> As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up.
This is really the key. Once this is implemented, loads of effort/money/research will flow into this field.
It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays".
But in any case, it seems obvious that DAC is required to avoid bad outcomes. We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. We could just leave it there and deal with the problems, but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago.
Exactly. I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less. In turn consumers will be incentivized to buy products that create less pollution.
Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing.
--
To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids?
driving 15k miles @25 mpg = 600 gallons of gas (15,000 / 25)
gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000)
cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600)
cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons)
price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon
yeah your math seems great lol
assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving
Agreed. BUT if we price in the true cost of carbon at all levels it balances out. In a world we’re there is sufficient DAC you could charge the extractors and refiners and delivery companies and consumers. The price of a unit of gas goes way up at that point. Take the original commentor’s guess at $10/gallon - is the new cost $25 or more? I think we’d get to reduced consumption quickly.
Oh, that’s only net zero. In this fantasy we should also charge fossil fuel industries for past infractions too - maybe they need to pay an extra 20% for extra dac capacity.
I personally disagree that's a good step. Sadly, I can't think of a good memorable three-worder involving "price in all external costs" and "stop moralizing at people". Increase, internalize, improve?
The reduce part is not that it is wrong to consume, there are many ways in which cars are useful, but if your purpose is to be "green" it is still the first step, for many people it is not an option and that is ok.
I mean, I don't think it should be up to individuals to be "green"; there's lots of individual choices but "price in the damage your actions cause" should not be one of them. And once environmental damage is correctly priced in, then reducing consumption is no longer green anyways, because the consumption is now carbon neutral.
>once environmental damage is correctly priced in, then reducing consumption is no longer green anyways, because the consumption is now carbon neutral.
Global warming is only a subset of environmental damage.
There's all kinds of other damage in the wake of over-consumption.
When you kill more trees than you grow back, the devastation comes much quicker than waiting for the whole world to get hotter.
Carbon can be looked at as only one material and IF it can be been made neutral in the face of rising or even curtailed consumption, that seems to be the pricing that can be correctly assessed to compensate.
To raise the ante and try to price in many other forms of environmental damage too, you're going to need a bigger bank.
Plus just to earn all that money to allow all that consumption leaves an additional trail of damage behind, with a departing path of financial acumulation leading off in the opposite direction.
And as we know, different currencies have different toxic footprints themselves, and that was before bitcoin which has gotten into a category of its own.
Gemstones and rare elements too, some are bloodier than others. Deaths here can occur faster and sooner than forests are dying.
To me this tends to indicate that reducing consumption will always be green.
There is an interesting discussion to have around whose behaviour is of an higher priority and/or which group has more blame, but regardless of that individuals can still contribute.
carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0].
so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV!
I think this is an overestimate because DAC is so inefficient when there are so many sources of higher grade CO2 emissions, both natural and man made that could be captured well before DAC makes any sense. Why would we bother doing DAC when you could capture streams of nearly pure CO2 from factories or even volcanic seeps etc?
Good luck getting Congress to pass a tax increasing the price of gas by 1.33-3x. That's political suicide, even for Democrats. Directly fucks over the working class but corporate fleets can afford to pay the extra $$$ or switch to electric.
This is not out of line with the price of fuel in some countries already; I think it demonstrates that the technology is quite possibly on the edge of economic viability for closing the carbon cycle of gasoline, even if we don't get hundredfold improvements in the technology. That's pretty good news for everybody.
In Sweden we're around the equivalent of 7.2 USD / gal, due to high taxes.
However, and I expect this to be the case in most European high-taxed countries, the taxes are just fed in to the general tax revenue of the government. Not ear marked for e.g capture programs.
These taxes do of course fund some inovation projects etc, but I think it would be a hard sell politically even here to direct all carbon-related taxes directly into buying Co2 capture.
For example, as renewables have grown larger in Sweden, the government has started taxing the production of solar power on larger installations (≈ roof of a warehouse), even if the energy is never sold/transmitted to the grid.
The biggest problem with any cost-driven incentive is that it has the ability to fuck people over. If you make electricity too expensive you end up with fuel poverty. There is no way out of it. There is no other 'choice' that poor people can make. Same with water charges. What do you do if you can't afford your water bill?
But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that. (Yeah, I know, people who live in the country are married to their cars). If your country really pushes EV charge points and implements tax incentives on EV vehicles, then you are providing people with a way out of high carbon tax. And you need your PR campaign to be clear that people are getting a choice: high price fossil fuel or cheap EV. Because the chicken/egg here is that you won't get a government that'll make those changes until your convince people to vote for it. And people won't vote for poverty, but they will vote for options.
If you create a tax that disproportionately hits poor drivers, you can balance that out with redistributive taxes - and incentives for buying electric cars that mainly benefit poor people.
Currently most incentives for buying electric cars benefit the wealthy. For example in the UK, I can get 45% of my tax back through salary sacrifice on an electric car, whereas a person on basic rate only gets 20%. It should arguably be the other way around i.e. a "super deduction" for the poor, capped at basic rate relief for the rich.
A cost driven incentive can still be viable. It needs to be accompanied by practical replacement solutions. For example, if driving cars becomes too expensive for people, then public transport needs investments and needs to cover more ground, to help people out.
Yep. I think they need to implement a "Fuel cost equivalent tariff" on public transport. FCET because everyone switching from a car needs to do this gradually so you can't include the depreciation etc because they are sunk costs. It costs me ~£65 for 50l of fuel which gets me about 450-500 miles in my car. If I'm travelling alone I should be able to buy a walk-up train ticket for that price, with a 20% discount for pre-planning my journey. If I'm travelling with my family then group tickets should be discounted so each extra person is a nominal extra amount as long as we all travel together. Tickets should be integrated across all transport modes like they are in Switzerland.
The big problem with this, in the UK at least, is that the trains are already full even though they are much more expensive than this. We really need more capacity but the hugely corrupt debacle that is High speed 2 is going to turn people against building better public transport.
> But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that.
So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?
That is why the proceeds of such a tax should be given back to the population directly. That way if your CO2 emissions are average, it's a net zero financially for you but you're incentivized to reduce your emissions as you could actually gain money if you go below average (in effect it would mostly be the rich that lose money as they're quite often the biggest CO2 emitters).
However the implementation of such a tax, although conceptually simple, is practically very complicated.
If you give it back to the population, then you can't use it to pay for sequestering. That prevents doing something about the problem, and just brings you back to "pay to pollute".
If we started doing that in 1990 or so, after the first couple of climate summits we could've spread out the change over two or three generations. Now it hurts a lot more. If we wait another ten years, it will be even harder.
Not if you used that money to directly transfer that wealth to working class. All the money they've paid would return to them, in addition to the money paid by those corporate fleets.
EVs' lifespan matters (I'm not sure how it compares to ICEs today): if after a year you then sell the car as used, that's a significant amount more efficient than assuming the car is destroyed each year.
> if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline?
It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US.
In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics).
Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.
This is a thing I don't get about climate politics in the Nordics. We have already implemented taxation that strongly disincentivizes a large source of CO2 emissions from businesses and private individuals. Gasoline is expensive here because we pay ~80% tax on it, not because it's expensive to ship. And granted, we do have very strong EV adoption to show for it.
But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else.
We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee.
But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!
Terrapass and others offering these low prices are based on traditional offsets rather than carbon removal.
By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere.
Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton.
Follow up question:
I am looking at a vehicle that has a gas or PHEV option. The hybrid option is ~$9k more. I plan to own it for only 3 years to purchase a full EV, and I expect the $7,500 tax credit in the U.S. may not apply. So in effect - if I did removal (calculated at 3.2t tons/yr driving so $498 for removal).... wouldn't it be cheaper for me to $1,500 removal rather than purchasing a PHEV ($9k addl)?
Yeah if you do the math and squint a little, virtually all of the economic value of the benefits of oil will be required to be repaid in order to undo the costs. I think over the long term e.g. Exxon is going to be a net-negative business.
Exxon in particular seems evil. I just some articles on Guyana check it out if you haven't seen it.
I hope we are successful in some of the ongoing litigation like cigarette companies.
Specifically for energy corporations I am fine with complete Gov. sanctions/high regulation. Similar to electric companies but strip all shareholder profit until it's all spent cleaning up the mess. Not sorry to be the AOC socialist left on this one lol.
> I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less
I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.
That doesn't take away the incentive, though. Anyone that can pass on less cost because of a better process now has a real competitive advantage, whereas today they can, what, virtue signal?
And how do you make developing countries pay carbon/pollution tax? There is a stage in country's development where the country don't care about environment and prioritise on development. All of the developed countries went through that phase from 1700s-1900s. Either we need, say USA, to coercively make country create less pollution(which we know that it generally doesn't work) with military control, or developed countries need to pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean. The second option sounds wrong but it is less wrong than alternatives.
The ideal solution is to "leap-frog" fossil fuels and go straight to renewables. This is an indirect way for developed countries to "pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean"; those "fees" take the form of massive research and development investment to create renewable tech, and massive subsidies to price it below the fossil fuel alternatives.
This doesn't need to be charity either; the maintenance cost of renewables can be much lower than the cost of fossil fuels, so they can end up cheaper over the long-term (obviously dependent on the situation). Hence it can be a straighforward loan/investment to set up this renewable tech. When talking about national policy, there are also factors like reducing dependence on oil imports, which can make renewables even more attractive.
you cant leapfrog fossil fuels. Wind and solar require backup from either gas, oil, coal or nuclear or it wont be able to provide energy all the time. All you are doing is creating a much more expensive system and you are not getting rid of fossil fuel. Furthermore do you knoe how much fossil fuels goes into building windmills and solar cells? Both from a material and manufacturing perspective.
> Furthermore do you knoe how much fossil fuels goes into building windmills and solar cells? Both from a material and manufacturing perspective.
You're just describing a feedback cycle: the more we transition to renewables, the less fossil fuels will go into wind turbines and solar cells.
From your link:
> Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics.
In other words, we should transition our vehicles to renewable power. Electric motors are already preferable when it comes to heavy machinery (bucket-wheel excavators and conveyor bridges, the largest machines ever made, being the most extreme examples). Wind/solar farms generate electricity, so they can start charging batteries or electrolysing water to hydrogen as soon as the first turbines/panels are installed; they'll eventually need hefty grid connections, so installing those early-on can also power the construction.
Managing an electric/hydrogen construction site is mostly logistics rather than engineering: we don't need new battery tech or fuel cell membranes when vehicles are operating on a single site, centrally coordinated, centrally owned/rented, etc. Battery swaps make more sense when a single entity controls all the batteries (no fear of losing a good battery for a worn-out dud). Even if you want to be incredibly pessimistic about battery/hydrogen usage: with a bit more coordination and training, construction vehicles could just be wired!
Similarly, electric trains are a thing; electric and hydrogen trucks are already available and getting better; we can sail cargo ships, for a price (time + money).
The only place which seems to require new science and engineering in all this is steel and concrete production, but (a) there are a bunch of companies bringing improvements to market already, and (b) that's no reason to avoid all the other improvements. Again, worst-case pessimism: we might need to plug excess renewables into some vastly-inefficient air capture system to offset jet aircraft, rockets (except hydrogen burners), concrete and steel; that's still easier than trying to offset all those things plus electricity and land transport and shipping and construction etc.
The only direct barriers are economic; and those are indirectly political.
Yet, it's fairly reliable in most developed countries. So how will a developing country, well, develop, if it can't build a consistent, reliable power grid?
The rich countries should emulate China's Belt and Road initiative, but instead of building ports and highways they should build electric grids and renewables in developing nations. Ideally without predatory balloon financing that results in sticky situations down the line.
electric grid based on renewables require fossil fuels to be both made and as backup to be reliable. Electricity is not going to solve the 80% of the energy needs, its not going to allow them to do manufacturing and agriculture at large scale either. Its the wrong approach to turn developing nations into developed nations. I know most people dont like to hear it but that is the reality.
> The ideal solution is to "leap-frog" fossil fuels and go straight to renewables. This is an indirect way for developed countries to "pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean"; those "fees" take the form of massive research and development investment to create renewable tech, and massive subsidies to price it below the fossil fuel alternatives.
That takes time. Meanwhile coal plants and concrete manufacture will continue as the developing countries grow. Even China has to operate a lot of coal plants to meet its current energy needs. Global C02 emissions likely won't peak for several years, before starting to decline.
I love nuclear but we are not going to deprecate fossil fuels. You can't build neither nuclear nor wind or solar without huge amounts of fossil fuels and again electricity is less than 20% of a country's energy consumption.
If it is safety regulation you're talking about, that is not exactly a plus for the local population. Sure, it is a non-renewable source of power, but it doesn't produce CO2 after it starts to operate. Ideally, it could be even used to capture carbon from air.
You start with developed countries, and go from there. It's only fair. They've created the most (by far, on a per-capita basis) unpaid negative externalities over the last 200 years, so they should be the first to start paying for it.
This concept of fairness seems to go against efficiency. As far as any pollution goes, you want to reduce creation and release of new pollutants as well. The old baggage is bad enough. Adding more of it means making the situation worse.
So you need to address currently polluting countries as well, because they are very much an important part of the problem. This set partly overlaps with the set of developed countries, partly not.
Happily this concern largely moot because most emissions are either directly by developed countries or paid for by them in the form of export goods from other countries.
It's only a real concern if you are very insistant about calling China and India "developing" countries.
Developed countries would need to add import emissions taxes for countries that aren't part of the global emissions trading system. It wouldn't be perfect, but the total amount taxed should roughly correspond to their estimated emissions. We should do the same with international shipping emissions.
I'm guessing this would require a change at the WTO level however, making it relatively unlikely.
> There is a stage in country's development where the country don't care about environment and prioritise on development.
OTOH renewable energy sources are getting economically competitive so development doesn't have to mean more carbon. For instance, wind power already accounts for 20% of Brazil's energy generation (and most of it was built recently with private capital, as the government has been broke for a few decades already).
Unless you count china in they group it may not be such a problem.
If businesses in developed countries had to simply pay the cost of cleanup when importing from countries without their own laws in place, it would still be a massive improvement.
Carbon credits will be enforced with coercion, just as the petrodollar has been. At the end of the day they are both schemes where technocrats print permission slips to consume energy.
Putting aside the fear mongering rationalizations for both schemes, I hope posters here can appreciate the inherent moral hazards.
You can enforce it using trade bans, don't need military for that. Also, if this would be a global policy then the costs would go globally for everyone making it much easier to cope with since all the competition (on company but also state level) would have the same obligations.
Not as easy as it sounds though. The societal return on pollution varies wildly by industry. Steel production vs. factory farms vs. bitcoin mining. A straight carbon tax is prohibitively difficult for some low margin entities that we kind of need to support and face international competition.
Who decides what is important? Who decides that steel is more important than small farms is more important than cryptocurrency? What are the metrics to decide "important" and how do we avoid this just becoming another subsidy to funnel money to cronies in your home state?
Does the government then get to set the winners and losers across broad swaths of industry?
Yes, the government does. Things can go very wrong with the state and the market. I have no patience for one's fears entirely being over one not the other.
Yes, we have endemic regulatory capture. Yes, we have shitty voting systems that severely restrict the electoral options and, worse, the Overton window.
But also, study the WW2 build-up. This was heavy state managed and did a fantastic job, and certainly our voting system were no better then.
I also hope a combination of UBI and Carbon taxes can work — so the relative prices of things change but the overall cost of living doesn't go up.
But a very easy to understand example of where that is insufficient is that it will be much more efficient to build out public transit than try to make electric cars for everyone cheap.
The structure of the US healthcare system is a direct consequence of how the government managed the WW2 build-up. Many people would assert that this was an extraordinarily damaging adverse outcome of "state management" that still causes very expensive and enormous problems going on a century later.
The history of state management is rife with adverse unintended consequences due to rampant short-sighted application of state power.
> We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Way, way more than than mere gigatons. FTA: "Last year, about 31 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere." That's tens of gigatons in one year.
If the reason we are discussing it is the climate effects, we need to look at systemic total CO2-equivalent emissions which are around 50 gigatons per year.
> it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago.
Sorry, that's just impossible in anything even remotely approximating a human time scale. None of these purported solutions pass even the most basic of physics and economics tests. Not sure why people never ask the right questions.
Someone else pointed out that we would have to build some 30,000 of these facilities just to be able to keep up with current CO2 contributions.
Ignoring for a moment the utter fantasy that such a proposal would represent, just one look at what is happening this very moment with the forest fires in California should make everyone who thinks we can control atmospheric CL2 at a planetary scale take pause. These forests are burning at a rate of tens of thousands of acres and we can't control them. Last I heard the fires (there's more than one) were somewhere between 11% and 30% contained. It is likely that, in a single week, these fires emit more CO2 than then entire US ground transport fleet emits in a year.
We do not have planetary-scale control of these matters. We can't fix this. That's the simple reality of the matter.
We have known this for quite some time (that we can't "save the planet"). A recent thread on HN explored yet another aspect of the issue:
Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area.
Regarding the viability of solutions I don't think there will be a one-size-fits-all approach and it will actually take many removal methods combined to make a dent.
> Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area.
Does the necessity to survive even exists at civilization scale ?
Because climate change will probably not put a clear end to humanity as a specie. And, sure, I’m optimistic : we’ll get through this like we happened to survive, world wars, pandemics and a load of other global catastrophic events.
But what will be the cost in human lives ? If, say, 20% of the planet remains inhabitable by the time we succeed to stop climate change, is that an optimistic take ?
Nothing wrong with this. The issue is that, unfortunately, physics cares not one bit about optimism, aspirations or what we might wish for. It just doesn't care.
I have not seen a single purported solution to date that passes the physics test. Not one. Most don't even pass the economics test.
I'll give you a simple example without numbers. One proposal is to seed the oceans with iron powder. Let's ignore the mechanism for now, it's irrelevant.
Anyone who knows anything about manufacturing will immediately zero-in on the hard and cold reality that producing such a material is an incredibly dirty and energy-hungry process. Producing it at a rate of billions, tens of billions or hundreds of billions of tons per year would likely require more energy than most nations can spare.
This would mean that hundreds to thousands of new power plants would have to be built. If they are not nuclear, then they burn something. Wind and solar? They are not clean at scale, but sure. No matter what you do, you will be producing CO2 (and other substances) at an alarming rate just to produce the material. I don't even want to think about the waste product.
Of course, we also have to ask what we would do to the planet in terms of the incremental mining necessary to obtain all of the raw material this would necessitate.
So, after all of that, you now have what you are after, and then you have to transport and deliver it. Transporting billions of tons of iron dust at a planetary scale would engage millions of ground, air and sea vehicles, all burning oil derivatives at a, well, planetary scale rate. Millions to billions of trips would have to be made to "paint the oceans" with this stuff. We might not have enough vehicles to do this, which means we'll have to manufacture them, which comes with environmental consequences.
The CO2 and pollution (because none of these processes are clean) this would produce is far more likely to make matters worse than to actually solve any problem.
And then you have the reality that a planetary-scale problem isn't going to be affected in seven days. Which means that the above-noted hypothetical might require ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred years of constant effort before anything even registers.
We are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to fix the planet.
None of the purported solutions I have ever seen engage in any realistic full-process analysis, not even at a superficial level. If you fire-up Excel and throw some numbers at these things it quickly becomes very obvious that they all exist within a range that lies between nonsense and hubris. What's brilliant is that they are all taking advantage of nice grants and research money, which, from one perspective, makes it genius. I can think of a few other imaginary things on this planet that make tons of money, one of them has a whole city built around it!
Believe it or not, my view isn't pessimistic at all. I am simply trying to make people think and understand that we are being sold a fantasy. Once that is well understood we need to focus on the reality of the matter. Which means we need to develop technology and programs aimed at living with this reality rather than living under the delusion that we can change a planetary scale problem.
I also urge anyone who cares to understand the truth to go out and buy a CO2 meter to then explore their environment. If you do that, what you will discover is that we actually live in an environment ranging between about 650 and 1100 ppm. And this has likely been the case for centuries. The most immediate observation being that humanity has obviously not turned into shapeless blobs of gelatin. In other words, someone needs to explain the "sky is falling" theory given the realities of what we actually experience in our homes, apartments, offices and cars every day of our lives.
My optimism is based on the idea that we will eventually understand we are being lied to due to both political and financial interests. At some point the "emperor has no clothes" scenario has to play out. And, when that happens, we will change our focus to more productive pursuits having to do with making life better while letting the planet do what it has to in order to manage the ecosystem --as it has for billions of years.
We can live with this at the micro level (because, at a planetary scale we are insignificant) while letting the macro level function as it does.
One thing is certain: None of us are going to see any change of note. Changes at a planetary scale are measured in tens of thousands of years, not decades.
> while letting the planet do what it has to in order to manage the ecosystem --as it has for billions of years.
Evolution has a maximum speed. A too fast changing environment means the death of most life. Even science have a maximum speed, adapting crops to the new climate may be not fast enought and cause massive famine. To slow down the change is needed to avoid extremely situations.
The food issue isn't a problem at all. For one thing, plants like CO2. More importantly, CEA (Controlled Environment Farming) is building-up speed all over the world. Farming is not a natural process, it was invented by us to grow food more efficiently. We are now navigating the next evolution in farming by bringing it indoors. We can, at the micro scale of a building, control climate.
I firmly believe this is a necessary future of the reality we are facing. I believe this to such an extent that we have been developing various technologies for CEA over the last couple of years, some of which will allow us to grow the same or better crops using 1/3 to 1/2 less energy (and heat) than best-in-class solutions in the market today.
I think this is an important element of humanity adapting to the changes ahead. It does not solve all problems. It solves one.
This. And the worst part about it is that the Paris agreement's 1.5°C target was based on the use of yet-to-be-developed CO2 capture and didn't account for already-happening-feedback-loops (like methane from Siberia, reduced reflection from melting poles and the shutdown of the Gulfstream, which is beginning to look inevitable)
From the IPCC:
> All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified
(Note: CDR Carbon Dioxide Removal)
On the CO2 budget calculated for 1.5°C:
> budgets applicable to 2100 would be approximately 100 GtCO2 lower than <calculated> to account for permafrost thawing and potential methane release from wetlands in the future, and more thereafter.
A number of years ago, when the controversy was brewing, I sat down and read the Paris agreement. The thing is a joke. It will do nothing for anyone other than shift billions of dollars into a number of nations for doing nothing. We already know some nations used the money to buy fleets of cars and airplanes, which is the very definition of irony.
The problem with a lot of these things is that everyone forms an opinion without investing any time reading the material (like the agreement) and doing even the most basic math to verify claims. And yet everyone knows we can "save the planet", it would be funny if it weren't so serious.
> Someone else pointed out that we would have to build some 30,000 of these facilities just to be able to keep up with current CO2 contributions.
Must be a miscalculation here, the articles cites 4k tons scrubbed per year for this facility, and 31bn tons emited per year (to which you would have to add 5-6bn for land use change). So that's about 10 millions such facilities we need, only for co2.
I am trying to be kind. Even if you take the 30K number, the scale is pretty close to nonsensical.
I have yet to find a single purported solution that passes what I call the "Excel Test". In other words, running something slightly above a superficial mathematical model of the solution that includes some physics and economics. In my experience the model doesn't have to be deep and complex to quickly reach the conclusion that the so-called solution isn't, in fact, a solution. The problem is that almost nobody does this. Nobody seems to care to take these delusion merchants to task and ask the hard questions. And so we keep talking about a fantasy rather than the hard and cold reality of the matter. We cannot fix a planetary scale problem. We simply can't. We need to focus on living with it.
No, you have to do the math. Do you mean to say we have excess energy availability? If so, you have to support that statement by running through the calculations.
For starters, we don't build power plants to provide two or three times the power we need. Most power plants run at somewhere around 80% utilization with a margin for peak periods.
In addition to this, if we are serious about a transition to an electric transportation infrastructure by means of electric cars, trucks, boats and planes, well, there is no way the current installed base of power plants can handle this.
Again, easy math. For example, the US has somewhere around 300 million cars and trucks. The power (not energy, power is very important) an electrified version of this fleet would require far outstrips what we have available today.
Aside from this, you have to look at the historical timeline. 62K power plants were not built in 10 years. If we are optimistic and assume a 50 year timeline, well, quite a few of the people reading this will not be alive by the time 30,000 non-trivial anything is built. And the impact from these 30,000 whatever-they-are will not be seen for a long time, more than likely thousands of years. That's on the very benign assumption that they actually do something. The more likely scenario is that they do nothing or make matters worse.
Everyone was convinced that renewable energy was the answer...until someone actually bothered to do the math and physics work to try to understand. And the conclusion? Paraphrasing:
Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of solar and wind energy (forms so efficient they are yet to be invented) at a global scale, not only will this not stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation, it will continue to rise exponentially.
This facility, which is small and really still basically a prototype, scrubs 4K tons. However future facilities that are currently in the works will scrub 1M tons. That brings you to the 30,000 facilities to meet existing demand. Google tells me that there are 62,500 power plants in existence currently, so it would seem that 30,000 capture plants is entirely feasible.
The thing is, these plants are in Iceland for a reason: they can't be anywhere like powerplants, they need to depend on a clean energy source that is also for some reason not easy to use for other means. Such constraints aren't solved that easily.
Finding the energy for 30k plants that are 250* more productive than this one (which, the article says, is the most efficient to date) is still kind of a problem.
> It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays".
This can be achieved with a carbon tax. Or even higher gasoline taxes in places like the US where gas is underpriced.
But people do not want this. It is politically infeasible. The current middle class rather preserves their current lifestyle for next 30-40 years they have left before the end of the old age rather than leaving a better planet for their children.
I think it's the lower-middle class, honestly. There are a lot of people in America driving older used cars that already get bad mileage.
Then there's the issue that most carbon tax proposals try to invest the money in green energy R&D or electric vehicle subsidies.
Making gas 2x as expensive and Teslas 20% cheaper doesn't help these people at all - they simply can't afford a brand new car to begin with.
Unless 100% of carbon taxes are given back directly to the citizens in the form of cash, it will always be perceived as grabbing money from poor rural people to subsidize the fancy lifestyles of "coastal elites" who want to drive shiny new luxury electric SUVs.
I think deforestation-based carbon credits are a particularly easy place for scams, or even accidental double-selling, or selling acres that wouldn't have been cut down to begin with.
I think buying credits from GoldStandard [1] is a safer bet. While I'm sure there's some of the same shadiness occasionally, I think that a lot more work goes into vetting projects. The majority of the projects I fund are small solar, wind or hydro plants. While many of these plants might get built anyway, I think the funding from GoldStandard may make the difference for lots of these small projects.
Carbon offsets are a financial instrument, which is very different than an approach that treats CO2 as a waste product. By nature trying to solve this via a financial instrument likely won't motivate anyone, it's just a way for organizations to play hot potato and literally pass the buck. However, if we were to treat CO2 emissions as a waste product, it would likely have more restrictive industry regulation around how organizations are required to manage their C02 waste by products.
In theory this system already exists with emission rights, but the problem I have with that is that everyone just gets an X amount of emission rights - and then gets the right to sell them, providing an additional source of income. Tesla famously earns a billion a year from selling their emission rights.
So that system can work, but don't give out the emission rights for free, have the companies buy them and invest the money earned in removing emissions from the air again.
Handing out emission rights can also be tied to the CO2 tax, assuming the CO2 tax is properly used to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere afterwards.
There must be some sort of optimal strategy in there somewhere, that maximizes the economic incentive to reduce one's emissions.
It's easy to forget why there is a bit of a challenge to getting C02 out of the air: there's so little of it, comparatively.
In order, air is, broadly, made up of the following:
Nitrogen: %78.084
Oxygen: %20.946
Argon: %00.934
C02: %00.042
The stuff is essentially beyond a rounding error - it really gives one an appreciation of the "either don't release it, or capture it at the point of release" sentiment, and for the difficulties in making carbon capture outside of these scenarios be even slightly cost-effective. It's great to see progress on this front.
(I'm sorry - I have long since given in to this strange urge to type short alpha-numerics as hex. I can't justify it; it's habitual; and when I catch it, I always hope no-one is using a font that highlights it.)
Could burning biofuel to generate highly concentrated co2 cheapen the process? This way there would also always be energy available for the capturing process and the capturing plants would be mostly just plots of land with plants on them.
What really matters is how much carbon you can capture per unit electricity used. Presumably you're going to run the carbon-capture plant on renewable electricity. If it can't capture more carbon per watt-hour than your dirtiest non-renewable power plant, you might as well just use the renewable electricity directly and junk the non-renewable plant.
>The extracted CO2 will then be piped from the collector boxes to a nearby processing facility, where it will be mixed with water and diverted to a deep underground well.
And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.
The only use is in removing it from the atmosphere.
That's not entirely true. IIRC, climeworks have also partnered with companies who can use the CO2 directly (in carbonated drinks, or in actual greenhouses).
The majority of the CO2 in drinks will probably just end up the air again, unless some of it binds to calcium in the body or something?
Yeah that's what I suspect. Apparently some of the consumed CO2 binds with calcium, some is burped out, and some presumably comes out the other end, but I couldn't find any numbers on how much ends up where.
If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. I would expect that the people who only care about profits to quickly allocate capital to this endeavor (if it's profitable) up until the point where diminishing returns makes it less profitable. Hopefully that doesn't happen until we're slowly decreasing CO2 versus slowly increasing.
Even just cutting the growth rate by half would do a lot, and it would give international bodies like the UN some footing to establish a carbon price. Right now the carbon market is highly illiquid; nowhere near enough people are able to manufacture credits. If you could guarantee that it's always possible to make more credits that changes the political and perhaps even economic dynamic.
> If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them.
That would just leave us where we're at right now, right? Even with emissions not increasing (unlikely...), we'd still need 60k just to decrease CO2 levels at the same rate... meaning it'd take several decades to bring them to acceptable levels. We'd probably need a few times that many facilities to be able to do this at the pace we need...
1 facility for every ~100k people isn't unreasonable. It's like building an air treatment plant for every water treatment plant there is. Anyway, while these plants are busy reprocessing the entire planet's atmosphere they can do other useful things besides removing CO2.
That gives an interesting sense of scale to the problem. Dealing with C02 emissions is similar to water waste treatment, both in concept and in scale of infrastructure required.
Unfortunately I suspect this is tech that scales with efficiency in a crazy way like inverse power plants. You'd likely get much greater returns and efficiencies from a few large facilities.
Don't get me wrong if they build a sink which can be deployed at a household level which is 80% efficient and a huge city one is only 90% efficient it might be worth going this route. But I suspect the numbers would be closer to 50% and 99% based on current technologies (granted I don't work in the sector I just read publications)
Tree aren't great for carbon capture. They take up land space, which then has to be reserved for those trees. Then, they eventually die, and decompose, which means a new tree has to grow to re-capture the carbon that is released when the tree decomposes. Better to put the excess carbon back underground, where it came from.
The term is “sequestration”. You are correct that trees are a temporary capture, and even then- only when you plant woodlands that did not previously exist. Given enough time, the trees that are planted will decompose or burn in a forest fire to become net neutral. Trees buy time, but they aren’t a clean up plan.
Trees decomposing and being consumed by other trees is literally how it's worked for untold millions of years, so doesn't seem like a problem to me ...
Forests also provide local cooling, improve the water cycle, and aid biodiversity. A world with forests is a healthier world.
It's also how we got all the carbon in our top soils. A 6 inch or more covering of carbon (mixed with minerals etc) covering huge parts of the earth's surface.
Planting trees, harvesting them, and turning them by pyrolysis into biochar/charcoal and then burying it can partially restore these soils and sequester carbon at the same time.
Oh, absolutely. It would take generations. But taking forestry waste and turning it into a soil amendment is a worthwhile endeavour even from the POV of improving food production.
A recent thought on carbon credit scheme with trees. If you grow a tree and build a house with it, then that carbon is captured until the house burns down.
Yes the scale is fascinating! 2018 per capita emissions in the USA are 15 tons of carbon dioxide per person. So 1 million tons is the yearly emissions for 66,666 people.
Still early days. We need to get 2x better at carbon removal every 12 months for the next decade to get to gigaton scale carbon removal.
30 billion+ and growing at roughly 5% annually. That means 1.5 billion tons CO2/yr, or 1,500 new facilities coming online this year and every year after... just to maintain our current (devastatingly high) CO2 levels.
All this talk about scaling the technology to fully draw down carbon feels like an fantasy if we can't even proven the concept of keeping pace with our year-over-year growth.
For comparison, the Gross World Product is about $90 Trillion, so a global sales tax of about 3% would cover the lower figure.
Another way to look at it is that the GWP has an average growth rate of over 3%, so economic growth could continue even if the $3 Trillion spent per year was considered economically unproductive.
I actually thought that sounds kind of cheap. On average each German person emits roughly 10 tons of carbon per year. So for a $1000 dollars per year, I can be carbon neutral without any additional changes? Sounds pretty good to me.
I feel like just letting the climate change over the next 100 years and adapting as needed would be cheaper than spending $1.2 quadrillion on a global geo-engineering project.
major hurdles, including high costs, remain before this technology can be widely deployed and play a key role in tackling climate change.
Major. Major, Major Challenges. CCS, (lets put the capture prt to one side and focus on Storage) is well proven as a gas field injection method to increase yield: Fugitive gas from fracking is a huge problem. Persisting injection, down into olivine or other rocks (basically, encouraging the CO2 to convert to carbonate solid) or into pressure depth as clathrate (I know methane clathrate is a thing, I assume CO2 does similar things but I could be wrong).. this is still really not at-scale simple.
A major Australian CCS project has continually reported failure to meet its goals, such that its had to pay massive fines to the WA government because of un-met Carbon offset benefit... which I bet partly helped 'justify' the investment on the gas field.
Given that the CO2 could easily be used to help pump more oil from underground I've never suspected actual storage is a problem.
(Oil that isn't burnt or thrown away is still _crazy_ useful imo)
I just doubt the seriousness of industry to invest in this in a significant and meaningful way...
Yes, Carbon sequestering and storage underground is something that brings out all the usual tin-foil hatters from Greenpeace to the alt-right who fantasize about "gassing the population".
What I am wondering is why we are not planting billions of trees, harvest them, make charcoal and stuff it underground. Or grow algae on roofs and use them to harvest carbon.
Certainly. Organic farms dump tonnes of compost per acre on their farms every year, almost all of it imported from off their property.
I would love to have a good clean home biochar solution to increase the carbon content of the soil of my farm. Something I can stuff prunings and grass and brush cuttings and leaves into, flip a switch, and get carbon out of.
But right now it's mostly DIY solutions that look of varying quality and still generate some smoke.
Wouldn't it be great if every suburban neighbourhood had an efficient pyrolysis chamber that processed the organic waste from the surrounding area?
You use plants to concentrate carbon. You make biochar. And then you put it back in the soil, so you're not depleting it of nitrogen, phosphates, and minerals.
The waste heat that you get from making the biochar is useful energy -- solar energy, really -- that you can use to heat homes, make hot water, and run heat engines.
Maybe even the Haber process too?
The chief challenge I see is how to reduce human labor requirements without increasing capital requirements too much.
I'm also a little concerned about eventually diluting the soil with too much biochar. Because you're sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, but the amount of phosphates and such is remaining constant.
I'll echo this - The technological developments we need to sequester gigatonnes of carbon at the level that it would make a difference already exists and are in common use, at scale, today. In my assessment most work on novel carbon capture technology is really working out how to make something that's profitable. I'm not confident it's an area of research likely to bear fruit although I also don't want to sound like I'm putting down folks who are doing much more than me here armchair judging.
Aside from growing then burying cellulose or cooking it off into carbon, you could also pyrolize it into a liquid form via a self-feeding process if your preferred form of sequestration is to pump it back underground i.e. into previous extraction fields.
Direct air capture is something that makes me doubly wary - Aside from the carbon-density-in-air issue, return-on-energy-invested is a key metric I don't see enough emerging encouraging information about. Incorporating the acres of wind, solar, or hydro required to power a DAC solution, the usual land-use objection to a forestry-based carbon removal approach would seem to evaporate pretty quick.
Reforesting is a complicated task, it is nothing like
for (int i = 0; i<= 100000000; i++)
{
Tree t = new Tree();
t.plant();
}
You need specific types of trees for specific microclimates, otherwise they won't thrive and might die. You need a healthy species mixture, otherwise you are creating monocultures vulnerable to mass pest infestation. You need the right amount of rain. You should not reforest good arable land, because we are almost 8 billion now and everyone wants to eat.
Israelis are very good at reforestation, but it took them over 100 years to recreate some modest forests there.
we should just stop cutting, burning, and remove forest space... trees are very good at replanting themselves, they had hundred of million of years to perfect it
Carbon removal from the air sounds like paying of credit card debt by aquiring additional credit cards. Is it not the case that it will always take more energy to get carbon out of the air than it does to put it in the air in the first place? If that's the case, we will have to not only replace our current energy consumption by renewable sources, but add a lot of extra energy to drain the atmosphere. And we have to do that within decades.
This is probably a naive take, but that's what it feels like.
The idea for most implementations of this I've seen are to colocate relatively "easy" sources of carbon neutral energy with the machines actively processing air - since you can theoretically remove CO2 from anywhere. In the case of Climeworks, their plants are often (or all of them?) positioned on or near a geothermal energy plant, which isn't something that's convenient to access in most locations.
My feeling that I get from reading comment sections on these things is that it will be prohibitively expensive to scale up to a size that matters and no-one will want to foot the bill.
That, and the idea that it's a pipe dream that is sold as an excuse not to make some really tough choices about decarbonising other things seems to be the prevailing thought about from cynical environmentalists.
Personally I can only feel that those arguments make some sense but I don't understand the potential enough.
Also, a more personal thought is that it seems really hard to collect such a diluted chemical from thin air?
Agreed, those 2 are common concerns carbon removal needs to address better. Working in the industry there are other concerns that seem more pressing (i.e. can we even make it work? can we grow it 2x per year for the next decade needed?).
As Alan Kay says, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Would be interesting to see a comparison between a perceived prohibitively expensive carbon-free alternative, and the use of carbon capture in order to offset the pollution of cheaper technology that is not carbon-free.
Like, would a coal power plant combined with carbon capture be more economical viable than a nuclear plant?
> Like, would a coal power plant combined with carbon capture be more economical viable than a nuclear plant?
Yeah it's an interesting line of thought but is it really possible to ask that? If you scale up one technology you will hopefully find incremental improvements that will turn that initial calculation on its head. My guess is that any such calculation would be so speculative it wouldn't give you any actionable information.
So my guess is that the best we can do is try scaling up all possibilities until we have a clear winner?
(Although in your example nuclear should already be scaled up enough to give us some idea.)
Energy engineering nerd here - naturally I've heard about it.
Question that Vaclav Smil had raised as a potentially fatal obstacle to large scale carbon capture. All is nice and well when we're trying to sequester 1000 tons of CO2 per year as a pilot project. But once we scale up to ~100Mtons or even ~Gton per year - we'll very quickly run out of places to safely store it. How much is this a real physical constraint vs. Smil's skepticism being cranked up to 11/10?
The solution would be to convert it to fuel, burn it again, then capture it again. Thereby creating carbon neutral fuel for air, shipping and road transport (as long as the energy going into the system is itself carbon neutral).
Just a night owl Californian. They seem like a fine idea, but there's a lot of doom and gloom in places, even here, about being able to make an impact due to our current and trending rate of carbon pollution. Not so much a question, but it makes me sad, and a bit wonderous.
Thanks Tito, you're a gifted speaker and you're right, the bit at the end hit the nail on the head. I appreciate your perspective and working to change hearts/minds.
Carbon removal is generally regarded as a scam, like 'clean coal,' something to distract people from actual carbon emission reductions. It would be great if it worked, but so far the only thing carbon capture technology has been successful at capturing is money.
Why the pessimism, really? In my opinion we need both a severe reduction in carbon output AND carbon removal technologies. Any progress in either of those is a step forward. Don't be so dismissive, this is a young technology that can really make a difference, provided we invest enough money into the problem.
Indeed, massive carbon emissions reductions are necessary, carbon removal is not a replacement. Marcius Extavour from XPRIZE gave a great keynote at AirMiners talking about this:
We certainly need to do both - Simply stopping all carbon emissions tomorrow still locks us into historical carbon emissions that will have unpleasant effects on the global climate.
Sucking carbon out of the air while also pumping it up there doesn't make too much sense unless the cost of carbon capture drops well below the cost of de-carbonizing.
I have a potentially stupid thermodynamic question. Since carbon air capture is essentially going from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, would it be dumping more in the form of waste heat into the environment than you would save from warming caused by CO2 in the atmosphere?
I already have an answer to why this reasoning is wrong - CO2 acts like an insulator and traps heat in the atmosphere, and does not generate any heat directly. Just curious if that's right.
I was thinking the same - the issue of course is that farm-able land is valuable, and we generally want to use that for food production. This is one of the reasons why we don't grow biofuels to power our cars.
I do like your idea of a custom bacteria in water solution, I think algae has been engineered for biofuel production (not sure how well that turned out though).
What if there was a genetically engineered bamboo that was denser than seawater, so that you could grow it and just dump it in the deep ocean... you could have trains of barges taking it to the coast and dumping it. Bamboo is also highly regular so its growth could probably be mechanized/automated to a degree.
There are some tropical fast-growing trees that are denser than water. In Costa Rica, there are rivers with logs on the bottom as a result of poorly-planned logging expeditions. The trees are so heavy partially because they take up silica from the soil - which is why they're also difficult to cut down.
Of course I agree and was just being rhetorical! I just think it’s better to applaud the progress here than fault it for not having yet solved all the world’s problems
We really just need to leave fossil fuels in the ground starting right now. Capture is good, and probably necessary, but we'll be fighting a losing, impossible battle until we stop emitting. Non-damaging energy technology is right there, we only need to use it.
This x1000. The one thing that absolutely must happen is the one thing that nobody seems to want to discuss. All oil wells, coal mines, and natural gas extractors must be shut down immediately. Hardly anything else is worth worrying about. As long as it is being extracted, it will be burned and anything else is rearranging Titanic deck chairs. Shut it down. People will find alternative energy sources.
This is wildly optimistic, but personally, I'm looking forward to CO2 captured from the atmosphere, reformed into hydrocarbons on-site, and used as feedstock in the global plastics and fertilizer trades.
Yes, balancing that equation is going to require energy input. Yes, probably gonna require some pretty smart chemists. But impossible? Well, I don't see why not.
Edit: There's probably not that much utility in this. See comments below.
Poster probably refers to Ammonia from Haber-Bosch process which generally used methane for H2 source (although I guess if we get to the point where we have the technical capability to take CO2 to energy feedstocks we probably have the capability to generate real green H2)
Yes but OP’s whole spiel is about us having enough excess energy to do things like turn CO2 into feedstocks and currently we can’t do that (well at least in no way is it economically viable to do that), and the proportion of green H2 is tiny in comparison to that made with fossil fuels, so it clearly isn’t economically effective to do that yet either
Carbon itself is a soil amendment. (think compost). Organic farms use tonnes of the stuff every year as a top dressing. If you have pure carbon you could mix it up with NPK and micronutrients and have a compost alternative for large scale industrial farming.
The only synthetic fertilizers that include hydrocarbons in their production chain are ammonia based, but all CO2 (or as much as is practicable) is removed from the end product. It's really only used on the way to producing hydrogen.
Furthermore the ammonia production processes use natural gas (not crude oil!) only as a source of hydrogen. They could split water instead, it’s just that the natural gas is cheaper.
I wonder why they didn't mention Carbfix [1], the Icelandic project that pulls CO2 from the air and flushes it underground. That's been going on for a few years now.
edit: According to Carbfix's "Current Projects" [2] section, it looks like they actually collaborated with Climeworks on this Project Orca.
Great question - Carbfix seems to be saying they already achieve $30/ton, which is already more than 10x better 5-6 hundred per ton the article cited as a goal. I'm confused.
It seems to depend on basaltic bedrock for the reactions they mention. So you are probably limited in scaling this to other non volcanic regions in the world.
Still maybe other countries could pay iceland to be a world air scrubber? Not sure.
And there it will rest. Underground. Forever, presumably. The carbon dioxide captured from the Icelandic air will react with basalt rocks and begin a process of mineralization that takes several years, but it will never function as a heat-trapping atmospheric gas again.
If they can get it down to $100/ton, that's kind of within reach for going carbon neutral, at least for the USA - we emit around 5 billion tons of CO2, so that's $500B/year to offset it all. (but ideally we'd reduce CO2 emissions so the cost to offset it all is lower). Could pay for it with a carbon tax, which would also help reduce CO2 since the heaviest sources of CO2 emission would be paying the most tax.
But do we really have a place to pump all of this CO2 laden water?
Eh, sort of, but that'll be a whole other research effort. A lot of the maps exist already at least.
But I think the way to encourage reducing waste and capturing waste to be in financial competition is that if capture costs $100/ton you charge a $90/ton tax so that your efforts are 90% funded already ($400B of the $500B) if they just paid the tax and changed nothing, while if they dropped their emissions in half they'd save $55/ton relative to a competitor that did nothing. But at least there is still an actual plan for the commons built in.
But I like that it sets a benchmark for what carbon pricing needs to be to provide a real incentive to stop emitting it.
Isn't that the whole problem of ocean acidification that everyone is intended on avoiding? Sounds like you would just accelerate the problem by moving CO2 from Air to ocean water.
> Only #IPCC AR6 Socioeconomic pathway SSP1-1.9 keeps warming at 1.5°, but assumes a flow of gigatons of CO2 into the ground as large as the current gigaton flow of all fossil fuels out of the ground.
Those interested in learning about carbon removal technology are encouraged to check out the AirMiners Boot Up, a 5-week program to learn about the world of carbon removal: http://bootup.airminers.org
You can also study the materials on your own under the "Resources" menu.
Since reading about olivine beaches, I don’t understand why DAC makes any sense. Can anyone explain why we would want to build machines to slowly capture it from the air compared to letting natural processes capture it from the oceans?
How would we get the CO2 onto the olivine beaches? Presumably these beaches already exist, and climate change is still a thing. Do we somehow need to increase the number of olivine beaches, or how would this work?
I meant the idea of spreading crushed olivine on particularly wavy beaches. The CO2 comes out of the ocean water. Still moving the olivine artificially, but relying on the ocean's natural mechanical energy and greater concentration of CO2 than the atmosphere.
Aha, thanks for clarifying that! Been reading up about it and it seems like a pretty solid idea. Doesn't look like there are any major projects underway though.
For whatever reason the climate establishment isn't on the olivine train. Using DAC to create carbon-neutral jet fuel makes more sense than sequestration in the short term anyway.
My dream is to use carbon capture as 1/3 of a full plan to fix climate change. Once you have the carbon, rather than pumping it into the ground, I would love to use off-shore nuclear reactors to convert it into gasoline. It might sound a little strange to turn it into something which is just going to get burned, but I firmly believe carbon neutral gasoline and natural gas which was cheaper than drilled would drop carbon emissions much faster than anyone can afford to sequestrate it.
Sequestering carbon while others are emitting it is not net carbon negative. It's just a highly elaborate and inefficient way of moving clean energy around. That's why it's in Iceland - wouldn't be much point in running the plant off fossil fuels would it?
If you have clean energy, using it directly to not burn fossil fuels is strictly more efficient than trying to undo the damage done by burning fossil fuels.
Clean energy isn't fungible. Energy created in Iceland can't easily be used in India.
If you can create energy in Iceland, which is already nearly 100% renewable for electricity generation, then using it for carbon capture is carbon-negative.
If you're claiming it isn't carbon negative because someone somewhere in the world is burning carbon, then the word is meaningless, because you may as well claim that every activity on Earth is generating the exact same amount of carbon -- the average of all the activities.
Correct, my point is I don't believe the quantity of carbon capture which can be deployed will get anywhere close to the amount of carbon being released without a different fundamental economic model.
Can we just start building facilities to test this at scale based on targeted taxes.
Worst case scenario is that we learn how to do a better job at improving our planet...
One challenge in fields where rapid advancements in tech are likely is that it can often not pay to deploy the first generation of something; if the second generation will arrive soon enough and be 25% better, building the first generation could be entirely wasteful. (Assuming you can learn enough in the lab to inform building the second generation at scale.)
This is known as the Wait Calculation (sometimes referred to as the Wait/Walk problem) but it only applies to scenarios where a better option B, if done later, can overtake an inferior option A; for example a future spacecraft might be able to beat a less advanced craft to its destination, rendering the first a waste of resources. In the case of carbon capture though, the results are additive: whatever carbon an inneficient gen 1 plant removes before gen 2 is developed will remain removed when you go to implement gen 2, and any number X gen 2 plants plus Y gen 1 plants as well will always outperform just X gen 2 plants. Now if you were putting money (or some comparable resource) into escrow to be used for future carbon capture plants and the total resources allocated to carbon capture were fixed, it might make sense to save it for those better gen 2 plants, but for the moment no such system is in place.
Whatever money we spend on a Gen 1 plant can’t also be spent on Gen 2 plant. Whatever CO2 emissions we create while making a Gen 1 plant can’t be used again to make a Gen 2 plant. Whatever land we dedicate... Whatever ongoing power is used less efficiently for decades to come...
I think there might be ample valid reasons to think 20 years from the starting line could be better for waiting rather than racing to get an inferior Gen 1 plant online in the name of doing something. This is partly a political/social problem, but it’s largely an engineering calculation. “At the end of the useful life of both plants, which leaves the planet and humans better off?” should be the guiding question.
Again, it's only relevant if there is a fixed pool that both are being drawn from. Unless you are planning on spending 100% of world GDP and 100% of world land area on carbon capture plants, you are not sacrificing any future Gen 2 plants to build a Gen 1 plant. Even in the magical world where we know for certain to what degree Gen 2 can outperform Gen 1, and there was no cost to leaving carbon in the atmosphere for 20 years, Gen 1 + Gen 2 will still always outperform Gen 2 alone. In the real world, racing to do something now with technology that works is obviously better than letting the problem fester in the blind hope that it will become easier to solve later. Engineering is not about maximizing efficiency, it is about successfully solving problems. The guiding question is always "what get's the job done?" It doesn't matter how superior Gen 2 plants may be, if you can't build them they aren't an option.
Very true, but my feeling on this is until the tech is scaled a lot of the advancements are either slowed or don't mature.
It's annoyingly the argument made for covering the surface of the planet in photovoltaic cells, but in this case if the tech is already CO2 negative it can't be that bad to try to test it's longevity or scalability and reliability.
Just need the equivalent got methane and were sorted ;)
Climeworks and Carbon Engineering, at least, are based on fairly old tech. Waiting for big improvements in the lab doesn't seem like the best bet.
Meanwhile, it's generally true that the more you make of something, the cheaper you learn to make it, and that appears to hold true here:
> “We’re confident our costs will continue to fall,” Oldham, the Carbon Engineering CEO said. “But only if we deploy. If you never deploy, your costs never go down.”
The C02 being released in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels was in the air initially before being tied up by photosynthesis. So as time goes on (since inception of life) more and more C02 is tied up in hydrocarbons and locked away in the ground.
So here's the question. What happens to life on earth if this process keeps going for millions more years? At what point is there insufficient C02 for plants to function?
That point will like be arrived at within 500--900 million years through increases in solar luminosity, increased weathering, slowed plate tectonics, and loss of the Earth's oceans.
This is among several substantial changes to the the ecosphere which would make much present life difficult or impossible.
I'm surprised this is even close to economical. In general you'd have a big chemical advantage with a higher concentration of CO2 (i.e. on top of a smokestack). But you also need to be close to a cheap source of clean power. I guess Iceland is one of the few places on earth where this can be done.
Economically that might be a niche where energy is nearly free. Environmentally, it seems like a better use of that energy than what it's currently being used for, which is bitcoin mining.
I have a gas powered boiler that heats my home and makes my hot water. Based on my gas bill, it’s incredibly efficient. But it still emits co2. Is there a “home scale” scrubber I can plug into its exhaust port? Can I do my own DAC?
AskHN: what's the best carbon capture service that I can subscribe to? "Best" as in: does CO2 removal (not planting trees or trading credits), is reasonably cost-efficient, and is audited?
What happens to the insects passing through these things? If many or all of them die then this would be a big issue as a huge amount of air will have to pass through these things.
You don’t need this on Venus, as getting CO2 from the atmosphere is trivial. They is pretty much the only thing the atmosphere is made of there.
But why would you want to get rid of CO2 on Venus? It has tons of benefits. It gives good lift ability for airships so you can stay far above then hot surface. Also no need to worry about Hindenburg disasters as stuff will not burn in CO2 atmosphere.
Putting the practicality of constructing such a facility on Venus aside, I presume geology of Venus' crust would be a big factor here.
Another important factor would be the chemistry needed to separate CO2 from Venus' atmosphere. It may or may not be different from that required for Earth's atmosphere.
No. Even if you built it floating in the clouds where the temperature and pressure aren't so bad, and powered it with a nuclear reactor, where would you put the captured carbon?
can't you split it into oxygen and carbon? then just dump the carbon? that way you have a supply of oxygen and over time couldn't you grow plants? can you then also get the hydrogen out of sulfuric acid and combine the hydrogen and oxygen to make water? use some of the hydrogen to run a nuclear fusion reactor? and if you did this on large scale and time span wouldn't the pressure start to lower?
Chemically, it is very possible, but terraforming a whole planet takes an impossible amount of resources and man-hours. Who would pay for this and why?
Off-topic but I really need a clarification on that:
I was told that we have already switched from a situtation where the most alarming greenhouse effect gas in the atmosphere was CO2, to a situation where the atmosphere is hot enough to hold much more H2O (as water vapour), making it the (vastly) most dangerous greenhouse effect gas.
So the greenhouse effect is now self-inducting itself mainly via H2O.
Anyone is aware of that, and can comment?
> As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up.
This is really the key. Once this is implemented, loads of effort/money/research will flow into this field.
It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays".
But in any case, it seems obvious that DAC is required to avoid bad outcomes. We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. We could just leave it there and deal with the problems, but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago.