3 ms·

Trouble is always the economics of production. We've been able to turn CO2 into useful materials for a long time. Sabatier's reaction has been known for about

Trouble is always the economics of production. We've been able to turn CO2 into useful materials for a long time. Sabatier's reaction has been known for about a century, and that turns CO2 into methane. Also Fischer Tropsch will convert CO (which you can get from poor combustion) into larger hydrocarbons. Many of the advancements nowadays are in making the catalysts more energy efficient or cheaper. But I suspect eventually what needs to happen is a combination of regulation (to reduce the amount of fossil derived CO2) and government subsidy (to harm the economics of extracting oil, as the free market doesn't intrinsically penaltize long term harm)

jillesvangurp 1y ago
The issue with CO2 is that there's not a lot of it in air. The amount is usually expressed in parts per million. It's a bit over 400 these days. Way up from around 280 where it used to be. Only about 0.04% of air is CO2. Which means that by mass and volume, you need to process enormous amounts of air to get a meaningful amount of CO2. The main issue with that is that it requires enormous amounts of energy and large scale infrastructure that by itself is quite wasteful. Once you have it captured, processing it and up-cycling it is not that hard. It's nice that we have some new ways. But it's not like synthetic fuels and plastics weren't already doable for decades. Carbon capture of course technically works. But you typically end up dumping the CO2 back in the air for things like fuels and plastics after they are expended. So, it's not that meaningful ultimately. You take fossil carbon, you burn it, you capture it, you create another fuel, and you dump it in the air. Because we simply don't capture the overwhelmingly vast majority of fossil carbon that we process and use. Using the carbon twice is a modest improvement. Three times even better. It's not that much of an improvement. Most carbon capture is stupid like that but it sounds nice if you are trying to green wash your CO2 intensive business. Optics and marketing are the main driver for carbon capture schemes. But technically it's just adding cost to things that are already quite expensive. Keeping the CO2 captured permanently is a bit hand wavy usually and technically a bit of an afterthought usually. We might do this, we might do that. It's going to be amazing. We could have, and would have, and eventually might do some of it. Or none of it. Or somewhere in between. The real world effectiveness of carbon capture to date is generally piss poor. Some people would say it's a scam. And the real worlds amounts of carbon captured ever are so meaninglessly low that dumping all of it back in atmosphere right now would not have any measurable effects whatsoever relative to the still growing amounts we dump into the atmosphere directly. Anyway we have great carbon capture machines readily available. All plants and trees do this naturally. Burning that stuff to create CO2 is a bit wasteful and not technically that useful if your goal is to process the carbon further. Wood is basically polymers. Much easier to use that directly. Either as a fuel or as a source of polymers (e.g. cellulose) and other carbo hydrates. Of course farming and forestry are hard work and not that cheap.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  >Anyway we have great carbon capture machines readily available. All plants and trees do this naturally They do, but it also gets released again unless you take extra steps. And it's not all that efficient: you'd need to grow something the size of the amazon, then cut it down and bury it, to have a notable effect. Other proposed options for carbon capture are already more efficient than that, and as you've noted they've still not taken off.
  - chabska 1y ago
    > but it also gets released again Quite slowly. Lignin, which makes up about 30% of woody biomass, is very difficult to break down biologically. Only a few specialized bacteria and fungi have the enzymes for it. We don't need to sequester carbon permanently, we just need to bind enough of it into soil carbon to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. The long residence time of carbon in the soil is sufficient for this purpose.
    - jillesvangurp 1y ago
      And not completely. That's why we have oil and gas deposits.
- jl6 1y ago
  > Wood is basically polymers. Much easier to use that directly. Is there a (plausibly economic) direct wood-to-plastic process?
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    It's a pretty big research area to make useful things from lignocelluose which you could get from trees but also crops like switchgrass: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666893923000403 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266689392... Like plastics recycling the basic problem is that it competes with plastic monomers and other bottom-of-pyramid substances that cost about 50 cents a pound. For instance you can make ethanol fuel using either strong chemicals under harsh conditions and mild conditions or with enzymes under mild conditions. Either way it doesn't work economically, you can use $30 of enzyme to make $1 of fuel, but hey, sometimes you get a radical cost reduction.
somedude895 1y ago
Good luck regulating China and India
- pfdietz 1y ago
  India has great incentive to control CO2 emission: killer heat waves in a somewhat warmer world. And China seems to be slashing their CO2 intensity without external prodding (coal use there seems to have peaked), and facilitating CO2 emission reduction elsewhere.
  - lazide 1y ago
    India already has massive incentives to be more effectively regulated than they are now in a dozen other areas. And yet, they remain India. China is definitely more effectively regulated than at regulation once the cdentral gov’t steps in, but it only has a limited number of things it can step in on.
    - lazide 1y ago
      Wow auto-correct stroke on the second paragraph. China is definitely more effectively regulated than India once the central gov’t steps in, but it only has a limited number of things it can step in on (or wants too).

jillesvangurp 1y ago

The issue with CO2 is that there's not a lot of it in air. The amount is usually expressed in parts per million. It's a bit over 400 these days. Way up from around 280 where it used to be. Only about 0.04% of air is CO2. Which means that by mass and volume, you need to process enormous amounts of air to get a meaningful amount of CO2. The main issue with that is that it requires enormous amounts of energy and large scale infrastructure that by itself is quite wasteful. Once you have it captured, processing it and up-cycling it is not that hard. It's nice that we have some new ways. But it's not like synthetic fuels and plastics weren't already doable for decades. Carbon capture of course technically works. But you typically end up dumping the CO2 back in the air for things like fuels and plastics after they are expended. So, it's not that meaningful ultimately. You take fossil carbon, you burn it, you capture it, you create another fuel, and you dump it in the air. Because we simply don't capture the overwhelmingly vast majority of fossil carbon that we process and use. Using the carbon twice is a modest improvement. Three times even better. It's not that much of an improvement. Most carbon capture is stupid like that but it sounds nice if you are trying to green wash your CO2 intensive business. Optics and marketing are the main driver for carbon capture schemes. But technically it's just adding cost to things that are already quite expensive. Keeping the CO2 captured permanently is a bit hand wavy usually and technically a bit of an afterthought usually. We might do this, we might do that. It's going to be amazing. We could have, and would have, and eventually might do some of it. Or none of it. Or somewhere in between. The real world effectiveness of carbon capture to date is generally piss poor. Some people would say it's a scam. And the real worlds amounts of carbon captured ever are so meaninglessly low that dumping all of it back in atmosphere right now would not have any measurable effects whatsoever relative to the still growing amounts we dump into the atmosphere directly. Anyway we have great carbon capture machines readily available. All plants and trees do this naturally. Burning that stuff to create CO2 is a bit wasteful and not technically that useful if your goal is to process the carbon further. Wood is basically polymers. Much easier to use that directly. Either as a fuel or as a source of polymers (e.g. cellulose) and other carbo hydrates. Of course farming and forestry are hard work and not that cheap.

rcxdude 1y ago
>Anyway we have great carbon capture machines readily available. All plants and trees do this naturally They do, but it also gets released again unless you take extra steps. And it's not all that efficient: you'd need to grow something the size of the amazon, then cut it down and bury it, to have a notable effect. Other proposed options for carbon capture are already more efficient than that, and as you've noted they've still not taken off.
- chabska 1y ago
  > but it also gets released again Quite slowly. Lignin, which makes up about 30% of woody biomass, is very difficult to break down biologically. Only a few specialized bacteria and fungi have the enzymes for it. We don't need to sequester carbon permanently, we just need to bind enough of it into soil carbon to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. The long residence time of carbon in the soil is sufficient for this purpose.
  - jillesvangurp 1y ago
    And not completely. That's why we have oil and gas deposits.
jl6 1y ago
> Wood is basically polymers. Much easier to use that directly. Is there a (plausibly economic) direct wood-to-plastic process?
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  It's a pretty big research area to make useful things from lignocelluose which you could get from trees but also crops like switchgrass: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666893923000403 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266689392... Like plastics recycling the basic problem is that it competes with plastic monomers and other bottom-of-pyramid substances that cost about 50 cents a pound. For instance you can make ethanol fuel using either strong chemicals under harsh conditions and mild conditions or with enzymes under mild conditions. Either way it doesn't work economically, you can use $30 of enzyme to make $1 of fuel, but hey, sometimes you get a radical cost reduction.

somedude895 1y ago

Good luck regulating China and India

pfdietz 1y ago
India has great incentive to control CO2 emission: killer heat waves in a somewhat warmer world. And China seems to be slashing their CO2 intensity without external prodding (coal use there seems to have peaked), and facilitating CO2 emission reduction elsewhere.
- lazide 1y ago
  India already has massive incentives to be more effectively regulated than they are now in a dozen other areas. And yet, they remain India. China is definitely more effectively regulated than at regulation once the cdentral gov’t steps in, but it only has a limited number of things it can step in on.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Wow auto-correct stroke on the second paragraph. China is definitely more effectively regulated than India once the central gov’t steps in, but it only has a limited number of things it can step in on (or wants too).