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Ocean Carbon Removal: Captura's marine carbon capture explained
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- ta988 2y agoI feel like it is missing most of the important questions. What's the impact on sea life (one sentence saying we need monitoring...) The techniques used mean that all the microorganisms, planktons, algaes will be destroyed by those processes. What is the yield of those approaches, you remove 1000 tons, but how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats... What do you do with the CO2, that's now weight you have to move as well and put in containers that required CO2 to be made. This all should count in the equations for the credits, and from what we have seen in the past it is unlikely it will.
- Avicebron 2y agoYeah this is seems like it's reduced the complexity down to one dimension (removing the CO2) and has blown past any of that, didn't even think about the algae initially, just energy expenditures getting this up and running, but yeah, that's pretty much saying you'll solve climate change by chopping down trees and planting golf course grass
- youngtaff 2y agoThey’re not even removing that much CO2 either > Captura’s Port of Los Angeles pilot can remove about 100 tonnes of CO2 per year from seawater. The company’s new plant under construction in Hawaii will capture 10 times that amount—a measurement the company can definitively quantify. So 1,000 tonnes of CO2 / year?
- Avicebron 2y agoSo back of the sticky note math, 1,000 ton/yr, at $7.37/ton carbon credit resell value per Google "AI" header thing, that's $7,370/year profit. Hopefully that covers the boat, employee salaries, and fuel. Good job team.
- natch 2y agoMy god, exactly. But I think you mean $7,370/year revenue. Meh, words. /s
- caseyohara 2y agoTo help quantify this further, a typical passenger car emits ~5 tonnes of CO2 per year. So we’re talking about offsetting 20-200 cars per year. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
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- noxer 2y agoOnly if you ignore the who knows how many tons of CO2 was put into the atmosphere to create the thing. In reality that thing probably need to run several years to break even.
- vsensei 2y agoOh no, the algae, nobody thought of them!
- aziaziazi 2y ago> how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats Boats consume way more fuel than a layman may think. I’ve been on a ~80m / 20people crew coast guard ship for 6 weeks and did a napkin math onboard based on tank levels and refueling date. It was +1000l/person/day of diesel (can’t remember precise numbers). We were moving ~50% or the time. In addition of the motors there were many BIG generators to make everything work: heating, sewage, hot water, AC, pumps, motors for cranes, anchor raising… you also need your motors running at least in low speed even when still to control your position and direction. I’m sure boats acting like platforms and with less crew to accommodate does consume less, however it’s still nothing comparable to an onshore plant. It work "economically" because you often manage to refuel in an port with low fuel price.
- ChuckMcM 2y agoI have wondered if you could tow a barge with the processing, then incentivize the box transports to pull the barge along behind. There are challenges with seas and storms and things like the tow line breaking. I read a proposal for an air extraction system that fit in a container, so that you could stack a few on a container ship and they would process air as they went from port to port. Typically power challenged though (you want some clean energy powering them). Nuclear powered container ships would be good for this.
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- alphan0n 2y agoHamilton class?
- renewiltord 2y agoYeah, this is a common reason that environmentalists oppose nuclear power. First you have to prove that what you're going to do is making an improvement. The key element to remember is that we got everything right until the 1970s. After that, it's best to not touch things.
- gmuslera 2y agoWhat could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure, and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended consequences. It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you do something big enough for causing a change it will probably affect a lot of things, most that will be obvious only on hindsight, and by Murphy it will end being something essential. Like what happened with the mandate of reducing the sulphur content in ship's fuel oil.
- cmckn 2y agoI had the same thought when I read: > If you want to strip out 1 gigatonne of CO2 from the ocean, you probably have to put the upper few meters of the Atlantic through your machines every year That sounds…drastic! And this seems quite hand-wavy about the risks: > a lot of environmental monitoring needs to be done to prove that marine carbon-removal strategies aren’t harming aquatic life
- grues-dinner 2y agoIt's also "only" a gigatonne, out of around 40 Gt of emissions per year. It's not nothing, but a mediocre year of global economic growth will outweigh it, and outweigh twice the year after. Unless we get our species' electrical generating shit together on a war footing level of effort, which we won't, global GDP will be a proxy measurement for carbon emissions for a good while.
- exe34 2y agoI've had this idea for a short story for a while, where humans try to do carbon capture and end up going too far, leading to a snow ball.
- moffkalast 2y agoHaven't seen Snowpiercer yet I take it?
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- jvanderbot 2y agoIn my sci-fi addled mind, and massive ship would trundle over the worlds oceans extracting readily available uranium and CO2 to make synthetic fuels for all time from nuclear energy. This skips a lot of important steps that likely cannot fit on one ship, but I love the idea of it.
- dylan604 2y agoThe oceans are big, so why limit it to one ship. Have a fleet of ships where each ship serves different purposes. Navies have been doing this for most of naval history.
- WillAdams 2y agoHal Clement posited schools of "pseudolife" fish processing seawater to extract gold/platinum and harvested by tenders in his short story "The Mechanic" --- it, "Raindrop" and "Halo" are still relevant today and highly recommended.
- photochemsyn 2y agoCosts to operate the ship would be more than the recovered uranium would generate. Meaning you wouldn't recover near enough uranium to break even on refueling the ship when it was needed. Same problem with gold (Fritz Haber famously tried this scheme thinking he could erase Germany's WWI war debts, usurious though they were, with gold from seawater). Concentration is just too low to make such processes feasible.
- jvanderbot 2y agoThe synthetic fuel is what you sell. The uranium keeps you producing fuel for cheaper than O&G traditional extraction. But you're right: Just put a off-the-shelf modular reactor on the ship, then use that power to synthesize payload fuel from CO2, and the gold, uranium, etc are just helpful extras.
- jlund-molfese 2y agoIf you haven’t already read it, Arthur C Clarke’s The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, which addresses this idea, is a short story that’s pretty interesting.
- hnthrow90348765 2y agoIt seems like they will do anything except the obvious because that would affect the economy. Why harm one business by forcing them to reduce emissions and profits when you can have two profitable companies where one pollutes and the other cancels that out (ideally...)? There has to be some other, unannounced benefit to funding these things like contributing research insights to naval warfare problems.
- wombatpm 2y agoBy having a second company, it becomes an expense of the polluting company. Now the MBA’s can put a cost savings into their decision model to reduce their emissions. If their CO2 cost is X and the upgrade costs are Y they can optimize, calculate paybacks, determine ROI. For some companies the calculus comes out the outsourcing CO2 capture is the best solution.
- jfengel 2y agoI suspect that the unannounced side benefit is that it sounds cool. You get to be the guy who had the brilliant idea that saved the planet with no effort on anybody else's part.
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoCDR technologies are being developed for the 2040s and 50s, when we have (hopefully) cut new carbon emissions down close to zero, and need to start repairing the sins of earlier decades.
- maxerickson 2y agoBenefiting the economy is good, actually. Having resources to consume is good. It's not a conspiracy to do something stupid. We also probably benefit from geoengineering regardless of what happens to CO2 production (depending on whether we think the weather was better a few decades ago or not).
- grues-dinner 2y agoBill Bryson's description of an ecological disaster of zinc smelter superfund site being amazing for GDP comes to mind.
- casenmgreen 2y agoI'm sure this will end well =-)
- chvrchbvrner 2y agoWhenever I read about Geo engineering stuff like this, I remember the last episode of "Dinosaurs" [0] and immediately get a bad feeling about it. Hopefully I'm just paranoid. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_Nature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_Nature
- jstanley 2y agoBeware of generalising from fictional evidence. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
- ANewFormation 2y agoThe most compelling of fiction tends to be compelling because it's based on reality. History is chock full of grand ideas intended to achieve some desired outcome only to create far worse problems than that you aimed to solve. Irrigation has destroyed entire seas, crop pests have been near exterminated only to learn those pests were eating far more dangerous pests - resulting in mass starvation, and so on endlessly. This entire idea really seems like the sort of action we're really not thinking through. Even the article points this out... "What’s not easy to quantify is what happens after the CO2-depleted effluent is returned to the sea. Theoretically, if.." To say nothing of the million other possible issues mostly just handwaved away.
- Levitating 2y agowow good read And interesting website in general, thanks for sharing!
- moralestapia 2y agoWhat a dumb take on the topic. There's hard sci-fi, for starters. Even outside that realm, nothing wrong with using them as cautionary tales. Asimov's tales excel at this, even if they're not "physically accurate"; who tf cares about that, honestly. No one in their right mind would treat this literature as if they were textbooks.
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- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoThis needs to really be slowed down. Just like we need changes in the FDA for approval of food ingredients as opposed to the current process that allows ingredients by default, this needs to change to a process of examining what the impacts might be and gaining approval first. This will of course hurt innovation with startups by slowing things down and making it expensive, but I worry about irreversible consequences. That said, I doubt any of this will be stopped in time. Our governments (state and federal) aren’t even quick enough to understand the impact of offshore wind farms on marine life. These geoengineering projects are far more complex and have less data available. So I think the default is that they’ll continue.
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- idontwantthis 2y agoI don’t see how any approach where you have to put the CO2 somewhere is ever going to work. Artificial weathering is the only approach that I’ve ever read anything remotely convincing about.
- grues-dinner 2y agoAlgae seeding and having it sink to the sea floor taking the carbon with it also seems plausibly physically-possible on the face of it since it uses the exponential growth of microorganisms in rich growth media. And it's even using the same relatively concentrated carbon source as this plan. And it's almost 100% solar powered to boot (the iron seeding ships presumably would not be).
- Lyngbakr 2y agoVery little organic carbon actually reaches the seafloor, though, because it is remineralised while sinking through the water column. Then, most of the organic matter that actually does reach the seafloor is similarly remineralised rather than buried. But say we did manage to get massive amounts of organic matter into the deep ocean, we could feasibly end up creating a so-called "dead zone" that is depleted in oxygen like we see elsewhere in the ocean, which would be detrimental to deep sea life.
- grues-dinner 2y agoI didn't say it's a good idea, or even that it actually works, just that it's one of the few schemes that I could even be convinced has some hope of even presenting two-digit gigatonnes of carbon to some reaction of interest a year. Which is what you'd need to be doing in the face of 40Gt/yr emissions. Processing millions upon millions of cubic kilometres (top 5m of the sea is a bit under 2 million) through machinery just screams science fiction or greenwashing to me, simply based on "you want how many pipes?!". Current human water use is 4000km^3/yr: so it's 500 times more than that to cycle the water once. If we could build that much processing infrastructure, we could just build decarbonised generation capacity in the first place. IEA estimates that 150ish GW of nuclear power would displace 1Gt, or maybe 600GW of solar. That's way less than pumps and handling plants for 100 Lake Baikals per year. China installed a third of that in just solar this year. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-direct-co2-emissions-avoided-per-1-gw-of-installed-capacity-by-technology-and-displaced-fuel https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-direct...
- htrp 2y agoThis will definitely end well /s
- retrofrost 2y agoI'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus using a couple thousand tons of sulphur dioxide to reduce energy in. Maybe not as a permanent fix, but a better fix than this nonesense.
- anakaine 2y agoThat sulfur was removed to reduce acid rain, so its not without some pretty terrible side effects.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoBecause (1) sulfur-dioxide injection is a short term solution that doesn’t solve the problem long term, (2) there is a huge risk of termination shock if civilization ever stops injecting it, (3) the only long term route to a stable client is to stop emitting and to remove the CO2 excess we’re adding, (4) all of this assumes that solar radiation management doesn’t have terrible unexpected effects on the climate. We’re probably going to have to do it anyway as a Hail Mary, since we’re now seeing clouds disappear due to warming. But it’s an emergency measure and not a solution. https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-s-clouds-are-shrinking-boosting-global-warming https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-s-clouds-are-s...
- robomartin 2y agoThe entire carbon removal "industry" is a dangerous joke. None of the systems and proposals are able deliver anything even remotely approximating planetary-scale CO2 mitigation without side effects in a range between making things worse and killing or destroying entire ecosystems. Not to mention requiring more energy, materials and resources than the planet might be able to provide. And nobody ever answers the question about violating some of the most basic laws of physics in the process. So long as money keeps flowing into this ridiculous industry and politicians keep using FUD to drive their voter-base, the flow of nonsensical non-solution will not stop. It is inevitable that, at some point in the future, people will finally understand reality for what it is. As an example, it has taken around twenty years for people to finally start understanding the scale of the energy problem we have in order to support full electrification of ground transportation. And now, with AI data centers likely doubling that requirement, this is finally leading to the --surprise!-- conclusion that nuclear power is a necessary solution. I have been brutalized here on HN in the past for daring to (years ago) bring-up the simple math related to the EV problem. Today we are at a point where the issue is starting to float to the surface. That took about twenty years. The math was the same back then. It's just that people refuse to think past what is being shoved into their heads from every angle. The next bridge to cross is the carbon removal scam. It will take time. I get it. People will eventually understand. I just hope we don't do irreparable damage to entire ecosystems between now and then.
- kragen 2y agoIn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42425415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42425415 (and elsewhere in the same thread) I corrected you the last time you made some of these false assertions. In the above comment, however, you seem to be repeating some of the claims that I demonstrated were incorrect, as well as adding some new ones. I did the math. I even had to correct my own math errors in that thread because you couldn't find them. In particular, as I showed there, no ecosystems need to be killed or destroyed for direct air capture; much less energy and materials are needed than the planet can provide (and which other resources do you have in mind?); and no laws of physics need to be violated.
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