is just the opposite: the only option for stopping climate change is to reduce CO2 emissions completely. Now, if we were at a point where we're emitting some few tens of millions of tonnes instead of the 40B we emit today, maybe then carbon capture to help offset the last few trickles would make some sense - but not before then, not in any way shape or form.
- mmiliauskas 3y ago
  > Galactic Federation President: Gentlemen, there's a solution here you are not seeing. > [Galactic Federation President blows his brains out]
  - znpy 3y ago
    Rick and Morty reference?
    - mmiliauskas 3y ago
      Yup :D
- permo-w 3y ago
  there are a lot of people arguing strongly for one xor the other. reduction in harm and reduction in use are both good things. neither need to be prioritised more than the other. however, one is easier to legislate for

globular-toast 3y ago

Yep, it's all just delusion that allows people to sleep night after night while contributing to the catastrophe that is climate change. But hey, if it means a few old men didn't have to change their lifestyles then it's all good, right?

gibolt 3y ago

While this is true, we eventually need to go net negative. There is no other option. Energy curtailment (overproduction) will likely be a common reality in some seasons by 2030 and definitely in the following decade. Building plants that are the most efficient at using that otherwise wasted energy to 'fix' our past mistakes (plus desalination and other uses) are better than just wasting the energy completely.

concordDance 3y ago
> There is no other option. Geoengineering seems quite possible on paper.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  Geoengineering is like an emergency tracheotomy. It might keep us alive for a bit and we might end up needing it, but it isn’t a solution - just a desperate patch that buys us a little more time.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Depending on how extensive your geoengineering is you can buy as much time as you like... Reflect 10% of sunlight and you'll be experiencing an ice age.
    - creamyhorror 3y ago
      With the concurrent rise of reasoning AI, we'd be getting ready to launch the Second Renaissance! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animatrix#The_Second_Renaissance_Part_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animatrix#The_Second_Renai...

permo-w 3y ago

40B tonnes -> 8B people -> 5 tonnes per person per year -> 13.6kg a day per person is 40B including the offset from photosynthesis?

quickthrower2 3y ago
To me that makes it sound more insurmountable than the pyramid comparison. Photosynthesis is cool but there are a lot of fires these days and also decomposition.
- permo-w 3y ago
  if it's an accurate number
pfdietz 3y ago
Photosynthesis has recently stopped being CO2 negative, since biomass oxidation has increased.

steeve 3y ago

This. Once one runs the numbers, everything is much less sexy. There’s a reason IPCC explains what it explains.

DennisP 3y ago

In general, I think we should reserve the term "greenwashing" for fake projects. Lots of carbon offsets, for example, actually do nothing at all. If you're using those projects to offset your personal emissions, you're wasting your money. If you're a corporation, it's great because although it's not real, it's cheap and looks good. On the other hand, if you pay Climeworks then they will actually remove the CO2 from the air that you think they're removing, and bury it in deep basalt where it will turn into limestone. It will be quite expensive, and it's a woefully inadequate approach on its own, but it's real and measurable. For most corporations, it's worthless for greenwashing because it costs too much. (An oil company using captured CO2 to pump more oil out of the ground probably still counts as greenwashing, though.)

denton-scratch 3y ago
> bury it in deep basalt where it will turn into limestone CO2 + Basalt !== Limestone Limestone is the fossilized remains of sea creatures. Wikipedia says: "Calcium released by basalts binds CO2 from the atmosphere forming CaCO3 acting thus as a CO2 trap." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt#Geochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basalt#Geochemistry CaCO3 is indeed the principal component of limestone, but not all Calcium Carbonate is limestone. I have no idea whether the process of basalt binding CO2 is efficient; WP doesn't detail the process. Nor does TFA; and I'm not surprised, because Oxy's goals are completely orthogonal to the production of CaCO3.
tsimionescu 3y ago
The majority of these projects are net carbon emitters, so they fit any definition of greenwashing. I also consider woefully small and unscalable, even if real, contributions to represent greenwashing. For example, the plastic straws craze, that attacked a problem that barely even constitutes a fraction of a fraction of a percent of plastic pollution, was pure greenwashing. And by this definition, literally all carbon capture initiatives, even the most well intentioned, are just greenwashing.
- DennisP 3y ago
  They're only net carbon emitters if they're powered by fossil fuels. The Climeworks plant is powered by geothermal. Any renewable or nuclear power source would be fine. It's expensive but it's scalable. There is a vast supply of suitable basalt formations. In terms of land area, it absorbs a thousand times as much CO2 as planting trees. I have seen a lot of complaints about the sheer number of devices that would be required, but this is the sort of scale that civilization is accustomed to. We built enough hardware to put that CO2 in the air. We can build enough to take it out. The real question is whether it can be made cheap enough in mass production to make a difference. That will partly depend on clean energy costs, but they are dropping constantly. It's certain that reducing emissions will be more cost-effective in most cases, but for some applications, like long-distance jet travel, we probably can't get away from hydrocarbon fuels for the foreseeable future.

Condition1952 3y ago

Literally all ideas about carbon capture make sense when you think about the main goal of all urgent projects: draining public money from the taxpayers and storing it into offshore accounts

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

Trying to derail the money train, are we?

ajuc 3y ago

> around 10B tonnes of C every year For comparison world uses around 97 000 000 barrels of oil per day, or about 3.5 billion tonnes of oil per year. Switching to synthetic oil (or any other hydrocarbon - I think methane is the easiest) would make a significant difference (and would make renewables much more viable, by solving the energy storage problem).

ilyt 3y ago

The tech is somewhat sensible when you slap it at end of the production chain, before CO2 gets to the atmosphere, but that's about it. Even if it "works" it would still require humongous amount of energy wasted to do it, just because it's separating tiny amount of CO2 per litre of air

migf 3y ago

Yep. We need massive new sources of green power generation, probably nuclear until fusion gets going. We need to build stable liquid hydrocarbons and inject them back into oil wells, and build new coal mountains to replace the ones we extracted. It's a completely insane amount of energy and effort, and every fossil fuel we burn makes it harder. I think it's possible and worthwhile. It isn't really any more cartoonish than the wastefulness of our current material culture.

SergeAx 3y ago

Bamboo. One hectare of bamboo captures approximately 50 tons of carbon per year. Seems like we need only 2M square kilometers of bamboo to offset all the carbon emission of humanity. It's a bit more than Alaska or less than a half of Sahara. It seems like a lot, but I think it is doable, given ease of bamboo planting. Of course we need to gene engineer variety of plants to capture the carbon for different locations. I believe in fast-growing pine or maple for that matter.

tsimionescu 3y ago
At 50 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, to capture the 40B tonnes of CO2 emitted every year you'd need 800M hectares of bamboo (or 8M km²). So you'd have to plant almost the entirety of the Sahara desert (9.2M km²) with bamboo to get this. Also, you're saying 50 tonnes per year, but bamboo doesn't live for a very long time, and after it dies, it will relatively quickly decompose and release everything it captured back. So, in reality, you'd have to plant the whole of the Sahara with bamboo and then harvest it every year (or, to be fair, maybe every couple of years), storing all of the bamboo somewhere where it can't decompose, forever. So no, bamboo (nor any other plant) is not even close to a solution, not at the current rate of emissions.

xnx 3y ago

I've always assumed any adequate carbon capture solution would need to be roughly equal in scale to every bit of fossil fuel infrastructure (oil well, refinery, oil tanker, pipeline, coal mine, power planet, etc.) currently in use. That would be just to break even on current emissions, not reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

jackdeansmith 3y ago

Carbon in the atmosphere is a stock and flow problem, even if we get to net zero emissions, we have just stopped the problem from getting worse. At that point, we need carbon capture to be scaled up and efficient. I don't think it's premature or greenwashing for technologists to support early efforts to get this tech ready. I don't think many supporters of carbon capture think the goal is to offset all the current emissions. They mostly think of carbon capture as a way to eventually deal with historical emissions.

_hypx 3y ago

We are also reaching another point in this conversation. The "it doesn't matter how hard it is, it has to be done, period." And we are reaching that point with carbon capture. It does not matter how hard it seems. It still has to be done. There are no other options left.

mikewarot 3y ago

Regenerative agriculture can capture about 1/2 ton of carbon per acre/year. Given there are 4.62 billion acres of farmland in the world, that would be about 2 Billion tons of carbon captured per year. 1/5 of the total, it's not a fix, but it would help.