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.
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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.
(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group)
Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper presents a false dichotomy.
Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming.
This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from parties that sometimes partially align with the science and sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture because it plays well and potentially increases their longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop carbon capture as part of the toolkit.
Carbon capture is our money being used to pay oil industry. It is for enhanced oil recovery. It is straight up theft with environmental marketing!
Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
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We pay in 8+ different ways for fossil fuels:
(1) Subsidies of trillions of dollars per year
(2) Ethanol and biodiesel subsidies
(3) Pay at the pump (or electricity)
(4) Pay for carbon capture to help oil companies extract more oil
(5) Pay for the consequences of climate change (a) increase of home insurance (b) bailouts of insurance and utility providers (c) dealing with the direct costs of climate change
(6) Health costs! Pollution is directly linked to every disease (except STIs?). Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Think of all the cancers, cardiovascular, metabolic, every biological systems.
(7) We pay a cost of other pollutants. Lead (thank you oil industry!), mercury (thank you coal industry!). Fish was a source of food, the best kind of renewable food, where you do absolutely nothing other than catch it! This source is now gone, there is so much mercury in fish, that all recommendations of fish are to limit the number of servings!
(8) Every person on the planet is paying a fossil fuel tax (the 5 above), to the super super rich. It is a transfer of wealth from everyone to about ~100 people. This money is used to buy all assets (real estate), stocks and everything else, enabling the super wealthy to extract every more wealth from every sector of the economy.
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Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
That's comparing apples to oranges though. Renewables are to stop emitting CO2, carbon capture to try and recover the one we've been emitting in the past decades. We need both, the latter possibly in the shape of organic capture since it's way more efficient and cheap.
European home heating using wood pellets is an environmental disaster. Cut down trees in North America, grind them into pellets, pack them in shipping containers, ship them to Europe, and burn them in low efficiency furnaces with zero carbon capture and high particulate and sulfur dioxide emissions. It's probably even worse than home heating using unprocessed wood, due to the massive amount of energy consumed in processing and transportation.
If we can't at least point capture stacks at the individual home level, then forget atmospheric capture.
Point capture and atmospheric capture are vastly different processes, economics for point capture are great, economics for atmospheric capture are terrible due to the thermodynamic high energy input inherently required for separating out a low concentration (400 parts per million) substance.
But this article puts both processes in the same category, which perfectly sets up a low-information, divisive debate. Why they would want to do that - well, some people stand to gain a lot from renewable energy program investment, let's put it that way.
I came in to drop a “glad the obvious is being confirmed!”, but after skimming the actual study I’m sadly a little dubious of its reasoning. It didn’t examine the two approaches (technically three: renewables, natural carbon capture, and synthetic carbon capture) on their engineering or economic merits, but rather just compiled historical data on jurisdictions that mainly promoted one of the three and compared the outcomes. I think the noisy nature of such an analysis is obvious, not to mention the bias against synthetic approaches from analyzing outdated tech. I’m a huge believer in renewables being the only path forward, but this study isn’t very convincing IMHO!
Also would’ve loved to see “degrowth”/reduce usage as an option, since that’s the last big one people advocate for IME.
P.S. does anyone know if the current US regime’s “any university that works on federal grants is forbidden from promoting DEI” policy is intended to apply to climate change as well? Seems likely, but I don’t recall seeing anything explicit in any of the EOs I’ve read. This study isn’t very out of Stanford, which would clearly be impacted — thus it piqued my interest.
The study on which the article is based seems somewhat speculative.
The assumption for the full renewable scenario are the existence of the hydrogen economy. I'm quite positive about the potential of hydrogen but there are quite a few unsolved problems at the moment and it seems the hydrogen part of the energy transition has slowed down a bit.
Certainly the total cost of such a system is not well known at this time. So the cost calculation for the renewable scenario is quite uncertain - other energy storage tech might be more expensive.
The carbon capture calculation is based on the assumption that there is no other renewables and we go 100% capture.
This is not really that interesting an scenario, what matters more is the marginal costs of each technology at different points in the future.
In general a healthy dose of scepticism is warented when it comes to long term projections or cost of technologies, though or course policy does require we take a stab at it.
The study is considering extremes, but that's not realistic.
Completely switching to renewables will be more expensive than planting some trees for instance. If we want the most cost effective methods, it will be a mix of both, maybe more on the "burning less fossil fuels" side than on carbon capture, but neither extreme make sense.
And it may turn out that a complete switch to renewables may not be enough anyways. We may need carbon capture too, and maybe some geoengineering.
This is kind of a silly analysis. Solar power is already the cheapest source of electricity ever created by man per kwh. The problem is geography, storage capacity, and load planning.
If we're talking purely about future hypotheticals, who's to know if carbon scrubbers are less cost effective than city-sized lithium storage facilities.
> Comparing two extremes
Jacobson and co-authors compared the annual energy costs, emissions, public health impacts, and social costs associated with implementing either of two extremes across all sectors in 149 countries over the next 25 years.
> One extreme would see a complete switch to using heat and electricity generated by wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower for all energy needs (...)
> The other extreme would see countries maintain their current reliance on fossil fuels with some renewables, nuclear, and biomass (...)
The study might be well intentioned, but since none of the two scenarios has a probability that is different from 0, its use for policy makers, investors, and voters might be very little. In reality, it will always be a mix of both approaches, not because I'm "the truth lies in the middle" kind of guy, but simply because there might be local optimizations found along the way that favor one or the other approach (or both at the same time) based on local and temporal considerations with regard to the financial, technological, political, social, ecological, and cultural conditions.
- Even if CO₂ production ends today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get back to normal levels is some form of carbon capture.
- Anyone can do carbon capture anywhere. You don't need to make the whole planet agree to and implement some treaty. Just put up some solar cells and pump the captured CO₂ underground. The costs need to go down a few orders of magnitude, but I see no fundamental reason why that would be impossible
Would love to have someone knowledgeable share why carbon capture is more viable than planting trees. I always thought the idea we need technology to capture carbon is silly, but never bothered enough to research more on it
If you wonder whether you could at least capture CO2 directly from the combustion process (instead of out of thin air), well yes that's cheaper but still too expensive.
The current CCS projects use highly concentrated CO2 sources, while the usual combustion process will generate air with only a few percent of CO2. There was an article last year about the Hammerfest LNG plant. They have a CCS project nearby, but found it cheaper to electrify the plant: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...
I recently saw a video by Sabine on this paper https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1 that basically proposes blowing up a gigantic nuclear bomb in deep sea basalt deposit and basalt would capture the carbon.
In the paper they did some math on the bomb size needed to reverse 30 years of carbon emissions, and it's huge (orders of magnitude larger than what we tested so far), although I don't understand why it needs to be one huge bomb. I'm sure you could try it with one military head and test the impact.
I think it's useful to think of the atmosphere as a battery, when we burn fossil fuels we discharge it gradually by taking O2 from the air and converting it to CO2 via the 'fuel'. You can extend this to an idea of there being a little parallel capacitor with the living biomass cycle on it, but it's okay to ignore for discussion.
We can't go on discharging it arbitrarily and leaving it there because that state is toxic to us.
This battery is insanely useful because it's all around us. Because most of the work is in the ambient O2 the 'fuel' we need use use this battery is incredibly dense. The miraculous density of it is because there is two parts to it, the density when you consider both is unimpressive (as anyone who has tried to operate a chainsaw inside a fire knows all too well, or run a ic motor underground), but because we can usually disregard the air side it is truly amazing.
It's so useful the all the higher life on earth also uses it, which is part of why discharging to much it is toxic to us.
Because it's so useful we're unlikely to completely stop using it unless we leave the planet. But that means we need to recharge it. The natural recharging mechanisms are only sufficient for surface biomass buffer, not the depths of the planets' oil and coal reserves which were changed over millennia using mechnisms that no longer exist (e.g. biomass trapped before microbes knew how to digest cellulose).
Unfortunately recharging it is probably going to take all the energy we got out of it and then somewhat more. It can only take less than that to the extent that we can find less enthalpic places to stash it that are as geophysically durable as the original forms. But that isn't so bad-- no one expects any battery to be 100% efficient, and one as useful as this one is worth some cost to use it.
But this also means that the proper price for long term fossil fuels is, shockingly, not the price that maximizes oil Barron incomes-- it's the price that covers the cost run run the recharging mechanism.
We don't have to make capture cheap, we just need it to be cheap enough that oil can be correctly priced.
A lot of energy from renewables are being wasted due to mismatch with the demand. Building storage for it is quite expensive. I wonder if it makes sense to set up carbon capture near the places which don't have the storage. For example here in the UK we're wasting between 13% and 25% of all wind electricity generated depending on the weather/time of the year.
> If scenarios with different mixes of CC/DAC and WWS were performed, it would not be possible to conclude whether one is an opportunity cost. Instead, using a mixture requires assuming that both CC/DAC and WWS should be used before determining whether one has any benefit relative to the other.
Seems stupid - they are both being used, so even the business-as-usual scenario is a mixture. If indeed the 100% WWS + 0% CC/DAC scenario is better than than the 95% WWS + 5% CC/DAC scenario, then it is logical to conclude that CC/DAC is useless, but according to the tables and figures, they didn't even look at whether a 50/50 WWS + CC/DAC split would be better or worse. Yet their conclusion is still "policies promoting CC and SDACC should be abandoned". They have these really complex models but at the end of the day it is garbage in, garbage out.
This obviously is not viable for X, Y, etc. reasons but I would like to know them. We select some fast growing woody plant that thrives on terrain useless for agriculture, we grow it at industrial scale and convert it to charcoal (using the energy generated for the process itself or the grid), we grind the charcoal and mix it with sea water and pump the slurry into some mine.
Creating charcoal and taking out of the cycle isn't actually net negative? We don't have enough space for growing or in mineshafts? I'm making Centralia 2.0? It's obviously non economic, but everything carbon capture is like that.
Every bit of opposition to climate change mitigation comes from the oil industry. How incredibly evil and vile they are for being willing to damage the world and our environment just to make a buck.
I would like to post this respectfully, just for posterity. The anti science insular concepts being assumed as fact, the discredited overpopulation theories, the sky is falling parts of climate change.
I can't credibly participate because from my perspective what is being discussed is a popular sci-fi series that I haven't read. The dogmas and rituals are alien to me.
We should ban private swimming pools, tennis courts, etc.. and restrict the size of villas, ban mowing the lawn, in order to maximize the space for trees and wild plants
Carbon capture is certainly more expensive than renewables but this headline presents a false dichotomy. The question isn't if we capture carbon instead of switching to renewables - that ship sailed long ago - the question is if we need carbon capture in addition to switching to renewables.
Energy companies are reporting that the cost situation for renewables is terrible. The thin margins continue to get thinner. They cannot justify pursuing new green projects to shareholders. We will hear a lot more about carbon capture in the years to come. It's the only way they can meet their climate obligations — which are also being "adjusted" these days.
I don't see how this would necessarily apply to every scenario. Transmission is expensive and storage is still not ideal.
Briefly reading the article it seems like the author is assuming there is like a 1:1 global marketplace where any energy produced in one area can replace energy demand in another. That's just not the case.
For electricity, it seems like a no-brainer, but that's not the only emitter. I wonder what cost for carbon capture they used (unfortunately the article is paywalled).
It seems to me like the obvious solution to the problem would be a CO2 tax equal to the estimated cost of carbon capture. It should not be higher - that would be yet another example of moralism that plagues so many environmental policies. Introduce that, properly monitor emissions (especially things like methane leaks), and the problem will quickly solve itself. Anything that remains is the edge cases where it is more economical to do carbon capture - so use the tax to do just that.
That also covers cases where it makes sense to do the change more slowly. No need to decide or argue back and forth whether someone can or cannot do it faster. You emit, you pay, you don't want to pay, you don't emit. Changing quickly is too costly? That's fine, you pay. Oh, it's not that costly when compared to the tax? Guess you change, then. Also fine. Want to generate electricity from lignite? I'm not going to argue, I'm just going to watch you go bankrupt... and if you don't, there probably was some good reason for doing that and forcing the opposite would have had some unintended side effects.
It's actually way cheaper as long as you imagine that some magic technology gets invented in the next few years that makes it cheaper. Then you just have to hold of until that is created and if it isn't, it won't cost you anything! Even more savings!
This has been obvious since day 0, for the same reason that doing elaborate industry-funded R&D to develop piss-extraction technology to filter and sequester piss from your swimming pool will never be more efficient than simply not pissing in your pool
It’s kind of trivially true right? The problem is we are on a path to have a shitload of carbon in the atmosphere so we better figure out how to get it out starting now
Is it dearer than storage though? my understanding was always that carbon capture if worth doing at all is for situations where the wind isn't blowing and the sun is dim (this nearly led to blackouts in uk recently)
The new paper regarding using a nuke to accelerate co2 sequestering in the sea from MIT....is man made water sequestration using minerals to bind the co2 from the water count as carbon capture?
They apply a "model" which is not described to justify an artificially low price for solar power delivered to retail customers.
In reality solar is more expensive than natural gas when reliably delivered. Batteries, over provisioning, fly wheels, and finally backup idle gas power plants are not surprisingly very expensive.
unfortunately, the only way this is relevant is if we actually price carbon emissions at the rate it costs to capture them. as long as you can emit for free, then switching to renewables is more expensive.
Could someone please explain how could carbon capture ever work? To me it looks as if it is a mathematically impossible thing: if you produce energy by releasing carbon, you would need to expend even more energy to capture the same carbon back, so it is impossible — there’s no way to produce required energy to do so. And if you had such an huge and cheap energy source for carbon capture, you wouldn’t burn carbon in the first place — you’d use that energy source instead.
What am I missing? Am I stupid, or the people who talk about carbon capture are ridiculously dishonest?
Not surprising. Carbon capture methods are so out there and so bogus sounding with very little evidence that they will work, really seems just custom made to soak up government money with little promise of benefit and certainly not efficient.
"don't worry, don't worry, once the environment gets unliveable we'll just pull the carbon out of the air. We don't need sustainable resources"
Is a lie on par with:
"I don't need to go to rehab, I can stop at any time" except the oil companies are the drug dealer and you are the deluded addict who will suffer the brunt of the consequence.
I guess I don’t see how any of this is really relevant today. Can someone help explain? My thought process is telling me that by far the worst environmental offender (China) is on the front end of a population collapse that will pretty much serve to self-correct them from an environmental standpoint. That could take 30 years at most?
I’m not sure there’s any sort of program we could implement in that time frame that really moves the needle, and when it happens most of the world’s capacity to build things like solar cells and wind farms will need to be re-built, because we won’t be getting a lot of those components we need from China anymore.
And who knows? By then maybe we look up at a smaller global population that’s largely de-globalized and decide nothing needs doing.
In the short term it’s a shame because IMO the #1 (by far, not close) contributor to global pollution doesn’t even make it to the table in these sorts of discussions.
Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find
(techxplore.com)574 points by Brajeshwar 15 February 2025 | 500 comments
Comments
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.
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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.
Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper presents a false dichotomy.
Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming.
This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from parties that sometimes partially align with the science and sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture because it plays well and potentially increases their longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop carbon capture as part of the toolkit.
Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
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We pay in 8+ different ways for fossil fuels:
(1) Subsidies of trillions of dollars per year
(2) Ethanol and biodiesel subsidies
(3) Pay at the pump (or electricity)
(4) Pay for carbon capture to help oil companies extract more oil
(5) Pay for the consequences of climate change (a) increase of home insurance (b) bailouts of insurance and utility providers (c) dealing with the direct costs of climate change
(6) Health costs! Pollution is directly linked to every disease (except STIs?). Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Think of all the cancers, cardiovascular, metabolic, every biological systems.
(7) We pay a cost of other pollutants. Lead (thank you oil industry!), mercury (thank you coal industry!). Fish was a source of food, the best kind of renewable food, where you do absolutely nothing other than catch it! This source is now gone, there is so much mercury in fish, that all recommendations of fish are to limit the number of servings!
(8) Every person on the planet is paying a fossil fuel tax (the 5 above), to the super super rich. It is a transfer of wealth from everyone to about ~100 people. This money is used to buy all assets (real estate), stocks and everything else, enabling the super wealthy to extract every more wealth from every sector of the economy.
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Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
If we can't at least point capture stacks at the individual home level, then forget atmospheric capture.
But this article puts both processes in the same category, which perfectly sets up a low-information, divisive debate. Why they would want to do that - well, some people stand to gain a lot from renewable energy program investment, let's put it that way.
Also would’ve loved to see “degrowth”/reduce usage as an option, since that’s the last big one people advocate for IME.
P.S. does anyone know if the current US regime’s “any university that works on federal grants is forbidden from promoting DEI” policy is intended to apply to climate change as well? Seems likely, but I don’t recall seeing anything explicit in any of the EOs I’ve read. This study isn’t very out of Stanford, which would clearly be impacted — thus it piqued my interest.
The assumption for the full renewable scenario are the existence of the hydrogen economy. I'm quite positive about the potential of hydrogen but there are quite a few unsolved problems at the moment and it seems the hydrogen part of the energy transition has slowed down a bit.
Certainly the total cost of such a system is not well known at this time. So the cost calculation for the renewable scenario is quite uncertain - other energy storage tech might be more expensive.
The carbon capture calculation is based on the assumption that there is no other renewables and we go 100% capture.
This is not really that interesting an scenario, what matters more is the marginal costs of each technology at different points in the future.
In general a healthy dose of scepticism is warented when it comes to long term projections or cost of technologies, though or course policy does require we take a stab at it.
Completely switching to renewables will be more expensive than planting some trees for instance. If we want the most cost effective methods, it will be a mix of both, maybe more on the "burning less fossil fuels" side than on carbon capture, but neither extreme make sense.
And it may turn out that a complete switch to renewables may not be enough anyways. We may need carbon capture too, and maybe some geoengineering.
>A Big Nuclear Bomb Could Fix Climate Change, Physicist Says https://youtu.be/aGPKpx6pMko
Just put some huge nukes in the basalt at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, it breaks it up so the rock absorbs CO2, job done!
(paper on the idea https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1)
If we're talking purely about future hypotheticals, who's to know if carbon scrubbers are less cost effective than city-sized lithium storage facilities.
I personally think we have to investigate this, as we are just not doing a good enough job of reducing fossil fuel use.
> One extreme would see a complete switch to using heat and electricity generated by wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower for all energy needs (...)
> The other extreme would see countries maintain their current reliance on fossil fuels with some renewables, nuclear, and biomass (...)
The study might be well intentioned, but since none of the two scenarios has a probability that is different from 0, its use for policy makers, investors, and voters might be very little. In reality, it will always be a mix of both approaches, not because I'm "the truth lies in the middle" kind of guy, but simply because there might be local optimizations found along the way that favor one or the other approach (or both at the same time) based on local and temporal considerations with regard to the financial, technological, political, social, ecological, and cultural conditions.
- Even if CO₂ production ends today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get back to normal levels is some form of carbon capture.
- Anyone can do carbon capture anywhere. You don't need to make the whole planet agree to and implement some treaty. Just put up some solar cells and pump the captured CO₂ underground. The costs need to go down a few orders of magnitude, but I see no fundamental reason why that would be impossible
It's a bit sad that to make money you need money, but I do recommend anyone who can afford it to just install them.
The current CCS projects use highly concentrated CO2 sources, while the usual combustion process will generate air with only a few percent of CO2. There was an article last year about the Hammerfest LNG plant. They have a CCS project nearby, but found it cheaper to electrify the plant: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...
In the paper they did some math on the bomb size needed to reverse 30 years of carbon emissions, and it's huge (orders of magnitude larger than what we tested so far), although I don't understand why it needs to be one huge bomb. I'm sure you could try it with one military head and test the impact.
Interesting approach in any case.
We can't go on discharging it arbitrarily and leaving it there because that state is toxic to us.
This battery is insanely useful because it's all around us. Because most of the work is in the ambient O2 the 'fuel' we need use use this battery is incredibly dense. The miraculous density of it is because there is two parts to it, the density when you consider both is unimpressive (as anyone who has tried to operate a chainsaw inside a fire knows all too well, or run a ic motor underground), but because we can usually disregard the air side it is truly amazing.
It's so useful the all the higher life on earth also uses it, which is part of why discharging to much it is toxic to us.
Because it's so useful we're unlikely to completely stop using it unless we leave the planet. But that means we need to recharge it. The natural recharging mechanisms are only sufficient for surface biomass buffer, not the depths of the planets' oil and coal reserves which were changed over millennia using mechnisms that no longer exist (e.g. biomass trapped before microbes knew how to digest cellulose).
Unfortunately recharging it is probably going to take all the energy we got out of it and then somewhat more. It can only take less than that to the extent that we can find less enthalpic places to stash it that are as geophysically durable as the original forms. But that isn't so bad-- no one expects any battery to be 100% efficient, and one as useful as this one is worth some cost to use it.
But this also means that the proper price for long term fossil fuels is, shockingly, not the price that maximizes oil Barron incomes-- it's the price that covers the cost run run the recharging mechanism.
We don't have to make capture cheap, we just need it to be cheap enough that oil can be correctly priced.
Seems stupid - they are both being used, so even the business-as-usual scenario is a mixture. If indeed the 100% WWS + 0% CC/DAC scenario is better than than the 95% WWS + 5% CC/DAC scenario, then it is logical to conclude that CC/DAC is useless, but according to the tables and figures, they didn't even look at whether a 50/50 WWS + CC/DAC split would be better or worse. Yet their conclusion is still "policies promoting CC and SDACC should be abandoned". They have these really complex models but at the end of the day it is garbage in, garbage out.
Creating charcoal and taking out of the cycle isn't actually net negative? We don't have enough space for growing or in mineshafts? I'm making Centralia 2.0? It's obviously non economic, but everything carbon capture is like that.
I can't credibly participate because from my perspective what is being discussed is a popular sci-fi series that I haven't read. The dogmas and rituals are alien to me.
Briefly reading the article it seems like the author is assuming there is like a 1:1 global marketplace where any energy produced in one area can replace energy demand in another. That's just not the case.
It seems to me like the obvious solution to the problem would be a CO2 tax equal to the estimated cost of carbon capture. It should not be higher - that would be yet another example of moralism that plagues so many environmental policies. Introduce that, properly monitor emissions (especially things like methane leaks), and the problem will quickly solve itself. Anything that remains is the edge cases where it is more economical to do carbon capture - so use the tax to do just that.
That also covers cases where it makes sense to do the change more slowly. No need to decide or argue back and forth whether someone can or cannot do it faster. You emit, you pay, you don't want to pay, you don't emit. Changing quickly is too costly? That's fine, you pay. Oh, it's not that costly when compared to the tax? Guess you change, then. Also fine. Want to generate electricity from lignite? I'm not going to argue, I'm just going to watch you go bankrupt... and if you don't, there probably was some good reason for doing that and forcing the opposite would have had some unintended side effects.
[ ] how much carbon is captured by KW?
[ ] are there expected improvement in the technology in the future 30 years?
[ ] and what do physicists say about it?
[ ] is it more efficient than photosynthesis?
[ ] how mature is the technology compared to other methods?
[ ] who funds it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19579185#19579943
The paper was published from RIT.
In reality solar is more expensive than natural gas when reliably delivered. Batteries, over provisioning, fly wheels, and finally backup idle gas power plants are not surprisingly very expensive.
What am I missing? Am I stupid, or the people who talk about carbon capture are ridiculously dishonest?
Nothing else.
You'd extract the CO₂ directly from the exhaust gases. It can't clean CO₂ from the open air. It does not scale that way.
Is a lie on par with:
"I don't need to go to rehab, I can stop at any time" except the oil companies are the drug dealer and you are the deluded addict who will suffer the brunt of the consequence.
OH WAIT
The unasked question though: More costly to who?
Modern capitalism (especially in the enrgy sector) is fundamentally based on externalities.
Getting someone else to bear the cost, while concentrating income as greatly as possible, is what the modern billionaire is all about...
But there already is a technology to do carbon capture. Plants. Plants cover the world. How does one think a machine could do better?
I wish people stopped comparing apples and oranges here.
I’m not sure there’s any sort of program we could implement in that time frame that really moves the needle, and when it happens most of the world’s capacity to build things like solar cells and wind farms will need to be re-built, because we won’t be getting a lot of those components we need from China anymore.
And who knows? By then maybe we look up at a smaller global population that’s largely de-globalized and decide nothing needs doing.
In the short term it’s a shame because IMO the #1 (by far, not close) contributor to global pollution doesn’t even make it to the table in these sorts of discussions.