7 ms·

Can Sucking CO2 Out of the Atmosphere Really Work?

cratermoon 12y ago
The sticking point seems to be the energy required to process the CO2. How to get that energy in a way that doesn't produce more CO2 than is captured seems like a hard problem, approaching a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Perhaps the reason he's gotten little interest so far is that he hasn't shown his process to be CO2-negative, and the experts are skeptical of what might amount to a very complicated version of yet another perpetual motion machine.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  I've wondered why we can't capture carbon by using plant matter (or by-products) to meet existing needs for durable goods like buildings and manufactured good that end up in landfills. Capturing CO2 this way doesn't require storage tanks or energy capture. Has there been any research along these lines?
  - chc 12y ago
    What does this mean? People living in live trees?
    - nine_k 12y ago
      Dead trees (cellulose) keep the carbon pretty fine. Build more wooded houses, etc. It's important to not let them rot, though, because this releases CO₂ back to the atmosphere.
      - graycat 12y ago
        I thought that when wood and other plants rotted, the main result was a lot of soil which I thought was heavily carbon, from the plants, from CO2, from the atmosphere. Maybe I'm wrong about this? Or, growing up, Dad put a lot of ammonium nitrate NH4NO3 fertilizer on the lawn. Then the lawn grew fast enough that I got the job to mow the grass twice a week instead of once each other week. After growing up in that house with that lawn, all the grass clippings raised the level of the top soil by about 1.5" -- this was easy to see next to the concrete driveway and walk ways which I observed close at hand as I ran the electric edger, with its 35,000 RPM motor, between the concrete and the lawn. So, CO2 from the atmosphere turned into grass turned into grass clippings turned into top soil which no doubt had a lot of carbon, originally from the CO2 in the atmosphere. While this is many years later and I moved away long ago, I have to believe that that top soil is still there and very much is not going anywhere, certainly not as CO2 back into the atmosphere. Net, a lawn commonly does sequester carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere. Here I'm just giving this point as a biological fact and without any judgment about this situation being good, bad, or otherwise for anything in particular.
        nine_k 12y ago
        "Rotting" usually means being slowly consumed by fungi and bacteria, which ultimately break a good part of the cellulose down to very simple compounds like CO₂ and water.
- chc 12y ago
  I don't think nuclear, solar, wind or hydro plants produce much CO2.
  - fiatmoney 12y ago
    The manufacturing, maintenance, & mining processes backing them do, albeit less than, e.g., a coal-fired power plant.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    The whole premise of carbon capture is that we're still burning fossil fuels. If the world literally eliminated 100% of carbon emissions then biological carbon sinks (plants) would eventually restore the natural equilibrium, the problem is we're burning more carbon than they can keep up with. Using nuclear power to sequester carbon is useless if someone else is still using carbon to power their air conditioner or whatever, you would do better to just use the nuclear power to run the air conditioner.
    - bdamm 12y ago
      There are lots of good reasons to burn carbon to produce energy. What we need is a carbon tax that goes to operations such as these, bound to the waste energy from nuclear or solar plants, for example. That way the carbon emissions can be offset by the carbon intake. Maybe we could burn all the carbon we wanted, at a rate even far exceeding the rate we make carbon emissions today, if those emissions were balanced with large-scale carbon removal. If that carbon removal produced fuel, that would be fine - the balance would be a lot closer to zero, and more importantly, we could have a control on the acceptable carbon in the atmosphere.
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        There is no "burn all the carbon we wanted" regardless of climate change because we're eventually going to run out of cheap oil. The cost of recovering it will eventually exceed the cost of renewable energy. The problem is that waiting until that point to stop burning oil and coal would do catastrophic damage to the planet. The thing that makes much better sense is to have a carbon tax and use the money to subsidize non-fossil energy on a per KWh basis, and set the amount such that it makes non-fossil energy cheaper. Do that and the market would sort it out in short order.
swartkrans 12y ago
Given that we need to stop emitting carbon into the air within the next few decades to avoid predictions for disaster, I think we should do whatever we can? Energy companies make a great deal of money, and they have a social responsibility to not drive up pollution. It's not just at the infrastructure level, people can also drive less and eat less meat.
- ganzuul 12y ago
  I emit carbon each time I exhale. But I would not be surprised if I'm surrounded by sentient vegetables. The debate about climate change is much more productive. Eventually someone has to realize we have to stop mistreating the ocean.
- bdamm 12y ago
  Do my personal choices really effect the greenhouse gases in the air? I am not sure that they do any more.
dogpa 12y ago
We could try it! You can do a home experiment with a bottle, some baking soda and vinegar maybe, a lamp and a thermometer to demonstrate how adding CO2 increases the temperature. Scares the holy-bejeebers out of the kids.
otterley 12y ago
We already have free self-replicating devices that do just that: plants. Just add water.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  The oceans are the largest carbon sinks currently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink. My professor in college predicted that at some point we'll start building highly efficient CO2 sinks out of specific types of plankton and dumping them into the oceans to float around and offset our bad CO2 behavior.
  - JTon 12y ago
    Dump them into the ocean? That's a bit of a scary thought. Not only tinkering with the oceans ecological balance, but also the idea of our genetically engineered plankton spawning out of the control. I'd prefer to keep them in controlled environments.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      Iron fertilization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization ) is a little less likely to spiral out of control, and once discontinued should stop having an effect in relatively short order. I've brought it up to people and had them say such large scale experiments are too scary to carry out, but we are already engaged in a CO2 experiment of that scale (without much ability to cease the input).
      - bduerst 12y ago
        >once discontinued should stop having an effect in relatively short order Not even close. The largest iron fertilization "experiment" to date was done by Russ George with just 100 tonnes off the Pacific coast of Canada in 2012. It's now 2014 and the salmon population has quadrupled from the algal bloom. We don't know what sort of impact iron fertilization at scale will have on the ecosystem.
aetherson 12y ago
His scheme seems to be, "We can pay for sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere by selling the CO2." Okay, reasonable enough, but just a quick question: doesn't the sold CO2 just get dumped back in the atmosphere? He suggests that industrial CO2 is used to rejuvenate oil wells, carbonate beverages, and juice up commercial greenhouses. Of those, carbonated beverages CERTAINLY release all their CO2 back into the atmosphere in a time-frame of at most years and probably weeks. I assume that some percentage of the CO2 used in commercial greenhouses is turned into, well, plants (though most plants pretty quickly decay and release their CO2 back into the atmosphere, with the exception perhaps of some woods), but I'd guess that 90%+ of it goes back into the atmosphere. I'm not sure how much of the gas stays underground for decades in the case of pumping CO2 into an oil well.
- LanceH 12y ago
  Where does the CO2 in carbonated beverages come from currently? Is it something produced which would now be displaced resulting in a net reduction? If we're producing CO2 as the product, we could lower that amount by recycling already produced CO2.
  - aetherson 12y ago
    No idea at all. But even if it is, this is more in the line of mitigating current CO2 increases than "taking CO2 out of the atmosphere." And if you grow the market for carbonated beverages by having cheaper CO2, that market growth will be CO2-positive, not CO2-reducing.
  - yongjik 12y ago
    Carbonated beverages are a red herring. This page[1] says a can of soda has 2.2g of CO2. If every single person in the world (population 7.125B) drinks 10 cans of coke every day for a year, we will be using 63 Mt of CO2. Mankind emitted 33615 Mt of CO2 in 2010[2]. [1] http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-the-carbon-dioxide-content-of-a-soda-can-or-bottle http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-th... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio... (Edit: sorry I at first miscalculated the result to be 6.3 Mt.)
gdilla 12y ago
don't trees and plants do this? Could'nt we just plant more. Especially on top of buildings?

The sticking point seems to be the energy required to process the CO2. How to get that energy in a way that doesn't produce more CO2 than is captured seems like a hard problem, approaching a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Perhaps the reason he's gotten little interest so far is that he hasn't shown his process to be CO2-negative, and the experts are skeptical of what might amount to a very complicated version of yet another perpetual motion machine.

humanrebar 12y ago
I've wondered why we can't capture carbon by using plant matter (or by-products) to meet existing needs for durable goods like buildings and manufactured good that end up in landfills. Capturing CO2 this way doesn't require storage tanks or energy capture. Has there been any research along these lines?
- chc 12y ago
  What does this mean? People living in live trees?
  - nine_k 12y ago
    Dead trees (cellulose) keep the carbon pretty fine. Build more wooded houses, etc. It's important to not let them rot, though, because this releases CO₂ back to the atmosphere.
    - graycat 12y ago
      I thought that when wood and other plants rotted, the main result was a lot of soil which I thought was heavily carbon, from the plants, from CO2, from the atmosphere. Maybe I'm wrong about this? Or, growing up, Dad put a lot of ammonium nitrate NH4NO3 fertilizer on the lawn. Then the lawn grew fast enough that I got the job to mow the grass twice a week instead of once each other week. After growing up in that house with that lawn, all the grass clippings raised the level of the top soil by about 1.5" -- this was easy to see next to the concrete driveway and walk ways which I observed close at hand as I ran the electric edger, with its 35,000 RPM motor, between the concrete and the lawn. So, CO2 from the atmosphere turned into grass turned into grass clippings turned into top soil which no doubt had a lot of carbon, originally from the CO2 in the atmosphere. While this is many years later and I moved away long ago, I have to believe that that top soil is still there and very much is not going anywhere, certainly not as CO2 back into the atmosphere. Net, a lawn commonly does sequester carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere. Here I'm just giving this point as a biological fact and without any judgment about this situation being good, bad, or otherwise for anything in particular.
      - nine_k 12y ago
        "Rotting" usually means being slowly consumed by fungi and bacteria, which ultimately break a good part of the cellulose down to very simple compounds like CO₂ and water.
chc 12y ago
I don't think nuclear, solar, wind or hydro plants produce much CO2.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  The manufacturing, maintenance, & mining processes backing them do, albeit less than, e.g., a coal-fired power plant.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  The whole premise of carbon capture is that we're still burning fossil fuels. If the world literally eliminated 100% of carbon emissions then biological carbon sinks (plants) would eventually restore the natural equilibrium, the problem is we're burning more carbon than they can keep up with. Using nuclear power to sequester carbon is useless if someone else is still using carbon to power their air conditioner or whatever, you would do better to just use the nuclear power to run the air conditioner.
  - bdamm 12y ago
    There are lots of good reasons to burn carbon to produce energy. What we need is a carbon tax that goes to operations such as these, bound to the waste energy from nuclear or solar plants, for example. That way the carbon emissions can be offset by the carbon intake. Maybe we could burn all the carbon we wanted, at a rate even far exceeding the rate we make carbon emissions today, if those emissions were balanced with large-scale carbon removal. If that carbon removal produced fuel, that would be fine - the balance would be a lot closer to zero, and more importantly, we could have a control on the acceptable carbon in the atmosphere.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      There is no "burn all the carbon we wanted" regardless of climate change because we're eventually going to run out of cheap oil. The cost of recovering it will eventually exceed the cost of renewable energy. The problem is that waiting until that point to stop burning oil and coal would do catastrophic damage to the planet. The thing that makes much better sense is to have a carbon tax and use the money to subsidize non-fossil energy on a per KWh basis, and set the amount such that it makes non-fossil energy cheaper. Do that and the market would sort it out in short order.

swartkrans 12y ago

Given that we need to stop emitting carbon into the air within the next few decades to avoid predictions for disaster, I think we should do whatever we can? Energy companies make a great deal of money, and they have a social responsibility to not drive up pollution. It's not just at the infrastructure level, people can also drive less and eat less meat.

ganzuul 12y ago
I emit carbon each time I exhale. But I would not be surprised if I'm surrounded by sentient vegetables. The debate about climate change is much more productive. Eventually someone has to realize we have to stop mistreating the ocean.
bdamm 12y ago
Do my personal choices really effect the greenhouse gases in the air? I am not sure that they do any more.

dogpa 12y ago

We could try it! You can do a home experiment with a bottle, some baking soda and vinegar maybe, a lamp and a thermometer to demonstrate how adding CO2 increases the temperature. Scares the holy-bejeebers out of the kids.

otterley 12y ago

We already have free self-replicating devices that do just that: plants. Just add water.

IgorPartola 12y ago
The oceans are the largest carbon sinks currently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink. My professor in college predicted that at some point we'll start building highly efficient CO2 sinks out of specific types of plankton and dumping them into the oceans to float around and offset our bad CO2 behavior.
- JTon 12y ago
  Dump them into the ocean? That's a bit of a scary thought. Not only tinkering with the oceans ecological balance, but also the idea of our genetically engineered plankton spawning out of the control. I'd prefer to keep them in controlled environments.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    Iron fertilization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization ) is a little less likely to spiral out of control, and once discontinued should stop having an effect in relatively short order. I've brought it up to people and had them say such large scale experiments are too scary to carry out, but we are already engaged in a CO2 experiment of that scale (without much ability to cease the input).
    - bduerst 12y ago
      >once discontinued should stop having an effect in relatively short order Not even close. The largest iron fertilization "experiment" to date was done by Russ George with just 100 tonnes off the Pacific coast of Canada in 2012. It's now 2014 and the salmon population has quadrupled from the algal bloom. We don't know what sort of impact iron fertilization at scale will have on the ecosystem.

aetherson 12y ago

His scheme seems to be, "We can pay for sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere by selling the CO2." Okay, reasonable enough, but just a quick question: doesn't the sold CO2 just get dumped back in the atmosphere? He suggests that industrial CO2 is used to rejuvenate oil wells, carbonate beverages, and juice up commercial greenhouses. Of those, carbonated beverages CERTAINLY release all their CO2 back into the atmosphere in a time-frame of at most years and probably weeks. I assume that some percentage of the CO2 used in commercial greenhouses is turned into, well, plants (though most plants pretty quickly decay and release their CO2 back into the atmosphere, with the exception perhaps of some woods), but I'd guess that 90%+ of it goes back into the atmosphere. I'm not sure how much of the gas stays underground for decades in the case of pumping CO2 into an oil well.

LanceH 12y ago
Where does the CO2 in carbonated beverages come from currently? Is it something produced which would now be displaced resulting in a net reduction? If we're producing CO2 as the product, we could lower that amount by recycling already produced CO2.
- aetherson 12y ago
  No idea at all. But even if it is, this is more in the line of mitigating current CO2 increases than "taking CO2 out of the atmosphere." And if you grow the market for carbonated beverages by having cheaper CO2, that market growth will be CO2-positive, not CO2-reducing.
- yongjik 12y ago
  Carbonated beverages are a red herring. This page[1] says a can of soda has 2.2g of CO2. If every single person in the world (population 7.125B) drinks 10 cans of coke every day for a year, we will be using 63 Mt of CO2. Mankind emitted 33615 Mt of CO2 in 2010[2]. [1] http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-the-carbon-dioxide-content-of-a-soda-can-or-bottle http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-th... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio... (Edit: sorry I at first miscalculated the result to be 6.3 Mt.)

gdilla 12y ago

don't trees and plants do this? Could'nt we just plant more. Especially on top of buildings?