12 ms·

Georgia Tech, Meta create open dataset to advance solutions for carbon capture

170 points by ohjeez 2y ago

dweinus 2y ago
Cool, but carbon capture from the air is at best a tiny fraction of the solutions we need. Right now our time is better spent on emissions reduction. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x
- malux85 2y ago
  Both, in parallel, theres enough humans and resources to work on both
  - cheonic00193 2y ago
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    - deleted 2y ago
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    - CalRobert 2y ago
      Why not?
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Suppose you have any finite number of humans to work on the problem. Emissions reductions can be achieved in known ways at some relatively modest cost, e.g. the difference in cost between using fossil fuels and using electric cars or renewable/nuclear generation methods, which are already very close together in price and could be made closer or even cause the alternatives to cost less through certain types of engineering R&D or reasonable regulatory changes, and not only lower emissions but lower energy costs. Carbon capture requires a large amount of R&D which might not yield any useful results whatsoever, and if it did the result would be a reduction in cost from a level which is hopeless and preposterous to one where actually deploying it would still cost trillions of dollars in implementation and operating costs to have any meaningful effect, while producing no other economic value and almost certainly a vast amount of chemical waste. The difference in cost effectiveness is so vast that the optimal allocation of finite resources to the latter could plausibly be zero.
  - atoav 2y ago
    I would generally agree with that statement. However in this case I disagree. Why? Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing? So in my mind carbon capture is something that we should work on if we are capable of the realization that the role it will play in fixing the problem is utterly insignificant. If you think it is the solution, carbon capture sells a false hope and prolongs the struggle — and at least where I am from proponents of carbon capture are the people who definitely don't want to reduce their CO2 output. Pointing at some future technology instead of doing something now is actively harmful. And I am not sure the actual positive effect of such technology would outweigh the negative effect it has as an excuse to justify not doing what is necessary now.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      > Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing? What you’re overlooking is that we will keep doing whatever we’re doing, for the same reason telling people to diet and exercise isn’t doing jack shit for the obesity crisis. We need Ozempic for the climate. Because the only alternative is 4C of warming.
      - Teever 2y ago
        If that's the case maybe we as a species should die? Or at least enough of the species that we change our behaviour for good? It's unfortunate that the ecosystem has to suffer.
        tticvs 2y ago
        "The future looks somewhat difficult, better give up and go extinct" Fortunately natural selection will remove this mindset eventually. It's unfortunate that the species has to suffer it in the meantime.
  - exyi 2y ago
    If we have enough resources dedicated to this problem, why are we still burning coal/gas for power on sunny days? I'm definitely not against researching carbon capture, but it currently isn't the "the solution the planet desperately needs"
    - icegreentea2 2y ago
      The resources going into carbon capture aren't the same resources going into renewable? The scale is also completely different. Bloomberg says global investment in carbon capture in 2022 was like $6.4 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/carbon-capture-investment-hits-record-high-of-6-4-billion/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/carbon-capture-investment-hits-r...). Bloomberg also says that global renewable investment in the first 6 months of 2023 was $358 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits-record-breaking-358-billion-in-1h-2023/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits...) Conversion of all carbon capture investment into more solar or wind capacity would not significantly move the needle on rate of renewable growth. Effectively all carbon capture investment right now is basically in the pilot phase. Governments are sinking money into carbon capture for a broad range of reasons, including cynical (as a smokescreen to protect fossil fuel industries) to optimistic (we can start investing in the next step of net-zero since renewable trajectories look good) to being realistic hedges (they see the challenges in achieving net zero in certain fields like aviation, shipping, construction, and believe that carbon capture is what is necessary to achieve net-zero).
  - lordswork 2y ago
    If we have fixed resources, how should they be allocated? I'd argue for every million dollars towards reaching net zero emissions, we should maybe spend 1 dollar towards carbon capture, where we scale that investment up as we approach net zero emissions.
- enriquto 2y ago
  Carbon capture is obviously inconsequential; but it would seem that even emissions reduction is a useless endeavor, wouldn't it? All extracted carbon will be eventually burned. Burning it sooner or later it's not such a big deal. What we need to do, for a start, is to close the damn oil wells! Just stop unearthing millions of years worth of captured carbon and putting them back into the biosphere.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > All extracted carbon will be eventually burned. Extraction operates on supply and demand. When people stop demanding it, they'll stop digging it out of the ground. There are two ways to achieve this: 1) You make burning it more expensive (carbon tax). 2) You make alternatives to burning it cheaper. You can do both at once. In fact you want to, because the first one gives the second one economies of scale and the second one reduces the economic impact of the first one. Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one except that instead of the money being collected as a tax that could be refunded to the population as a tax credit, it goes to the people who are still doing the remaining extraction. We could, however, stop subsidizing extraction.
    - exyi 2y ago
      > Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally. Unless OPEC just compensates by increasing production. IMHO carbon tax indeed better tool for EU/US, given that most of oil production out of "our" control
      - mistrial9 2y ago
        > might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally that statement upon examination does not pass scrutiny for weaslewords
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally. Which major countries could already do through tariffs on any country not collecting it, without giving the money to OPEC.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  His calculations are based off present day capabilities. The point of R&D is to create new capabilities. Solar also used to be a lot more expensive than it is today.
  - curtisf 2y ago
    No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. We emit 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That is more than 7x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 8x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 17x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 60x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons). But carbon is completely worthless. We can't build a logistics pipeline dedicated solely to moving a worthless substance that is larger than the rest of human logistics combined.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The only plausible result would be something along the lines of a photosynthesis hack to produce synthetic wood at a faster rate than natural processes, which would then have a market value because you could make boxes and couches and houses out of it. But then you could also use it as a renewable fuel and we'd be calling it biofuels instead of carbon capture.
      - user_7832 2y ago
        That's a very good point: commercializing the products of CO2 capture. I wonder if bio-engineering photosynthesis to speed it up is moderately feasible.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      >No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. This is obviously utterly false, given how much CO2 has been absorbed each year by current gen CO2 absorption technology. >But carbon is completely worthless. Current Gen carbon absorbers turn CO2 into some of the most useful materials on earth, like food, building materials and raw materials for oils and plastics. Much of the current world logistics is already dedicated to transporting their products.
- rpmisms 2y ago
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  - input_sh 2y ago
    Both of those emit much less CO2 per capita than the US. Heck, if India emitted 7x as much per capita, they'd still emit less than the US does.
    - rpmisms 2y ago
      That's simply false. China under-reports by a vast amount, so does India. Also completely discounting the shipping aspect, which embargos would fix.
      - input_sh 2y ago
        Well luckily I didn't consult either China's or India's own figures, but EU's, which addresses these concerns. > Bottom-up national emission inventories are therefore an essential component of reporting and tracking progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, national inventory reports are not yet available for all countries and years. In addition, they are dependent on individual national reporting processes and methodological choices, they can present data gaps for specific sectors and currently, except for Annex I parties, there is no obligation to include long-term series of emissions up to the most recent year. > The European Commission’s in-house Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)7 offers an alternative to overcome these limitations and to complement national inventories and has the advantage of producing timely emission estimates that are comparable across countries. > EDGAR relies on several sources of international statistics for the underpinning data. Foremost among these is the International Energy Agency (IEA). To harmonise global GHG emission estimates, this booklet incorporates IEA CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion sources named IEA-EDGAR CO2 emission dataset (v2), which are complemented with in-house EDGAR estimates for CH4, N2O and F-gas emissions. PDF: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/booklet/GHG_emissions_of_all_world_countries_booklet_2023report.pdf https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/booklet/GHG_emissions_of_all_...
      - 2y ago
- llm_trw 2y ago
  We have put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to melt the icecaps. The only thing worth doing now is converting everything to nuclear so we can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere before industrial society becomes impossible. In short: even if we get the most fervent dreams of de-growth and live like cavewomen starting tomorrow we've still got a million years of global warming before we're back to pre-industrial levels.
  - greenthrow 2y ago
    Nuclear is way too slow and carbon intensive. Solar and wind with battery storage make way more sense from every rational angle. They are cheaper, they are faster, they have less embedded carbon, they have far less tosk, etc. Nuclear has been getting hyped and pushed hard by big money interests but the truth is its time has come and gone abd it no longer makes any aense.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      I've been hearing this for 20 years and I'll be hearing it until we die from global warming. The only thing that wind and solar have done is make the grid more unstable and make a lot of money for speculators on the power market. There is a reason why every country which has reduced nuclear power has increased its green house gas emissions.
      - hackerlight 2y ago
        Getting rid of nuclear is stupid but so is adding new nuclear. Firmed renewables with lithium ion batteries and pumped hydro makes the most financial sense since the 2020s, especially in the US which has less seasonal solar resources than Europe.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        Again, I've been hearing that for 20 years and I'll be hearing it for 40 years until global warming knocks the internet off.
- globalnode 2y ago
  they wont give up on carbon capture fantasies because it means they can keep making buckets of money on free hydrocarbons...
- gumby 2y ago
  If the bathtub is overflowing you need to fix the broken tap and mop up the water that has already spilled. Yes, if you are the only person in the house, prioritize the tap, but if someone else is working the leak, grab a mop right away!
  - Shrezzing 2y ago
    For the metaphor to reflect reality, the oil & gas industry is walking around the house breaking more taps, while saying that they'll get round to inventing a mop in the next few years.
  - darby_eight 2y ago
    This metaphor would work a lot better if the tap were overflowing with cash.
  - graemep 2y ago
    > and mop up the water that has already spilled. Not if the spilled water is running down the drain. If we stopped our CO2 emissions and nothing else changed CO2 levels in the atmosphere would start falling immediately as photosynthesis would capture carbon faster than natural sources emit it.
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  They're doing that, too. Everything Georgia Tech is working on with respect to climate: https://climatesolutions.gatech.edu/ https://climatesolutions.gatech.edu/ Go the tab for the subsection on transportation and you'll see they're working on ways to reduce emissions, too. They also provide the dashboard and tracker app for the Drawdown Georgia initiative, which was co-drafted by Georgia Tech and aims to eventually get to net zero emissions in the state.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  Strong disagreement! Carbon capture is the only way to get back to pre industrial CO2 levels! Even if/when we emit zero CO2, the elevated levels would remain for many centuries!
  - lordswork 2y ago
    We need both, but reaching zero emissions is far more urgent and cost effective (by many orders of magnitude) right now.
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    the problem with carbon capture is that carbon capture with a grid that is over 10% fossil fuel is net negative. it's like fixing a broken tap by pointing a firehoze at it.
  - darby_eight 2y ago
    What happens if we can't find a carbon capture method that works efficiently and at scale? We need about a million better plans than that to maintain any sense of sanity.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      We already have carbon capture technology, which is deployed at mass scale and transforms carbon into some of the most useful resources on earth, like food, building materials, raw materials for fuels and plastics and much, much more. Given that this technology already is deployed over enormous stretches of the earth and that it actively benefits in its productivity from elevated levels of CO2 why not further that technology? CO2 isn't some poison in the atmosphere, it needs to be there. The one thing under control of humans is what percentage of Carbon is in the atmosphere or bound in different forms. The problem isn't too much CO2 in the atmosphere, it is that the amount of CO2 there can't be reabsorbed at a self regulating rate.
dyauspitr 2y ago
Carbon capture is so dumb. Just do the effective things like building out massive renewable energy generation like in China and India, phase out coal and oil, improve/install heat pumps, top down changes to phase out the use of plastic and reuse more containers like milk, soda etc like we did in the past, make nuclear plants, come up with cheap, safe lab grown meat etc.
- yfw 2y ago
  Lab grown meats are a boondoggle and will never happen at scale. https://josepheverettwil.substack.com/p/lab-meat-is-18-trillion-dollar-bullshit https://josepheverettwil.substack.com/p/lab-meat-is-18-trill...
  - jabl 2y ago
    Apparently the meat industry thinks otherwise, hence they're trying to push their poodles to outlaw it. With some success even: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68947766 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68947766
    - benzible 2y ago
      See https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... for a thorough exploration of why lab grown meat will never happen... > Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat. > “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      I'm happy that they are wasting their money then.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
yfw 2y ago
How many failed carbon capture projects do we need to make a point? https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-learned https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-lear...
- icodesoimgenius 2y ago
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blendo 2y ago
“running quantum chemistry computations on the inputs provided by the Georgia Tech team. These calculations used about 400 million CPU hours” Not sure bragging about high energy consumption helps their argument as much as they think.
- smt88 2y ago
  I'm happier to see these CPU-hours go to a boondoggle climate project than to ChatGPT writing people's emails for them.
0xDEADFED5 2y ago
comments on carbon capture are short-sighted, imo. this is a method using SOA technology to accelerate research into metal-organic frameworks. this is pretty cool science even if carbon capture never turns out to be feasible.
- cactusfrog 2y ago
  Yeah. One application that I’ve heard is retrofitting indoor animal farms to capture methane and reduce methane emissions.
- 11101010001100 2y ago
  Cool. I see what you did there.
janalsncm 2y ago
Really surprised to see so much cynicism about this. Discovering a chemical which can facilitate the reversal of climate change is vastly more useful than almost everything else those supercomputers would’ve been used for.
- sa-code 2y ago
  I would also like to add that adopting instead of having your own baby is the most effective way to save the planet
  - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
    I’ve never even heard this mentioned as an environmental choice. It strikes me as very strange that this would be the _most effective_ choice we can make — do you have some sources?
    - photonthug 2y ago
      If you’re receptive to any kind of argument about reducing consumption, then how could you ignore an argument about reducing consumers? People that want others to do things like avoid plastic straws but themselves have 2.5 unadopted kids per household are obviously being somewhat hypocritical
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        It is clearly possible to operate at the level of zero carbon emissions. People did it for thousands of years before the industrial revolution and modern technology runs just fine on renewable or nuclear energy. Since the emissions per person can be zero, any level of emissions reduction can be achieved with any number of people, you just need more emissions reductions per person when you have more people. "We should have both more emissions reductions and more people" is thereby an entirely consistent position. More than that, emissions reductions generally require R&D and have some economic cost, but an aging population is economically weaker and has fewer resources to spare. Meanwhile older people who aren't going to live much longer and have no descendants have less incentive to care about what happens in the future and spend those scarce resources on things like emissions reductions. People having more kids avoids that death spiral. Also, I mean, who are we trying to save the world for?
thelastgallon 2y ago
Carbon capture is not for what people think it is. It is for enhanced oil recovery. Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-capture-and-storage/ https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca... While renewables capture an inexhaustible source of energy (Sun), fossil fuels rely on an inexhaustible source of money for them: subsidies. Fossil fuel companies can't survive without the hundreds of billions of subsidies every year[1]. They can capture more subsides for 'carbon capture', using the captured carbon to extract more oil. Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil: https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denbury https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb... [1]Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022 https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
- elil17 2y ago
  This is how carbon capture is being used currently. However, I it's absolutely not the goal of legislation that funds carbon capture research - research that was lobbied for by environmental groups (not that big oil didn't lobby for it too). It's also not the goal of people I know who are working on carbon capture technology research. The goal is to reduce global atmospheric carbon levels. The problem is that doing that isn't technically or economically feasible at the moment. If we could make carbon capture cheaper and more efficient (and that's a big if - it may not be possible, which is why research is needed), carbon could be permanently sequestered.
  - thelastgallon 2y ago
    A ton of {coal,petroleum,natural gas} emits {2.6,2.75,3.2} tons of CO2. 8.5 billion tons of coal burnt every year. 4000 billion cubic meters of Natural gas/year (~3000 billion tons - gemini), Global oil production is 4.5 billion metric tons/year. I don't see a reason to subsidize fossil fuels, release all this carbon, and then subsidize fossil fuels companies even more to capture something thats measured in parts per million. And all this to waste 67% to 75% of energy. See Rejected energy: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/US%20Energy%202022.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U... We'd be better off not burning fossil fuels, we have the technology today. People are ok spending billions on carbon capture. But are against subsidizing EVs, ICE cars emit 1 ton of CO2 for every 2500 miles, every car emits 5 tons CO2/year. For a lifetime of 20 years, thats 100 tons of CO2. Why not fund EVs as carbon capture? Or is the only path forward to give money to fossil fuel companies? Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year[1]. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs. [1]https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation-and-storage/direct-air-capture https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation...
kfrzcode 2y ago
It would be supremely excellent if these companies embraced the Hedera Hashgraph as a truly sustainable, net-zero (or net-negative) approach to their carbon capture tokenization efforts: https://hedera.com/learning/sustainability https://hedera.com/learning/sustainability
freddealmeida 2y ago
Trees are great for carbon capture.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  They take up a lot of space at scale though.
  - salynchnew 2y ago
    Most tree planting efforts fail, as they ignore a lot of implementation/maintenance details and result in lots of dead trees. Mass tree planting is like doing a massive, massive migration. You can't just stick seedlings in the ground arbitrarily and expect a stand of trees to sustain itself 'cause "nature"... the successful processes like the Miyawaki method require planning, community investment, sustained work for ~5 years, etc. https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-build-forests/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-...
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      Planting is just the first step as I see it. After the trees have grown, you need to harvest them and - somehow - make sure they don't rot and return the CO2 to the atmosphere. Finding space for that is what I mean by "take up space at scale".
photochemsyn 2y ago
This is about developing metal-organic materials that absorb CO2 under one set of conditions and release it under a different set of conditions. The whole goal here is to generate a stream of 100% pure CO2 starting with ~400 ppm CO2 - meaning if you want 1 liter of pure CO2 at room temperature and pressure, you need to process a minimum of 2500 liters of air - and likely quite a bit more as you are not going to be 100% efficient. Making this work is all about minimizing the energy (and thus economic) cost of this first step. Then you need to reduce (add hydrogen and remove oxygen) the CO2 and start building other products - methanol, long-chain hydrocarbons, etc. (that's shipping and jet/rocket fuel, respectively). But why stop there? If you want long-term stable materials, converting the CO2 into carbon fiber is a good option - more sci-fi is a diamond endpoint, which takes a lot of energy, but has many uses. This will have minimal effect on atmospheric CO2 unless fossil fuel extraction and combustion is eliminated from the energy mix - but it does point to how human civilization can do material and fuel production without having to mine carbon from the earth or cut down forests. In the long run, this is the only plausible option.
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
In terms of CCS, we're probably better off reducing emissions AND capping methane emissions (MethaneSAT just launched). IIRC, CCS needs to be around 4% of the solution.
araes 2y ago
No comment on the CO2 uses, just seems like something's going on with Meta / FB lately. Who releases a framework/demo where you click the "Download ODAC23 Data" [1] or "Try ODAC ML Models" [2] links and get "404 - page not found"? Georgia Tech? They're supposedly 3rd worldwide in Business Analytics. Releasing a press release with 404's everywhere's not great "analytics". [1] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATASET.md#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23 https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATAS... [2] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODELS.md#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23 https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODEL... Did somebody even look at this stuff before writing their press release? It's not like it's much link following to click "The project, named OpenDAC" and then find out it's all a bunch of dead links.
- anuroopsriram 2y ago
  Hi: I'm one of the authors of the OpenDAC paper. Our Github repo has been going through significant restructuring and it looks like the files were moved after the press release went out. Here are the updated links: - https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/datasets/odac.html https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/datasets/od... - https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/models.html#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23 https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/models.html... We'll update the links in the release ASAP. -AS
idrathernot 2y ago
Let’s just ban all manufacturing, commerce and transportation in western countries while we all try to breathe less. That’s the only way win the war on carbon.
consumer451 2y ago
I find that it's usually folly to speak in absolutes, but in this case I feel confident in stating: The only carbon capture which will ever scale as well as we need it to scale, is carbon capture which creates carbon-based products cheaper than current fossil-fuel methods. There is a company working on that, there should be a dozen. Terraform Industries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006 Interviews with CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611

170 points by ohjeez 2y ago

Cool, but carbon capture from the air is at best a tiny fraction of the solutions we need. Right now our time is better spent on emissions reduction. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x

malux85 2y ago
Both, in parallel, theres enough humans and resources to work on both
- cheonic00193 2y ago
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  - CalRobert 2y ago
    Why not?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Suppose you have any finite number of humans to work on the problem. Emissions reductions can be achieved in known ways at some relatively modest cost, e.g. the difference in cost between using fossil fuels and using electric cars or renewable/nuclear generation methods, which are already very close together in price and could be made closer or even cause the alternatives to cost less through certain types of engineering R&D or reasonable regulatory changes, and not only lower emissions but lower energy costs. Carbon capture requires a large amount of R&D which might not yield any useful results whatsoever, and if it did the result would be a reduction in cost from a level which is hopeless and preposterous to one where actually deploying it would still cost trillions of dollars in implementation and operating costs to have any meaningful effect, while producing no other economic value and almost certainly a vast amount of chemical waste. The difference in cost effectiveness is so vast that the optimal allocation of finite resources to the latter could plausibly be zero.
- atoav 2y ago
  I would generally agree with that statement. However in this case I disagree. Why? Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing? So in my mind carbon capture is something that we should work on if we are capable of the realization that the role it will play in fixing the problem is utterly insignificant. If you think it is the solution, carbon capture sells a false hope and prolongs the struggle — and at least where I am from proponents of carbon capture are the people who definitely don't want to reduce their CO2 output. Pointing at some future technology instead of doing something now is actively harmful. And I am not sure the actual positive effect of such technology would outweigh the negative effect it has as an excuse to justify not doing what is necessary now.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    > Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing? What you’re overlooking is that we will keep doing whatever we’re doing, for the same reason telling people to diet and exercise isn’t doing jack shit for the obesity crisis. We need Ozempic for the climate. Because the only alternative is 4C of warming.
    - Teever 2y ago
      If that's the case maybe we as a species should die? Or at least enough of the species that we change our behaviour for good? It's unfortunate that the ecosystem has to suffer.
      - tticvs 2y ago
        "The future looks somewhat difficult, better give up and go extinct" Fortunately natural selection will remove this mindset eventually. It's unfortunate that the species has to suffer it in the meantime.
- exyi 2y ago
  If we have enough resources dedicated to this problem, why are we still burning coal/gas for power on sunny days? I'm definitely not against researching carbon capture, but it currently isn't the "the solution the planet desperately needs"
  - icegreentea2 2y ago
    The resources going into carbon capture aren't the same resources going into renewable? The scale is also completely different. Bloomberg says global investment in carbon capture in 2022 was like $6.4 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/carbon-capture-investment-hits-record-high-of-6-4-billion/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/carbon-capture-investment-hits-r...). Bloomberg also says that global renewable investment in the first 6 months of 2023 was $358 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits-record-breaking-358-billion-in-1h-2023/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits...) Conversion of all carbon capture investment into more solar or wind capacity would not significantly move the needle on rate of renewable growth. Effectively all carbon capture investment right now is basically in the pilot phase. Governments are sinking money into carbon capture for a broad range of reasons, including cynical (as a smokescreen to protect fossil fuel industries) to optimistic (we can start investing in the next step of net-zero since renewable trajectories look good) to being realistic hedges (they see the challenges in achieving net zero in certain fields like aviation, shipping, construction, and believe that carbon capture is what is necessary to achieve net-zero).
- lordswork 2y ago
  If we have fixed resources, how should they be allocated? I'd argue for every million dollars towards reaching net zero emissions, we should maybe spend 1 dollar towards carbon capture, where we scale that investment up as we approach net zero emissions.
enriquto 2y ago
Carbon capture is obviously inconsequential; but it would seem that even emissions reduction is a useless endeavor, wouldn't it? All extracted carbon will be eventually burned. Burning it sooner or later it's not such a big deal. What we need to do, for a start, is to close the damn oil wells! Just stop unearthing millions of years worth of captured carbon and putting them back into the biosphere.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > All extracted carbon will be eventually burned. Extraction operates on supply and demand. When people stop demanding it, they'll stop digging it out of the ground. There are two ways to achieve this: 1) You make burning it more expensive (carbon tax). 2) You make alternatives to burning it cheaper. You can do both at once. In fact you want to, because the first one gives the second one economies of scale and the second one reduces the economic impact of the first one. Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one except that instead of the money being collected as a tax that could be refunded to the population as a tax credit, it goes to the people who are still doing the remaining extraction. We could, however, stop subsidizing extraction.
  - exyi 2y ago
    > Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally. Unless OPEC just compensates by increasing production. IMHO carbon tax indeed better tool for EU/US, given that most of oil production out of "our" control
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      > might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally that statement upon examination does not pass scrutiny for weaslewords
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally. Which major countries could already do through tariffs on any country not collecting it, without giving the money to OPEC.
janalsncm 2y ago
His calculations are based off present day capabilities. The point of R&D is to create new capabilities. Solar also used to be a lot more expensive than it is today.
- curtisf 2y ago
  No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. We emit 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That is more than 7x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 8x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 17x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 60x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons). But carbon is completely worthless. We can't build a logistics pipeline dedicated solely to moving a worthless substance that is larger than the rest of human logistics combined.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The only plausible result would be something along the lines of a photosynthesis hack to produce synthetic wood at a faster rate than natural processes, which would then have a market value because you could make boxes and couches and houses out of it. But then you could also use it as a renewable fuel and we'd be calling it biofuels instead of carbon capture.
    - user_7832 2y ago
      That's a very good point: commercializing the products of CO2 capture. I wonder if bio-engineering photosynthesis to speed it up is moderately feasible.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    >No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. This is obviously utterly false, given how much CO2 has been absorbed each year by current gen CO2 absorption technology. >But carbon is completely worthless. Current Gen carbon absorbers turn CO2 into some of the most useful materials on earth, like food, building materials and raw materials for oils and plastics. Much of the current world logistics is already dedicated to transporting their products.
rpmisms 2y ago
[flagged]
- input_sh 2y ago
  Both of those emit much less CO2 per capita than the US. Heck, if India emitted 7x as much per capita, they'd still emit less than the US does.
  - rpmisms 2y ago
    That's simply false. China under-reports by a vast amount, so does India. Also completely discounting the shipping aspect, which embargos would fix.
    - input_sh 2y ago
      Well luckily I didn't consult either China's or India's own figures, but EU's, which addresses these concerns. > Bottom-up national emission inventories are therefore an essential component of reporting and tracking progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, national inventory reports are not yet available for all countries and years. In addition, they are dependent on individual national reporting processes and methodological choices, they can present data gaps for specific sectors and currently, except for Annex I parties, there is no obligation to include long-term series of emissions up to the most recent year. > The European Commission’s in-house Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)7 offers an alternative to overcome these limitations and to complement national inventories and has the advantage of producing timely emission estimates that are comparable across countries. > EDGAR relies on several sources of international statistics for the underpinning data. Foremost among these is the International Energy Agency (IEA). To harmonise global GHG emission estimates, this booklet incorporates IEA CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion sources named IEA-EDGAR CO2 emission dataset (v2), which are complemented with in-house EDGAR estimates for CH4, N2O and F-gas emissions. PDF: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/booklet/GHG_emissions_of_all_world_countries_booklet_2023report.pdf https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/booklet/GHG_emissions_of_all_...
    - 2y ago
llm_trw 2y ago
We have put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to melt the icecaps. The only thing worth doing now is converting everything to nuclear so we can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere before industrial society becomes impossible. In short: even if we get the most fervent dreams of de-growth and live like cavewomen starting tomorrow we've still got a million years of global warming before we're back to pre-industrial levels.
- greenthrow 2y ago
  Nuclear is way too slow and carbon intensive. Solar and wind with battery storage make way more sense from every rational angle. They are cheaper, they are faster, they have less embedded carbon, they have far less tosk, etc. Nuclear has been getting hyped and pushed hard by big money interests but the truth is its time has come and gone abd it no longer makes any aense.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    I've been hearing this for 20 years and I'll be hearing it until we die from global warming. The only thing that wind and solar have done is make the grid more unstable and make a lot of money for speculators on the power market. There is a reason why every country which has reduced nuclear power has increased its green house gas emissions.
    - hackerlight 2y ago
      Getting rid of nuclear is stupid but so is adding new nuclear. Firmed renewables with lithium ion batteries and pumped hydro makes the most financial sense since the 2020s, especially in the US which has less seasonal solar resources than Europe.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        Again, I've been hearing that for 20 years and I'll be hearing it for 40 years until global warming knocks the internet off.
globalnode 2y ago
they wont give up on carbon capture fantasies because it means they can keep making buckets of money on free hydrocarbons...
gumby 2y ago
If the bathtub is overflowing you need to fix the broken tap and mop up the water that has already spilled. Yes, if you are the only person in the house, prioritize the tap, but if someone else is working the leak, grab a mop right away!
- Shrezzing 2y ago
  For the metaphor to reflect reality, the oil & gas industry is walking around the house breaking more taps, while saying that they'll get round to inventing a mop in the next few years.
- darby_eight 2y ago
  This metaphor would work a lot better if the tap were overflowing with cash.
- graemep 2y ago
  > and mop up the water that has already spilled. Not if the spilled water is running down the drain. If we stopped our CO2 emissions and nothing else changed CO2 levels in the atmosphere would start falling immediately as photosynthesis would capture carbon faster than natural sources emit it.
nonameiguess 2y ago
They're doing that, too. Everything Georgia Tech is working on with respect to climate: https://climatesolutions.gatech.edu/ https://climatesolutions.gatech.edu/ Go the tab for the subsection on transportation and you'll see they're working on ways to reduce emissions, too. They also provide the dashboard and tracker app for the Drawdown Georgia initiative, which was co-drafted by Georgia Tech and aims to eventually get to net zero emissions in the state.
BurningFrog 2y ago
Strong disagreement! Carbon capture is the only way to get back to pre industrial CO2 levels! Even if/when we emit zero CO2, the elevated levels would remain for many centuries!
- lordswork 2y ago
  We need both, but reaching zero emissions is far more urgent and cost effective (by many orders of magnitude) right now.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  the problem with carbon capture is that carbon capture with a grid that is over 10% fossil fuel is net negative. it's like fixing a broken tap by pointing a firehoze at it.
- darby_eight 2y ago
  What happens if we can't find a carbon capture method that works efficiently and at scale? We need about a million better plans than that to maintain any sense of sanity.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    We already have carbon capture technology, which is deployed at mass scale and transforms carbon into some of the most useful resources on earth, like food, building materials, raw materials for fuels and plastics and much, much more. Given that this technology already is deployed over enormous stretches of the earth and that it actively benefits in its productivity from elevated levels of CO2 why not further that technology? CO2 isn't some poison in the atmosphere, it needs to be there. The one thing under control of humans is what percentage of Carbon is in the atmosphere or bound in different forms. The problem isn't too much CO2 in the atmosphere, it is that the amount of CO2 there can't be reabsorbed at a self regulating rate.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Carbon capture is so dumb. Just do the effective things like building out massive renewable energy generation like in China and India, phase out coal and oil, improve/install heat pumps, top down changes to phase out the use of plastic and reuse more containers like milk, soda etc like we did in the past, make nuclear plants, come up with cheap, safe lab grown meat etc.

yfw 2y ago
Lab grown meats are a boondoggle and will never happen at scale. https://josepheverettwil.substack.com/p/lab-meat-is-18-trillion-dollar-bullshit https://josepheverettwil.substack.com/p/lab-meat-is-18-trill...
- jabl 2y ago
  Apparently the meat industry thinks otherwise, hence they're trying to push their poodles to outlaw it. With some success even: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68947766 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68947766
  - benzible 2y ago
    See https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... for a thorough exploration of why lab grown meat will never happen... > Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat. > “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    I'm happy that they are wasting their money then.
- dyauspitr 2y ago

yfw 2y ago

How many failed carbon capture projects do we need to make a point? https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-learned https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-lear...

icodesoimgenius 2y ago
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blendo 2y ago

“running quantum chemistry computations on the inputs provided by the Georgia Tech team. These calculations used about 400 million CPU hours” Not sure bragging about high energy consumption helps their argument as much as they think.

smt88 2y ago
I'm happier to see these CPU-hours go to a boondoggle climate project than to ChatGPT writing people's emails for them.

0xDEADFED5 2y ago

comments on carbon capture are short-sighted, imo. this is a method using SOA technology to accelerate research into metal-organic frameworks. this is pretty cool science even if carbon capture never turns out to be feasible.

cactusfrog 2y ago
Yeah. One application that I’ve heard is retrofitting indoor animal farms to capture methane and reduce methane emissions.
11101010001100 2y ago
Cool. I see what you did there.

janalsncm 2y ago

Really surprised to see so much cynicism about this. Discovering a chemical which can facilitate the reversal of climate change is vastly more useful than almost everything else those supercomputers would’ve been used for.

sa-code 2y ago
I would also like to add that adopting instead of having your own baby is the most effective way to save the planet
- pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  I’ve never even heard this mentioned as an environmental choice. It strikes me as very strange that this would be the _most effective_ choice we can make — do you have some sources?
  - photonthug 2y ago
    If you’re receptive to any kind of argument about reducing consumption, then how could you ignore an argument about reducing consumers? People that want others to do things like avoid plastic straws but themselves have 2.5 unadopted kids per household are obviously being somewhat hypocritical
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      It is clearly possible to operate at the level of zero carbon emissions. People did it for thousands of years before the industrial revolution and modern technology runs just fine on renewable or nuclear energy. Since the emissions per person can be zero, any level of emissions reduction can be achieved with any number of people, you just need more emissions reductions per person when you have more people. "We should have both more emissions reductions and more people" is thereby an entirely consistent position. More than that, emissions reductions generally require R&D and have some economic cost, but an aging population is economically weaker and has fewer resources to spare. Meanwhile older people who aren't going to live much longer and have no descendants have less incentive to care about what happens in the future and spend those scarce resources on things like emissions reductions. People having more kids avoids that death spiral. Also, I mean, who are we trying to save the world for?

thelastgallon 2y ago

Carbon capture is not for what people think it is. It is for enhanced oil recovery. Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-capture-and-storage/ https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca... While renewables capture an inexhaustible source of energy (Sun), fossil fuels rely on an inexhaustible source of money for them: subsidies. Fossil fuel companies can't survive without the hundreds of billions of subsidies every year[1]. They can capture more subsides for 'carbon capture', using the captured carbon to extract more oil. Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil: https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denbury https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb... [1]Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022 https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022

elil17 2y ago
This is how carbon capture is being used currently. However, I it's absolutely not the goal of legislation that funds carbon capture research - research that was lobbied for by environmental groups (not that big oil didn't lobby for it too). It's also not the goal of people I know who are working on carbon capture technology research. The goal is to reduce global atmospheric carbon levels. The problem is that doing that isn't technically or economically feasible at the moment. If we could make carbon capture cheaper and more efficient (and that's a big if - it may not be possible, which is why research is needed), carbon could be permanently sequestered.
- thelastgallon 2y ago
  A ton of {coal,petroleum,natural gas} emits {2.6,2.75,3.2} tons of CO2. 8.5 billion tons of coal burnt every year. 4000 billion cubic meters of Natural gas/year (~3000 billion tons - gemini), Global oil production is 4.5 billion metric tons/year. I don't see a reason to subsidize fossil fuels, release all this carbon, and then subsidize fossil fuels companies even more to capture something thats measured in parts per million. And all this to waste 67% to 75% of energy. See Rejected energy: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/US%20Energy%202022.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U... We'd be better off not burning fossil fuels, we have the technology today. People are ok spending billions on carbon capture. But are against subsidizing EVs, ICE cars emit 1 ton of CO2 for every 2500 miles, every car emits 5 tons CO2/year. For a lifetime of 20 years, thats 100 tons of CO2. Why not fund EVs as carbon capture? Or is the only path forward to give money to fossil fuel companies? Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year[1]. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs. [1]https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation-and-storage/direct-air-capture https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation...

kfrzcode 2y ago

It would be supremely excellent if these companies embraced the Hedera Hashgraph as a truly sustainable, net-zero (or net-negative) approach to their carbon capture tokenization efforts: https://hedera.com/learning/sustainability https://hedera.com/learning/sustainability

freddealmeida 2y ago

Trees are great for carbon capture.

BurningFrog 2y ago
They take up a lot of space at scale though.
- salynchnew 2y ago
  Most tree planting efforts fail, as they ignore a lot of implementation/maintenance details and result in lots of dead trees. Mass tree planting is like doing a massive, massive migration. You can't just stick seedlings in the ground arbitrarily and expect a stand of trees to sustain itself 'cause "nature"... the successful processes like the Miyawaki method require planning, community investment, sustained work for ~5 years, etc. https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-build-forests/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-...
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    Planting is just the first step as I see it. After the trees have grown, you need to harvest them and - somehow - make sure they don't rot and return the CO2 to the atmosphere. Finding space for that is what I mean by "take up space at scale".

photochemsyn 2y ago

This is about developing metal-organic materials that absorb CO2 under one set of conditions and release it under a different set of conditions. The whole goal here is to generate a stream of 100% pure CO2 starting with ~400 ppm CO2 - meaning if you want 1 liter of pure CO2 at room temperature and pressure, you need to process a minimum of 2500 liters of air - and likely quite a bit more as you are not going to be 100% efficient. Making this work is all about minimizing the energy (and thus economic) cost of this first step. Then you need to reduce (add hydrogen and remove oxygen) the CO2 and start building other products - methanol, long-chain hydrocarbons, etc. (that's shipping and jet/rocket fuel, respectively). But why stop there? If you want long-term stable materials, converting the CO2 into carbon fiber is a good option - more sci-fi is a diamond endpoint, which takes a lot of energy, but has many uses. This will have minimal effect on atmospheric CO2 unless fossil fuel extraction and combustion is eliminated from the energy mix - but it does point to how human civilization can do material and fuel production without having to mine carbon from the earth or cut down forests. In the long run, this is the only plausible option.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

In terms of CCS, we're probably better off reducing emissions AND capping methane emissions (MethaneSAT just launched). IIRC, CCS needs to be around 4% of the solution.

araes 2y ago

No comment on the CO2 uses, just seems like something's going on with Meta / FB lately. Who releases a framework/demo where you click the "Download ODAC23 Data" [1] or "Try ODAC ML Models" [2] links and get "404 - page not found"? Georgia Tech? They're supposedly 3rd worldwide in Business Analytics. Releasing a press release with 404's everywhere's not great "analytics". [1] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATASET.md#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23 https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATAS... [2] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODELS.md#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23 https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODEL... Did somebody even look at this stuff before writing their press release? It's not like it's much link following to click "The project, named OpenDAC" and then find out it's all a bunch of dead links.

anuroopsriram 2y ago
Hi: I'm one of the authors of the OpenDAC paper. Our Github repo has been going through significant restructuring and it looks like the files were moved after the press release went out. Here are the updated links: - https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/datasets/odac.html https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/datasets/od... - https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/models.html#open-direct-air-capture-2023-odac23 https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/models.html... We'll update the links in the release ASAP. -AS

idrathernot 2y ago

Let’s just ban all manufacturing, commerce and transportation in western countries while we all try to breathe less. That’s the only way win the war on carbon.

consumer451 2y ago

I find that it's usually folly to speak in absolutes, but in this case I feel confident in stating: The only carbon capture which will ever scale as well as we need it to scale, is carbon capture which creates carbon-based products cheaper than current fossil-fuel methods. There is a company working on that, there should be a dozen. Terraform Industries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006 Interviews with CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611