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Carbon Capture Facility in World Creates 25x More CO2 from Use of Product
- otikik 3y agoCarbon capture is about sequestration of public funding through subsidies and burying it deep, deep inside the bank accounts of big polluting companies, where tax collectors will never find them.
- moralestapia 3y agoI was very involved in this field about three years ago. Almost everything (>95%) is a fraud and the people running the show know it. They should be in jail.
- senectus1 3y agoI'm part of an org that is trying to ensure that Gov money doesn't go towards it. Do you have anything you can safely share?
- agumonkey 3y agoi'm also curious about your org now :)
- Akronymus 3y agoCarbon capture could theoretically work. With VERY heavy use of nuclear power, which the advocates for carbon capture, in my experience, almost always advocate against. And even then, the energy is much better used on other stuff.
- briantakita 3y agoThe whole thing is a fraud to capture (no pun intended) markets...and put meters on what was once free.
- darth_avocado 3y agoCarbon capture is for fossil fuel industry what recycling is for plastic industry. Everyone knows it doesn’t work and we still keep trying.
- the_cat_kittles 3y agoyou absolutely can recycle some plastics. hdpe, ldpe, eps to name a few. doesnt mean they are good, or we should keep using them. but you are wrong in general
- darth_avocado 3y agoThere is a difference between can theoretically and can practically. That’s why we landfill or burn >90% of plastics. https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
- the_cat_kittles 3y agoyou said it doesnt work- so i pointed out it does in fact work, in the literal sense. if you were implying that it doesnt work economically, then its more complicated. look at some of the eu, they successfully recycle a lot more thanks to more regulation and perhaps subsidies. so, it could work better here in america, if there were more laws as well as incentives. i run a eps (styrofoam) recycling facility btw.
- Vuizur 3y agoDo you mean direct air capture (DAC) or carbon capture and storage from burning fossil fuels?
- nebula8804 3y agoHow are we going to deal with already emitted carbon after we transition to a post carbon world? I haven't looked at the latest UN climate change reports but I recall previous ones indicating that carbon capture needs to be part of the mix of solutions to limit us to ~2 degrees warming (now probably 2.3 degrees :/)
- candiodari 3y agoOr we can just face reality and start actively controlling the climate (meaning reduce temperature directly without doing what's essentially outlawed by the second law of thermodynamics. Ie. unmixing gases) Ironically, solar panels do exactly what. Especially on water. Water absorbs 93% of solar radiation. Solar panels aborb 30% to 70%. Global warming (all of it, all 150 years) is about a 0.7% change in albedo, so "bad" (30% absorption 70% reflection) solar planels on water (or concrete, or grass) undo ALL global warming on 90 times their surface area. And you can do better than that. You can just paint 3% of the land area of the planet of 1% of the ocean, and undo global warming.
- nebula8804 3y agoIf the UN climate change panel is not talking about this I assume its probably nonsense. They have been at this for decades before "saving the environment" was even in vogue. Do you have any studies to back this up?
- defrost 3y agoReflecting sunlight back from space (bubbles in L2 (?) stable orbit), and reflecting sunlight back from high atmosphere (aerosol injection) have both been studied and atmospheric geoengineering has already begun at a tiny tiny scale by independant VC types. Reflection from ground based surfaces not so much - I suspect the issue is reflection isn't absolute and transfers heat - the oceans reflect back light while warming the ocean surface layer is already part of the dynamic, solar panels and other reflective objects will also heat up and transfer that heat to the lower atmosphere land|sea layer. That aside, there's some merit in the notion, it should have been looked at and there's likely a paper or three on the subject.
- refulgentis 3y agoIt's actually good that the natural gas operator sequesters carbon.
- defrost 3y agoBut not nearly as good as leaving the gas in the ground. It's actually good that the arsonist put some of the matches back.
- missedthecue 3y agoIs it? Would it be better that the demand for gas was satisfied by exploring and drilling new gas fields rather than using the ones we already have more efficiently?
- tempestn 3y agoOr by burning coal instead of NG.
- defrost 3y ago[flagged]
- elric 3y agoApparently that one isn't quite so clear cut. At least in the case of LNG, its greenhouse gas emmissions are pretty awful when you look at how much methane leaks out into the atmosphere (e.g. during processing and transport). At least with coal, it's unlikely to end up in the atmosphere unless its burnt. Liquefying and transporting natural gas across an ocean by ship seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. But here we are, doing just that.
- GeoAtreides 3y agoMethane from coal mines is actually a problem: "Methane (CH4) emissions from coal mining and abandoned coal mines accounted for about 8% of total U.S. methane emissions in 2019. It was the fifth-largest methane-emitting sector" https://www.epa.gov/cmop/about-coal-mine-methane https://www.epa.gov/cmop/about-coal-mine-methane
- neilv 3y agoCaption on the illustration: > ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic cutaway illustration you requested, showing the system that extracts natural gas from beneath the North Sea, the CO2 removal process, and the CO2 injection into a subsea salt brine cavern. How useful is this illustration?
- arsome 3y agoNot useful, but artistic in nature. A number of magazines used to have illustrators do something similar in cases where there was no appropriate imagery.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoIt’s anti-information really. It distracts the brain and prevents us from better imagining the real facility, or let’s the author imagine they’ve done work instead of actually finding a suitable photo of the facility. Reminds me of the images on this article from last year, which when they were first posted didn’t even have the clarifying captions they have now: https://newatlas.com/lifestyle/powdered-beer/ https://newatlas.com/lifestyle/powdered-beer/
- realusername 3y agoAI is just the next step of the worthless newspaper illustration, before that they used stock images. They know people are more likely to stay on an article which has images so they invent some even if it doesn't make sense.
- rayiner 3y ago[flagged]
- oezi 3y agoCounterpoint: the operators and engineers failed to develop designs which are safe and commercially viable. The actual cost of Nuclear has exceeded all reasonable levels. The continued subsidies would have been much better spent on developing renewables.
- rayiner 3y agoFrance has been getting the majority of its power from nuclear for the last 40 years. The French have such a low carbon footprint that if the entire developed world came down to the French level, the entire developing world could come up to the French level—without increasing CO2 emissions compared to today’s levels. Yeah, we can spend money “developing renewables” now. But we are basically out of time already. Nuclear is something we could have deployed at the national grid scale 50 years ago, which would’ve been impossible with renewables. Now, anything we do—barring a major advance in carbon capture—will be too little too late. Even as of 2022, Germany gets only 40% of total power consumption from wind, solar, and hydro. It will take Germany until probably 2030 or so to get to the same place France was at in 1990.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd the French are the only ones doing that. Also, back when France built its nuclear reactors, climate change and CO2 emissions were nothing people considered or where bothered with. Love it how the only feasible way forward from where we stand now, aka massive investments in renewables of all kinds, is always countered by what we should have done decades ago, usually by die hard nuclear fan boys. Just a very lazy way of argueing with 20/20 hindsight.
- vlovich123 3y agoGreen house gasses and global warming were well understood since the 1970s. In fact, fossil fuel companies did their best to silence their own research showing it on three fronts as I understand it: 1. Promoting a global cooling theory to prime the public with a theory that’s easily discredited so that people think “those scientists don’t know anything” 2. Funding greenpeace and other environmentalist groups that were anti nuclear 3. Funding politicians who promoted an anti nuclear message. It is a bit of a conspiracy theory to link each individual point together into a narrative, but I believe #1 and #2 are generally known and have evidence for while #3 is probably a conjecture on my part. Anyway, global warming was a known issue since the 1970s. Heck - I did a report for geography class on how big a problem global warming would be in the mid 90s. Regardless, I’ll counter and say that nuclear is still cheaper than solar which is about competitive only if you exclude storage. So from that perspective, combined with Whrite’s law, bucket nuclear is still the better investment option. The only challenge is we’ve killed our nuclear manufacturing industry so hard there’s going to be an extra cost to spin it up again.
- elric 3y ago@dang Can you please fix the title, this one makes me head hurt, thx <3
- arcanemachiner 3y ago@elric tagging people doesn't do anything on HN. I think you would have to use email, strangely enough. Try hn@ycombinator.com
- feverzsj 3y ago"You have become the very thing you swore to destroy."
- LispSporks22 3y agoUntil they are fitting the carbon capture machinery over the end of coal/gas fired power plant chimney stacks, it’s bullshit.
- planck01 3y agoA good way is to put in on bio powered power plants. So you grow trees etc in dedicated areas, which remove co2 from the air. You harvest it for centrally burning for energy and co2 capture. In the meantime you grow new trees etc at the harvest locations. Do this at scale. It makes money, energy and results in a net co2 loss. Obviously you can also make systems to do direct air capture, but that is much more expensive, you'll need wind turbines because of low co2 density in air, and it won't make money. So just using trees on large areas is probably hard to beat.
- graemep 3y agoWhere is the land going to come from? You either use wilderness or agricultural land. The latter will need to be replaced so will end up taking wilderness anyway. No net win and probably a huge net loss. On top of that wood burning is highly polluting in other ways.
- doublerebel 3y agoThis article desperately needs an editor. Non sequiturs, sentence fragments, and a lack of citations all make this difficult to read and believe. I’m skeptical of many carbon capture solutions, but this presentation isn’t doing itself any favors. It shouldn’t cite generalized articles, or articles from the same website. It should be citing facts and studies.
- teo_zero 3y agoSorry, I don't get the point about Equinor. It (a) extracts gas and (b) captures CO2. The reasoning goes like, since using the gas obtained by (a) releases much more CO2 than how much is saved by (b), then it's not worth doing (b). Am I the only one to see the fallacy in this way of thinking?
- gmuslera 3y ago"Capturing" carbon into fuel to be released back is not exactly capturing, maybe it could be called buffering. A lot of the Net Zero proposal "compensates" to keep extracting oil/coal/gas with generating new fuels in this way, but it is not about reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at all. If it were to stop extracting fossil fuel at least it could had some meaning, but with this kind of environmental policies the fossil fuel will stop to be extracted by the time the wells run dry. Same goes with using planting trees as carbon capture, in a world where climate is going haywire (so drought, heat waves and other things that promotes massive forest fires becomes increasingly more common) that is carbon that could be released back any time. The most effective carbon capture energy is to keep buried fossil carbon that way. It has been in that form for hundreds of millions of years, at least until some not so smart apes decided to destabilize with it the ecosystem where they live in just a century.
- teo_zero 3y agoThanks for your comment. You seem to assume that they capture CO2 from atmosphere and somehow inject it into the fuel (gas) that they sell. It's not what TFA talks about, though. It's exactly the opposite: > Carbon dioxide is stripped from natural gas with amine solvents and is deposited in a saline formation.
- dhumph 3y agoHank green discussed this recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dRgCsZ1q7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dRgCsZ1q7g