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I've spent a decent amount of time learning about this stuff. Here's the lens I use to understand advancements in CO2 reduction: Carbon monoxide is, indeed, a

I've spent a decent amount of time learning about this stuff. Here's the lens I use to understand advancements in CO2 reduction: Carbon monoxide is, indeed, an incredibly useful and versatile precursor in many industrial processes. Sourcing it from CO2 in the air unlocks all sorts of carbon-negative technologies, including sustainable fuels and plastics. As we begin to wind down fossil fuel extraction, this becomes increasingly important. However, the only driver of adoption at scale is cost. Any new method to reduce CO2 must compete not only with established fossil sources, but also more established reduction techniques like RWGS. Even if there's a breakthrough in energy efficiency, as we seem to have here, one must consider the entire system cost as compared to the alternatives. This is why a lot of research isn't aiming for straight CO2 reduction, but conversion to C2+ molecules. This might allow a more efficient pathway from CO2 to more valuable chemicals. This article linked here suggests that the researchers also have this in mind: > By swapping in different catalysts, the researchers plan to try making other products such as methanol and ethanol using this approach. In my opinion, this is where the rubber meets the road. It's not just about making carbon monoxide: It's about turning CO2 into value-added molecules.

joak 3y ago
I cannot agree more. Having a better energy efficiency can only improve opex but capex makes probably most of the cost. And energy is probably free. Let me explain: if we install solar panels at scale only a fraction of the energy produced can be sold because in the sunny hours of the day there is overproduction. So why would you want to have a better efficiency in energy use? What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess. At whatever efficiency, otherwise the energy is simply curtailed.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  > What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess. I see 4 ways you can use excess. Either sell it to other states or countries, make green hydrogen (natgas competitor), charge short term storage (batteries, pumped hydro), or carbon conversion.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    “make green hydrogen“ Which requires a machine which may or may not be the cheapest to do keep available for opportunistic "power2somethinguseful". Batteries are also in this category, they excel in how many watts you can dump per dollar worth of battery (before they are full), but don't offer many Wh per investment. Which brings us back to what GP wrote: "What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess." It's all about how many hours of opportunistic activity does it need per year to be worthwhile. If you build some super efficient power2useful machine that is only worthwhile when running 24/7, then you are exactly zero steps closer to the green energy future. The key metric is where on the opportunisticity spectrum between 24/7 on one end and only the few most energy-abundant hours per year on the other end a technology can place itself. At the opportunistic extreme end of the scale we will undoubtedly find resistive boosters to latent heat stores that usually run on heatpumps alone (boosters come online when maket price drops below the heat pump's buy threshold divided by work factor)
- caturopath 3y ago
  Solar power production patterns don't make energy free. Normal pricing mechanisms apply. This can mean that something has a zero or negative price sometimes (this occurs in electricity markets today), but that is an unusual circumstance. Usually when something is available due to some sort of regularity in the world, people find uses and this drives the price up to some positive value.
- prometheon1 3y ago
  This future world with all these solar panels might also have lots of intercontinental HVDC cables to spread that power around the world: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9241117 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9241117 Nevertheless, if we install enough panels, it will be so cheap that the cost is negligible for most applications.
emporas 3y ago
Turning carbon into useful materials is good here on Earth, but there is at least a planet on our solar system with more water, and there is the possibility that there is a planet with more carbon as well. We are talking about rain and rivers of methane. Carbon as a construction material is the way to go, here on Earth, and other planets as well. In normal pressures we experience here on earth or in similar planets, temperature, radioactivity etc, carbon is the most versatile material of all. I think carbon gold rush is well on it's way.
- culopatin 3y ago
  What’s the point of your first paragraph?
- ben_w 3y ago
  I think you're thinking of Europa and Titan, which are moons not planets. The gas giants themselves are much harder to extract resources from than the moons, and ISRU from the moons (even our own) are beyond us for the moment even if they have more of both in total. As we can already synthesise diamond from methane, I couldn't guess what we'll be doing by the time Titan looks like an interesting target for industrial expansion.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Any fossil fuel power generation I think is permanently left behind by the current solar/wind LCOE economics, and it's only getting more lopsided every year. Of course load leveling / industrial power generation / etc will still be a huge need as will long haul shipping (that could use carbon capture). So those would benefit. Something to make carbon extraction from the sea/air that is economical would very much be welcomed, an actual carbon tax would help even today.
- tarsinge 3y ago
  Even if you account for intermittence? As far as I know solar/wind alone are not a replacement e.g. I'm not aware of steel factories running on batteries given the order of magnitude of energy consumption.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    On paper a global 1 Ω power grid is only $265 billion of aluminium / 1.7 years of current global production. I don't actually expect the whole world to do this because politics, but I won't be surprised if China makes a proof of concept in the form of a 100 Ω connection to both Africa and South America. As for iron/steel specifically, I think people have only recently demonstrated that this can be electrified at scale, even without batteries. Battery capacity is also in the early stages yet; what we need for fully electric transportation — which is probably around a decade of exponential growth away — is more than enough for balancing current (no pun intended) electrical demand, but I don't know if it's also enough once we electrify steel. I think iron might be one of the cases where it makes sense to electrolyse hydrogen from water and use that as a direct chemical agent, but my chemistry knowledge is a mediocre GCSE from 24 years ago plus YouTube videos so I don't trust my own judgement on this regardless of what Wittgenstein says about 'to believe falsely' in the first person, present indicative.
    - skissane 3y ago
      > On paper a global 1 Ω power grid is only $265 billion of aluminium / 1.7 years of current global production. Sorry, what does ohms mean in this context? I would get what gigawatts or gigawatt-hours would mean in this context, but don’t understand the relevance of resistance
kjkjadksj 3y ago
There is no sustainable plastic until we are able to seed the earth with a genetically modified bacteria that can break down this plastic in the environment. Combustion is also not perfectly clean.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Combustion is also not perfectly clean. It can be if done in a sealed device which then processes the remainder. Which is important because aerobic life is basically a combustion process.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  "genetically modified bacteria that can break down this plastic" Isn't there a huge risk that this bacteria would also break down the plastics that are in use, so cars would just melt away, all plastic parts that are currently needed would break. So general industrial collapse. This sounds good when talking about land fills. It doesn't sound so good when all technology stops working.
  - codersfocus 3y ago
    Microorganisms need certain conditions to work. Wood furniture can last indefinitely as long as it’s not wet.
  - scherlock 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure I read a scifi dystopian novel where a scientist develops a bacteria that eats plastic they release it and the novel follows the after effects. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind but it appears there are a few books that explore this idea.
baq 3y ago
Money is a social construct. We have to make this point stand out more if we want our children and grandchildren to have a livable planet. Thus, the monetary cost of any technology is easily adjustable by regulation - taxes, carbon dividends, subsidies, etc. The energy cost is what I’m more worried about because physics doesn’t care, it just does its thing, both ways. We’re at .25C of warming per decade due to CO2 and reduced sulphur emissions. If clathrates go, it’s going to be worse still. I’m confident the global leaders will figure this out eventually, but I’m very afraid the tech won’t be there when the money stops being an issue.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Isn't there a lot of extra energy needed for fracking and oil sands? Oil isn't all that cheap to extract anymore, it isn't just bubbling up. So doesn't this new process just have to be cheaper than the cost of extracting oil from oil sands.
photochemsyn 3y ago
The world isn't flat: countries that have to import fossil fuels will be far more interested in developing this technology even if the resulting product costs more than the imports because of the energy security issues related to being dependent on imports for something as important as energy supply. In contrast, countries that earn large amounts of revenue from exporting fossil fuels will be much less interested in developing a technology that will end up making their exports worthless if optimized (especially as fossil fuel extraction costs rise). That's not even mentioning the issue of hidden externalities not directly reflected in the cost of fossil fuels, massive state subsidies to fossil fuel producers that result in lower consumer costs, and so on. The conclusion is that the global energy market isn't some idealized economic model, it's highly controlled and manipulated and ignoring this reality is disingenous at best.
- usrusr 3y ago
  > In contrast, countries that earn large amounts of revenue from exporting fossil fuels will be much less interested in developing a technology that will end up making their exports worthless if optimized Usually, when your product is about to be replaced by something different, you want to be the one who makes that new different thing. Everybody who isn't depending on selling the old one has a little less incentive to be the one supplying the replacement. For all others, not investing in the new thing has lower opportunity cost than for exporters of the old thing. So from a game theory perspective, the incumbents can and will outspend others in investment in the new thing. Unless they don't try.

joak 3y ago

I cannot agree more. Having a better energy efficiency can only improve opex but capex makes probably most of the cost. And energy is probably free. Let me explain: if we install solar panels at scale only a fraction of the energy produced can be sold because in the sunny hours of the day there is overproduction. So why would you want to have a better efficiency in energy use? What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess. At whatever efficiency, otherwise the energy is simply curtailed.

hackerlight 3y ago
> What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess. I see 4 ways you can use excess. Either sell it to other states or countries, make green hydrogen (natgas competitor), charge short term storage (batteries, pumped hydro), or carbon conversion.
- usrusr 3y ago
  “make green hydrogen“ Which requires a machine which may or may not be the cheapest to do keep available for opportunistic "power2somethinguseful". Batteries are also in this category, they excel in how many watts you can dump per dollar worth of battery (before they are full), but don't offer many Wh per investment. Which brings us back to what GP wrote: "What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess." It's all about how many hours of opportunistic activity does it need per year to be worthwhile. If you build some super efficient power2useful machine that is only worthwhile when running 24/7, then you are exactly zero steps closer to the green energy future. The key metric is where on the opportunisticity spectrum between 24/7 on one end and only the few most energy-abundant hours per year on the other end a technology can place itself. At the opportunistic extreme end of the scale we will undoubtedly find resistive boosters to latent heat stores that usually run on heatpumps alone (boosters come online when maket price drops below the heat pump's buy threshold divided by work factor)
caturopath 3y ago
Solar power production patterns don't make energy free. Normal pricing mechanisms apply. This can mean that something has a zero or negative price sometimes (this occurs in electricity markets today), but that is an unusual circumstance. Usually when something is available due to some sort of regularity in the world, people find uses and this drives the price up to some positive value.
prometheon1 3y ago
This future world with all these solar panels might also have lots of intercontinental HVDC cables to spread that power around the world: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9241117 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9241117 Nevertheless, if we install enough panels, it will be so cheap that the cost is negligible for most applications.

emporas 3y ago

Turning carbon into useful materials is good here on Earth, but there is at least a planet on our solar system with more water, and there is the possibility that there is a planet with more carbon as well. We are talking about rain and rivers of methane. Carbon as a construction material is the way to go, here on Earth, and other planets as well. In normal pressures we experience here on earth or in similar planets, temperature, radioactivity etc, carbon is the most versatile material of all. I think carbon gold rush is well on it's way.

culopatin 3y ago
What’s the point of your first paragraph?
ben_w 3y ago
I think you're thinking of Europa and Titan, which are moons not planets. The gas giants themselves are much harder to extract resources from than the moons, and ISRU from the moons (even our own) are beyond us for the moment even if they have more of both in total. As we can already synthesise diamond from methane, I couldn't guess what we'll be doing by the time Titan looks like an interesting target for industrial expansion.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

Any fossil fuel power generation I think is permanently left behind by the current solar/wind LCOE economics, and it's only getting more lopsided every year. Of course load leveling / industrial power generation / etc will still be a huge need as will long haul shipping (that could use carbon capture). So those would benefit. Something to make carbon extraction from the sea/air that is economical would very much be welcomed, an actual carbon tax would help even today.

tarsinge 3y ago
Even if you account for intermittence? As far as I know solar/wind alone are not a replacement e.g. I'm not aware of steel factories running on batteries given the order of magnitude of energy consumption.
- ben_w 3y ago
  On paper a global 1 Ω power grid is only $265 billion of aluminium / 1.7 years of current global production. I don't actually expect the whole world to do this because politics, but I won't be surprised if China makes a proof of concept in the form of a 100 Ω connection to both Africa and South America. As for iron/steel specifically, I think people have only recently demonstrated that this can be electrified at scale, even without batteries. Battery capacity is also in the early stages yet; what we need for fully electric transportation — which is probably around a decade of exponential growth away — is more than enough for balancing current (no pun intended) electrical demand, but I don't know if it's also enough once we electrify steel. I think iron might be one of the cases where it makes sense to electrolyse hydrogen from water and use that as a direct chemical agent, but my chemistry knowledge is a mediocre GCSE from 24 years ago plus YouTube videos so I don't trust my own judgement on this regardless of what Wittgenstein says about 'to believe falsely' in the first person, present indicative.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > On paper a global 1 Ω power grid is only $265 billion of aluminium / 1.7 years of current global production. Sorry, what does ohms mean in this context? I would get what gigawatts or gigawatt-hours would mean in this context, but don’t understand the relevance of resistance

kjkjadksj 3y ago

There is no sustainable plastic until we are able to seed the earth with a genetically modified bacteria that can break down this plastic in the environment. Combustion is also not perfectly clean.

ben_w 3y ago
> Combustion is also not perfectly clean. It can be if done in a sealed device which then processes the remainder. Which is important because aerobic life is basically a combustion process.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
"genetically modified bacteria that can break down this plastic" Isn't there a huge risk that this bacteria would also break down the plastics that are in use, so cars would just melt away, all plastic parts that are currently needed would break. So general industrial collapse. This sounds good when talking about land fills. It doesn't sound so good when all technology stops working.
- codersfocus 3y ago
  Microorganisms need certain conditions to work. Wood furniture can last indefinitely as long as it’s not wet.
- scherlock 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure I read a scifi dystopian novel where a scientist develops a bacteria that eats plastic they release it and the novel follows the after effects. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind but it appears there are a few books that explore this idea.

baq 3y ago

Money is a social construct. We have to make this point stand out more if we want our children and grandchildren to have a livable planet. Thus, the monetary cost of any technology is easily adjustable by regulation - taxes, carbon dividends, subsidies, etc. The energy cost is what I’m more worried about because physics doesn’t care, it just does its thing, both ways. We’re at .25C of warming per decade due to CO2 and reduced sulphur emissions. If clathrates go, it’s going to be worse still. I’m confident the global leaders will figure this out eventually, but I’m very afraid the tech won’t be there when the money stops being an issue.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Isn't there a lot of extra energy needed for fracking and oil sands? Oil isn't all that cheap to extract anymore, it isn't just bubbling up. So doesn't this new process just have to be cheaper than the cost of extracting oil from oil sands.

photochemsyn 3y ago

The world isn't flat: countries that have to import fossil fuels will be far more interested in developing this technology even if the resulting product costs more than the imports because of the energy security issues related to being dependent on imports for something as important as energy supply. In contrast, countries that earn large amounts of revenue from exporting fossil fuels will be much less interested in developing a technology that will end up making their exports worthless if optimized (especially as fossil fuel extraction costs rise). That's not even mentioning the issue of hidden externalities not directly reflected in the cost of fossil fuels, massive state subsidies to fossil fuel producers that result in lower consumer costs, and so on. The conclusion is that the global energy market isn't some idealized economic model, it's highly controlled and manipulated and ignoring this reality is disingenous at best.

usrusr 3y ago
> In contrast, countries that earn large amounts of revenue from exporting fossil fuels will be much less interested in developing a technology that will end up making their exports worthless if optimized Usually, when your product is about to be replaced by something different, you want to be the one who makes that new different thing. Everybody who isn't depending on selling the old one has a little less incentive to be the one supplying the replacement. For all others, not investing in the new thing has lower opportunity cost than for exporters of the old thing. So from a game theory perspective, the incumbents can and will outspend others in investment in the new thing. Unless they don't try.