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Carbon capture tech a 'complete falsehood', says Fortescue Metals chairman

56 points by thelastgallon 3y ago

api 3y ago
IMHO it doesn't pass the thermodynamic sniff test. It would be better to spend energy displacing fossil fuel generation than to spend energy capturing carbon. The only way I can see this changing is if we developed something like cheap efficient fusion reactors that allowed us to just burn energy with contempt. In that world carbon capture might make sense as a way to blunt climate change.
- aqme28 3y ago
  I agree with this. It could only make sense where there is abundant almost free energy. But now people just mine crypto in those places. Carbon capture needs to pay better than mining crypto or it won’t happen.
  - cozzyd 3y ago
    Too bad nobody in the "innovative" crypto sector has come up with a Proof-of-Carbon-Capture coin.
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      Oh don't worry, they did, several times. It went predictably. Here's one very stupid white paper. [1] [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.00185.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.00185.pdf
      - cozzyd 3y ago
        As usual, a crypo white paper is indistinguishable from parody
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      It's been tried at least in theory but blockchains are only REALLY good at keeping track of purely digital things that happen within their chain. Outside of that they're at the mercy of people putting bad data into them. Conceptually how would that reward system even work? It would have to rely on real world auditors to validate that the carbon sinking was actually being performed (and working).
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      A somewhat related notion, a carbon coin, is a key plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > if we developed something like cheap efficient fusion reactors that allowed us to just burn energy with contempt All problems humanity faces are energy problems. With sufficiently cheap and abundant energy, we can work through anything.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  There's maybe a niche for it where our energy storage ability can't use all the renewables produced at a given time so we use the excess to run carbon capture facilities. Right now the times where there's >100% power demand for renewables is fairly rare though.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    In that world, I suspect people will find other uses for very cheap energy. I mean if my (cold) town had free energy even a few days per year, I'd just fit a heater on every street light and turn them on whenever energy was free so we could have 'warm streets' days.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Are we talking about carbon capture (like from the smokestack of a coal plant)? Or carbon sequestration, where we pull it out of the air? The latter probably makes sense even at high energy cost... it makes a climate crisis reversible rather than just slowable. The former seems rather more suspect even with cheap fusion. What do you even do with the carbon, once captured? You can't turn it into a solid... that would be the coal you just burned. And while it might be capturable as a gas, how would one go about storing it safely?
  - ummonk 3y ago
    Capture and sequestration go hand in hand - you first have to capture the carbon to sequester it. It will obviously always be more efficient to capture carbon at the source of the emissions (e.g. a smokestack) where it is highly concentrated than to pull it out of the air..
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      There are other methods of sequestration that may be better than carbon capture. Rock weathering is the main one, where dump crushed olivine rock into the oceans where it picks up the dissolved CO2. This has advantage that uses known technology and scales well. It also locks CO2 into rock instead of worrying about where to put the captured CO2.
- ajross 3y ago
  It's usually talked about in broader contexts. There are some fuel modes (air travel being the really obvious one) that aren't ever going to be non-combustion. You have to put carbon into the upper atmosphere to move people in jetliners, period. So solutions would involve either synthesizing carbon-neutral fuel, or burning petroleum and offsetting it by putting the same amount of carbon back into the ground somewhere else. There's a reasonably strong argument that the latter is more energy-efficient. But it's all infant tech and no one really knows.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- haqlootydoot 3y ago
  [flagged]
zug_zug 3y ago
Seems like a bit of a reductionistic bait/soundbite. Obviously the tech isn't there yet, but when we find a (fast) way turn CO2 back into gasoline that will both allow all existing technologies to go green and also give us a good recapture path (pump it back down into the wells).
- eindiran 3y ago
  > [W]hen we find a (fast) way turn CO2 back into gasoline The more salient point than fast is cheap, preferably something with a net profit, which seems... unlikely.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Even in the best case, doing this requires at least as much energy as was released by burning the gasoline. But more likely 2-3x as much energy. It's far more energy efficient to prevent the emissions in the first place. Burning the captured gasoline again would be extremely foolish.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dageshi 3y ago
    We might well reach a point with solar + wind where we have massive gluts of power we can't do anything with and can't store. Even energy inefficient processes like the one you describe might become viable especially if it effectively creates a storable energy source.
  - travisporter 3y ago
    Terraform industries
  - realusername 3y ago
    I'm also sceptic of CO2 to gasoline for this reason. The only reason why petrol engine work at all is because gasoline contains a tremendous amount of energy, otherwise their efficiency sucks and the vast majority of this energy is wasted. If we want to do the reverse operation, we don't have the luxury of just spending the wasted part though, we have to spend all of this energy.
bordercases 3y ago
What about trees!
- choilive 3y ago
  What about them?
elil17 3y ago
It should be noted that Fortescue Metals is not some disinterested third party here. They have a massive stake in green hydrogen production (see their FFI division). Hydrocarbons (not necessarily from fossil fuels, see https://prometheusfuels.com/ https://prometheusfuels.com/) + DAC are one proposed alternative to green hydrogen for powering industries (such as mining) where batteries are not a good option. I know experts who believe this is more viable. I still agree with him that DAC can't be used as an excuse to keep emitting.
- dauertewigkeit 3y ago
  Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels depend on both green hydrogen and DAC. So green hydrogen would be needed anyway. The only question is whether you build infrastructure with the goal of using hydrogen directly or not.
  - elil17 3y ago
    Synthetic hydrocarbons would likely not use much of FMG's hydrogen technologies: membranes, hydrogen liquidification, hydrogen vehicles, etc.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  It should also be noted that many of the most vociferous advocates of CCS are of or aligned with the fossil fuels industry, whether direct producers or major consumers, particularly electric utilities (especially those reliant on coal), and hard-to-substitute activities such as air and marine shipping. For the latter, petroleum-analogue synfuels seem to me a far more viable option, along with a shifted economics (higher cost curve) of the sector --- air travel and long-distance shipping are likely to be rather more expensive by and by.
ajross 3y ago
> Australia's Fortescue is a major iron ore producer Basically: "Executive of regulated company doesn't want to be regulated". The incentives don't line up here to take this on faith (no reasoning was given, really, it's not a tech article) like the article does. He's not an expert witness, he's a player with an agenda. That doesn't mean he's wrong. CCS is absolutely an unsolved problem and all emerging technologies involve risk. But all he's saying here is that CCS is going to impact his business, he doesn't like that, and he'd prefer government try to solve the problem by impacting someone else's business instead.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  Australia’s regulatory environment is such that resources companies are nowhere near the point where they need to publicly kick up a fuss to influence government policy. They are more than capable of doing that in private. Twiggy is very much the ‘odd one out’ here in making any sort of public statement about…pretty much anything…ever.
- senectus1 3y ago
  > he's a player with an agenda. His agenda is REAL Zero Carbon. Yes he is a ruthless businessman and all businesses want to make profit. He has decided to turn his ruthlessness to improving the planet and the investors pockets at the same time. How else in a capitalist world is it going to get done? There is not magic wand to wave, there is just economics. He at least is putting his money where his mouth is, to the extent that he's ordered his company to stop claiming diesel tax credits. this alone is worth hundreds of millions a year. He's making Fortescue find green energy ways to do it better and cheaper. money where his mouth is.
crypro1952 3y ago
Carbon capture devices otherwise known as trees... sigh...
- realusername 3y ago
  Trees only prove the concept can work, not that they are the most efficient system to do it.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  Yes, but also no. If we were still burning fuels derived entirely from plants that we re-grew, it would be a closed loop. But we're digging oil out of the ground and burning it, and also not planting trees, so we're kinda burning the candle at both ends there. You couldn't plant enough trees to make up for digging coal and oil out of the ground and burning it -- especially since mature forests aren't just carbon sinks. They reach an equilibrium where they're carbon neutral as the decay of wood and leaves releases carbon into the atmosphere. Don't get me wrong, trees are good, and reforestation helps, but it's more of an umbrella in a hurricane type thing. You'd have to plant trees, chop them down then sequester them geologically somehow to actually make a carbon sink. [1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-dont-we-just-plant-lot-trees https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-dont-we-just-plant-lot-t...
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    > chop them down then sequester them geologically somehow to actually make a carbon sink. And I suspect if you did that at vast scales, you'd soon start running out of other elements like phosphorus that trees need to grow.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Charcoal doesn't really decay and leaves the soil fertile. So it seems like it should work. Making charcoal is a lot of pollution though.
      - 3y ago
narrator 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwway120385 3y ago
  I don't understand. Are you trying to say that Climate Change doesn't exist and is just a narrative pushed by a bunch of scientists and policy makers to hide their real agenda to end oil usage for some reason? Why haven't we heard from any defectors from this conspiracy of tens of thousands?
  - narrator 3y ago
    No, you're only familiar with fake narratives and fake counter-narratives, so you mistake my opinion for the fake counter-narrative which is contrived cornucopian b.s. Climate Change doesn't exist, but we're running out of oil production very slowly and it will continue to decline and there's nothing anyone can do about it except switch to other fuels and implement a crash program to eliminate oil consumption, which is what Net Zero 2050 is. Net Zero 2050 is at least a plan to deal with the steady decline in oil production. It's not an evil plan by baby eating globalists, it's just that the WEF and UN Climate panels don't want to tell people that we're running out and it's not anything anyone can do anything about, which would trigger nationalism, hoarding and global war.
    - throwway120385 3y ago
      Are you feeling alright?
- 303uru 3y ago
  Oh, where to begin with this avant-garde take on climate change and energy policy? It's like saying the Titanic hit an iceberg just to spice up its maiden voyage. If climate change discussions were merely a cover-up for oil production collapse, then carbon capture efforts would be the equivalent of trying to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon – a noble yet futile gesture. To suggest that the push towards Net Zero 2050 is a cunning plan to mask the decline in oil production is to give the world's governments and environmental organizations a level of credit for coordination and foresight that would make even a conspiracy theorist blush. It's like believing that all the world's scientists, who can barely agree on where to have lunch, have somehow conspired to create a global narrative just for the fun of it. As for the grand finale, suggesting that climate change is a plot to promote globalism and suppress a Mad Max-style future of oil wars, is a narrative twist not even Hollywood could dream up. It's as if we're living in a world where every environmental policy is a scene from a dystopian thriller, where the heroes are misunderstood oil barons, and the villains are those dastardly folks trying to save the planet. In short, the comment is a masterpiece of dystopian fiction, worthy of a place in the annals of "Creative Conspiracy Theories 101." It's a reminder that the real world, with its complex challenges and nuanced solutions, often outstrips even the most vivid imaginations.
rqtwteye 3y ago
I have done some reading on carbon capture and so far I find it hard to believe any of these technologies can be scaled up to even remotely the level needed to make a difference. And if we scale up to that level we sit on enormous amounts of carbon that need to be sequestered somehow without causing other massive problems.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  IMO it's the storage part that isn't scalable, I think we're going to figure out how to scale the capture part because IMO it's the most viable way to get carbon-neutral aviation and rockets. Capture carbon, combine with green hydrogen to synthesize methane for rockets and kerosene for jets.
willemh 3y ago
This video[1] gives a good perspective on where carbon capture solution fits from an economic standpoint. The summary is that it’s highly infeasible now but if we got to a point where putting a price of $250/ton CO2 was possible then it could make sense. Right now there’s a lot of other things we can do to make the biggest impact for a lot less cost but we need to be in the research phase for these kinds of things so that once they’re necessary/useful we’ll have the tech to do it. 1: https://youtu.be/1dRgCsZ1q7g https://youtu.be/1dRgCsZ1q7g
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- spiffytech 3y ago
  It's challenging to discuss carbon capture because people can mean two different things. The article is discussing decarbonizing emissions at the source, such as capturing the emissions of a factory smoke stack before it goes anywhere. The video you've linked (at just a quick peek) discusses direct air capture — pulling CO2 out of the open air.

56 points by thelastgallon 3y ago

api 3y ago

IMHO it doesn't pass the thermodynamic sniff test. It would be better to spend energy displacing fossil fuel generation than to spend energy capturing carbon. The only way I can see this changing is if we developed something like cheap efficient fusion reactors that allowed us to just burn energy with contempt. In that world carbon capture might make sense as a way to blunt climate change.

aqme28 3y ago
I agree with this. It could only make sense where there is abundant almost free energy. But now people just mine crypto in those places. Carbon capture needs to pay better than mining crypto or it won’t happen.
- cozzyd 3y ago
  Too bad nobody in the "innovative" crypto sector has come up with a Proof-of-Carbon-Capture coin.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    Oh don't worry, they did, several times. It went predictably. Here's one very stupid white paper. [1] [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.00185.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.00185.pdf
    - cozzyd 3y ago
      As usual, a crypo white paper is indistinguishable from parody
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    It's been tried at least in theory but blockchains are only REALLY good at keeping track of purely digital things that happen within their chain. Outside of that they're at the mercy of people putting bad data into them. Conceptually how would that reward system even work? It would have to rely on real world auditors to validate that the carbon sinking was actually being performed (and working).
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    A somewhat related notion, a carbon coin, is a key plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.
gottorf 3y ago
> if we developed something like cheap efficient fusion reactors that allowed us to just burn energy with contempt All problems humanity faces are energy problems. With sufficiently cheap and abundant energy, we can work through anything.
rtkwe 3y ago
There's maybe a niche for it where our energy storage ability can't use all the renewables produced at a given time so we use the excess to run carbon capture facilities. Right now the times where there's >100% power demand for renewables is fairly rare though.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  In that world, I suspect people will find other uses for very cheap energy. I mean if my (cold) town had free energy even a few days per year, I'd just fit a heater on every street light and turn them on whenever energy was free so we could have 'warm streets' days.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Are we talking about carbon capture (like from the smokestack of a coal plant)? Or carbon sequestration, where we pull it out of the air? The latter probably makes sense even at high energy cost... it makes a climate crisis reversible rather than just slowable. The former seems rather more suspect even with cheap fusion. What do you even do with the carbon, once captured? You can't turn it into a solid... that would be the coal you just burned. And while it might be capturable as a gas, how would one go about storing it safely?
- ummonk 3y ago
  Capture and sequestration go hand in hand - you first have to capture the carbon to sequester it. It will obviously always be more efficient to capture carbon at the source of the emissions (e.g. a smokestack) where it is highly concentrated than to pull it out of the air..
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    There are other methods of sequestration that may be better than carbon capture. Rock weathering is the main one, where dump crushed olivine rock into the oceans where it picks up the dissolved CO2. This has advantage that uses known technology and scales well. It also locks CO2 into rock instead of worrying about where to put the captured CO2.
ajross 3y ago
It's usually talked about in broader contexts. There are some fuel modes (air travel being the really obvious one) that aren't ever going to be non-combustion. You have to put carbon into the upper atmosphere to move people in jetliners, period. So solutions would involve either synthesizing carbon-neutral fuel, or burning petroleum and offsetting it by putting the same amount of carbon back into the ground somewhere else. There's a reasonably strong argument that the latter is more energy-efficient. But it's all infant tech and no one really knows.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
haqlootydoot 3y ago
[flagged]

zug_zug 3y ago

Seems like a bit of a reductionistic bait/soundbite. Obviously the tech isn't there yet, but when we find a (fast) way turn CO2 back into gasoline that will both allow all existing technologies to go green and also give us a good recapture path (pump it back down into the wells).

eindiran 3y ago
> [W]hen we find a (fast) way turn CO2 back into gasoline The more salient point than fast is cheap, preferably something with a net profit, which seems... unlikely.
AlexandrB 3y ago
Even in the best case, doing this requires at least as much energy as was released by burning the gasoline. But more likely 2-3x as much energy. It's far more energy efficient to prevent the emissions in the first place. Burning the captured gasoline again would be extremely foolish.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dageshi 3y ago
  We might well reach a point with solar + wind where we have massive gluts of power we can't do anything with and can't store. Even energy inefficient processes like the one you describe might become viable especially if it effectively creates a storable energy source.
- travisporter 3y ago
  Terraform industries
- realusername 3y ago
  I'm also sceptic of CO2 to gasoline for this reason. The only reason why petrol engine work at all is because gasoline contains a tremendous amount of energy, otherwise their efficiency sucks and the vast majority of this energy is wasted. If we want to do the reverse operation, we don't have the luxury of just spending the wasted part though, we have to spend all of this energy.

bordercases 3y ago

What about trees!

choilive 3y ago
What about them?

elil17 3y ago

It should be noted that Fortescue Metals is not some disinterested third party here. They have a massive stake in green hydrogen production (see their FFI division). Hydrocarbons (not necessarily from fossil fuels, see https://prometheusfuels.com/ https://prometheusfuels.com/) + DAC are one proposed alternative to green hydrogen for powering industries (such as mining) where batteries are not a good option. I know experts who believe this is more viable. I still agree with him that DAC can't be used as an excuse to keep emitting.

dauertewigkeit 3y ago
Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels depend on both green hydrogen and DAC. So green hydrogen would be needed anyway. The only question is whether you build infrastructure with the goal of using hydrogen directly or not.
- elil17 3y ago
  Synthetic hydrocarbons would likely not use much of FMG's hydrogen technologies: membranes, hydrogen liquidification, hydrogen vehicles, etc.
dredmorbius 3y ago
It should also be noted that many of the most vociferous advocates of CCS are of or aligned with the fossil fuels industry, whether direct producers or major consumers, particularly electric utilities (especially those reliant on coal), and hard-to-substitute activities such as air and marine shipping. For the latter, petroleum-analogue synfuels seem to me a far more viable option, along with a shifted economics (higher cost curve) of the sector --- air travel and long-distance shipping are likely to be rather more expensive by and by.

ajross 3y ago

> Australia's Fortescue is a major iron ore producer Basically: "Executive of regulated company doesn't want to be regulated". The incentives don't line up here to take this on faith (no reasoning was given, really, it's not a tech article) like the article does. He's not an expert witness, he's a player with an agenda. That doesn't mean he's wrong. CCS is absolutely an unsolved problem and all emerging technologies involve risk. But all he's saying here is that CCS is going to impact his business, he doesn't like that, and he'd prefer government try to solve the problem by impacting someone else's business instead.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
Australia’s regulatory environment is such that resources companies are nowhere near the point where they need to publicly kick up a fuss to influence government policy. They are more than capable of doing that in private. Twiggy is very much the ‘odd one out’ here in making any sort of public statement about…pretty much anything…ever.
senectus1 3y ago
> he's a player with an agenda. His agenda is REAL Zero Carbon. Yes he is a ruthless businessman and all businesses want to make profit. He has decided to turn his ruthlessness to improving the planet and the investors pockets at the same time. How else in a capitalist world is it going to get done? There is not magic wand to wave, there is just economics. He at least is putting his money where his mouth is, to the extent that he's ordered his company to stop claiming diesel tax credits. this alone is worth hundreds of millions a year. He's making Fortescue find green energy ways to do it better and cheaper. money where his mouth is.

crypro1952 3y ago

Carbon capture devices otherwise known as trees... sigh...

realusername 3y ago
Trees only prove the concept can work, not that they are the most efficient system to do it.
arcticbull 3y ago
Yes, but also no. If we were still burning fuels derived entirely from plants that we re-grew, it would be a closed loop. But we're digging oil out of the ground and burning it, and also not planting trees, so we're kinda burning the candle at both ends there. You couldn't plant enough trees to make up for digging coal and oil out of the ground and burning it -- especially since mature forests aren't just carbon sinks. They reach an equilibrium where they're carbon neutral as the decay of wood and leaves releases carbon into the atmosphere. Don't get me wrong, trees are good, and reforestation helps, but it's more of an umbrella in a hurricane type thing. You'd have to plant trees, chop them down then sequester them geologically somehow to actually make a carbon sink. [1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-dont-we-just-plant-lot-trees https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-dont-we-just-plant-lot-t...
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > chop them down then sequester them geologically somehow to actually make a carbon sink. And I suspect if you did that at vast scales, you'd soon start running out of other elements like phosphorus that trees need to grow.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Charcoal doesn't really decay and leaves the soil fertile. So it seems like it should work. Making charcoal is a lot of pollution though.
    - 3y ago

narrator 3y ago

[flagged]

throwway120385 3y ago
I don't understand. Are you trying to say that Climate Change doesn't exist and is just a narrative pushed by a bunch of scientists and policy makers to hide their real agenda to end oil usage for some reason? Why haven't we heard from any defectors from this conspiracy of tens of thousands?
- narrator 3y ago
  No, you're only familiar with fake narratives and fake counter-narratives, so you mistake my opinion for the fake counter-narrative which is contrived cornucopian b.s. Climate Change doesn't exist, but we're running out of oil production very slowly and it will continue to decline and there's nothing anyone can do about it except switch to other fuels and implement a crash program to eliminate oil consumption, which is what Net Zero 2050 is. Net Zero 2050 is at least a plan to deal with the steady decline in oil production. It's not an evil plan by baby eating globalists, it's just that the WEF and UN Climate panels don't want to tell people that we're running out and it's not anything anyone can do anything about, which would trigger nationalism, hoarding and global war.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    Are you feeling alright?
303uru 3y ago
Oh, where to begin with this avant-garde take on climate change and energy policy? It's like saying the Titanic hit an iceberg just to spice up its maiden voyage. If climate change discussions were merely a cover-up for oil production collapse, then carbon capture efforts would be the equivalent of trying to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon – a noble yet futile gesture. To suggest that the push towards Net Zero 2050 is a cunning plan to mask the decline in oil production is to give the world's governments and environmental organizations a level of credit for coordination and foresight that would make even a conspiracy theorist blush. It's like believing that all the world's scientists, who can barely agree on where to have lunch, have somehow conspired to create a global narrative just for the fun of it. As for the grand finale, suggesting that climate change is a plot to promote globalism and suppress a Mad Max-style future of oil wars, is a narrative twist not even Hollywood could dream up. It's as if we're living in a world where every environmental policy is a scene from a dystopian thriller, where the heroes are misunderstood oil barons, and the villains are those dastardly folks trying to save the planet. In short, the comment is a masterpiece of dystopian fiction, worthy of a place in the annals of "Creative Conspiracy Theories 101." It's a reminder that the real world, with its complex challenges and nuanced solutions, often outstrips even the most vivid imaginations.

rqtwteye 3y ago

I have done some reading on carbon capture and so far I find it hard to believe any of these technologies can be scaled up to even remotely the level needed to make a difference. And if we scale up to that level we sit on enormous amounts of carbon that need to be sequestered somehow without causing other massive problems.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
IMO it's the storage part that isn't scalable, I think we're going to figure out how to scale the capture part because IMO it's the most viable way to get carbon-neutral aviation and rockets. Capture carbon, combine with green hydrogen to synthesize methane for rockets and kerosene for jets.

willemh 3y ago

This video[1] gives a good perspective on where carbon capture solution fits from an economic standpoint. The summary is that it’s highly infeasible now but if we got to a point where putting a price of $250/ton CO2 was possible then it could make sense. Right now there’s a lot of other things we can do to make the biggest impact for a lot less cost but we need to be in the research phase for these kinds of things so that once they’re necessary/useful we’ll have the tech to do it. 1: https://youtu.be/1dRgCsZ1q7g https://youtu.be/1dRgCsZ1q7g

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
spiffytech 3y ago
It's challenging to discuss carbon capture because people can mean two different things. The article is discussing decarbonizing emissions at the source, such as capturing the emissions of a factory smoke stack before it goes anywhere. The video you've linked (at just a quick peek) discusses direct air capture — pulling CO2 out of the open air.