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This 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 gr

This 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 ago
Of 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 ago
  I 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.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    It indeed doesn't sound too bad this way, as long as we can realistically assume this is running 100% on renewables, ie not at night for solar. What's a bit unclear as of now is how much energy and thus possibly co2 emissions went into constructing this thing (material, transportation, etc.) and how long it will take to offset those. One or two years fine, ten years well, we'd have to see what the actual running costs other than electricity is. Should we throw in storage for our solar generated power so we can run it 24/7, we'd have to consider that too. I don't know what the current environmental footprint for lithium batteries is, but probably not negligible at that scale? I mean, I want to believe, I really worry about this, but this just sounds like feel-good project a bit too much.
    - CHY872 3y ago
      There’s just an economic bar where below that point, it’ll be what happens. Similar thing with solar and electric cars. Already cheaper to install solar than keep running coal. Give it a couple years and a government will be offering a rebate on cars only if the car can double as grid storage when parked.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something In the same way we celebrate EV and PV production, even though those may still be carbon-positive at the outset. Especially when they were still in prototyping.
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  Any good sources on the carbon footprint of producing a single unit of, say, the low-end Tesla?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    EVs: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifetime-carbon-emissions-electric-vehicles-vs-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti... https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d... > Based on a series of assumptions, the data showed that a Tesla Model 3 in the United States, for example, would need to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla. > The model was developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and includes thousands of parameters from the type metals in an electric vehicle (EV) battery to the amount of aluminium or plastic in a car. > Argonne's Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Technologies (GREET) model is now being used with other tools to help shape policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board, the two main regulators of vehicle emissions in the United States. > Jarod Cory Kelly, principal energy systems analyst at Argonne, said making EVs generates more carbon than combustion engine cars, mainly due to the extraction and processing of minerals in EV batteries and production of the power cells. TLDR ~1-2 years of driving, more upfront carbon emissions in manufacturing EVs but lower lifetime emissions overall. PV: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800919320543 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... ("Implications of Trends in Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for Transitioning to Renewable Electricity") > Recent papers argue that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for renewable electricity technologies and systems may be so low that the transition from fossil fuelled to renewable electricity may displace investment in other important economic sectors. For the case of large-scale electricity supply, we draw upon insights from Net Energy Analysis and renewable energy engineering to examine critically some assumptions, data and arguments in these papers, focussing on regions in which wind and solar can provide the majority of electricity. We show that the above claim is based on outdated data on EROIs, on failing to consider the energy efficiency advantages of transitioning away from fuel combustion and on overestimates of storage requirements. EROIs of wind and solar photovoltaics, which can provide the vast majority of electricity and indeed of all energy in the future, are generally high (≥ 10) and increasing. The impact of storage on EROI depends on the quantities and types of storage adopted and their operational strategies. In the regions considered in this paper, the quantity of storage required to maintain generation reliability is relatively small.
rockemsockem 3y ago
Right ...... Because we should wait until the grid is fully clean before developing this technology. Serialize all progress!

iforgotpassword 3y ago

Of 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 ago
I 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.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  It indeed doesn't sound too bad this way, as long as we can realistically assume this is running 100% on renewables, ie not at night for solar. What's a bit unclear as of now is how much energy and thus possibly co2 emissions went into constructing this thing (material, transportation, etc.) and how long it will take to offset those. One or two years fine, ten years well, we'd have to see what the actual running costs other than electricity is. Should we throw in storage for our solar generated power so we can run it 24/7, we'd have to consider that too. I don't know what the current environmental footprint for lithium batteries is, but probably not negligible at that scale? I mean, I want to believe, I really worry about this, but this just sounds like feel-good project a bit too much.
  - CHY872 3y ago
    There’s just an economic bar where below that point, it’ll be what happens. Similar thing with solar and electric cars. Already cheaper to install solar than keep running coal. Give it a couple years and a government will be offering a rebate on cars only if the car can double as grid storage when parked.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something In the same way we celebrate EV and PV production, even though those may still be carbon-positive at the outset. Especially when they were still in prototyping.

everybodyknows 3y ago
Any good sources on the carbon footprint of producing a single unit of, say, the low-end Tesla?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  EVs: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifetime-carbon-emissions-electric-vehicles-vs-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti... https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d... > Based on a series of assumptions, the data showed that a Tesla Model 3 in the United States, for example, would need to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla. > The model was developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and includes thousands of parameters from the type metals in an electric vehicle (EV) battery to the amount of aluminium or plastic in a car. > Argonne's Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Technologies (GREET) model is now being used with other tools to help shape policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board, the two main regulators of vehicle emissions in the United States. > Jarod Cory Kelly, principal energy systems analyst at Argonne, said making EVs generates more carbon than combustion engine cars, mainly due to the extraction and processing of minerals in EV batteries and production of the power cells. TLDR ~1-2 years of driving, more upfront carbon emissions in manufacturing EVs but lower lifetime emissions overall. PV: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800919320543 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... ("Implications of Trends in Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for Transitioning to Renewable Electricity") > Recent papers argue that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for renewable electricity technologies and systems may be so low that the transition from fossil fuelled to renewable electricity may displace investment in other important economic sectors. For the case of large-scale electricity supply, we draw upon insights from Net Energy Analysis and renewable energy engineering to examine critically some assumptions, data and arguments in these papers, focussing on regions in which wind and solar can provide the majority of electricity. We show that the above claim is based on outdated data on EROIs, on failing to consider the energy efficiency advantages of transitioning away from fuel combustion and on overestimates of storage requirements. EROIs of wind and solar photovoltaics, which can provide the vast majority of electricity and indeed of all energy in the future, are generally high (≥ 10) and increasing. The impact of storage on EROI depends on the quantities and types of storage adopted and their operational strategies. In the regions considered in this paper, the quantity of storage required to maintain generation reliability is relatively small.

rockemsockem 3y ago

Right ...... Because we should wait until the grid is fully clean before developing this technology. Serialize all progress!