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The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California
- rich_sasha 3y agoWhen they say "commercial"... How does this thing make a profit? Carbon permits? Negative electricity costs? Or is it in fact some kind of non profit?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- anon84873628 3y agoIt seems companies (eg Microsoft being the big customer in this example) pay to offset their carbon emissions so they can use that fact for marketing purposes.
- carstenhag 3y agoLast I read about this topic, it was way more efficient to just buy better ovens for Ruanda and Nigeria [1] instead of trying to capture carbon. Was there any recent technology advancement that changed this? 1: https://www.atmosfair.de/de/save80/ https://www.atmosfair.de/de/save80/ - just an example, there are many ways of reducing co2 emission.
- tmorton 3y agoYes, we need that too. This happens a lot in climate policy discussions - "what about this other solution?" The answer is always "yes, that too!"
- xingped 3y agoI'd be hard pressed to find it again, but I remember watching a video years ago talking about the issue of buying new ovens for poor Africans in villages not actually working to reduce carbon as intended because what ended up happening is that they would just use now two stoves, the old one and new one, at the same time instead of tossing the old one and only using the new one. Great in theory and a seemingly easy low-hanging fruit, but may fall apart in practice, unfortunately.
- everybodyknows 3y agoReally? They're stove-limited rather than fuel-limited? Even if so, it's fixable by simply giving them as many of the new stoves as they want. It's merely a marginal inefficiency in the program.
- jjeaff 3y agoor allow them to trade an old stove for a new one rather than give them for free.
- bluejekyll 3y agoI keep thinking about why we’re going through this effort rather that using trees, which can also be harvested for lumber and the sequester that carbon in construction. My super rough math, from quick Google searches, this unit 1,000 tons per year. A mature tree is estimated to capture 48 pounds per year. That would be about 42,000 trees. At roughly, 100-200 trees per acre. Let’s just say 150, so that’s 280 acres of forest/trees to roughly match to performance of the system. Granted, it’s on much less land, but still. That doesn’t seem like a lot of land when you consider that large protected parks like Yosemite are 759,620 acres.
- smallerfish 3y agoLet's say you jam your trees in at 40 foot spacing (you want large mature trees) - that gives you 27 trees per acre. Assuming your math is right, and we need 42,000 mature trees per year capturing carbon, that means we need 1,555 newly planted acres of trees _per year_ to match this plant (and, there will be 25-30 years before the first batch to be planted actually matches in terms of capture). So you have a small problem of finding land that isn't already forested, finding labor to plant and maintain your growing forest, and continuing to do the same year after year. And, bear in mind that this plant is just a rounding error on the problem in terms of capacity, so in reality you need to scale by orders of magnitude.
- bluejekyll 3y ago27 trees per acre is a low number, and based on my own experience with land returned to a forest with decent canopy, the 150 trees per acre is not unreasonable. That said, even with my estimates you’re correct that this is a lot of land, but I wanted to quickly put it into perspective. We are losing forests all over the planet, and this can also help understand the impact of that. Also, the labor you mention is probably a wash compared to the construction of this plant. Edit: as an example, if you ever have a chance, go tour a maple tree farm as a good reference. Now, that said I did just google for maple farm tree density and they estimate 70 per acre.
- smallerfish 3y ago
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- exabrial 3y agoThis is infinitely dumb. We’re burning carbon to pull some out of the atmosphere… the energy used to power this plant would be better spent just powering the grid and would have an actual positive impact. People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoOf course, because tech and hype, woohoo. Never mind forests or even better swamps capture carbon "for free".
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Never mind forests or even better swamps capture carbon "for free" They’ve also been releasing it back into the atmosphere for free since the end of the Carboniferous.
- CHY872 3y agoI while ago I rand some relatively unscientific numbers, and learned that even swamps and forests are relatively inefficient users of space as it pertained to carbon capture. For example, a well managed bamboo plantation will yield 25T/hectare/year of bamboo, and this includes quite a bit of labour for the management. Meanwhile, the same area, covered in solar panels, will get you to around 500MWh per year of produced capacity. The world emissions per capita are presently around 5T per year, per capita. The world has 5 billion hectares (out of 13B total) of agricultural land in general, overall (and generally if land _could_ be used for agriculture it _is_ used for agriculture), so generally, there's not a tonne of space to do lots of carbon sequestering quickly with agriculture, especially as you'd need to move the carbon you've created somewhere else. The moral is that if you can ever get sequestering carbon down such that you can sequester 1 tonne of carbon for 20MWh power, you're close to a major winner, at least in all the deserts where you clearly can't grow bamboo but can grow solar, because at that point your cost of operations is just cost of infra. That startup thinks it can get down to around 1MWh/tonne, which is comparatively awesome! My conclusion (before getting to something super scientific) was that if you want to rely on trees and swamps for your carbon capture, you basically end up with massive geopolitical issues because you need to cover most of the world in trees and swamps, but most of the world's land is already used to grow food. Meanwhile, carbon capture can work in areas where land is not (as) valuable. If they are able to get to $50/tonne, that implies 1MWh/tonne, so that's about 500 tonnes/year per hectare. That'd mean that if you covered arizona in solar panels, you'd be sequestering 1/5 of human carbon output. Whereas if you grew bamboo, you'd cover the contiguous US for the same output. Do I believe them? No. But even 10x worse is cheap enough to change the world.
- x86x87 3y agoThis reminds me about how they tried to fix the problem in: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation_(short_story)
- snapplebobapple 3y agoThis comment thread is disappointingly low on valley/porn jokes. With how dumb carbon capture is, the correct response is ridicule and jokes, not serious discussion...
- scaramanga 3y ago"The plant is capable of removing 1,000 tons of CO2 a year" So about equivalent to 100 hectares of forest? Anyway, cool, another 50 million more of these facilities and we'll be at break-even.
- fbuslop 3y ago[dead]
- anovikov 3y agoAs another yardstick, it will cost about 2x the annual world GDP to mitigate all emissions this way. With normal amortisation rates and operating costs, it will be about 1.5x-2x more than entire energy expenditure worldwide. I wonder if this is simply a scheme to siphon public money. What a good catch for Fox News! Of course, if $100 per ton ever becomes a reality, then it's just 3% of world GDP and is probably affordable. But that's a pie in the sky "forward looking statement".
- ghiculescu 3y agoPeople on this technology forum seem skeptical that technology can improve or get cheaper.
- dotnet00 3y agoIt's a defining feature of this place, no optimism is allowed. If it isn't perfect from the start, it can never be good enough.
- thisgoesnowhere 3y agoI think they just understand that this is very unlikely to work even with best case estimates from people with a direct financial interest in this working
- junofan 3y agoIt’s part of the IEA’s net zero by 2050 plan. An understanding of basic physics is all that is required to see that DAC must be in the mix to achieve net zero emissions globally.
- CyanLite4 3y agoDid it cost more in carbon just for the construction workers to drive their pickup trucks to build this plant than what the plant will actually remove?
- reducesuffering 3y agoSolar panels required people be clothed, fed, and transported in excess carbon emissions than the first 10,000 reduced.
- undersuit 3y agoI'd like to know this too, the article only let me read two paragraphs. I found a NASA stat that an US average car will emit a metric ton of CO2 in 3 months of use. "The U.S. EPA has found that a typical 22 MPG gas-based car emits about 5 tons of carbon dioxide per year. On average, you emit one ton of CO2 for about every 2,500 miles you drive". CarbonCure(the partner of Heirloom here) agrees with me on the math: "CarbonCure’s global network of concrete producer partners has produced more than five million truckloads of carbon mineralized concrete, removing and reducing more than 365,000 metric tons of CO2. That’s equivalent to taking more than 80,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year." So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year... minus the activities of the employees to get to the plant. That's what I wanna know. When are the workers going to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? And how many need to be at work everyday at the plant? I guess at least California is pushing electric cars.
- somedude895 3y ago> So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year So it's basically useless? Just for show? Surely you could have done much more for the environment investing that money in a smarter way?
- Libcat99 3y agoOr it's a stepping stone in design that shows a technology can function. Future designs could be more efficient.
- pmarreck 3y agoit seems very labor-intensive to prepare trays of special dust and slide them in and out of these gigantic towers of them
- pengaru 3y agohttps://archive.is/bl4XZ https://archive.is/bl4XZ It's too bad these DAC systems don't take it a step further kicking the o2 back into the atmosphere while turning the carbon into something physical and industrially valuable like say spools of carbon fiber fabric or graphene/carbon nanotubes.
- turbocon 3y agoThis is off topic, but does anyone else always get an infinitely reloading captcha for archive[.]is links?
- tux3 3y agoThat happens if you use Cloudflare as DNS. archive.is has a notorious feud with Cloudflare over some technical detail they care about strongly.
- beretguy 3y agoFound some info on that https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-1-1-1-1-not-resolve-archive-is#135223 https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-... Ok, now let’s go back talking about carbon and oxygen.
- phanimahesh 3y agoAt this point every thread with an archive.is link has atleast one similar comment. Etiquette should probably shift to including this info in the same comment that posts the link to reduce the noise.
- jappgar 3y agoThose are called "trees" and were actively killing them to create farm land to feed an ever growing population.
- HPMOR 3y ago*we’re
- Proven 3y ago[dead]
- cglan 3y agoHow on earth is this ever going to be economically feasible. Wouldn’t it be more economically viable to literally just bury paper in the ground, or like simply not use the carbon in the first place?
- dottjt 3y agoHow on earth could you possibly make an economic argument on the future viability of our species on this planet? It's because of economics we're in this mess in the first place.
- Dylan16807 3y agoHuh? Even with extremely important life-saving goals, you still want to use a cost-effective method to get there. Also if it was actually expensive enough, we'd simply be doomed. Economics can't be ignored. They're a proxy for how much we can accomplish.
- dottjt 3y agoI agree in principle, but my question to you, is how do we make something economic i.e. CO2 pollution, which in principle provides no value? The same goes for fossil fuel consumption. There's nothing economic about not using fossil fuels. Understandably it's a compromise, but the first reaction shouldn't be "it costs too much, so don't do it". This attitude is the reason why nothing ends up getting done. I would much rather an uneconomic solution, than no solution at all, which seemingly is the status quo.
- Dylan16807 3y agoTaxes are one straightforward way. But no matter how you're paying for it, if you have method A and method B, and they'd both do the job, you don't pick the one that costs 5x as much because you think economic arguments are a bad thing.
- sspiff 3y agoThat's an extremely sad point of view. Of course humans can accomplish things that are not economically viable. Perhaps it's become harder in our current society, but many great projects of man were economic folly. To give one admittedly a little cliche example, landing on the moon never made any economic sense.
- chalcolithic 3y agocan we bring back ice age if we build enough of these?
- friend_and_foe 3y agoYes, theoretically. It's interesting, the limiting factors for biomass production are bioavailable nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sunlight and water, in that order. The ability to remove carbon dioxide from the air is the ability to modulate the amount of life on the planet, even to 0 if desired.
- kajaktum 3y agoHow does carbon capture help? Wouldn't it need to be stored somewhere? What happens if the storage leaks? People say that trees is a bad solution because the carbon is still there. This is even worse than trees. Trees at least looks good.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoWe're emitting around 40 billion tonnes of CO2 per year on this planet. This removes 1000. We need another 40 million or so of these facilities to take out what we emit. And mind you, what we emit, is still growing, by about 300M tonne per year. So, at best you could say that this slows down this growth by a tiny meaningless percentage. At this scale, it's a cynical form of green washing that is so futile that it's not even worth talking about. The point of installations like this is to allow polluters to buy off their sins. The church built a booming business out of allowing people to buy off their sins in the middle ages. It didn't really help but it made people feel good about themselves. This sort of is the modern day equivalent.
- RetroTechie 3y agoWorse: this type of greenwashing gives businesses (and politics) an excuse to do even less about the actual problem. Direct-air carbon capture is (at best) about as useful as re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
- tshaddox 3y agoDo what now? Who is complaining that “the carbon is still there?” Surely the total amount of carbon on Earth is relatively fixed and only changes slightly from, like, meteorites and space launches and radioactive decay.
- slowhadoken 3y agoIt would be cool if the facility blew oxygen then it could be switch from suck to blow
- tyronehed 3y ago[dead]