3 ms·

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 lite

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
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Your claim doesn't appear to be correct. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118302253 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... Fan energy for this scheme is estimated as 61 kWh per tonne of CO2.
    - hju22_-3 3y ago
      While I'm not saying this whitepaper is wrong, keep in mind that this is done by Carbon Engineering who receive funding from people and organizations like N. Murray Edwards[1], Chevron Corporation, Occidental Petroleum and BHP[2] which either have hands deep in the oil or mining market, among other things. There is financial incentive to provide results that are in-line with what your funders want, and it's nothing new that this kind of thing has been, and still is being done. It's just hard to prove often. So as with all science, consult multiple whitepapers, including ones that don't have direct or borderline not indirect funding from those who have financial incentive to get a result that increases revenue or similar, to get a clearer idea of the probability that the topic isn't incorrect or what have you. As an aside, whether it's right or wrong (since it's a heated topic), I feel these videos demonstrate at least the possibility of companies playing with these kinds of things. They're amusing to watch, if nothing else, in my opinion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM https://youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM and https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw [1] https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/out-of-thin-air/ https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/out-of-thin-air/ [2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-bcs-carbon-engineering-secures-68-million-to-commercialize-c0/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-bcs-carbon-...
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        You could have given a technical rebuttal, but all you had was disparagement of motives.
concordDance 3y ago
> Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2. I'd appreciate an attempt to actually put some numbers on how much it would cost to pull in a billion billion litres of air, because on the face of it this sounds like it might only cost a trillion dollars in equipment, not counting the giant solar farm required to run 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
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Your claim doesn't appear to be correct. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435118302253 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... Fan energy for this scheme is estimated as 61 kWh per tonne of CO2.
  - hju22_-3 3y ago
    While I'm not saying this whitepaper is wrong, keep in mind that this is done by Carbon Engineering who receive funding from people and organizations like N. Murray Edwards[1], Chevron Corporation, Occidental Petroleum and BHP[2] which either have hands deep in the oil or mining market, among other things. There is financial incentive to provide results that are in-line with what your funders want, and it's nothing new that this kind of thing has been, and still is being done. It's just hard to prove often. So as with all science, consult multiple whitepapers, including ones that don't have direct or borderline not indirect funding from those who have financial incentive to get a result that increases revenue or similar, to get a clearer idea of the probability that the topic isn't incorrect or what have you. As an aside, whether it's right or wrong (since it's a heated topic), I feel these videos demonstrate at least the possibility of companies playing with these kinds of things. They're amusing to watch, if nothing else, in my opinion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM https://youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM and https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIezuL_doYw [1] https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/out-of-thin-air/ https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/out-of-thin-air/ [2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-bcs-carbon-engineering-secures-68-million-to-commercialize-c0/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-bcs-carbon-...
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      You could have given a technical rebuttal, but all you had was disparagement of motives.

concordDance 3y ago

> Or about 2 billion liters of air for 1 tonne of CO2. I'd appreciate an attempt to actually put some numbers on how much it would cost to pull in a billion billion litres of air, because on the face of it this sounds like it might only cost a trillion dollars in equipment, not counting the giant solar farm required to run it.