[HN Gopher] A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total c... ___________________________________________________________________ A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture Author : phreeza Score : 216 points Date : 2021-04-04 08:43 UTC (14 hours ago) (HTM) web link (pubs.rsc.org) (TXT) w3m dump (pubs.rsc.org) | dennis_jeeves wrote: | Given that CO2 in the air is a tiny fraction of air (0.03%) and | it's absolutely critical for plants, plants would have evolved to | utilize CO2 as much as possible, in the one of most energy | efficient and safe manner that will be really hard to beat by | 'artificial' means. | | Point being, that besides reducing consumption (the best being is | by reducing population I think, rather than doing the, feel-good | recycling etc. ) allow more forests to flourish. | | Side note - the fixation on CO2 as the devil or enemy number one, | has connotations of a lynch mob or the intellectual who indulges | in intellectual masturbation by crunching numbers, i.e a modern | day religion. | GekkePrutser wrote: | For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions | of tonnes of this "N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine | (2-EEMPA)" stuff.. | | I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What | do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? We can't just dump | that stuff in the sea. | | I wonder if CO2 capture does not cause more problems than it | solves. Even if we magically _could_ capture CO2 as pure carbon | and let the O2 back into the air, we 'd end up with enough carbon | to fill all the mines we've emptied over the years. Where are we | going to leave all that without making a huge environmental mess? | And how do we transport all that there? And that's not even | considering the energy usage and possible reagents. | | I think we should really reduce our energy usage instead. Every | tonne of CO2 not emitted does not have to be captured, and the | effects of not producing it are positive for the environment in | more ways than just global warming. | | Of course we're already on a path for significant global warming, | but I think we'll just have to deal with that as we go. I don't | think we'll manage to do significant CO2 capture before the | effects are irreversible anyway. | bko wrote: | For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions | of people reduce their energy consumption.. | | I wonder if this won't be a governance hazard in itself. What | do we do after we create a global governance structure to | reduce global emissions. We can't just tell people to stop | using so much carbon. | | I wonder if reduction causes more problems than it solves. Even | if we magically could reduce everyones consumption, how do we | deal with population growth assuming humans still produce some | carbon. | | I think we should really remove existing CO2 from the | environment instead. Every ton of CO2 that can be captured and | removed from the environment means some family in a poor | country can enjoy the benefit of industrialization. | | Of course we're already on a path of significant global warning | so I don't think we have a choice either way. | derefr wrote: | > Fill all the mines we've emptied over the years | | ...and why not do exactly that? | | Keep in mind, a _capture solvent_ is something that will stably | hold onto the CO2 at STP. It doesn't need special care or | treatment; the CO2 just becomes incorporated into its molecular | structure, and now that complexed molecule is "what it is." | | So it's not like we'd be pumping the mines full of pressurized | gas. We'd just be pouring a stable, non-reactive liquid or | solid in there. Even if the mine had an earthquake, caught on | fire, etc., that wouldn't leak the CO2 back out into the world. | It's not nuclear waste. It's rock dust. | rtkwe wrote: | Not sure if it's the same stuff exactly or if the cost includes | reprocessing but there's an amine cycle that seems to be mostly | closed that's used for CO2 removal on submarines. So it's just | used to separate CO2 from the rest of the output. I think | that's what this sentence is talking about: | | > Notably, it is projected that this solvent can operate at a | regeneration heat rate of 2.0 GJ per tonne CO2 for post- | combustion capture | | Smarter Every Day did a video on it and atmosphere management | on a submarine more generally which is pretty neat. The CO2 | scrubbing is around 20 minutes. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Ud6mHdhlQ | grodes wrote: | but we must capture de one we already emitted to balance the | CO2 cicle | iamthemonster wrote: | 1. The solvent in carbon capture runs in a closed loop. You | typically heat it, and it releases the CO2 so you can compress | it and inject it below ground. | | 2. You don't necessarily need a depleted natural gas reservoir | to inject CO2 subsurface (though they sure are convenient) and | there is plenty of room for CO2 subsurface. It also doesn't | creep to the surface on any meaningful timescale. | | 3. How do we transport it there? Pipelines. | | I feel like CO2 sequestration is second only to nuclear in the | amount of unfounded concerns. There's one very well founded | concern directly in the article - they estimate $50 per tonne | of CO2 just to capture, let alone to store. My experience on a | 2009 carbon capture plant design was that approx $100 per tonne | of CO2 was the lowest carbon price that would really make | carbon sequestration highly attractive and widespread. | | I also happen to think a $100 per tonne carbon price is not | such a bad idea. But it is possible that other technologies | would beat carbon sequestration at that carbon price point. I | don't know. | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: | The fossil fuel CO2 tax in Switzerland is currently 96 CHF = | 102 USD. | LatteLazy wrote: | To put it in perspective, 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) | maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's | very affordable when the alternatives are Water World level | flooding or living like a vegan hermit in a cave... | rayiner wrote: | Yes. But don't forget that for many, berating people into | living like a vegan hermit is part of the point, and if | science solves that problem it gets taken away from them. | | It's the same people who want everyone to keep using masks | even after vaccination. | tptacek wrote: | Where are those "masks forever" people? I hear about | them, but I never seem to hear them. Is there a news | report or something I can read? | rayiner wrote: | You should read my Facebook wall. I'm not saying there's | a lot of them, but I'm apparently Facebook friends with | all of them. :D | dllthomas wrote: | "Forever" or "after a particular individual is | vaccinated, while vaccination rate generally is still low | and incidence is still high"? | quotemstr wrote: | > 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful | lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable | | In the eyes of the annoying kind of climate activist, the | affordability you've mentioned is a bug, not a feature. Too | many people who claim to care about the planet want to use | the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and | to roll back industrial civilization more generally. This | sort of activist doesn't see the carbon problem as an | engineering challenge, but instead as a political and | aesthetic project. It's super annoying, because people like | this reject technology that would let us have our modern | lifestyle cake and eat it too. | | Not all climate activists are like this, but there are | enough of these bad faith people around to seriously impair | earnest and good faith efforts to solve the actual | engineering side of the carbon problem. | LatteLazy wrote: | Best get on and solve it as an engineering issue before | too many people read the Unabomber Manifesto... | GekkePrutser wrote: | > to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's | lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more | generally. | | Not roll back. But do smarter. | | It's not just global warming. We're shipping billions of | tons of stuff from one side of the planet to another in | sulphur-blowing rustbuckets. Creating continents of | floating plastic in the oceans. Causing toxic lakes from | harvesting rare earth minerals. | | We can't keep doing this. Maybe we can keep it up so | before your lifetime is over, but sooner or later it's | going to be a problem that can't be avoided just like | climate change is now. | | There's many quick wins here. Buying locally produced | foods instead of stuff flown in from half a world away. | Not flying across europe for a 1 hour business meeting. | Reducing plastic packaging. | | And there's good news too. We're continuing the excellent | path of energy reduction in electric appliances. They had | to keep adding "+"es and now rework the entire energy | labels in Europe because "A++++" efficiency became too | long. | | I think COVID already brought us halfway there. We're no | longer used to business meetings, the fragility of our | supply chains has opened up many eyes, and most office | workers now work from home at least part time and do just | fine. For the environment this has all been pretty great | :) | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: | A lot of the seemingly-dumb stuff happens because the | market is a lot more effective at finding efficient | solutions than gut feelings. | | Some of it is also because externalities like pollution | aren't priced in, but often the seemingly-bad thing is | actually better by most metrics. | | Reducing plastic packaging may be one such example: Sure, | it reduces plastic waste, but it creates more wasted | product, and packaging from stuff consumed in households | is exceedingly unlikely to end up in the ocean in a | western city that burns their trash in a waste-to-energy | plant. | imtringued wrote: | You don't get it, the rich can afford to care about the | environment. The poor destroy it because they have no | other choice and that's not a big conspiracy, it's what | the Europeans and Americans did 200 years ago when they | were poor. | quotemstr wrote: | > We can't keep doing this | | In the broadest possible sense, no, we can't keep doing | "this": either we limit fertility somehow or we got the | Malthusian limit eventually. That's just the consequence | of the exponential function. And right now, whether | population will stabilize on its own before we hit | carrying capacity is an open question. | | But if you hold population constant? Yes, we can keep | doing this indefinitely, or at least until the sun boils | the oceans in 500 million years or so. Why wouldn't we? | There's every reason to believe that we can supply | oranges in January to everyone. | | Show me the math that says we can't. I'm not persuaded by | rhetoric about rust bucket cargo ships. It's exactly this | sort of sentimentality that makes it difficult to | actually make progress on addressing actual climate | problems. | vidarh wrote: | Right now most population models suggest we'll see growth | flatten within decades, and peak within a century. | | It's not really an open question - it would take reversal | of long lasting trends in large parts of the world to do | more than at most delay the reversal. | quotemstr wrote: | The reversal analysis you've mentioned doesn't take into | account (not in the forms I've seen) the presence of high | fertility subpopulations that will come to dominate | larger low fertility populations eventually and drag | everyone's fertility rate back up. | djrogers wrote: | > Right now most population models suggest we'll see | growth flatten within decades, and peak within a century. | | We're way off topic here but what the heck... in my | entire life, I've not seen one single 'population model' | play out accurately. We've seen dozens of popular ones | that have failed to come true in the past century alone - | what makes today's different? | pjc50 wrote: | The flooding is hardly "water world": | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z | | "Central estimates in the recent literature broadly agree | that global mean sea level is likely to rise 20-30 cm by | 20503,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. End-of-century projections diverge | more, with typical central estimates ranging from 50-70 cm | under representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5 and | 70-100 cm under RCP 8.53,9,10,12, though more recent | projections incorporating Antarctic ice sheet dynamics | indicate that sea levels may rise 70-100 cm under RCP 4.5 | and 100-180 cm under RCP 8.5, and could even exceed 2 m or | more in far-tail scenarios4,7,8,11. Via a structured | elicitation of opinion, experts now estimate there is a 5 | percent chance 21st century sea-level rise will exceed 2 m" | | Bad news for East Anglia and the Somerset Levels, and many | estuary cities including London will need mitigation work. | refulgentis wrote: | #1 thank you for sharing, I was all prepared to come back | here and say "20 cm-30 cm is a lot! that puts half of | boston underwater!", but it doesn't, not even remotely, | and thus is a useful reminder to me I can chill | | #2 to be fair to OP, think they're referencing what would | happen to humanity as a whole if we _didn't_ have carbon | capture, not specifically "water world by 2100", and | something I've picked up since moving to Boston from | Buffalo is that storm surge has a _much_ more significant | effect when you're around so much water. Even the 20-30 | cm, once you add a foot or two of storm surge that we get | a handful of times a year, floods most of Boston in 2050. | linknoid wrote: | Maybe you can help enlighten me on this. I've been struggling | to understand the basics thermodynamics of carbon capture for | quite some time. | | So we have a hydro-carbon, we mix it with oxygen, and the | oxygen combines with the hydrogen and the carbon, and | releases heat as a byproduct. The heat energy increases the | pressure of the newly created CO2. This higher pressure is | placed on one side of a turbine or a piston, and we extract | useful work by moving it from a high density state to a low | density state, causing it to cool in the process. | | Now it seems like if you want to re-concentrate that CO2, it | should take at least as much work to compress it back to its | original size as it released when you burned it in the first | place, and probably a lot more, because the CO2 has been | diffused into the general atmosphere. | | To state it more succinctly, we extract work through a | pressure differential, and by reversing that pressure | differential, won't that require more work than we got out in | the first place by the second law of thermodynamics? | | I ignored the part where part of the energy is coming from | the hydrogen. Is the hydrogen -> water where most of the | energy is coming from, and the carbon part relatively | insignificant? | jellicle wrote: | You are mostly right, but the missing part is that you | don't need to turn the CO2 back into a hydrocarbon fuel, | you just need to turn it into something that isn't gaseous | CO2. | | So carbon capture hinges on the idea that we can find a | low-energy route that involves a chemical reaction with CO2 | that produces something that isn't a fuel but isn't gaseous | CO2 either. And that we can find a LOT of it. | Majromax wrote: | > he heat energy increases the pressure of the newly | created CO2. This higher pressure is placed on one side of | a turbine or a piston, and we extract useful work by moving | it from a high density state to a low density state, | causing it to cool in the process. | | You run the hot, high-pressure gas through a turbine to | give you less-hot, lower-pressure gas. You then extract as | much waste heat out of that stream as you can via a heat | exchanger process, to pre-heat incoming fuel/air and to | recover more energy by boiling water to run through another | turbine. | | At the end of the process, you have a medium-temperature | stream of combustion product that has high concentrations | of CO2. You capture the carbon from this stream, before | releasing the last bits of gas to the atmosphere. | | You gain usable energy out of the process because all of | the _heat_ movement happens through a turbine (to directly | generate energy) or through a heat exchanger (to recycle | the heat to other more useful parts of the process). | khuey wrote: | Enthalpy of combustion for CH4 is 802 kJ and for an | equivalent amount of gaseous hydrogen it's 286 kJ so most | of the energy does come from the carbon. | ethagknight wrote: | The goal is not to re-create fuel, but to clean up the | waste. This is more like sweeping out the ashtray | sseagull wrote: | This is a really good question, and a bit deeper than it | first appears. So here is some semi-educated spitballing | (I'm a chemist, but thermodynamics was a while ago): | | 1. Immediately after ignition, you have a low-volume, high- | pressure, high-temperature amount of gas. Sequestration | does not aim to turn CO2 back to this exact same state, but | only a high-ish, average-temperature state. | | 2. Combustion often evolves more molecules of gas (look at | the formula for the combustion of octane, and remember that | water after combustion will be a gas). This increases the | pressure, but is not something that needs to be reversed | during sequestration. | | 3. Carbon dioxide isn't bad, but having too much in the | atmosphere is. Sequestration doesn't aim to completely | reverse the reaction in the first place, it just aims to | remove it from the atmosphere so that it can't act as a | greenhouse gas. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Ok closed loop sounds better, the article didn't clarify | this. But the compression itself and the heating will cost | significant energy too, don't forget this. | | But consider for a moment how much coal and oil we've been | digging up since the industrial age. CO2 is much less dense | once it's uncontained underground. It won't stay liquid at | that pressure. | | In that case we'll need to have underground space of a size | of many times the space that all that coal and oil took up, | due to the lower density. Just pumping it there, forcing it | underground in different spots etc will also cause | significant ecological disruption. It's a lot of land we're | going to be running pipelines to, drilling into to inject it, | using heavy machinery etc. | | And if some of it does end up being released due to a | mistake, it can have potentially deadly effects. Like what | happened at Lake Nyos. Safety would really have to be | guaranteed. | | I don't know, it just sounds like a solution that won't scale | to the enormity of the climate problems, and rather more like | big business wanting to monetise the problem itself (and also | use it as an excuse to not reduce consumption). | | But anyway, if it does prove itself in trials I would change | my mind on it. | DennisP wrote: | One great idea for storage is underground basalt | formations. Inject CO2, and it'll turn into limestone in | under two years. It can't solve the whole problem by | itself, but there's enough capacity for gigatons of CO2. | | There are several entities working on this. Here's a | company with a small pilot project, and links to scientific | papers: https://www.carbfix.com/ | throwaway316943 wrote: | I believe basalt can be produced artificially as well, is | there a chance we could build limestone farms? That would | be a neat trick. | corty wrote: | Artificial production alone doesn't do the trick. It | would have to be low in energy consumption, preferably | exothermic. I don't think there is such a reaction with | plentifully available material. Otherwise you spend more | energy on the basalt than the CO_2 production gave you. | | Also, large parts of this planet consist of natural | basalt deposits, every area with some current or historic | vulcanism has them. E.g. half of Siberia is a huge basalt | deposit. Google Siberian Trap. So I do not think | artificial production would be necessary. | marcosdumay wrote: | > But the compression itself and the heating will cost | significant energy too, don't forget this. | | That's in the abstract, it's 2GJ/ton of carbon. So, it's | roughly 1/20 of the energy generated by burning the carbon | at the first place. | londons_explore wrote: | The little detail that injecting CO2 into gas and oil wells | can help get more gas and oil out of them is the main | reason companies are investing in this tech. If the | government can be persuaded to pay for the research, all | the better! | PaulHoule wrote: | In Texas you can find big pockets of CO2 undeground and | pdople havd been driling holes into those and pumping the | CO2 into oil wells. Thus the pipeline, injection, etc. | are all developed. | | CO2 at 1200 psi will mix with oil very well and do | wonders getting into pores, but to scale up storage there | are not enough oil wells and we'd probably store in | saline aquifers. | DennisP wrote: | For electricity generation, it'll be cheaper to build low- | carbon generators. For long-distance jet travel, it's | probably cheapest to turn the captured CO2 into fuel. For | emissions from concrete, ambient capture and sequestration | might be best. | | The great thing about a price on carbon is that the market | would sort all this out. | namibj wrote: | The emissions from concrete come from limestone kilns, | which are even easier to capture the CO2 from than coal | power plants. | DennisP wrote: | Ah, interesting. | | Agriculture is a pretty diffuse source though. And | ultimately, we need to take CO2 levels back down to | 350ppm or so. | namibj wrote: | Oh, for sure. | [deleted] | macspoofing wrote: | >I feel like CO2 sequestration is second only to nuclear in | the amount of unfounded concerns | | The problem with CO2 capture specifically (specifically from | the atmosphere as opposed to at the source) is that CO2 | comprises a very small part of air. This means you have to | move huge amounts of air through a capture device to capture | a very small amount of carbon. How is that ever going to make | sense? | quotemstr wrote: | It makes sense because brute force engineering solutions | are frequently the right ones. If you capture carbon from | the air, you can mass produce _one_ kind of capture | facility and spam as many copies of this facility as you | need (at low cost, thanks to mass production) to give | humanity closed-loop control over atmospheric composition. | | If you rely on source emissions control only, you need | finnicky source-specific installation and control | technology everywhere, which greatly increases the cost and | complexity of the implementation. And there are places | where you can't realistically do carbon capture and | sequestration, e.g. jet engines. | | On top of all that, we live in a world with multiple | governments and jurisdictions, and not all of them agree on | the right level of investment in source capture. Do you | really expect developing countries to give up on coal | generation right away? What are you going to do, bomb them | into the stone age? A climate management solution must be | robust against the problem of uncooperative actors. We | can't rely on everyone getting along and singing carbon | kumbaya. | | Compared to source mitigations, an atmospheric capture | approach is simpler, more robust, and better capable of | dealing with uncooperative emitters. Yes, you have to move | a lot of air, but that's just energy, and energy is cheap | if you're not picky about geography or uptime, and it's | especially cheap if you're not squeamish about nuclear. | HPsquared wrote: | Remember those facilities would have very high running | costs (energy usage), it's not just a case of building | them. | DennisP wrote: | The paper says 2.0 GJ per tonne CO2. One GJ is 278kWh, | and annual emissions about 36 gigatonnes, so that comes | to 2.4 terawatts to absorb all our emissions. | | Global energy consumption is about 18 TW[1], so 2.4 TW is | a lot but not outlandishly so. It makes sense to look at | global energy rather than just global electricity, | because the input to this process is heat. We'd need | clean energy sources, but we have those. Since we need | heat and can use a fixed amount of energy constantly, | high-temperature nuclear reactors would probably be | ideal. | | It would be silly to do this instead of decarbonizing | electricity production and converting to electric cars, | but we also have to deal with steel and concrete | production, agricultural emissions, long-haul jets, etc. | Let's say we need one TW to cover emissions we can't | easily decarbonize. | | Nuclear power produced 2657 TWh of electricity in | 2019.[2] Divide by hours in a year, that's 0.3 TW. | Assuming 50% thermal efficiency, it's 0.6 TW of heat | energy. So basically, triple the number of nuclear plants | in the world and we can absorb 40% of our emissions. | | Some of the high-temperature designs are fast reactors or | thorium breeders. If we use either of those, we won't | remotely strain our nuclear fuel supply. | | There are other methods of absorbing CO2, like | reforestation, topsoil restoration, and olivine beaches. | But most methods have scaling limits. Direct air capture | with basalt sequestration[3] and/or carbon-neutral fuel | production could easily play a large role. | | [1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/current_world_ | energy_... | | [2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information- | library/current-an... | | [3] https://www.carbfix.com/ | elgfare wrote: | I guess the low hanging fruit is to attach this to a power | plant or some other CO2 emitting process. | Jouvence wrote: | That's true, but then it is surely better to cut out the | middle-man and just not use fossil fuels for static | generation in the first place. | | The energy needs which are hard to meet with renewables | (aviation, other large-scale transport) are the same | places where CCS is non-viable due to the efficiency hit. | | The best we can do is decarbonise as quickly as possible, | and live with the fallout of our failure to act this far | - unless a significant use for captured CO2 is | identified, atmospheric capture technology will always | struggle with commercial viability. | elgfare wrote: | The best we can do is to do everything we can. It might | also be interesting to start burning biomass and | capturing the CO2, which would be net negative. | | Maybe it's viable for cement production as well. | GekkePrutser wrote: | > unless a significant use for captured CO2 is identified | | And a significant use that does not end in it being | released to the atmosphere after being used :) | marcosdumay wrote: | > My experience on a 2009 carbon capture plant design was | that approx $100 per tonne of CO2 was the lowest carbon price | that would really make carbon sequestration highly attractive | and widespread. | | Is there a market for captured carbon? I understand there is | a small market for industrial process and carbonated water, | but are there people buying long-term capture in large enough | quantities to make an impact? | | Anyway, I don't think the price matters on that scale. Once | we decarbonize electricity, I think it will be governments | and non-profits that will do most of the carbon capture | (unless there exists a large market for my previous | question), and for those a lower price only means a higher | rate of growth, not the difference between viable or non- | viable. | Gravityloss wrote: | $50 per tonne? A coal plant produces about a tonne of CO2 for | every MWh produced. Industrial electricity price might be $50 | per MWh. So just paying for the carbon capture doubles your | electricity price? $100 carbon capture charge would triple | it. I can't see how this could be competitive. | | We have an excellent carbon storage technology, it's called | coal. And what's best, it's already there, underground, very | safely, proven for millions of years! With no cost! | | But we're still building new coal plants in many places. In | some places, coal plants and steel factories have shut down, | but it's often because industry has been offshored to a place | that uses coal, or they're replaced with natural gas, only a | somewhat better alternative. | | So if leaving coal unused can't be made to work, then more | inefficient and thus expensive methods of carbon avoidance | likely can't either. | | It's like working hard in the car wash for the whole day and | then at the end of the day, spending all the money you just | earned on having your car washed. It's a bad strategy - you | would have spent a lot less time and effort if you had just | washed your car yourself. | | When the coal and natural gas plants have been shut down, | then carbon capture might have a role. | | Nice page about world coal usage: | https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-information-overview | DennisP wrote: | It certainly makes no sense to capture CO2 from burning | coal. But lots of industries are harder to decarbonize than | electricity production. On top of that, we're past the | point where just stopping emissions is enough; we have to | draw CO2 levels back down. | pfdietz wrote: | Capturing CO2 from burned biomass (or waste) would | provide a CO2-negative energy source. Not enough to run | the world, but nice to have. | 7952 wrote: | Co2 pricing is not the only way though. You could give co2 | capturing gas peakers a strike price in the same way as | renewables. Or have a capacity market that is only open to | carbon capturing energy sources. | tjoff wrote: | Double the price of coal sounds like an excellent thing! | | Still very cheap. Promotes better sources of energy. | javajosh wrote: | Indeed. The fact is that coal energy externalities have | been ignored, artificially depressing the cost. | Increasing the cost of a product to reflect those | externalities is not a "blow to the industry", but rather | the first time in history coal's price will reflect its | externalities. | | Nope, it's not a great time to be a coal-miner, but I | hear Biden is trying to spend $4T on infrastructure so | maybe some of those miners can buy a truck and form a | road maintenance company instead! | ethbr0 wrote: | The issues with coal mining are (a) it sucks and is | dangerous, (b) therefore, people who do it, or whose | families have done it, feel a lot of pride about it, (c) | in the US, it's typically located in parts of states that | don't have a lot of other employment (Wyoming, Illinois, | Pennsylvania, West Virginia). | | If you're serious about getting rid of coal in the US, it | needs to start with "We appreciate your and your family's | work over the years, and here's a truckload of money and | economic development for your region so that you can lay | down that burden." | | Nobody reacts favorably to doing a hard job, every day, | and then listening to someone tell them they're killing | the planet. | derefr wrote: | Asbestos, AB somehow managed to get over their pride and | stop fighting to continue mining asbestos. They're still | proud of the _history_ and _hard work_ that their town | represents, but nobody there thinks it would be a better | world if they were still digging asbestos out of the | ground. (Heck, they finally renamed the town, too. It's | "Val-des-Sources" now.) | | How the townsfolk there transitioned into that "doing it | historically was good and necessary; but _continuing_ to | do it today would be dumb and bad" mindset might make for | a good case-study. It'd certainly make for a more | respectful and in-depth interview to do with them than | just talking about the town's name ;) | javajosh wrote: | _> Nobody reacts favorably to doing a hard job, every | day, and then listening to someone tell them they're | killing the planet._ | | Sorry, but them's the breaks! Don't mean to sound harsh, | but larger industries have died for worse reasons. What | you do is what the wage earner did in the past: you suck | it up and you move on because you have to provide for | your family. | | How many layers of industries have we invented and then | rendered obsolete by subsequent industries? That number | varies, in energy alone consider all the changes in | distribution, extraction, etc. There has been a great | deal of change in our understanding of the world since | the invention of the coal industry, and it turns out coal | is far more expensive than we realized. | | I can see though why this seems synthetic, and why one | would be motivated to challenge the assertion of fact. | And it is true, that this argument is "synthetic" in the | sense that it requires synthesizing many different | observations spread over time and space using methods | most of us aren't familiar with. | | But a lot of us are swayed by the argument that using all | this stored up energy in the ground has a side-effect of | increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in direct | proportion to that consumption, and that this in turn is | unwanted because CO2 is opaque to IR, and it will | increase global temperature. | | There is a "false debate" about whether or not the global | temperature is actually increasing. If you look at the | data, or even just the satellite photos of the arctic | over time, you should be convinced that there is no | debate, and its just a simple fact. (And while a | conspiracy that has modified those images is technically | a possibility, I think there's enough on-the-ground | evidence to back it up. If those Richard Attenborough | narrated programs are computer generated, then they have | rendering technology beyond anything in Hollywood.) | | This simple assertion of fact (and its acceptance by a | strong majority) has real ramifications for us in the | most personal of ways, because it is a matter of the | quality of life for our kids and grand-kids. | | The scale of the change we must make is going to be big, | and I think the coal miners are going to get the least of | it. We Americans are all going to have to consider our | consumption more carefully, become more frugal, more | European. Our cars will shrink, and become electric. Our | physical store options will become more limited, but | computer mediated options more diverse, more local, more | self-sustaining. | | Ideally this change comes naturally as small town kids | get educated in major universities in big cities, and are | introduced to what I can only describe as an | "Enlightenment Era Ethos", one that is rational, | reasonable, skeptical, experimental (and innovative), and | which is clearly convinced of the reality and importance | of Global Warming. Personally, I'm convinced on first | principles. Clearly energy expenditure we make, moving a | 4-ton SUV 15 miles each way for one person to go to the | supermarket, where each item comes wrapped in its own | weight of disposable, nested wrappers that serves more of | a marketing purpose than a "safe food delivery" purpose." | | America can and must go through what I call the | "Contraction", where life here becomes more European, | communal, local and frugal in terms of the daily details | of your life. There will also be the further embrace of a | national safety net, and not just for old people. My hope | is that cultural shifts will help major chains like | Starbucks contract, too, being eclipsed by local cafes | with better products, made with greater care, at similar | prices, and giving more people the experience of running | a business and being the boss! Heck, I would like to see | the return of the local ISP business, just a rack of | computers in an office park with battery backups and a | person who knows how to maintain it all and secure it. | | So, don't be fooled. American coal workers have an | outsized influence on national politics in those states | because reasons. Their jobs aren't more sacred than | anyone elses and if they feel "tied to the land" or their | "way of life", I tell them: I'm sorry. We will all need | to change if we're to keep our ecosystem healthy by | averting a possibly unfixible tragedy. | | I will volunteer right now and in a legally binding way, | to tutor, for free, any coal miner who wants to learn how | to code for a living. Reach out via profile. First come, | first serve. | rbanffy wrote: | > (a) it sucks and is dangerous, (b) therefore, people | who do it, or whose families have done it, feel a lot of | pride about it | | We really need to get rid of that "proud to kill myself | to make my employer richer" trait. | | > "We appreciate your and your family's work over the | years, and here's a truckload of money and economic | development for your region so that you can lay down that | burden." | | It's only fair. | gfodor wrote: | They're not proud because they're killing themselves for | their employer, they're proud for killing themselves to | feed their families, and perhaps because they are | creating energy for others to use. | rbanffy wrote: | Nobody should have to choose between living a healthy | life and feeding their family. | [deleted] | gfodor wrote: | That is a strange way to say "perhaps I jumped to | conclusions assuming people who are proud to be miners | are foolish and ignorant for doing so" | ByteJockey wrote: | Ok, but people did. | | And there's a certain amount of pride in that struggle. | khuey wrote: | > I can't see how this could be competitive. | | It can't. Coal plants are dinosaurs that need to be shut | down. Charging a carbon price is one way to make that | happen faster. | lenkite wrote: | How does one leverage this excellent carbon storage | technology ? Plant fast-growing trees/crops, cut them upon | maturity and bury them underground ? | headsupernova wrote: | Simple - don't light it on fire. | thatcat wrote: | The closest thing we have to coal creation is biochar, so | you plant the trees and then anaerobically pyrolyze the | material and put it underground. | namibj wrote: | Be aware that capturing exhaust CO2 of coal plants is about | the cheapest source of CO2 for capturing, as you just need | to pre-enrich the air in oxygen to get nearly-pure CO2 | exhaust. | | This expensive part is for capturing CO2 out of ambient | air, where you only get like 0.04%. | ehnto wrote: | It doesn't have to be competitive, it has to be regulated. | If coal plants and CO2 emissions heavy processes aren't | viable once the cost of sequestering the carbon is charged | to the people emitting the carbon, then they should give | way to processes that do (or be expensive enough that | they're only used when necessary) | | We can't solve the crisis by trying our best not to disturb | the status quo, things are going to get shaken up a bit. | Gravityloss wrote: | Yes, though even now it's already possible to price CO2, | yet somehow it doesn't factor in significantly in the | price of goods produced with coal heavy electricity. | scsilver wrote: | If coal plants produce 50$ in unaccounted externalities for | every 1MWh they produce, is it fair to any of us to allow | them not to have to pay for it's mitigation? | DesiLurker wrote: | thats a good point, I'd argue given that CO2 | concentration in atmosphere is a public bad (as in taking | ability to sustain life out of 'common biosphere'), the | cost to remove it on a per unit basis represents a good | measure of externalized costs of unmitigated pollution | (just co2, ignoring other pollutants for the moment). | | this is doubly good because it provides a great incentive | for the free market to minimize the costs of CO2 | sequestration and hopefully will let us hit the knee of | the optimization curve asap. | 8note wrote: | The government will pay for it so they can keep a few coal | workers in business and get their influencial votes | magicalhippo wrote: | > I also happen to think a $100 per tonne carbon price is not | such a bad idea. | | Government here in Norway recently released their climate | plan, and part of it was the gradual increase to 2000 NOK | (~234 USD) per tonne of CO2 in 2030[1]. | | Not sure if it survives the years of politics between then | and now though... | | [1]: https://www.dn.no/politikk/erna-solberg/sveinung- | rotevatn/kl... | layoutIfNeeded wrote: | Does this include the carbon ultimately released from oil | that was sold to other countries by Norway? | [deleted] | magicalhippo wrote: | As I understand it no, it only covers usage of oil and | other fossil products. | | On the one hand I absolutely agree that's ignoring a | major CO2 source. | | On the other hand, if Norway added the CO2 tax to | exported fossil fuel but other countries did not, would | that affect fossil fuel consumption in any meaningful | way? | extropy wrote: | I would guess no. The buyer could be pumping it back in | the ground for all the seller knows. | | Requirement to sell "carbon neutral" oil to countries | that do not have their own carbon capture rules would be | an interesting idea. | | Could as well add another tax for all the other nasty | chemicals the refinement process releases. | layoutIfNeeded wrote: | >The buyer could be pumping it back in the ground for all | the seller knows. | | Yeah, I'm afraid I don't buy this reasoning... | marvin wrote: | Super fascinating. Wasn't aware that the suggested CO2 tax | was this high. This is the order of magnitude we need to | aim for, in order to make CO2 removal and reduction of CO2 | emissions properly profitable. | | I get the impression that the tax is to be levied on the | entity that emits CO2 to the atmosphere, not the fuel | producer? | | What's also encouraging is that it's the right party | fronting this suggestion. It's not a fringe left-wing | environmental party. | magicalhippo wrote: | > I get the impression that the tax is to be levied on | the entity that emits CO2 to the atmosphere | | Yes that seems to be the case[1]. | | > It's not a fringe left-wing environmental party. | | Indeed, so will be interesting times ahead. Not | unsurprisingly Norway has a very oil-oriented industry, | which obviously did not think too highly of this | proposal. There's lots of talk about transitioning to a | "greener economy" but precious few concrete proposals | about how to turn those jobs green. | | So yeah, interesting times ahead. | | [1]: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/tema/okonomi-og- | budsjett/skatt... | holoduke wrote: | Key is to plant plans and trees. Billions of them. Our energy | needs will only become bigger. Transition to renewable economy | is in progress. That's good. But there is not enough focus on | plants and trees. | Klapaucius wrote: | For any mitigation solution, you have to ask 3 questions 1) | How much does it cost 2) How much space does it require 3) | How does it scale | | Planting trees performs excellent on (1) but terribly on (2) | and (3). According to Bill Gates' recent book on the topic | (where he aims as best has he can to summarize the state of | knowledge as per today), you'd basically have to make a big | forest of the rest of the world just to offset US emissions. | | In addition, it's not enough to plant trees, you have to | plant trees where there wouldn't have grown any if you were | not planting (i.e. making forest out of non-forest). This is | going to put an additional huge strain on the need for land | to feed more mouths, which is a problem that is only becoming | more precarious. | imtringued wrote: | You're supposed to turn the Sahara into a green forest. The | obvious problem is that you would need the cooperation of | those countries. | horstmeyer wrote: | Yes and trees only store CO2 while they are alive. Once | they die and rot, it's released back into the environment. | Also monocultures with fast groing trees that ideally can | be harvested come with their own problems. Planting trees | is good way to do something now, but it's not going to | solve the problem forever. | graeme wrote: | Avoiding emissions would certainly be better. It is supremely | inefficient to dig up and burn fuel now then capture it and | bury it later. | | But current global plan is to keep doing the first part, so | we'll have to undo it. We actually _already_ likely have too | much CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if we went to zero emissions | today the climate would keep warming from the accumulated CO2 | and feedback effects. Takes some years for those to work | through the system. | inglor_cz wrote: | Well, _anyone_ can decide to run potential future capture | plants, cleaning up after others (that includes the previous | generations), while _everyone_ would have to agree to reduce | emissions. | | What looks inefficient as far as pure physics goes, might be | very efficient politically. Build some solar power plants in | the Sahara, use the energy to sequester carbon, pay poor | countries like Niger some money for that, reduce the current | migration stream to Europe by creating local green jobs - | that does not sound too bad. | gameswithgo wrote: | Yes most people do not fully grasp the scale of the problem. | Any way you attack it the scale is absurd making almost all | solutions crazy. Getting the co2 back and putting it somewhere, | ceasing all fossil fuel use, storing enough energy for wind and | solar to work, all of these are trillion dollars scale global | moonshot projects. | | *but so its all of the energy/money/effort that goes into | modern fossil fuel extraction and processing so it isn't | fundamentally impossible* | TigeriusKirk wrote: | >I think we should really reduce our energy usage instead. | | There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's energy | usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a dangerous | one. | | Energy use is fundamentally tied to progress to such an extent | that we should always be looking for ways to increase the | energy available to us. | | Of course the energy should be produced in as low-impact a | manner as possible, but it's long past time to accept that | energy usage will go up, not down. | kenmacd wrote: | It seems this excludes increases in efficiencies. For example | today we have lighting that uses a small fraction of the | power of a couple decades ago. | | Plus we're nearing peak populations, after which the number | of humans will be going down. | bushbaba wrote: | Most energy usage isn't residential in nature. | | It's likely our industrial needs will continue to increase | even with a smaller population | _jal wrote: | Energy efficiencies do not decrease energy use, you just | get more of the cheaper thing. | | I agree more with the second point; the way that I'd say | that is humans as a species will never self-moderate energy | use. | samvher wrote: | Obligatory mention of Jevons Paradox: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox | CharlesW wrote: | Thank you, I'm one of today's lucky 10,000. | https://xkcd.com/1053/ | epistasis wrote: | This is false, energy efficiencies do decrease energy | use, in most situations. Jevon's paradox is the | exception, not the rule. | | For example, increasing fuel efficiency of cars does | decrease energy use, because fuel cost is not the | limiting factor foe most car travel. Similarly, more | efficient lighting, more efficient home space heating and | water heating, and better weatherization of homes, all | increase energy efficiency and decrease energy use. | | There's only so much lighting I would ever want to use, | only so much heat, only so much time I want to spend in a | car. Energy efficiency is one of the most powerful tools | we have to reduce pollution, because it makes all the | other things easier. | revax wrote: | >For example, increasing fuel efficiency of cars does | decrease energy use | | MPG from passenger car didn't decreased since 1976 | despite huge advancement in fuel efficiency. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CAFE_mpg_curve_from_NH | TSA... | porb121 wrote: | MPG is a measure of efficiency, so it makes sense that it | increases. To support your argument, you would need to | demonstrate a corresponding increase in vehicle miles | traveled per car, so that total gallons of fuel burned | (i.e. energy) is constant or increasing. | epistasis wrote: | There's a lot going on with US gasoline consumption: | | 1) land use decisions are pushing people further from | workplaces | | 2) consumers are switching from the "car" class of | vehicle to "light truck" which is negating fuel | efficiency improvements [1]. There's a lot going on here, | from people getting larger vehicles for perceived safety, | to better comfort, to just having more money to spend on | larger vehicles. Plus, all those people who think they | need a truck despite using the bed once or twice per | year. | | 3) Demand for gasoline is incredibly inelastic in | response to price, with huge price spikes having almost | no change in gallons of gasoline even as consumption in | dollars spike [2] | | [1] https://thenextweb.com/shift/2021/01/12/despite-ev- | growth-ga... | | [2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40893 | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | As an anecdote: if you take an ant population (or any | controllable population), and put it into a confined | space with constrained resources, the population | eventually dies due to one of two things: | | 1. Elimination of resources | | 2. Excessive waste product (in this case, excrement and | bodily wastes; pollution) | epistasis wrote: | You seem to be talking about the need of a species to | rely on a greater ecosystem in order to survive. However, | I'm not sure how that relates to demand elasticity and | energy efficiency. Perhaps you could be a bit more | explicit? | plutonorm wrote: | Is transitioning slowly back to a hunter gatherer life style | morally a bad idea? If so why? | sporkland wrote: | Depends if you think babies and moms dying is a morally bad | thing or not. | | Estimated 30-50% mortality rate for babies and 1% per birth | mortality rate for moms (times say 12 kids). Lotta innocent | babies gotta die to achieve your goals. | | While this may sound tongue in cheek or a gotcha. I do | think people underestimate how terrible, hard and brutal it | was to live in those cultures as a human. We definitely | create our share of travesties as modern humans (factory | farms, anthropogenic mass extinction events, global climate | change making the world uninhabitable). It remains to be | seen if we can use technology to out pace some of these | problems we've created, but I'm somewhat hopeful that we | can, and find a path forward to live humanely and | sustainably. | laurent92 wrote: | People always think about medical conditions when | thinking about archaic societies; but there is also an | associated cost in not having a central ministry in | charge of monitoring violence to women. Energy abundance | shaped people's moral values and society, we'll also lose | them when scaling down. In other example: Who cares about | PETA during war, who protects the gays, etc. | | So yes, scaling down is de facto against our moral | values. | danmaz74 wrote: | How many billion people would need to die to make that | sustainable? | aardvarkr wrote: | This sounds like hyperbole but it's the honest truth. | Billions would die due to food shortages. Our modern | farming system is incredible at its job of feeding 7 | billion people. | dagss wrote: | ...and yet 1/3rd of the food is thrown away/perish | globally. | | There is a lot of excessive waste / inefficiencies due to | energy being -- relatively -- cheap. | | If energy prices soar, many inefficiencies will get more | attention. Like, if food becomes more expensive we would | stop throwing away 1/3 of it. (And more houses would get | proper insulation. And so on.) | eloff wrote: | You want to reduce the world population to a hundred | million or so? How do you do that ethically? | | How would you get everybody to agree to accept all the | limitations and ills of their non technological lives | without wanting to reinvent modern civilization? | PaulAJ wrote: | A pure hunter gatherer lifestyle is going to support a | percent or less of current population. So you are basically | going to have to prohibit the vast majority of the | population from having children for a century or so. It | also means abandoning all technology. Good luck persuading | people to go along with that. | BurningFrog wrote: | Humans produce the vast majority of food we eat. | | If we stopped that, and just consumed the food that nature | spontaneously produces, it supports maybe 50M people. So | first you'd have to kill 7000M people. | | Even after that, I don't know how you'd stop people from | reinventing agriculture. | | So on balance, I recommend against this :) | fnord77 wrote: | > There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's | energy usage decreases | | sure there is. reduce the population by a factor of 10. | occz wrote: | Any true malthusian will of course voluntarily take the | first step and remove themselves. Right? | api wrote: | Scratch a Malthusian and you will find either a pure | misanthrope or a racist. In either case the solution is | always for others to die. | rebuilder wrote: | Surely we can agree that growth in total energy usage must | stop at some point? With continuous growth, you run into the | limit of the earth's ability to radiate heat into space, or | later on, the energy produced by the sun, in worryingly short | timeframes. | nerbert wrote: | We can agree to talk about it again once we're exploiting | the energy of the entire galaxy. | rebuilder wrote: | Without FTL, I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about a | "we" doing galactic conquest, it'll be a bunch of | societies who never talk to each other, or even separate | species given the timescales involved. | stcredzero wrote: | Basically, any scientifically/1st principles viable | technology that might save us from doing extensive | desperation geo-engineering deserves some investment, from a | cost/benefit point of view. Otherwise, we might learn that we | coined the name "Antropocene" too early. | | _There is no viable future scenario in which mankind 's | energy usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a | dangerous one._ | | Agreed. There would need to be crushing totalitarian rule | over everyone on Earth to prevent progress, and that wouldn't | be stable long term. Otherwise, competition by competing | powers will inevitably result in a Kardashev 2 civilization. | Here's why: | | Space solar power and fusion power are a couple of _serious_ | tech /economic inflection points. Once humanity's technology | and our self-organization reach that level of capability, we | are literally within striking distance of threatening any | star system in our galaxy with huge destructive energies. We | only need one of the two for this to be the case. Fusion is | unnecessary at this point. If someone can establish large- | scale industry on the Moon and the asteroids, solar power | will be every bit as good as fusion in many regards. (At | large enough scales, solar power _is_ fusion power, | basically.) | | Modern geopolitics are _dominated_ by the logistics of energy | transport and production. It has been this way since before | World War II. The logistics of fueling factories, ships, then | tanks and airplanes has absolutely dominated strategic | thinking since even before that time. The lengths to which | the allies went to provide the fuel to run the invasion of | Europe were absolute feats of engineering, planning, and | intelligence /disinformation. So just think ahead a bit: what | if, instead of having to fuel your military, you could | instead beam power to outposts, which would use that power to | synthesize fuel? The side that can do that would have huge | logistical advantages, which would also be strategic | advantages. (There's a compelling reason why submarines and | aircraft carriers are nuclear powered.) | | Going further, once we are at the level of space industry at | scale, the Earth becomes just one location in a much larger | context, whose available energy dwarfs the available energy | on Earth by many orders of magnitude. At those levels of | available energy, we could build things like Shkadov | thrusters and Nicoll-Dyson beams. At that point, we'd have | the hypothetical ability to move stars and build devices that | could fry the biospheres off of planets in the bulk of our | own galaxy. | samvher wrote: | A lot of energy is currently used for low-utility purposes | (e.g. flying for meetings). There are also major | opportunities for reduce-reuse-recycle that would not result | in significant decreases in quality of life. | | I'm all for aiming for high energy availability in the long | run, but the idea that we can just keep increasing our usage | monotonically (without a temporary reduction to get our shit | sorted out) seems like the dangerous pipe dream to me. | | Edit because I think maybe the tone sounded a bit | short/unfriendly: I see a carbon tax as a necessary step in | taking care of our issues, and my expectation is that this | would reduce usage of fossil fuels quite significantly, | temporarily. It seems likely that our energy budget would | move more towards high-value-per-joule activities such as | information technology and away from things like | transportation. And I think this is a necessary step - people | are currently quite careless about energy, especially about | usage of fossil fuels, and I think if they become aware of | its cost across a variety of activities they will adjust | accordingly. | shoo wrote: | I agree that avoiding emissions in the first place is | preferable to trying to figure out how to undo the emissions | afterwards. | | Mental model of emission removal scope is some giant world | system maybe 1x or 2x the size of the fossil fuel industry, | trying to run in reverse what we've spent the last hundred or | two years doing. | | Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax. Something significant like | $250 / ton. Cannot come soon enough. Ideally a global carbon | tax, failing that just between a few countries & with tariffs | or sanctions or so on to penalize trading partners that don't | regulate externalities of pollution. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Exactly that's what I think too. We have to do the removal | much faster than we did the actual burning. And the removal | will only cost us money, not fuel our economy. I just don't | see this happening at significant enough scale. And the | capture will have lots of environmental impact too if we do | it at that massive scale. | | And I agree about the carbon tax. It could even pay for some | of the removal. | | The strange thing here now in Europe is that greener | alternatives like trains are taxed much higher than dirtier | ones like airplanes. Because trains have VAT taxes on them, | but the planes fly on kerosene that's exempt from tax and the | price kept down due to international agreements. | | As a result trains aren't a reasonable alternative and won't | be for at least the next 20 years or so (as the train network | would have to be scaled up significantly which would have | been happening already if it was more a better alternative to | flying). It's a shame because Europe is a great place for | this with lots of short-distance trips. | saddlerustle wrote: | Most european rail is given huge government subsidies too, | though. Also flights in the EU already have to pay for | emissions as part of the EU emissions trading scheme. | pantalaimon wrote: | At least in Germany, car subsidies (investments in road | infrastructure) are significantly larger than any | investments in rail infrastructure. | Aachen wrote: | > I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. | What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? | | I don't see coal being an environmental hazard and that's | carbon captured in the ground. Plus you have to ask whether | some risk of leaks or whatever is worse than not even trying at | all. | | > I don't think we'll manage to do significant CO2 capture | before the effects are irreversible anyway. | | - Without joking: not with that attitude we won't. Let's not | quit before trying? | | - We need all solutions to develop and mature right now. If it | turns out cement remains unsolved, for example, or maybe it's | fertilizer that we can't find a solution for or we can't get | the solution to farmers in low income countries, then having a | way of removing said issue indirectly will still be helpful. | | - There are different degrees to overshooting. A +3degC climate | (already way too hot by current estimates) is still better than | a +5degC. Maybe the runaway effects at +3 make it into +5, but | also, those effects take time to run their course. Anything we | do to slow down, reverse, control, it all buys us time to | decide what options to deploy. "We won't manage anyway, why | bother" is the only wrong path to walk down. Maybe we can adapt | to +4, but without tech to reduce emissions or counter a | runaway effect, it won't stay at +4. | inglor_cz wrote: | "I don't see coal being an environmental hazard" | | As long as you do not accidentally set it on fire ... | | This is actually fairly close to Aachen, no? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennender_Berg | GekkePrutser wrote: | > I don't see coal being an environmental hazard and that's | carbon captured in the ground. Plus you have to ask whether | some risk of leaks or whatever is worse than not even trying | at all. | | When it's in the ground it's not, no. But when we try to take | it out or put it back in it does cause significant | environmental disruption. Especially open mining. | | > - Without joking: not with that attitude we won't. Let's | not quit before trying? | | Because any effort and money we throw at this won't go to | things that are more likely to work. The scale to make CO2 | capture actually make a difference is huge. Even the thought | of producing and siting all those capture factories is | mindbogglingly difficult without creating even bigger | problems. For example: If we have to ship all their machinery | and steel from China, we're likely to emit more CO2 than they | will capture in years. | | Like I said I'm open to being proven wrong but I don't think | it will ever scale to this level. | earlyriser wrote: | It's important to throw money at this, but also to throw | brains that could bring surprisingly simple ideas. Have you | seen tech like https://noyalabs.com ? There's no need to | create a capture factory with their approach. | qPM9l3XJrF wrote: | "just reduce our energy usage" has been the plan for decades, | and it's easier said than done. Also: | | "Our hardest climate problems - the ones that are both large | and lack obvious solutions - are agriculture (and deforestation | - its major side effect) and industry. Together these are 45% | of global carbon emissions. And solutions are scarce." | | https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how-to-decarbonize-america... | | At the very least I think carbon capture makes sense for the | long tail of industrial processes where the "CO2 emission" to | "cost of reinventing process" ratio starts to get less and less | favorable. | | But even if you think we can decarbonize every last industrial | process, we might as well develop carbon capture in case too | much carbon gets emitted before that goal is achieved. | cryptica wrote: | As a rule of thumb, any attempt to control things on a global | scale when there are millions of unknown variables will always | have unexpected drawbacks and more likely than not, the | drawbacks will not be worth the benefits. | Klapaucius wrote: | Underground saline aquifers are an excellent place to store | CO2, and worldwide storage space is estimated to be orders of | magnitude above what is ever going to be needed. | | Also, keep in mind that CO2 is not stored as a gas, but in | dense phase (liquid-like), due to the high pore pressures at | the depths considered (> 3000 feet), well above the CO2 | critical point. | | At these depths, any leakage to the surface would be | negligeable unless you make a really lousy job in choosing your | reservoir. | | I agree that we should aim to reduce energy usage, but I would | argue we would need to both. As often said, there is no "silver | bullet" to dealing with climate change, only the possibility of | a "silver buckshot", where we'll have to do many large changes | at once. Even if we could transit to 100% "green energy" | overnight, that alone wouldn't take care of more than less than | half of current emissions. | | A third of emissions come from industrial processes, much of | which entirely unrelated to the energy used. In a nutshell, | these emissions can be reduced using CO2 capture/storage, or | alternatively we could stop making things such as steel, cement | or fertilizer. | watertom wrote: | The effects are irreversible. Once the permafrost began to | thaw, and that started back in the 80's, it's been game over. | The permafrost is releasing massive amounts of CO2, Methane, | and Nitrous Oxide, in about 10 years the earth itself will be | releasing as much greenhouse gasses as humans release. | | The entirety of the Paris agreement has been a joke, cap | warming? You can't cap the warming, you need to put the earth | into a stable situation to cap the warming, but that's not | possible. The earth's climate has a number of positive feedback | loops running, positive feedback loops don't stop until either | they run out of "fuel" in this case it would be greenhouse | gases as the fuel, but with the permafrost thawing it will | continue to thaw and release greenhouse gases, causing more | warming, causing more gases to be released. | | The other way to stop a positive feedback loop is a disruptive | event. The climate positive feedback loop is massive so the | disruptive event would also need to be massive, like a large | meteor hitting the earth, or a super volcano erupting, of | course both of those events would kill most life on earth, but | it would stop global warming. | | All we can do is witness what we've set into motion. What I | think will happen is that through the acidification of the | oceans the phytoplankton population will crash. Phytoplankton | is the basis for the entire marine ecosystem, when that | population crash happens, the entirety of the marine food chain | will collapse quickly. 40% of the world's population relies on | the ocean as their primary source of protein. | rayiner wrote: | Reducing energy usage is just the slow path to extinction. | We'll never become a multi-planet civilization with that | attitude. | | Also if you believe the science, reducing energy usage won't | meet targets. The developed world will have to go carbon | negative over the next couple of decades to counter growing CO2 | emissions in the developing world. | rm445 wrote: | If we could capture carbon by itself, we wouldn't bury it, we | could make all kinds of stuff with it. The problem, | approximately, is that you get energy from oxidising stuff, and | have to put energy in to reduce it. | | Of course, turning solar energy plus carbon dioxide into | sequestered carbon and O2 is what plants do, but evidently not | enough compared to human action. I do wonder whether biological | (plants, algae) action, aided by genetic modification, could do | more for atmospheric CO2. | williesleg wrote: | Nice! A tree! | gwern wrote: | Fulltext mirror: | https://www.gwern.net/docs/science/2020-zheng.pdf | samlosodesign wrote: | If we do this we also need to build Snowpiercer | worik wrote: | At ~$50/Tonne, that is more than than current carbon prices, as | far as I can tell. | | The cheapest way is to not produce it in the first place. | | Deepening topsoil is my favourite way of sequestering carbon. | teabee89 wrote: | In addition to price, I would like to see, for any CO2 capture | tech, the estimated CO2 emission amount with scope 3 accounting | (i.e., including the CO2 emitted in the entire supply chain, | amortized by the estimated non-infinite lifetime). | cryptica wrote: | I don't see what is the point to try to remove CO2 from the | atmosphere. I don't even understand the fuss around global | warming.Why is global warming a bad thing? | | The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the | additional heat. There will be natural selection as usual. New | variants of plants will evolve which can absorb more CO2. All | species on earth will find a new equilibirum as they always had | in the past. | | The fear of global warming is only a human concern. The planet | and the animals don't give a crap - Each individual specimen just | tries the best they can to adapt to whatever the universe morphs | into. | | The problem with trying to manage global situations is that | evolution is cleverer than you are. | | To quote George Carlin: | | "We're so self-important. Everybody's going to save something | now. 'Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those | snails.' And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save | the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves | yet." | | "The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. | And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet | will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth | plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward | plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees | plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only | reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first | place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. | Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric | philosophical question, 'Why are we here?'" | | Full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so- | self-import... | GekkePrutser wrote: | True. Some areas will become uninhabitable or flooded but | others will become more habitable (like permafrost/tundra | regions). Nature will indeed adapt though there will be reduced | biodiversity for a while. Especially because this effect | normally happens on a much longer timescale. | | I think the problem is more that the regions that will become | uninhabitable are currently mostly inhabited by people. And | often pretty poor ones. It will cause millions to billions of | people having to be relocated, causing many societal issues on | its own, with a serious potential of societal collapse or war. | Especially because the source and destination of these mass- | migrations will often lay in different countries. See how | refugees from wars in e.g. Africa or Syria are currently not | really welcome anywhere, and multiply their numbers by 1000. | That's the kind of disruption we're talking. Migrants will get | more desperate while on the other side of the fence anti- | migrant feelings will grow more and you have an explosive | situation just waiting for a spark. | | And war itself is a major destructor not just of humans but of | the planet itself. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons. | cryptica wrote: | Humans will use nuclear weapons eventually. They exist, so | they will be used eventually. That cannot be stopped. "Monkey | see, monkey do" principle. And the people in power seem to | keep getting dumber so we are probably not far off. | quotemstr wrote: | There are really two separate questions that we have to | consider when talking about the climate: | | 1) "Do we as a species need to be able to control the | composition of the atmosphere?", and | | 2) "What is the optimal composition of the atmosphere?". | | The answer to question #1 is pretty clearly "yes". We're well | on our way to becoming a Kardashev type I civilization. At that | planetary scale, humanity's inputs to various global systems | will just swamp the natural feedbacks that kept things roughly | stable before people, so if we don't exert some kind of | stabilizing control ourselves, the system will break down. Are | we on the verge of a breakdown right now? Maybe. Maybe not. | It's complicated. But at some point, if humanity keeps growing, | we will reach a point where active management of planetary | systems becomes a necessity --- we're going to have to learn to | terraform the Earth. | | And as for question #2? Maybe the optimal atmosphere has more | carbon than it did in the pleistocene. Finding the right level | of carbon in the atmosphere is a task that will depend on fancy | modeling and careful experimentation. But it's hard to worry | about question #2 when we haven't figured out #1; why worry | about exactly the right position for a knob on a complex | machine when the machine's knob is currently broken off? | dagss wrote: | Question 2 cannot be answered without tying into history and | politics.. | | Climate change trends will likely be negative for US food | production and citied... but excellent to Russian food | production and affect barely any Russian infrastructure. | | Climate change is objectively good for Russia; devastating | for Bangladesh, probably very bad for US and Europe.. | | So question 2 is hard for that reason too. | Jabbles wrote: | _" The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the | additional heat"_ | | Evolution takes thousands of years. In that time species will | go extinct, so there is no chance for them to evolve. | | For a simple demonstration of how fast we are changing the | climate compared to other periods when ecosystems may have been | able to adapt, see https://xkcd.com/1732/ | cryptica wrote: | >> Evolution takes thousands of years | | Not true. Natural selection can work its magic in a single | generation. | | For example, given any normal population, choose any trait | and remove all individuals which have this trait from the | population. The next generation will not have this trait. | Specimens with the trait will become extremely rare depending | on how accurate the selection process was. | | It can be quite radical. For example, if a law was introduced | (with death penalty) which prevented all people of normal | height and above from having children. In just one | generation, all humans would become much shorter. | Aachen wrote: | Yeah, because there exist short humans and so their genes | would indeed be passed on. Now check that for all organisms | relevant to our food chain (assuming we even know which | ones those are, and assuming we only care for ourselves and | the rest can go extinct) there is a sufficient number of | individuals in the relevant places able to cope with | droughts, heat waves, flooding, storms, and other extreme | weather introduced in the new climate. | | It doesn't magically just solve itself, even if that's the | easiest thing to tell yourself and look for confirmation | bias for. | 8note wrote: | Now try this with food. In one generation get these animals | to stop needing to eat. | Jabbles wrote: | That's not natural selection, that's artificial selection. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding | cryptica wrote: | Your counter-argument is about semantics. Logically, it | only reinforces my argument. Unless you're suggesting | that global warming is natural and not caused by | humans... | | If you agree that 'artificial selection' can work quickly | (as scientific evidence suggests) and you believe that | humans are the main driver of climate change (as is the | consensus among climate scientists). Then my proposition | that evolution can work very fast in the context of | global warming (being an 'artificial', human-driven | process) is a logical conclusion. | | QED. | Jabbles wrote: | Wow what a watertight argument. | | The key is the word "can" - which you interpret to mean | "extremely likely", and I interpret to mean "extremely | unlikely". | | Other than that, we agree. | phreeza wrote: | I'm not saying it will come to it, but the worst case for | global warming is not some jungle planet, it is earth turning | into a planet like venus, which would probably sterilize earth | if it happens faster than evolutionary timescales that are | needed for nature to adapt as you suggest. | | The argument about us not being able to save ourselves is | really a falacy, akin to whataboutism. It's the same as saying | we shouldn't fly to the moon as long as there is famine on | earth, or not try to cure cancer as long as we don't have a | cure for the common cold. | LatteLazy wrote: | You could even use the waste heat from a power plant to drive the | co2 back out... | sradman wrote: | ScienceMag summarizes this research in an article named _New | generation of carbon dioxide traps could make carbon capture | practical_ : | | https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/new-generation-carbo... | seesawtron wrote: | This [0] AMA from the research group answers most of the | questions I am seeing here in the thread. | | "Technologies range from aqueous amines - the water-rich solvents | that run through modern, commercially available capture units - | to energy-efficient membranes that filter CO2 from flue gas | emitted by power plants. Our newest solvent, EEMPA, can | accomplish the task for as little as $47.10 per metric ton - | bringing post-combustion capture within reach of 45Q tax | incentives." | | [0] reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mdouzu/askscience_ama_series | _hi_reddit_we_are_scientists/ | williesleg wrote: | Trees and plants consume CO2 and produce O2. By absorbing the | CO2 you make less trees. That will kill the plants. Mission | accomplished. Assholes. | Aachen wrote: | Clickable link: | https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mdouzu/askscien... | londons_explore wrote: | $47.10 per ton smells like someone has calculated the cost of | the reagents and cited that as the price... | | Any estimate of this process cost would never be to 3 Sig fig. | hansvm wrote: | Sig figs are just a crude method to in-band signal some | bounds on your estimates. They don't seem super relevant here | when communicating an order of magnitude improvement. | CharlesW wrote: | I don't know why $47.10 is any less credible than $47, but | here's more detail on what the estimate represents from | TFAMA: | | "For the $47.10/metric ton carbon capture cost, 48% comes | from CAPEX while the remaining is OPEX. The equipment life of | a carbon capture unit would be similar to that of a power | plant, about 20-30 years. The $47.10/metric ton cost is just | for carbon capture, and does not include transportation and | sequestration costs." | eitland wrote: | It is still suspicious to use so exact numbers for a | technology that has not yet been tested out at scale at | all. | phreeza wrote: | In my experience, the obsession with correct significant | figures is an american high school thing. Why should you | deliberately have to choose a number that is not your | best guess? Ideally you should include confidence bounds, | but if you don't, it shouldn't imply that you are | confident to that level. | kortilla wrote: | It hints that someone doesn't understand these confidence | values at all. | | Why $47.10 and not $47.1032471? | adrianmonk wrote: | That's definitely where I learned that it was expected. | | I look at it as one of many possible conventions for | communicating precision. For what it is, it works well. | But it's not universal, and people who do and don't use | it should both keep in mind that the other group exists. | nullc wrote: | Yep. The weird thing is that their sigfig rules of thumb | aren't particularly accurate and after any non-trivial | operations (or more than a few operations) just give | wrong results. | | Tracking precision through calculations requires interval | arithmetic, which is a pretty big PITA and not frequently | used. | | I think the sig figs cult comes out of mistaking a | simplified lesson on precision for a useful practice. | LasEspuelas wrote: | Not sure exactly what you mean. It is well known that you | should keep additional digits throughout the calculation | and then drop non-significant ones for final results. | Gibbon1 wrote: | When I was getting my engineering degree too many | significant figures would earn you -2 pts. | lb1lf wrote: | Measure with a micrometer. | | Mark with a chalk. | | Cut with an axe. | | (Apparent practice at a workshop I used to frequent.) | Gibbon1 wrote: | Old crusty semi-retired engineer I knew said when he was | young he liked designing things to close tolerances. But | once he was old he found more pleasure in designing | things that worked with really shitty tolerances. | lb1lf wrote: | -I had a colleague once, fresh out of mechanical | engineering at the local univerity college, who as his | first project did a locking pawl for a winch drum. | | Tolerance? H7. | | The fitters threw a fit trying to make that happen. | jfim wrote: | Because it gives an idea of what range is expected for | the actual price. If someone gets an estimate of "about | fifty bucks" versus "about $51.04", their reaction to | seeing a final price of say $62.17 would be different. | The first one implies that it's a rough estimate, while | the second one doesn't. | phreeza wrote: | "About" is doing a lot of work, too, no? | throwawayfire wrote: | If someone said "about fifty bucks" and it turns out to | be $62.17, I'd immediately understand them to be scamming | me. | jfim wrote: | Really depends on what the context is. Maybe for a taxi | ride when negotiating a price ahead of time, but pointing | at an object, asking for its price, getting an estimate | that's off, then getting the actual price before the | transaction is completed doesn't feel like a scam. | aaron695 wrote: | > I don't know why $47.10 is any less credible than $47 | | It shows a lack of understanding of either basic science or | napkin maths. | | For either reality, science or invention, it matters. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures | worldofmatthew wrote: | I am pretty sure the $0.10 per tree of the Eden reforest | project would be far cheaper than $47.10 per ton, to say the | least. | | That would be 471 trees for $47.10. | earlyriser wrote: | That price is per tree planted and there's not guarantee | the tree is going to grow. It's great to plant trees, but | even if we could reforest the entire Earth on the good | places we'll need other technologies to capture carbon. | KptMarchewa wrote: | Does the 0.10$ include land acquisition for the forest? If | not, the cost could be significantly higher. | sbierwagen wrote: | Reforestation only sequesters carbon if the land remains | forest forever. If it's cleared again in the future then | that carbon goes right back into the atmosphere. | vbezhenar wrote: | Just plant trees, cut them and bury in the oceans. Nature already | have all the necessary mechanisms to capture carbon. On the plus | side it'll serve as an energy reserve for future civilizations | should ours collapse. | worldofmatthew wrote: | We have a lot of spare space for mangroves. That will store | most of the carbon in the soil for up to 1,000 years. | matthewmorgan wrote: | Now let's start charging $50 a ton to release CO2 | heipei wrote: | The EU is charging ~ $47 (USD) per ton right now. | freeone3000 wrote: | Huh, that's a convenient and familiar looking price. | qeternity wrote: | Alright HN domain experts. I'm prepared. What's the rub? | adammunich wrote: | It's only practical on mixtures with high co2 gas | concentrations | mdf wrote: | Would inside a chimney work? | extropy wrote: | From the abstract it seems to be very applicable to | combustion exhausts (coal/gas plants) and consuming 5-10% of | the combustion energy to recapture the CO2. | | Hard to tell what is the required CO2 concentration without | the full article. Typical combustion exhaust seems to be ~10% | of CO2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue_gas | | Edit: spelling. | raverbashing wrote: | I wonder how research is doing to concentrate CO2 from the | PPM amounts we have "in regular air" | | There are at least two low-hanging fruits that make it | "easier": CO2 is heavier than other important gases and | mildly polar. | magicalhippo wrote: | Plant lots of trees or similar, then burn them for | electricity and capture the CO2 from the smoke. | | Compared to a lot of the other proposals out there it | almost sounds plausible. | marcusverus wrote: | Why not just do a partial burn and reduce the remainder | to charcoal? It would be much cheaper, require no | chemicals, and the end product is pure carbon, which | would be easier to store. You could literally dump it in | a pile and deal with it later. | idiotsecant wrote: | Making charcoal is not energy-positive and still only | results in about 50% carbon capture, best case scenario. | Burning it in a biomass plant with good carbon capture | does better _and_ displaces carbon-emitting generation | processes at the same time. As an added bonus biomass | plants are excellent 'baseload' type plants, a feature | that wind, solar, etc are missing without expensive | storage and complex management schemes. | lostapathy wrote: | Or skip a step. Turn the trees into lumber and build | something with it. Long-lived wooden structures sequester | carbon until they are abandoned and rot. | chobeat wrote: | Like with every other solution, under the current political and | economic systems, there's no incentive to scale it up quickly | enough to make a dent in global warming and it will just live | in small local prototypes and in the dreams of techno- | solutionists. | chr1 wrote: | That's not a techno solution worth to dream about, the real | techno solution is a fine grained control of weather (like | https://viento.ai) and in that case the extra CO2 in | atmosphere will be naturally sequestered in fields and farms | in Sahara. | neolog wrote: | That "leadership team" doesn't seem qualified to be working | in this area. | dalbasal wrote: | Aubrey de Grey, heh? IDK... now I like it more. | | What he _is_ qualified for is running this sort of | effort. I just don 't know what to call this sort of | effort. | | _Viento is a 'moonshot' nonprofit pioneering targeted | weather security_... by combining big data, forecasting | breakthroughs and AI directed weather interventions... | framed as "break glass in case of climate emergency." | | So... I don't like the idea. I do however, like the way | he puts together moonshot projects, generally. Maybe this | will evolve into something better. It's useful to have | 0.X% of people working on tech, to be doing it in an | environment that isn't standard academia or big tech. | pineaux wrote: | Elon musk wasn't qualified to build a rocket company. | Still pretty succesful though. | neolog wrote: | He had Ivy-league degrees in physics and economics and | two billion dollars. More importantly, he wasn't the | whole leadership team: the CTO was a rocket engineer and | the COO had other experience. | chobeat wrote: | thanks but no thanks | mckirk wrote: | To be honest, the layout of that site does not exactly | inspire confidence. | | But the team is interesting indeed. Incidentally, there's | an online SSC meetup with Jaan Tallinn as guest, _today_: | https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jQQYCdtiH5d3CtrNC/jaan- | tall... | mrpopo wrote: | I think the bigger gotcha with carbon capture is it sustains | the quid pro quo that climate change is the biggest threat to | unchecked energy consumption growth. Behind climate change, | there's also biodiversity collapse, ocean fish depletion, and | that's gonna ruin the food system billions of people depend | on, way before they see the benefits of globalisation. | dalbasal wrote: | True, but if it's really good, it probably _could_ be brought | into the political /economic system at some point. Just | mandate zero emissions for certain classes of carbon fuel | burners... like power new stations. | | Replacing the first 30% of fossil fuel usage is hard/slow. At | some point, it will become much easier/quicker... because the | economics will be favourable. | | The last 30% of fossil fuel will be hard/slow. Fossil fuel | burning use cases that for different reasons are hard to | replace. For these, exhaust capture makes sense. | chobeat wrote: | lot of wishful thinking here. There's clearly not enough | time for this | dalbasal wrote: | Enough time for what? | | All I'm predicting is that carbon reduction will follow a | path. Slow, then fast, then slow again. At that late | point, exhaust capture may be mandatory... I would even | say probably. | chobeat wrote: | Enough time to prevent systemic collapse that will | inevitably make intervetions to such a scale possible. | dalbasal wrote: | I see. | adammunich wrote: | That too | GistNoesis wrote: | how much co2 is released each year ? -> "The world emits about 43 | billion tons of CO2 a year (2019)" | | This article -> 50$ per ton of capture. | | product = $2,15 trillion to capture the whole year emissions. | | US GDP 2020 -> $20.93 trillion | | Only a few plants and ~10% of GDP from a single country could | solve it. | | Does this mean that global warming is almost a non-issue, but | merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot the bill ? | Aachen wrote: | Well, as another person said, it only works with high | concentrations. You'd have to have this country of choice go | and install the devices on all exhausts everywhere. There's | still a percentage getting past the exhaust, there will still | be emissions from fertilizer and the like, | methane/nox/refrigerants are still a thing, and so we'd reduce | the amount of emissions by, say, 75%. That would be amazing and | hugely helpful, but not the solution. In the end we'll need | something around 100% (bit more due to overshooting, more | likely than not). | GistNoesis wrote: | Ok, I hadn't understood, that this new solution was only | applicable only to the CO2 produced by combustion for which | we can easily install an exhaust filter. | | You quote this fraction at 75% : With some efforts we can get | 75% reduction at 50$ per ton. | | What is the cost per ton to remove the CO2 from the | atmosphere for the remaining 25%, and for the CO2 we already | have emitted in the past ? | pjc50 wrote: | > merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot the bill ? | | This was always the real problem. | kylewatson wrote: | I'm sure in 20 years we'll learn this causes cancer. And someone | will be posting an article on how to remove this from the water | supply. | tim333 wrote: | For comparison I was looking back at the "Project Vesta - | Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches" thing. | | There were estimates of $10-$25 a ton for olivine rock | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415138 | thechao wrote: | I don't know why the Democrats, in particular, don't turn this | into political hay: it's literally the perfect counter to the | coal issue. | | 1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings | from huge defunct coal mines; | | 2. All of the mining & transportation infrastructure is already | in mining country; | | 3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue | collar work; and, | | 4. Mining country already has expertise in ... mining. | | Instead of rolling in and telling mine workers that "their | livelihood is destroying the world, please go find something | else to do", the Fed could roll in and say: "now it's your turn | to ~save the world~; go dig!" | fastball wrote: | Coal has other externalities besides CO2. | BurningFrog wrote: | 1. The tech isn't ready to deploy. | | 2. There are hardly any Democrat leaders left who care about | or can talk to blue collar workers. | petra wrote: | It's not enough to change people's beliefs about climate | change and political choices. | | >> Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, | | That means olivine will be mined everywhere. not necessarily | in coal country. | labster wrote: | Computers are plentiful everywhere, yet more bits are mined | in SV than anywhere else. Maybe the fact that bit mining | expertise is concentrated there is useful to produce more | zeroes and ones. I suppose the same might be true of | olivine. | silasdavis wrote: | > yet more bits are mined in SV than anywhere else | | Are they? | aardvarkr wrote: | Just a side note, as I don't know a thing about olivine, but | wouldn't they be able to pull the material from the waste | piles instead of mining new material? I remember this popping | up in a discussion about thorium (super abundant in coal | mining waste) and that was one of the points brought up | thechao wrote: | Yep; straight from the tailings. It's all the transport & | digging parts of mining, without any of the dangerous | "going into a hole" parts of mining. Obviously, this is | just a form of strip-mining so there's definite downsides. | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | I think part of this is because there is a group of people | that doesn't want there to be an easy technical solution to | climate change. They would rather use the massive threat of | climate change as the catalyst for social, economic, and | behavioral change. They view climate change mitigation tech | that does not require changes in behavior much as religious | conservatives viewed birth control and condoms - a technical | hack to get around immoral behavior. | phreeza wrote: | Neither of these mechanisms are likely to be completely price | inelastic, so in a perfect world we would pursue both of them | to a degree relative to their price. | acje wrote: | I can't imagine an industrial approach that won't fail on scale, | lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve the problem | these are strategies to get rich. | | The only kind of strategy that seems capable of delivering on | both scale and lifecycle is one where we enhance the environment | to capture the CO2 for us and store it in the organic food chain | simply by scaling it up to hold the extra mass. | | Most likely we would have to enhance plains and deserts to become | forests. Use regenerative agricultural practices and eat less | meat. The big opportunity is in the oceans. There are wast "sea | deserts" that could be transformed into more biological active | habitats by using our industrial base to build some kind of | structure to protect small life. Perhaps also disperse nutrients | to accelerate biological processes. | acje wrote: | Wow the downvotes.. was this really that controversial? Are we | still trying to solve the problem with the same mindset we | created it? | Ensorceled wrote: | This is not an argument against the solution proposed: | | > I can't imagine an industrial approach that won't fail on | scale, lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve | the problem these are strategies to get rich. | | Neither this this: | | > Are we still trying to solve the problem with the same | mindset we created it? | | I don't know if this solution is at all useful, but climate | change is massive threat to a large percentage of humanity | and discarding solutions because you don't like the "mindset" | isn't going to get it done. | stephanheijl wrote: | I've been looking at the use of algae with regards to sequester | img CO2 from the atmosphere. This seems to have some remarkable | advantages: single molecules which make mass production easier, | presumably less finicky operating procedure and way more | straightforward to pump into disused oil wells. From the abstract | it does seem to need CO2 being supplied to it as opposed to | drawing it from the atmosphere actively. I assume this could be | used in exhausts of some kind? Definite benefit is the fact that | the CO2 is captured immediately as opposed to over a years long | timeline, like trees. | galangalalgol wrote: | I'm interested in causing algae blooms near the equator with | iron sulfide. Not for co2 capture, most of that would get | released on decomposition, but for the albedo effect. It also | has the failsafe that if it gets too cold the algae will die | preventing a snowball earth. They did some tests for salmon | production, and scaling that linearly for area covered it would | be less than a $1.5 billion project. Also we get salmon. | sargun wrote: | Would you get enough salmon to offset the cost? What's the | net cost of this approach? | galangalalgol wrote: | I wouldn't count on any savings from the $1.5B. You would | get more salmon than we know what to do with and you have | to harvest them or the overpopulation would mess with the | ecosystem. | jtolmar wrote: | > more salmon than we know what to do with | | Bury them in the ground as fertilizer? | | Requires people to fish them up, but maybe we can | redirect some of the effort that goes into overfishing to | that. | jules-jules wrote: | Is there a way this could be used in a home-setting by private | individuals or too dangerous/costly? | robomartin wrote: | Every time something like this comes up I think exactly the same | thing: Did everyone flunk first year Physics? | | Someone please explain how nobody seems to care about the fact | that you cannot violate conservation of energy. | | How much energy will it take to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 | ppm? | | Never mind time and resources. Let's just talk energy. | | How much? | | The simple answer is: More than the energy that went into | creating the problem in the first place. | | How much more? | | A lot more. Because these processes are not efficient at all when | looked into in their entirety. | | A number? | | OK. How did we get the CO2? By burning oil. What did it take to | create this oil. Billions of years of plants and biological | matter being crushed and cooked by...solar energy. Massive | amounts of energy falling on this planet. The end result being a | highly concentrated source of energy. When we burn a gallon of | oil we are releasing the culmination of what took unimaginable | time and energy to produce. | | You are not going to make an impact without expending an equally | massive amount of energy and resources. | | Let's say I burn a pile of lumber inside a large sealed | warehouse. Say, 100K square feet (about 10K square meters) and | very high. Large volume. Smoke, particles, gases disperse | throughout the volume. | | You are tasked with cleaning it. | | You can't open windows, etc. That would be cheating. There is not | "and then a miracle occurs" scenario. | | It would take an immense amount of energy and resources (relative | to what it took to create the mess) to go find every particle and | clean-up the noxious gases in that warehouse. | | If we can't clean a warehouse, what makes anyone think we can | magically deal with a planetary-scale problem? | | We already know this. There are research papers that explain just | how it is that even the idea of converting the entire planet to | renewable energy sources is an exercise in futility. | | My point is: If we could just stop lying to ourselves maybe we | can devote brain power towards dealing with the reality of the | problem rather than the fantasies of non-existing solutions. | | I am not saying "let's be filthy and do nothing". I am simply | saying we are not facing reality, which means we are wasting | valuable time and resources "solving" a problem we cannot | possibly solve without risking killing everything on this planet. | | All you need in order to understand this is the atmospheric CO2 | data from ice core samples going back 800,000 years. We know that | if humanity was not around it would take about 50K years for a | 100 ppm drop in CO2. In other words, with the ultimate "solution" | --if we left this planet-- it would take 50K years. What makes | people actually believe we can solve the problem in a generation | or two if we stick around? That's not hubris, that's a delusion. | Sorry. | | If anyone disagrees. Great. I would like to learn how I am wrong. | Kindly explain how you are going to achieve a rate of change | between 500 and 1,000 times greater than what could be achieved | if humanity --and all of our technology-- got erased from this | planet. That's the challenge. No magical technology can do better | than the absence of humanity and all of our toys. That should be | self evident. And yet, without us around, the timeline is in the | 50K year range. | | Take your time, show how this 1000x improvement in rate-of-change | will happen without at least 1000x the energy deployed at a | planetary scale by natural processes. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-04 23:00 UTC)