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Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry. All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by t

Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry. All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. We continue to see companies and politicians claiming it's feasible and will help us become "green". We should call them out on their shit. If we had the renewable power budget to use proper carbon capture on a large scale, we would already have a fully green grid. --- Well... There are other methods than reversing c02 back into carbon chains. Capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas form in underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years with likely upkeep. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free) Ideas to shove c02 air bubbles in concrete are promising but barely enough to offset the c02 generated from creating the concrete itself. One promising approach is to grow plants and turn them into charcoal. Charcoal is great for keeping fertilizer in the soil so that we can spread it over crop fields for a small increase in yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. Almost feasible. (bamboo, algae, and sunflowers seem to be the highest biomass generators, but perhaps a slower crop that can handle worse climate is preferable) But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.

Tade0 2y ago
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty, but there's an inaccuracy here: In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen. We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak, but it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them in the first place.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  > In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen. This I wasn't quite aware of. Thanks for the correction. > But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here... > We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak, I also agree with your list. Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP. Liquid fuel for transport is, however, the most difficult and probably the last to be replaced. It's to the point that generating green liquid fuels (that don't use fossil sources of carbon) is still actively researched and used, as air travel or shipping may never become feasible on green energy sources.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Ever see a diesel 'rolling coal'? They are burning the hydrogen and sending carbon into the air. Terrible for the local evironment though. this is still carbon positive though since some carbon is burned - just not all.
  - blkhawk 2y ago
    > But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave > it like that with a net energy gain > This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here... In nat. gas this is possible - its called pyrolisis - as an alternative to steam reformation it is generating pure carbon and hydrogen instead of the CO2 and Hydrogen that steam reformation does. Its main downside is that it takes more energy so you get less usable energy out of the process. You can do it with other organic fuels as well and the simplest process is making charcoal from wood but its not as clear a way to separate out carbon there.
  - taurknaut 2y ago
    > Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP. Sadly I think the only viable route to this is wealthy countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power plants (and presumably replace them with something equivalent). This has two nice benefits. One, wealthy countries show they act in good faith. Two, this will greatly reduce wealth disparity. Of course, there's the chance some people will threaten to emit gas to acquire disproportionate power. This is true, but still preferable to the west just roasting the planet and then blaming china. Like grow tf up.
semi-extrinsic 2y ago
I'm sorry, but it's clear from your statements that you don't know what you're talking about. > capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas from underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber cool and leakproof for 1000 years with yearly maintenance. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free) CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof, since they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years. Yes, there is a maximum limit of how much you can pump down, and yes there is a need to achieve good seal on plugging and abandonment. But that's the same as with any other subsea oil & gas well, it's a solved problem. Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place. Now it really annoys me thay researchers are still putting out papers like this, comparing irrelevant strawman scenarios and pretending it's insightful. There is extremely broad consensus that we will need all the good solutions simultaneously. Stop beating a dead horse. Furthermore, since we've been dragging our heels on climate change, even if we achieve extremely quick shift to 100% renewables by 2040, we will need CO2 removal from the atmosphere to achieve net negative emissions. To make an analogy, it won't be enough to cut our spending to match our income, we then need to also pay back our old debts.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  > Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place. Leakproof to one substance doesn't necessarily mean leakproof to another. Heavy oil is hydrophobic and a less mobile, volatile molecule than CO2. Methane otoh is lighter. That said, CO2 capture mostly works in scenarios where you have a highly concentrated stream AND can afford the weight and energy penalty of the capture apparatus. Good on big chemical/industrial plants, refineries and maybe gas power stations, and worth doing for that reason - industrial processes are some of the hardest to replace or avoid of the big emitters. Likely useless for vehicles and aircraft. It's very hard to feed 8Bn people without a whole lot of Haber-Bosch though, and hard to do that without methane in, CO2 out. All the more reason to cut down on wasteful uses of both food and energy.
gruez 2y ago
>All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. All the serious proposals for carbon capture involve use cases where it's unfeasible to swap in photovoltaics or whatever. For instance, fertilizer production, cement production, and air transport.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  The first two examples are feasible, the last not so much. You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2. That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2. The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it). Sorry gents, those Kenyan roses for Valentines are over. Get your loved one some tulips instead.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2. >That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2. Carbon capture includes direct air capture, which doesn't come with any weight constraints. >The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it). Any solution that's predicated on "do it less" is going to be DOA politically. The options available voters aren't "electric planes" or "don't fly", they're "do something" or "do nothing". Telling people they're going to have to make upfront sacrifices for vague future benefits is going to be a losing proposition politically. Any solution to climate change is going to have to come from technological advances, not getting people to consume less. US emissions per capita has dropped more than 25% since 1990[1]. That's not because people ate 25% less meat or drove 25% less. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
    - Earw0rm 2y ago
      How much does diffuse DAC cost? Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed. And the next 35 years - to 2060 - have to be a much steeper reduction than 25%, or the 35 years after that will, one way or another, represent a _forceful_ reduction of a lot more than 25%. Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption basis? Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends that are likely to continue, again more for political reasons than anything else.
pfdietz 2y ago
Storing the CO2 after it's been separated is the easy part. Already CO2 is regularly injected underground to enhance oil extraction, and the CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by burning the oil.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  >CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by burning the oil. Do check your source on that. Cause I cannot find it. The number I could find is muuuch lower than the extracted oil worth of co2.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    I overstated it, and thank you for calling me on that, but one can find references that say it can breakeven. For example: https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasification/gasifipedia/eor https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasificati... "each ton [of CO2] can yield 2-3 barrels of oil" Burning a barrel of oil produces 468 kg of CO2, so 2 barrels would be slightly carbon negative.
SilasX 2y ago
>All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. That's just not true. While the conclusion may be correct (about it not being feasible), it's something that would depend on more that just this first-principles analysis. Remember, the goal is only that the output is "not atmospheric CO2". So that means it could be CO2 somewhere else, or some lower energy state of the carbon, or even a higher energy state that isn't as high as the fuel that was burned to produce it. And while, again, those methods might not be feasible, it depends on much more than the (false) premise that the only way involves completely reversing whatever process was originally used to extract the energy.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  Carbon has a few other molecules it likes to bind to, but narrowing it down to what is actually abundant limits you to basically oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. of those, two of them are what we burned, and one of them is our problem. Someone else pointed out, though, that you can burn hydrocarbon (carbon and hydrogen chains, aka methane and oil) and turn it into coal (carbon-carbon).
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    That's just not right. Carbon dioxide will bind with just about any reactive metal out there. Yes, there is oxygen involved, but Earth is full of rocks that could absorb it.
  - SilasX 2y ago
    Which, again, is still a different argument than the one you originally made.
WhyNotHugo 2y ago
This was intuitively obvious already, but there's still great value is having proper research prove this too. Anyone building an argument on "carbon capture is more costly" so far had the burden of proving this, even if it is intuitively obvious. Now they can cite existing research and move on with their point.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  I feel like probably not much has changed. People, who will listen and think a little for themselves, will already be able to come to the conclusion, that it is better not to put the CO2 out in the first place. And those who are typically pretending to only not believe it because one cannot provide a research article, are very likely to just try to discredit the research. Some people are just so lost, that you cannot change their mind with facts, whatever those facts are, and whatever you do. They do not want to. They want you to spend more time and effort on them than is proportionate.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Putting CO2 out in the first place is how the global economy got to where it is today. It's better not to put CO2 out in the first place except for when it makes more economic sense. There are tradeoffs involved. To the extent renewables can replace outputting greenhouse gases, then that makes more sense. But where they still can't, then it doesn't make sense. And we likely will still need to remove some of that CO2 in the future.
    - zelphirkalt 2y ago
      > Putting CO2 out in the first place is how the global economy got to where it is today. And now we have realized, that it is dangerous to continue doing more of that and need to live with reality.
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  Arguing with someone who starts demanding your obvious claim has the burden of proof is useless. Any proof you offer is going to contain an obvious step or assumption and they demand proof for that too.
perching_aix 2y ago
> We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. But we don't [only]. A significant amount comes from nuclear power or renewables, especially in specific countries.
- afiori 2y ago
  This is irrelevant; the total energy cycle of a green grid can be abstracted as fossil_production + green_production + carbon_capture_consumption + all_other_uses. Since fossil_production < carbon_capture_consumption it is best to simply set them both to zero
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    I don't really follow, what you outline seems to be a different argument the person I replied to outlined.
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      It really doesn't require math as sophisticated as the napkin kind. Thermodynamics tell the whole story and it's so unfavorable that the actual range of achievable costs for energy input to DAC can vary wildly, and in relation to the prevailing market value of energy in general which is subject to major variation itself. And still none of the actual dollar amounts really matter and can be effectively canceled so the moving target component can be conveniently overlooked numerically. It simply requires the cost of the energy input to be a small fraction of the actual market value of that energy. Whether or not fossil fuels are the primary factor which sets the market value at the time. DAC only really works with remarkable effectiveness when the cost of the energy input approaches zero relative to its market value. And once you've got that low cost supply of energy, then the "sustainability" of the process depends on your continued inability to directly sell your unmatched low-cost energy wholesale, and your commitment to forego dramatic multiples which dwarf the expectations of most shareholders of the oil companies themselves.
BobbyTables2 2y ago
I’m also amazed people don’t talk more about reducing consumption than carbon capture. It boggles my mind that a StarBucks coffee, drank in a few minutes involves a lined paper cup, plastic lid, plastic stopper, corrugated holder ring. Using disposable plastic utensils in dine-in restaurants also bothers me. All the energy spent to gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant… Seems massively inefficient for such a short use. Yeah, a dishwasher isn’t free either but surely heating some water to clean reusable things is got to be much better than disposable trash. Heck, compared to plastic ware and coffee cups, disposable plastic grocery bags almost seem amazingly better in terms of utility vs waste. (Less material)
- esarbe 2y ago
  Because for many people reducing consumption reeks of poverty. They've grown up in a world where everything just yells more! more! at them. It's the dominant paradigm of our times - growth above everything. Conspicuous consumption as a measure of wealth. It's become so absurd that even the mere suggestion of improving efficiency - at the consumer level - is met with the outcry of "forcing people into poverty". We are rich, so we can afford to be wasteful. Not be wasteful means poverty. It's insanity.
- dublinben 2y ago
  There's no profit motive behind reducing consumption to lower emissions, so it's not a message being pushed by companies. It's obviously the easiest way for most people to reduce their environmental impact though, but it's always been very unpopular to tell people to 'spend less, save more.'
- themaninthedark 2y ago
  Most customers aren't dine in at a coffee shop. I would also be careful with the claim that it is cheaper to wash, mugs are heavy and require the same: gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant. Periodically replacement of broken cups as well. Silverware makes good sense as it is not usually subject to being broken, only lost or stolen.
bee_rider 2y ago
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. Hmm. Actually. I don’t think this is quite “back of the napkin math,” which usually involves some figures, if just only very rough ones with lots of rounding. This seems more like an argument from basic principle in the style of “I’ll reject any proposal of a perpetual motion machine because, however clever, it fundamentally can’t produce power.” And I don’t think your fundamental principle here really is correct actually. Some ideas around carbon capture are basically to do a chemical process that releases some energy, and then make sure the byproducts don’t escape, and bury them underground, right? There’s no fundamental reason that this should be impossible. I mean it’s obviously possible to take a log, burn it in a very big airtight metal box (very big, so there’s enough oxygen in there to fully burn the thing), the box will heat up, and then the byproducts will all be in the box, so you just don’t open it. This is a silly contraption but there’s obviously no fundamental law of physics being violated, so it must not be physically impossible. I’m unhappy to write this because I agree with your conclusion. Carbon capture is mostly bullshit. But it is bullshit for complicated reasons, not simple or fundamental ones, I think.
- thinkcontext 2y ago
  There's an idea to do this with old oil and gas wells. Only hydrogen comes out of the well, the carbon stays underground. https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/protonh2-launches-project-apollo-to-produce-500-tons-of-low-carbon-hydrogen-daily-for-under-1-per-kg https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/protonh2-launches-project-ap...
mnky9800n 2y ago
I’m not going to argue the economics of it but the co2 is typically assumed to mineralise when injected into rocks like basalts ands peridotites which are the primary targets for co2 sequestration. It’s not stored highly pressurised under ground. It is absorbed by the rocks. This has been demonstrated in both the lab and the environment.
- Jordanpomeroy 2y ago
  This is my understanding as well. And the logistics of doing this can be simplified by re-using oil and gas facilities. Regardless of your feelings and levels of skepticism about oil and gas, this seems like the most straight-forward and low-energy path forward to me.
  - mnky9800n 2y ago
    My favourite solution was in the 2006 ipcc report for recommendations for carbon storage and one is liquifying it and dumping it in the Mariana Trench. Where it would stay for up to 300 years. The best part is that they plainly say it will simply be someone else’s problem so that’s a reason that could go in the pro column of deciding to do this or not haha.
  - defrost 2y ago
    As it stands such projects are net negative. Currently the largest global carbon capture project in practice is little more than green washing, it's a large Australasian LNG field that will pump back a tiny percentage of the CO2 released by the projects outputs. The required scale of carbon capture to offset our current annual consumption is huge, we extract on the order of a cubic mile of oil per annum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cubic_Mile_of_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cubic_Mile_of_Oil the buildout and the additional energy required to address that is at the scale of the existing oil industry with no profit to be had.
    - boringg 2y ago
      They get paid to use CO2 pumped back in the wells so its a way to subsidize drilling. Also the monitoring of said CO2 reservoirs is poor with leaks being a concern enough that would negate the whole project.
Tuna-Fish 2y ago
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. No, we don't. CO2 in the atmosphere is not the lowest-energy state in the system. If CO2 stopped being added to the atmosphere, it would eventually all be consumed out by chemical weathering of silicate rocks into carbonates, because that's an exothermic reaction that consumes CO2. All the actually promising carbon capture proposals are essentially ways to speed up chemical weathering. The limiting factor here is surface area; the process is naturally very slow, and only occurs at an appreciable rate on the exposed surfaces of rocks in shallow water. None of them are cost-effective *yet* (and might never be), but there is not some one-sentence gotcha answer that prevents them from eventually being successful. They are not fighting against physics.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Um, no. The limiting factors are all still economic. If you want to try to rely on mineral weathering to reduce atmospheric CO2 any reasonable amount you now have to finance the quarrying, crushing to fine power, transport, and distribution of gigatons of stone or engineer a suitable replacement which replaces quarry and processing costs with input stock acquisition and synthesis leaving transportation and distribution untouched.
  - Tuna-Fish 2y ago
    ... Alternatively you do none of that and frack underwater basalt. What makes these gotcha arguments so infuriating is that you have no clue what you are talking about, and refuse to spend even 15 minutes googling for what projects have been proposed and what is being studied. Instead you dream up an imaginary strawman to rail against. Literally no-one has ever proposed doing any of what you just talked about, because it would very clearly be economically unviable. There are many options that are not that which are being studied.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't been paying any attention to ongoing pilot projects in europe studying seeding ag land with basalt fines as a possible mitigation strategy. Far from being uninformed I was merely trying to extend to you the benefit of the doubt inasmuch as I assumed nobody would credibly believe that fracking could produce meaningful amounts of surface area compared to powdered fines. Clearly I was mistaken, there are those among us that confuse make work for drill crews with actual progress. Carry on then.
hedora 2y ago
Basic thermodynamics say atmospheric carbon capture will be more expensive than switching to renewables. However, we’re already committed to carbon capture because corrupt politicians decided not to switch to renewables in the 1980’s, and will continue to block them for at least another decade (if we only want to wait another ten years to take action, we’ll need to somehow magically replace Trump with democrats tomorrow).
HPsquared 2y ago
It's all in the details, not really as simple as the napkin math. The CO2 capture step obviously doesn't use ALL the energy released from burning the fuel. You're not converting the CO2 back into fuel, just capturing it and sequestering it somehow. It's a question of capital and operating expense (and risks) of the process overall.
tomas789 2y ago
This assumes that we reverse the reaction. That does not need to be the case. We can put it back into the ground. It can either stay where natgas or crude used to be or we can basically turn that into rock (don’t know details but there is a process to do that). Or it can be put in salt caverns. Either way we still need to capture the CO and CO2 from flue gas which is costly even from point sources and way worse from DAC. Unless we do oxyburning or fosil fuels which is a hack but you need a source of cheap oxygen which we don’t have unless we dramatically scale up electrolysis.
tzs 2y ago
How about for the long term? My napkin math last time I did it said that if we took the current annual production of solar panels and used it to built solar farms in the world's subtropical deserts and built carbon direct air capture (DAC) plants in those deserts powered by those solar farms (using the energy requirements per kg of capture that current DAC plants achieve), and continued doing this each year, in around 200 years we'd be removing about 10% more CO2 per year than we'd be emitting assuming that the human population peaks as expected somewhere in the 10-11 billion range and the per capita CO2 emissions do not go much higher than they are now. Using the entire current annual production of solar panels for this is clearly impractical now, but if production of solar panels continues its current growth trends for several more years we should reach a point where diverting an amount equal to current production might be practical.
vegetablepotpie 2y ago
We’re going to lose economic growth because of climate change, “Staying under the 2C threshold could limit average regional income loss to 20 percent compared to 60 percent" [1]. Whether it will be significant amount, or a devastating amount is still to be determined. US GDP is $20T, and the difference between low warming and high warming is 40% loss! This means we could spend up to $8T a year to address climate change and it would still make economic sense. The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing, we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly people with power and influence. [1] https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-gdp.html https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-gdp.htm... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-senate-deal-energy-taxes-00048325 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-sen...
- Voultapher 2y ago
  As much as I'm in favor of moving towards renewables, we are still destroying our biosphere, and the resources needed for renewables are not renewable ... > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/ Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth, which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics. Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the last species alive, or at least your wining will look very sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a petri dish what it thinks.
cperciva 2y ago
All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. In addition to the chemistry other people have mentioned -- if we burn hydrocarbons and then capture carbon we're still net positive H -> H2O, capturing carbon as carbonate rocks can be less expensive than splitting CO2 to C and O2, etc -- most serious proposals for carbon capture have involved using cheap electricity, e.g. solar power in the middle of the day. It's quite possible that using cheap midday electricity to generate methane (which can be easily stored in large quantities) which is then burned in gas "peakers" when power is expensive would be economically profitable despite not being thermodynamically profitable.
DanHulton 2y ago
And the number one problem that any method of carbon capture that involves moving things around, is that you have to add the carbon expenditure of that transportation into the mix. You wanna create charcoal and spread it over crop fields? You then have to transfer that charcoal. You want to embed CO2 in concrete and bury the concrete? You have to move the concrete. (You can use it for building, but there's additional infrastructure for transporting the CO2 to the concrete or vice-versa there as well.) So many of the "barely break even" concepts don't even come close due to this transportation factor. Even if you use solar to generate electricity to power this transportation, we don't have excess solar yet - that's capacity that's being used for this new expense, not being used to offset existing expenses. That said, I'm hopeful that research, refinement, and excess renewable grid capacity will eventually make it worthwhile to do this in addition to reducing our fossil fuel usage, but we just _gotta_ reduce our fossil fuel usage. It's not negotiable anymore, and heck, never was.
- rtpg 2y ago
  If you're doing the book-keeping on that stuff, though, comparing to the status quo.. that charcoal that is on the crops used to be some fertilizer that also was being transported, right? You have to be careful not to double-count progress but if you consider things relative to status quos, then you're still looking at progress right? Like improvements are still good, right? Like if you're dead set on building a building, you're gonna need concrete no matter what. Might as well use "good" concrete I guess? Though there's likely not much magic to where building the building _reduces_ CO2 net.
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    >then you're still looking at progress right? Like improvements are still good, right? No, because they share a budget and thus have opportunity cost.
    - rtpg 2y ago
      Fair enough. I think it’s possible to do a lot of things at once but if you have a “fixed” budget you really should just order by effectiveness. Fungibility is pretty context dependent
dkkergoog 2y ago
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Melting_Harps 2y ago
> But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid. This is still the best option, but even after having spent over 20 years in environmentalism in various aspects we have to admit that carbon-free is simply unattainable panacea for a myriad of reasons that go far beyond the scope of this post; but it is this form of absolutism that is the biggest hindrance from my POV--outside of the stalemates and endless impasse created by tribal/identity politics, but they often benefit from the status quo. The truth is that methane is and remains the the biggest threat in terms of 'carbon chains,' and with a focus on market based solutions to capture and re-purpose these leaks/vents to ancillary purposes (Bitcoin mining proved the concept) and a continued expansion in plant/tree cultivation of a myriad of cultivars we would be better suited than ANYTHING that has been offered to date. The perpetual need to try to go headlong for a one-size-fits-all approach is what has allowed us to have all the technology we need to start to reverse these systemic issues to our biosphere but be left at a constant dead-end while we wait for corporate elites and their political class cohorts to delay progress. Sidenote: Bio-char is very useful, I worked with Biodyanimc farmers with BSc in hand on this topic in EU who were traveling to Africa to promote the use of bio-char and it's benefits to help subsistence farmers to be able to support and eventually scale their farms; while at the same time the Bitcoin community via Bit-pesa was helping with micro/small loans to said farmers that allowed for (gradual) progress. And it is this type of seemingly diametrically opposed communities need to be bridged in order for things to actual work.
- ViewTrick1002 2y ago
  2/3 of all global investment in the energy sector is going to renewables and storage. It is happening, but only started to truly kick off on its own in the past couple of years. Given the lifespan of grid generation assets even a 3% increase in electricity mix per year will lead to near 100% renewable penetration when it reaches saturation.
tempestn 2y ago
The Project Vesta approach looks promising and at least theoretically cost effective: https://www.vesta.earth/science#Introduction https://www.vesta.earth/science#Introduction
sojuz151 2y ago
Also, with renewable energy sources, the problem is not manufacturing energy per se but getting the energy where and when you want. For example, you could run a gas turbine in Germany in winter at night during a spike of the consumption and run carbon capture on a desert during the day In a sense you use atmosphere as battery/transportation system. I am not saying that this must make sense but this is far more complex than napkin math.
gosub100 2y ago
solar efficiency was crap too, for decades. should we have abandoned that in the 1990's for the same reason?
gcanyon 2y ago
> Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years It seems highly unlikely that even 100 years from now we'll be net positive on CO2 release into the atmosphere. Renewables are a thing, and we're making significant progress. So once we're net negative, it'll be up to us to figure out how much CO2 to release, but it seems a certainty that long before 1000 years we will no longer need to store any of the captured carbon.
ETH_start 2y ago
Your opening line is totally against HN's rules against inflammatory remarks that incite flame wars.
lostlogin 2y ago
> yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. For a year? And can you offset them again the following year by adding more the next year?
- defrost 2y ago
  First you need to clear, plough, seed, and ... much harder, water, an "Australia worth of farmland". Every year. That's a lot of transport energy, a great deal of fertilizer, and a continent's worth of liquid gold. Don't forget the additional area required to offset the energy expenses of that annum's worth of additional agriculture.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    I misunderstood - I read that as 'an amount of farmland equivalent to Australia's'.
    - defrost 2y ago
      Hmm, I haven't chased that detail down myselg (busy ATM), but I strongly suspect the area intended was that of mainland Australia (or, close to equivilantly, the area of mainland lower 48 contiguous USofA). Certainly a detail worth checking, farmland in Australia is much less than the area of Australia.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    Also nitrogen fertilizer is produced using fossil fuel derived hydrogen. Making green fertilizer from the air is possible but requires a 10x increase in energy input into a process that is already one of the worlds most energy intensive industries.
    - defrost 2y ago
      It's on the list: https://energy.fortescue.com/en/green-energy-tech/green-ammonia https://energy.fortescue.com/en/green-energy-tech/green-ammo... https://www.fertilizerseurope.com/paving-the-way-to-green-ammonia-and-low-carbon-fertilizers/ https://www.fertilizerseurope.com/paving-the-way-to-green-am... https://www.yara.com.au/crop-nutrition/grow-the-future/sustainable-farming/green-ammonia/ https://www.yara.com.au/crop-nutrition/grow-the-future/susta... with capital investment and scheduled ground breaking on plants: https://energy.fortescue.com/en/our-green-projects/gibson-island https://energy.fortescue.com/en/our-green-projects/gibson-is...
dataflow 2y ago
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. I think you're forgetting location and energy sources are a big factor here. Nobody is suggesting burning carbon to capture carbon. If you could somehow e.g. use nuclear power in the middle of the continent to capture carbon emitted across the world - that would be incredibly useful, even if you had to put in twice as much power as you had obtained originally. (I am not suggesting carbon capture is a particularly good idea, just pointing out that your napkin math ignores some key factors.)
rank0 2y ago
Easy! All we need to do is convert every person on the planet to your religion! It’s what the napkin maths say. Obviously someone as pious as you would never use electronics or fly or hang out on a startup accelerator forum.
dismalaf 2y ago
> Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry. The issue isn't whether or not it's feasible now. Reducing usage of fossil fuels is a prisoner's dilemma problem... No country is going to do it if it hurts them in any way. Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done. Carbon capture is the only potential way to reverse this and that alone is worth investing in. It might not be feasible today but that doesn't mean it won't be feasible in 50 years...
- rank0 2y ago
  > Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done. That’s an understatement. Billions would perish in the name of “the greater good”
dogcomplex 2y ago
An Australia's worth of kelp farms in the deep ocean might do it too. Tricky parts are supplying the nitrogen fertilizer (upwelling might be enough), automating planting/harvesting (many drones on a wire probably) and fuel costs (offshore rig-based ideally). Sinking the kelp may keep the CO2 on the ocean floor long enough to do the trick, or sink packs of rotting kelp in kelp-plastic membranes for much longer. Bonus is this is all basically bio-fuel, so you're basically growing a renewable oil patch. Drawdown til targets are hit and then you can burn or eat the rest. Also bonus: dampens waves, so seastead potential. Recommended: attach simple motors to the anchored tethers, sinking kelp 30m down during storms or nearby ships to avoid big wave damage and the deepest hulls. Or keep it at that level for just slower growth.
_bin_ 2y ago
wrong. many of the energy options that are claimed to be extremely cheap and that they lean on - wind and solar particularly - aren't as cheap as they're made out to be. e.g. people love to cite Lazard's LCOE projections, which undershoot actual cost, overshoot production, and undershoot wear and tear (esp. on solar). storage numbers also often suck. frankly, hydrocarbons are probably a better option to synthesize and store than something like lithium-ion batteries. and storage becomes a much bigger concern if one considers running a grid primarily on inconsistent renewables rather than using them as auxiliary power sources. plus your magical all-green grid still needs gas peakers most likely unless you massively overbuild that storage and generation.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Lithium ion batteries have an efficiency of around 99%. They are also not the only form of energy storage system or battery technology used for ESS. The most efficient fossil fuel power plants (combined cycle plants that burn natural gas to power a generator driven by a turbine, and then use the heat from the exhaust to generate steam in a second turbine) have an efficiency of about 60%. That doesn't even begin to address the inefficiency in "synthesizing" "hydrocarbons." Electrolysis, for example, is less than 95%. If you have such a fundamental ignorance then you are not remotely qualified to be making comments like "wind and solar are more expensive than they're made out to be!" You must know better than all those silly grid and solar/wind farm operators! You should ring them up and tell them how stupid they are to be using solar and wind, how they have no idea what it's actually costing them! And no, green power is not "unreliable." Hilariously, during the massive Texas blackouts during the ice storms, wind and solar were just about the only power sources still working... That German power system you alt-righters love to shriek about for being stupid for going green? They have one fifth the outage rate the US does. As they massively increased their green power sources, their grid reliability went up. https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-energy-and-the-grid-debunked https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e... Several countries in Europe have periods where their grids are entirely powered by renewables. But suuuuure, "magical green power" is unreliable.
  - _bin_ 2y ago

Tade0 2y ago

> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty, but there's an inaccuracy here: In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen. We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak, but it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them in the first place.

aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
> In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen. This I wasn't quite aware of. Thanks for the correction. > But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here... > We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak, I also agree with your list. Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP. Liquid fuel for transport is, however, the most difficult and probably the last to be replaced. It's to the point that generating green liquid fuels (that don't use fossil sources of carbon) is still actively researched and used, as air travel or shipping may never become feasible on green energy sources.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Ever see a diesel 'rolling coal'? They are burning the hydrogen and sending carbon into the air. Terrible for the local evironment though. this is still carbon positive though since some carbon is burned - just not all.
- blkhawk 2y ago
  > But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave > it like that with a net energy gain > This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here... In nat. gas this is possible - its called pyrolisis - as an alternative to steam reformation it is generating pure carbon and hydrogen instead of the CO2 and Hydrogen that steam reformation does. Its main downside is that it takes more energy so you get less usable energy out of the process. You can do it with other organic fuels as well and the simplest process is making charcoal from wood but its not as clear a way to separate out carbon there.
- taurknaut 2y ago
  > Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP. Sadly I think the only viable route to this is wealthy countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power plants (and presumably replace them with something equivalent). This has two nice benefits. One, wealthy countries show they act in good faith. Two, this will greatly reduce wealth disparity. Of course, there's the chance some people will threaten to emit gas to acquire disproportionate power. This is true, but still preferable to the west just roasting the planet and then blaming china. Like grow tf up.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago

I'm sorry, but it's clear from your statements that you don't know what you're talking about. > capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas from underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber cool and leakproof for 1000 years with yearly maintenance. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free) CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof, since they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years. Yes, there is a maximum limit of how much you can pump down, and yes there is a need to achieve good seal on plugging and abandonment. But that's the same as with any other subsea oil & gas well, it's a solved problem. Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place. Now it really annoys me thay researchers are still putting out papers like this, comparing irrelevant strawman scenarios and pretending it's insightful. There is extremely broad consensus that we will need all the good solutions simultaneously. Stop beating a dead horse. Furthermore, since we've been dragging our heels on climate change, even if we achieve extremely quick shift to 100% renewables by 2040, we will need CO2 removal from the atmosphere to achieve net negative emissions. To make an analogy, it won't be enough to cut our spending to match our income, we then need to also pay back our old debts.

Earw0rm 2y ago
> Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place. Leakproof to one substance doesn't necessarily mean leakproof to another. Heavy oil is hydrophobic and a less mobile, volatile molecule than CO2. Methane otoh is lighter. That said, CO2 capture mostly works in scenarios where you have a highly concentrated stream AND can afford the weight and energy penalty of the capture apparatus. Good on big chemical/industrial plants, refineries and maybe gas power stations, and worth doing for that reason - industrial processes are some of the hardest to replace or avoid of the big emitters. Likely useless for vehicles and aircraft. It's very hard to feed 8Bn people without a whole lot of Haber-Bosch though, and hard to do that without methane in, CO2 out. All the more reason to cut down on wasteful uses of both food and energy.

gruez 2y ago

>All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. All the serious proposals for carbon capture involve use cases where it's unfeasible to swap in photovoltaics or whatever. For instance, fertilizer production, cement production, and air transport.

Earw0rm 2y ago
The first two examples are feasible, the last not so much. You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2. That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2. The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it). Sorry gents, those Kenyan roses for Valentines are over. Get your loved one some tulips instead.
- gruez 2y ago
  >You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2. >That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2. Carbon capture includes direct air capture, which doesn't come with any weight constraints. >The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it). Any solution that's predicated on "do it less" is going to be DOA politically. The options available voters aren't "electric planes" or "don't fly", they're "do something" or "do nothing". Telling people they're going to have to make upfront sacrifices for vague future benefits is going to be a losing proposition politically. Any solution to climate change is going to have to come from technological advances, not getting people to consume less. US emissions per capita has dropped more than 25% since 1990[1]. That's not because people ate 25% less meat or drove 25% less. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    How much does diffuse DAC cost? Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed. And the next 35 years - to 2060 - have to be a much steeper reduction than 25%, or the 35 years after that will, one way or another, represent a _forceful_ reduction of a lot more than 25%. Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption basis? Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends that are likely to continue, again more for political reasons than anything else.

pfdietz 2y ago

Storing the CO2 after it's been separated is the easy part. Already CO2 is regularly injected underground to enhance oil extraction, and the CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by burning the oil.

aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
>CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by burning the oil. Do check your source on that. Cause I cannot find it. The number I could find is muuuch lower than the extracted oil worth of co2.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  I overstated it, and thank you for calling me on that, but one can find references that say it can breakeven. For example: https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasification/gasifipedia/eor https://netl.doe.gov/research/coal/energy-systems/gasificati... "each ton [of CO2] can yield 2-3 barrels of oil" Burning a barrel of oil produces 468 kg of CO2, so 2 barrels would be slightly carbon negative.

SilasX 2y ago

>All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. That's just not true. While the conclusion may be correct (about it not being feasible), it's something that would depend on more that just this first-principles analysis. Remember, the goal is only that the output is "not atmospheric CO2". So that means it could be CO2 somewhere else, or some lower energy state of the carbon, or even a higher energy state that isn't as high as the fuel that was burned to produce it. And while, again, those methods might not be feasible, it depends on much more than the (false) premise that the only way involves completely reversing whatever process was originally used to extract the energy.

aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
Carbon has a few other molecules it likes to bind to, but narrowing it down to what is actually abundant limits you to basically oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. of those, two of them are what we burned, and one of them is our problem. Someone else pointed out, though, that you can burn hydrocarbon (carbon and hydrogen chains, aka methane and oil) and turn it into coal (carbon-carbon).
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  That's just not right. Carbon dioxide will bind with just about any reactive metal out there. Yes, there is oxygen involved, but Earth is full of rocks that could absorb it.
- SilasX 2y ago
  Which, again, is still a different argument than the one you originally made.

WhyNotHugo 2y ago

This was intuitively obvious already, but there's still great value is having proper research prove this too. Anyone building an argument on "carbon capture is more costly" so far had the burden of proving this, even if it is intuitively obvious. Now they can cite existing research and move on with their point.

zelphirkalt 2y ago
I feel like probably not much has changed. People, who will listen and think a little for themselves, will already be able to come to the conclusion, that it is better not to put the CO2 out in the first place. And those who are typically pretending to only not believe it because one cannot provide a research article, are very likely to just try to discredit the research. Some people are just so lost, that you cannot change their mind with facts, whatever those facts are, and whatever you do. They do not want to. They want you to spend more time and effort on them than is proportionate.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Putting CO2 out in the first place is how the global economy got to where it is today. It's better not to put CO2 out in the first place except for when it makes more economic sense. There are tradeoffs involved. To the extent renewables can replace outputting greenhouse gases, then that makes more sense. But where they still can't, then it doesn't make sense. And we likely will still need to remove some of that CO2 in the future.
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    > Putting CO2 out in the first place is how the global economy got to where it is today. And now we have realized, that it is dangerous to continue doing more of that and need to live with reality.
joe_the_user 2y ago
Arguing with someone who starts demanding your obvious claim has the burden of proof is useless. Any proof you offer is going to contain an obvious step or assumption and they demand proof for that too.

perching_aix 2y ago

> We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. But we don't [only]. A significant amount comes from nuclear power or renewables, especially in specific countries.

afiori 2y ago
This is irrelevant; the total energy cycle of a green grid can be abstracted as fossil_production + green_production + carbon_capture_consumption + all_other_uses. Since fossil_production < carbon_capture_consumption it is best to simply set them both to zero
- perching_aix 2y ago
  I don't really follow, what you outline seems to be a different argument the person I replied to outlined.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    It really doesn't require math as sophisticated as the napkin kind. Thermodynamics tell the whole story and it's so unfavorable that the actual range of achievable costs for energy input to DAC can vary wildly, and in relation to the prevailing market value of energy in general which is subject to major variation itself. And still none of the actual dollar amounts really matter and can be effectively canceled so the moving target component can be conveniently overlooked numerically. It simply requires the cost of the energy input to be a small fraction of the actual market value of that energy. Whether or not fossil fuels are the primary factor which sets the market value at the time. DAC only really works with remarkable effectiveness when the cost of the energy input approaches zero relative to its market value. And once you've got that low cost supply of energy, then the "sustainability" of the process depends on your continued inability to directly sell your unmatched low-cost energy wholesale, and your commitment to forego dramatic multiples which dwarf the expectations of most shareholders of the oil companies themselves.

BobbyTables2 2y ago

I’m also amazed people don’t talk more about reducing consumption than carbon capture. It boggles my mind that a StarBucks coffee, drank in a few minutes involves a lined paper cup, plastic lid, plastic stopper, corrugated holder ring. Using disposable plastic utensils in dine-in restaurants also bothers me. All the energy spent to gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant… Seems massively inefficient for such a short use. Yeah, a dishwasher isn’t free either but surely heating some water to clean reusable things is got to be much better than disposable trash. Heck, compared to plastic ware and coffee cups, disposable plastic grocery bags almost seem amazingly better in terms of utility vs waste. (Less material)

esarbe 2y ago
Because for many people reducing consumption reeks of poverty. They've grown up in a world where everything just yells more! more! at them. It's the dominant paradigm of our times - growth above everything. Conspicuous consumption as a measure of wealth. It's become so absurd that even the mere suggestion of improving efficiency - at the consumer level - is met with the outcry of "forcing people into poverty". We are rich, so we can afford to be wasteful. Not be wasteful means poverty. It's insanity.
dublinben 2y ago
There's no profit motive behind reducing consumption to lower emissions, so it's not a message being pushed by companies. It's obviously the easiest way for most people to reduce their environmental impact though, but it's always been very unpopular to tell people to 'spend less, save more.'
themaninthedark 2y ago
Most customers aren't dine in at a coffee shop. I would also be careful with the claim that it is cheaper to wash, mugs are heavy and require the same: gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant. Periodically replacement of broken cups as well. Silverware makes good sense as it is not usually subject to being broken, only lost or stolen.

bee_rider 2y ago

> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. Hmm. Actually. I don’t think this is quite “back of the napkin math,” which usually involves some figures, if just only very rough ones with lots of rounding. This seems more like an argument from basic principle in the style of “I’ll reject any proposal of a perpetual motion machine because, however clever, it fundamentally can’t produce power.” And I don’t think your fundamental principle here really is correct actually. Some ideas around carbon capture are basically to do a chemical process that releases some energy, and then make sure the byproducts don’t escape, and bury them underground, right? There’s no fundamental reason that this should be impossible. I mean it’s obviously possible to take a log, burn it in a very big airtight metal box (very big, so there’s enough oxygen in there to fully burn the thing), the box will heat up, and then the byproducts will all be in the box, so you just don’t open it. This is a silly contraption but there’s obviously no fundamental law of physics being violated, so it must not be physically impossible. I’m unhappy to write this because I agree with your conclusion. Carbon capture is mostly bullshit. But it is bullshit for complicated reasons, not simple or fundamental ones, I think.

thinkcontext 2y ago
There's an idea to do this with old oil and gas wells. Only hydrogen comes out of the well, the carbon stays underground. https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/protonh2-launches-project-apollo-to-produce-500-tons-of-low-carbon-hydrogen-daily-for-under-1-per-kg https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/protonh2-launches-project-ap...

mnky9800n 2y ago

I’m not going to argue the economics of it but the co2 is typically assumed to mineralise when injected into rocks like basalts ands peridotites which are the primary targets for co2 sequestration. It’s not stored highly pressurised under ground. It is absorbed by the rocks. This has been demonstrated in both the lab and the environment.

Jordanpomeroy 2y ago
This is my understanding as well. And the logistics of doing this can be simplified by re-using oil and gas facilities. Regardless of your feelings and levels of skepticism about oil and gas, this seems like the most straight-forward and low-energy path forward to me.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  My favourite solution was in the 2006 ipcc report for recommendations for carbon storage and one is liquifying it and dumping it in the Mariana Trench. Where it would stay for up to 300 years. The best part is that they plainly say it will simply be someone else’s problem so that’s a reason that could go in the pro column of deciding to do this or not haha.
- defrost 2y ago
  As it stands such projects are net negative. Currently the largest global carbon capture project in practice is little more than green washing, it's a large Australasian LNG field that will pump back a tiny percentage of the CO2 released by the projects outputs. The required scale of carbon capture to offset our current annual consumption is huge, we extract on the order of a cubic mile of oil per annum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cubic_Mile_of_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cubic_Mile_of_Oil the buildout and the additional energy required to address that is at the scale of the existing oil industry with no profit to be had.
  - boringg 2y ago
    They get paid to use CO2 pumped back in the wells so its a way to subsidize drilling. Also the monitoring of said CO2 reservoirs is poor with leaks being a concern enough that would negate the whole project.

Tuna-Fish 2y ago

> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. No, we don't. CO2 in the atmosphere is not the lowest-energy state in the system. If CO2 stopped being added to the atmosphere, it would eventually all be consumed out by chemical weathering of silicate rocks into carbonates, because that's an exothermic reaction that consumes CO2. All the actually promising carbon capture proposals are essentially ways to speed up chemical weathering. The limiting factor here is surface area; the process is naturally very slow, and only occurs at an appreciable rate on the exposed surfaces of rocks in shallow water. None of them are cost-effective *yet* (and might never be), but there is not some one-sentence gotcha answer that prevents them from eventually being successful. They are not fighting against physics.

forgetfreeman 2y ago
Um, no. The limiting factors are all still economic. If you want to try to rely on mineral weathering to reduce atmospheric CO2 any reasonable amount you now have to finance the quarrying, crushing to fine power, transport, and distribution of gigatons of stone or engineer a suitable replacement which replaces quarry and processing costs with input stock acquisition and synthesis leaving transportation and distribution untouched.
- Tuna-Fish 2y ago
  ... Alternatively you do none of that and frack underwater basalt. What makes these gotcha arguments so infuriating is that you have no clue what you are talking about, and refuse to spend even 15 minutes googling for what projects have been proposed and what is being studied. Instead you dream up an imaginary strawman to rail against. Literally no-one has ever proposed doing any of what you just talked about, because it would very clearly be economically unviable. There are many options that are not that which are being studied.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't been paying any attention to ongoing pilot projects in europe studying seeding ag land with basalt fines as a possible mitigation strategy. Far from being uninformed I was merely trying to extend to you the benefit of the doubt inasmuch as I assumed nobody would credibly believe that fracking could produce meaningful amounts of surface area compared to powdered fines. Clearly I was mistaken, there are those among us that confuse make work for drill crews with actual progress. Carry on then.

hedora 2y ago

Basic thermodynamics say atmospheric carbon capture will be more expensive than switching to renewables. However, we’re already committed to carbon capture because corrupt politicians decided not to switch to renewables in the 1980’s, and will continue to block them for at least another decade (if we only want to wait another ten years to take action, we’ll need to somehow magically replace Trump with democrats tomorrow).

HPsquared 2y ago

It's all in the details, not really as simple as the napkin math. The CO2 capture step obviously doesn't use ALL the energy released from burning the fuel. You're not converting the CO2 back into fuel, just capturing it and sequestering it somehow. It's a question of capital and operating expense (and risks) of the process overall.

tomas789 2y ago

This assumes that we reverse the reaction. That does not need to be the case. We can put it back into the ground. It can either stay where natgas or crude used to be or we can basically turn that into rock (don’t know details but there is a process to do that). Or it can be put in salt caverns. Either way we still need to capture the CO and CO2 from flue gas which is costly even from point sources and way worse from DAC. Unless we do oxyburning or fosil fuels which is a hack but you need a source of cheap oxygen which we don’t have unless we dramatically scale up electrolysis.

tzs 2y ago

How about for the long term? My napkin math last time I did it said that if we took the current annual production of solar panels and used it to built solar farms in the world's subtropical deserts and built carbon direct air capture (DAC) plants in those deserts powered by those solar farms (using the energy requirements per kg of capture that current DAC plants achieve), and continued doing this each year, in around 200 years we'd be removing about 10% more CO2 per year than we'd be emitting assuming that the human population peaks as expected somewhere in the 10-11 billion range and the per capita CO2 emissions do not go much higher than they are now. Using the entire current annual production of solar panels for this is clearly impractical now, but if production of solar panels continues its current growth trends for several more years we should reach a point where diverting an amount equal to current production might be practical.

vegetablepotpie 2y ago

We’re going to lose economic growth because of climate change, “Staying under the 2C threshold could limit average regional income loss to 20 percent compared to 60 percent" [1]. Whether it will be significant amount, or a devastating amount is still to be determined. US GDP is $20T, and the difference between low warming and high warming is 40% loss! This means we could spend up to $8T a year to address climate change and it would still make economic sense. The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing, we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly people with power and influence. [1] https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-gdp.html https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-gdp.htm... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-senate-deal-energy-taxes-00048325 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-sen...

Voultapher 2y ago
As much as I'm in favor of moving towards renewables, we are still destroying our biosphere, and the resources needed for renewables are not renewable ... > Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/ Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth, which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics. Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the last species alive, or at least your wining will look very sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a petri dish what it thinks.

cperciva 2y ago

All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. In addition to the chemistry other people have mentioned -- if we burn hydrocarbons and then capture carbon we're still net positive H -> H2O, capturing carbon as carbonate rocks can be less expensive than splitting CO2 to C and O2, etc -- most serious proposals for carbon capture have involved using cheap electricity, e.g. solar power in the middle of the day. It's quite possible that using cheap midday electricity to generate methane (which can be easily stored in large quantities) which is then burned in gas "peakers" when power is expensive would be economically profitable despite not being thermodynamically profitable.

DanHulton 2y ago

And the number one problem that any method of carbon capture that involves moving things around, is that you have to add the carbon expenditure of that transportation into the mix. You wanna create charcoal and spread it over crop fields? You then have to transfer that charcoal. You want to embed CO2 in concrete and bury the concrete? You have to move the concrete. (You can use it for building, but there's additional infrastructure for transporting the CO2 to the concrete or vice-versa there as well.) So many of the "barely break even" concepts don't even come close due to this transportation factor. Even if you use solar to generate electricity to power this transportation, we don't have excess solar yet - that's capacity that's being used for this new expense, not being used to offset existing expenses. That said, I'm hopeful that research, refinement, and excess renewable grid capacity will eventually make it worthwhile to do this in addition to reducing our fossil fuel usage, but we just _gotta_ reduce our fossil fuel usage. It's not negotiable anymore, and heck, never was.

rtpg 2y ago
If you're doing the book-keeping on that stuff, though, comparing to the status quo.. that charcoal that is on the crops used to be some fertilizer that also was being transported, right? You have to be careful not to double-count progress but if you consider things relative to status quos, then you're still looking at progress right? Like improvements are still good, right? Like if you're dead set on building a building, you're gonna need concrete no matter what. Might as well use "good" concrete I guess? Though there's likely not much magic to where building the building _reduces_ CO2 net.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  >then you're still looking at progress right? Like improvements are still good, right? No, because they share a budget and thus have opportunity cost.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    Fair enough. I think it’s possible to do a lot of things at once but if you have a “fixed” budget you really should just order by effectiveness. Fungibility is pretty context dependent

dkkergoog 2y ago

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Melting_Harps 2y ago

> But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid. This is still the best option, but even after having spent over 20 years in environmentalism in various aspects we have to admit that carbon-free is simply unattainable panacea for a myriad of reasons that go far beyond the scope of this post; but it is this form of absolutism that is the biggest hindrance from my POV--outside of the stalemates and endless impasse created by tribal/identity politics, but they often benefit from the status quo. The truth is that methane is and remains the the biggest threat in terms of 'carbon chains,' and with a focus on market based solutions to capture and re-purpose these leaks/vents to ancillary purposes (Bitcoin mining proved the concept) and a continued expansion in plant/tree cultivation of a myriad of cultivars we would be better suited than ANYTHING that has been offered to date. The perpetual need to try to go headlong for a one-size-fits-all approach is what has allowed us to have all the technology we need to start to reverse these systemic issues to our biosphere but be left at a constant dead-end while we wait for corporate elites and their political class cohorts to delay progress. Sidenote: Bio-char is very useful, I worked with Biodyanimc farmers with BSc in hand on this topic in EU who were traveling to Africa to promote the use of bio-char and it's benefits to help subsistence farmers to be able to support and eventually scale their farms; while at the same time the Bitcoin community via Bit-pesa was helping with micro/small loans to said farmers that allowed for (gradual) progress. And it is this type of seemingly diametrically opposed communities need to be bridged in order for things to actual work.

ViewTrick1002 2y ago
2/3 of all global investment in the energy sector is going to renewables and storage. It is happening, but only started to truly kick off on its own in the past couple of years. Given the lifespan of grid generation assets even a 3% increase in electricity mix per year will lead to near 100% renewable penetration when it reaches saturation.

tempestn 2y ago

The Project Vesta approach looks promising and at least theoretically cost effective: https://www.vesta.earth/science#Introduction https://www.vesta.earth/science#Introduction

sojuz151 2y ago

Also, with renewable energy sources, the problem is not manufacturing energy per se but getting the energy where and when you want. For example, you could run a gas turbine in Germany in winter at night during a spike of the consumption and run carbon capture on a desert during the day In a sense you use atmosphere as battery/transportation system. I am not saying that this must make sense but this is far more complex than napkin math.

gosub100 2y ago

solar efficiency was crap too, for decades. should we have abandoned that in the 1990's for the same reason?

gcanyon 2y ago

> Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years It seems highly unlikely that even 100 years from now we'll be net positive on CO2 release into the atmosphere. Renewables are a thing, and we're making significant progress. So once we're net negative, it'll be up to us to figure out how much CO2 to release, but it seems a certainty that long before 1000 years we will no longer need to store any of the captured carbon.

ETH_start 2y ago

Your opening line is totally against HN's rules against inflammatory remarks that incite flame wars.

lostlogin 2y ago

> yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. For a year? And can you offset them again the following year by adding more the next year?

defrost 2y ago
First you need to clear, plough, seed, and ... much harder, water, an "Australia worth of farmland". Every year. That's a lot of transport energy, a great deal of fertilizer, and a continent's worth of liquid gold. Don't forget the additional area required to offset the energy expenses of that annum's worth of additional agriculture.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  I misunderstood - I read that as 'an amount of farmland equivalent to Australia's'.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Hmm, I haven't chased that detail down myselg (busy ATM), but I strongly suspect the area intended was that of mainland Australia (or, close to equivilantly, the area of mainland lower 48 contiguous USofA). Certainly a detail worth checking, farmland in Australia is much less than the area of Australia.
- AngryData 2y ago
  Also nitrogen fertilizer is produced using fossil fuel derived hydrogen. Making green fertilizer from the air is possible but requires a 10x increase in energy input into a process that is already one of the worlds most energy intensive industries.
  - defrost 2y ago
    It's on the list: https://energy.fortescue.com/en/green-energy-tech/green-ammonia https://energy.fortescue.com/en/green-energy-tech/green-ammo... https://www.fertilizerseurope.com/paving-the-way-to-green-ammonia-and-low-carbon-fertilizers/ https://www.fertilizerseurope.com/paving-the-way-to-green-am... https://www.yara.com.au/crop-nutrition/grow-the-future/sustainable-farming/green-ammonia/ https://www.yara.com.au/crop-nutrition/grow-the-future/susta... with capital investment and scheduled ground breaking on plants: https://energy.fortescue.com/en/our-green-projects/gibson-island https://energy.fortescue.com/en/our-green-projects/gibson-is...

dataflow 2y ago

> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor. I think you're forgetting location and energy sources are a big factor here. Nobody is suggesting burning carbon to capture carbon. If you could somehow e.g. use nuclear power in the middle of the continent to capture carbon emitted across the world - that would be incredibly useful, even if you had to put in twice as much power as you had obtained originally. (I am not suggesting carbon capture is a particularly good idea, just pointing out that your napkin math ignores some key factors.)

rank0 2y ago

Easy! All we need to do is convert every person on the planet to your religion! It’s what the napkin maths say. Obviously someone as pious as you would never use electronics or fly or hang out on a startup accelerator forum.

dismalaf 2y ago

> Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry. The issue isn't whether or not it's feasible now. Reducing usage of fossil fuels is a prisoner's dilemma problem... No country is going to do it if it hurts them in any way. Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done. Carbon capture is the only potential way to reverse this and that alone is worth investing in. It might not be feasible today but that doesn't mean it won't be feasible in 50 years...

rank0 2y ago
> Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done. That’s an understatement. Billions would perish in the name of “the greater good”

dogcomplex 2y ago

An Australia's worth of kelp farms in the deep ocean might do it too. Tricky parts are supplying the nitrogen fertilizer (upwelling might be enough), automating planting/harvesting (many drones on a wire probably) and fuel costs (offshore rig-based ideally). Sinking the kelp may keep the CO2 on the ocean floor long enough to do the trick, or sink packs of rotting kelp in kelp-plastic membranes for much longer. Bonus is this is all basically bio-fuel, so you're basically growing a renewable oil patch. Drawdown til targets are hit and then you can burn or eat the rest. Also bonus: dampens waves, so seastead potential. Recommended: attach simple motors to the anchored tethers, sinking kelp 30m down during storms or nearby ships to avoid big wave damage and the deepest hulls. Or keep it at that level for just slower growth.

_bin_ 2y ago

wrong. many of the energy options that are claimed to be extremely cheap and that they lean on - wind and solar particularly - aren't as cheap as they're made out to be. e.g. people love to cite Lazard's LCOE projections, which undershoot actual cost, overshoot production, and undershoot wear and tear (esp. on solar). storage numbers also often suck. frankly, hydrocarbons are probably a better option to synthesize and store than something like lithium-ion batteries. and storage becomes a much bigger concern if one considers running a grid primarily on inconsistent renewables rather than using them as auxiliary power sources. plus your magical all-green grid still needs gas peakers most likely unless you massively overbuild that storage and generation.

KennyBlanken 2y ago
Lithium ion batteries have an efficiency of around 99%. They are also not the only form of energy storage system or battery technology used for ESS. The most efficient fossil fuel power plants (combined cycle plants that burn natural gas to power a generator driven by a turbine, and then use the heat from the exhaust to generate steam in a second turbine) have an efficiency of about 60%. That doesn't even begin to address the inefficiency in "synthesizing" "hydrocarbons." Electrolysis, for example, is less than 95%. If you have such a fundamental ignorance then you are not remotely qualified to be making comments like "wind and solar are more expensive than they're made out to be!" You must know better than all those silly grid and solar/wind farm operators! You should ring them up and tell them how stupid they are to be using solar and wind, how they have no idea what it's actually costing them! And no, green power is not "unreliable." Hilariously, during the massive Texas blackouts during the ice storms, wind and solar were just about the only power sources still working... That German power system you alt-righters love to shriek about for being stupid for going green? They have one fifth the outage rate the US does. As they massively increased their green power sources, their grid reliability went up. https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-energy-and-the-grid-debunked https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e... Several countries in Europe have periods where their grids are entirely powered by renewables. But suuuuure, "magical green power" is unreliable.
- _bin_ 2y ago