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The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal: existing technologies have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon carbon dioxide removal. I

• glatisaint 2y ago
  Not really. It's necessary to meet our climate goals. They also depend on a lot of other technology that doesn't exist yet that we'll need to develop and subsidize over the coming years.
• dymk 2y ago
  That was also the state of the solar power industry a few decades ago, it took time and coordination (government action) to make it the dominant, economically viable form of renewable energy it is today.
  • goneri 2y ago
    Solar is nowhere near to be a dominant source of energy and will never be.
    • jaggederest 2y ago
      > and will never be. Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the size of Arizona
      • vlovich123 2y ago
        Saying solar is the upstream of fossil fuels is a technicality. Fossil fuels are more like a battery that’s stored millions of years of solar energy (+ the earth itself contributed a lot of energy). Solar cells are more like plants and cannot be used to replace batteries and our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed. Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
        • ben_w 2y ago
          > our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed. I disagree. The tech itself already good enough to supplant the majority of cases, which in turn gives us more time for the things that remain (such as long-haul aircraft). That said, I may be a little on the optimistic side about how much warming the ecosphere can take. If it's already too hot, then yes, naturally you are correct. > Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth). That's not what the graphs show: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix • Coal: down since 2012 • Gas: close enough to steady since 2012 • Nuclear: down since early 2000s • Wind and solar: up Looks to me like gas mostly replaced oil (since the late 90s); and that wind+solar is displacing nuclear (since the former became big enough to show up on a graph).
          • pyrale 2y ago
            > That's not what the graphs show The graphs you provided show that coal and usage are still growing in absolute numbers. They're only going down in perentages. So, aside from oil (which is mostly still there), nothing was displaced. The only significant thing we learn is that we've doubled our electricity usage since 2000. The share of low carbon electricity generation barely moved since 1985. Renewables just helped avoid it crumble due to hydro not being scalable.
          • XorNot 2y ago
            If batteries were literally free today, they still wouldn't be good enough due to the cost in support electronics required to put them on the grid (which is currently about price parity with batteries per watt). EDIT: and those electronics also degrade - a lifespan of 20 years would be reasonable at scale.
            • svnt 2y ago
              So you’re charging twice for the grid tie? Because the reason for installing batteries would be 1) to not grid-tie, or 2) to grid-tie along with a renewable energy source, which if it is a commercial site, is already grid-tied.
      • lukan 2y ago
        To quote Wikipedia for further context: "The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 122 PW·year = 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002 (2019), this was more energy in one hour (one hour and 25 minutes) than the world used in one year."
    • joak 2y ago
      Solar is the cheapest and the one that grows the fastest. So eventually it will become dominant.
      • yesbut 2y ago
        Eventually is a long time from now.
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          So is never.
        • ben_w 2y ago
          I estimate that in the early 2030s, PV will pass the TW-year/year mark, or 50% of current demand. I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
          • yesbut 2y ago
            How much coal will we need to burn in order to make all of those PV cells? How many mountain tops removed to get the raw materials? Nobody ever provides an honest answer to those questions. This isn't a binary versus issue. If you have to ramp up coal burning and natural habitat destruction to produce the needed PV cells then you also need to stop endless-growth profit seeking manufacturing wholesale.
            • bastawhiz 2y ago
              Versus burning fossil fuels that need to be mined, refined, and shipped for nonrenewables? You think the materials needed to build turbines for a fossil fuel plant just magically appear? How much coal do you think is burned to facilitate a kWh of solar production versus a kWh of coal power generation?
            • elliotto 2y ago
              you're moving goalpoasts.
    • dymk 2y ago
      That's not what I said, try reading my comment again. Also, based on the current rate of solar adoption, you're likely wrong about it never being the dominant form of energy generation.
    • jjtheblunt 2y ago
      Is solar the only source of power on long spacecraft journeys, like that of Voyager and so on?
      • lukan 2y ago
        No, Voyager uses a radioactive battery. The sun is already way too far away for Voyager, to provide enough energy.
      • thinkcontext 2y ago
        Voyager doesn't use solar power since its incredibly faint as you get further from the Sun. It uses the heat from the decay of radioactive plutonium to generate electricity.
    • andybak 2y ago
      Well on a certain level, all energy sources are "solar but with extra steps" so make of that what you will. If you think I'm being silly, well... I'm not the one using the word "never"
      • dymk 2y ago
        It's all fusion with extra steps, but your point stands.
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          Uranium's energy derives from gravitational collapse, not fusion. The neutron stars whose collision produces uranium have undergone endothermic nuclear reactions; their nuclear matter (aside from its gravitational binding energy) is at a higher energy state than the initial protons and electrons. Geothermal is most either primordial gravitational energy from the Earth's formation or energy from decay of uranium and thorium. Only decay of K-40 might be ascribed to fusion. Tidal is derived from gravitational energy.
          • zeroonetwothree 2y ago
            Fusion also comes from gravity so we could say gravity is the source of all energy.
            • Dylan16807 2y ago
              Gravity is just the catalyst for solar fusion. The energy comes from moving the atoms closer to iron in size.
            • pfdietz 2y ago
              We can compare the fraction of the Sun's energy that has come from fusion vs. coming from gravitational collapse (that is, the release of energy as the material becomes more tightly gravitationally bound, starting from the diffuse gas cloud that formed the Sun). It's about two orders of magnitude in favor of fusion. This is related to the historical question of the age of the Earth. Before the discovery of fusion, it was thought the Sun was powered by gravity, which put an upper limit on the age of the Sun of some tens of millions of years. This was close to Lord Kelvin's limit on the age of the Earth as modeled as a solid sphere cooling by conduction, which led him to believe both estimates were correct. As it turns out, both estimates were flawed, but for different reasons, and it was only coincidence they were similar.
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      Solar is looking to be the ultimate winner for powering the world. Your contention seems without sense to me.
    • bastawhiz 2y ago
      Unfortunately there's zero metrics from any reputable sources that would agree with you. Solar deployment is accelerating massively (0-8% of utility scale production in just a couple decades) while all nonrenewables are decelerating.
      • pyrale 2y ago
        > while all nonrenewables are decelerating. 2023 is the year we burned the most coal, the most gas, the most oil, etc... So far.
        • bastawhiz 2y ago
          I said decelerating, not shrinking
        • dalyons 2y ago
          Might be the most ever , at least for power generation https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electricity-review-2024/the-big-picture/#past-the-peak-a-new-era-of-falling-power-emissions https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electrici... Here’s hoping!
      • goneri 2y ago
        You ignore the short daylight period during the winter, when the electricity consumption is the most important. There is no practical why to store the energy for the nights. At the end we end up with a cheap source of energy that covers only a fraction of our needs, and we have to maintain a second source of production for the rest of the time. We pay two times to keep the two system operational. Nuclear is also cheap and doesn't have this limitation.
        • ben_w 2y ago
          Nuclear is, last I checked, the same cost as the combination of PV with a sufficient number of batteries to be the backup. And for transport we need some kind of storage system regardless (doesn't have to be batteries, but does have to exist), the scale of which is larger than needed to do anything we want with night/clouds/etc. issues with PV. The factories to make those batteries are being built very quickly.
    • icehawk 2y ago
      Define dominant.
• Hugsun 2y ago
  Combatting the byproducts of the entire industrial world is a huge undertaking. We should not expect statistically significant contributions to the fight, until the most promising technologies have been scaled up massively. This does not mean the field is just composed of scams. The opposite could be true with the same results we see.
  • schiffern 2y ago
    >We should not expect statistically significant contributions to the fight, until the most promising technologies have been scaled up massively. Just to put a finer point on it, we do not want a large scale-up until we largely stop burning fossil fuel for stationary baseload power. Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously. No, right not we should be researching and laying the groundwork for a future (post-combustion) scale-up, but environmentally we should not be scaling up just yet. Scaling up right now would actually generate more pollution, not less.
    • Hugsun 2y ago
      Well said. > Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously. That is true in the abstract but there is yet more nuance that is important to consider. Capturing co2 doesn't have to consume as much energy as is released when it's emitted. Although, many methods, like everything revolving around trees and biomass do have this negative net energy property. There are chemical ones that don't if I'm not mistaken[1]. There is also the unreliability of most renewable energy sources. While we haven't solved all the energy storage problems. There might still be periods where it would be somewhat sensible to use surplus renewable energy to capture carbon, while a low-wind, low-sun place is powered by fossil fuels. We do of course want to shut all of them down ASAP, but the optimal ordering might not be as strict as you imply. I agree with your broader point though. There is a lot of potential for energy waste if carbon capture is prematurely applied aggressively. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/how-icelands-carbfix-is-harnessing-power-turning-co2-into-stone-2023-10-30/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/how-ic...
• yesbut 2y ago
  The only solution to this problem is reducing / eliminating carbon output. And the only way to do that is to stop making plastics, stop burning fossil fuels for smelting, and reign in all global manufacturing outputs completely. All of the solutions you guys are promoting ignore that and are trying to make a profit as part of the solution of cleaning up this mess. Pipe dream. Scam artists.
  • joak 2y ago
    Agree, net zero carbon emissions is mandatory. But it's not enough because the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will continue to heat the planet and have to be removed. This not carbon capture vs net zero, the goal is net zero AND carbon capture.
    • yesbut 2y ago
      I don't disagree with you, but I don't think carbon capture will provide the gains needed in a realistic timeframe. I don't think its development should be abandoned, but we all have a tendency to go to sleep thinking "cool, tech will solve this for me" when in reality only public policy will. All of our governments are owned by these corporations that are trying to either continue making money via the status quo or make money with these fly-by-night tech-will-save-us-all get rich quick schemes. Nobody is bribing the politicians to enact policy that cuts global manufacturing output.
      • tito 2y ago
        Agreed, we have to find a way to do both. It's unlikely we will prevail. As is, the path we're on is about 4 million tons per year of removals by 2030. A new model from Rocky Mountain Institute suggests we need to be at more like 285 million tons annually of removals by 2030 to be on track. It's time to invest in scaling carbon removal.
  • AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    The "good" news is that the scale of the problem to those that know explicitly precludes any of these scams being useful. They are almost tautologically insignificant. But politically they can have a minor delaying impact, like birds killed by windmills (1/1000th the effect of skyscrapers), vids of collapsing/exploding windmills in the middle of nowhere (compared to oil transit and storagw explosions)
• baq 2y ago
  scale 100x in a decade and 10x in the one after this or face extinction. we've done it with CFCs. sort of.
  • AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    There roughly 3 TRILLION excess tons of co2 in the atmosphere, and God knows how much is in the oceans. I have no idea what the funny numbers alleged cost per ton for carbon removal in this report, but even if it is down to 20$/ton (100$ per ton was more realistic a few years ago) ... Then do the math. We have a sunk cost of something like 50 trillion dollars using removal using the most optimistic of methods and assuming we stopped carbon emissions today, and it's probably more like 200 trillion in reality. The petroleum industry would really like us to pay them to clean up their problem to the the of that amount I'm sure.
    • baq 2y ago
      A bit late but pointing out that dollars are fiat money (i.e. numbers on spreadsheets) but CO2 in the atmosphere is very real. Climate crisis will be super-inflationary if we manage to pull through.
• jethro_tell 2y ago
  I bet if you took the subsidies from fossil fuels and dumped it into carbon removal you could solve both problems at once.
  • parski 2y ago
    Now we're talking.
• tito 2y ago
  Carbon removal is expensive and sounds like science fiction. Unfortunately, IPCC reports from 2018 and 2023 confirm that carbon removal is necessary to stabilize temperatures. Decarbonization alone is no longer enough. We need to get better at carbon removal...fast.
  • schiffern 2y ago
    "We need carbon removal," sadly, isn't actually an argument for the feasibility of carbon removal. It is also possible (nay, probable) that this dilemma will get resolved by just... humanity not getting the thing we "need."
• karaterobot 2y ago
  I totally agree with you. Like I always say—if things could improve, they would have improved by now. Anything that doesn't immediately change the world is usually a scam, con, or flimflam. Personally, I don't know how basic research works, or how industries get bootstrapped, and I don't care. If it's not easy to do, but someone is trying to do it anyway, I assume a crime must be taking place. The people I view as heroes? Those anonymous figures throughout the history of the world, who looked at huge problems and said: "don't bother". They were right, and you are right.