[HN Gopher] A New Carbon Capture Plant Will Pull 36,000 Tons of ...
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A New Carbon Capture Plant Will Pull 36,000 Tons of CO2 from the
Air Each Year
Author : cheinyeanlim
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-06-29 21:51 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (singularityhub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (singularityhub.com)
| yread wrote:
| 650M$ in funding and they will remove emissions from about 10 000
| cars! You could just spend 32 500$ per each car to replace it
| with an EV and the second 32 500 on renewable energy and storage.
| We would need 100 000 of these plants to get back to equilibrium.
| tito wrote:
| $650M in funding and they are developing first of its kind
| technology that will inspire better, more efficient systems and
| planetary change.
|
| I offer that anyone looking at a DAC machine today could see
| the equivalent of the first transistor sitting on a bench in
| Bell Labs [0]. Gooey, weird, and packed with potential.
|
| [0]
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10261887...
| missedthecue wrote:
| Early lightbulbs had a lifespan of 14 hours and weren't much
| brighter than a set of candles. I'm glad they didn't quit and
| invest the money into candle factories!
|
| The analogy isn't perfect, but the point is clear. Refining and
| developing imperfect Co2 extraction technology today can pay
| _massive_ dividends in the future.
| tito wrote:
| I like the analogy! I think it's clearer than the one about
| transistors I offered above.
| rob_c wrote:
| Fantastic, how long until it scales up I wonder and can the tech
| be adapted to other gases?
| tito wrote:
| Re: adapting to other gases, this is something I'm curious
| about as well. As someone mentioned here, removing one ton of
| carbon dioxide means cycling through many more times the amount
| of air. At what point does removing other pollutants at the
| same time become effective. Carbon dioxide is just the most
| prevalent and a good place to start.
| qeternity wrote:
| As nice as DAC projects sound, I really cannot wrap my head
| around them. 36kt is not much. We'd need around 1.5m of these
| plants to reach carbon neutrality (without any other changes).
| conductr wrote:
| > Climeworks was launched by Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph
| Gebald in 2009 out of ETH Zurich, the main technical university
| in Switzerland. Since then, Wurzbacher told CNBC, DAC
| technology has improved by leaps and bounds. "We started with
| milligrams of carbon dioxide captured from the air," he said.
| "Then we went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms
| to tons to 1,000 tons." That sort of leveling up over the
| course of 13 years is no small feat.
|
| > To meet its future goals, though, the company will have its
| work cut out for it; they're aiming to remove millions of tons
| of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by 2050.
|
| It's a startup and growth is the name of the game
| mattashii wrote:
| Yes, but the point is that you need to start somewhere.
|
| And 36kt CO2 captured /year means over 2 million euros in
| tradable emissions each year, at current ETS prices of 60+
| euros per metric ton CO2 emissions.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Sounds like a lot? How many oil wells do you think the world
| has built? There are 2 million operating oil and gas wells in
| the U.S. alone. Building carbon infrastructure at scale is
| something humans are good at. We just need to reverse the sign.
| tito wrote:
| Yes, reverse the sign. Carbon emissions are not tracked in
| our existing accounting systems. Integrating carbon tracking
| and emissions into our society is inevitable, but it's only
| going to get more expensive the longer we wait.
| binarymax wrote:
| Yeah but the oil wells were built as part of an energy
| providing supply chain - it has actual use. This carbon is
| going to be injected into the ground, so there's no economic
| incentive to building and operating these plants. If the
| subsidies are enough, and therefore the incentive great
| enough, then they will be built - but the incentive for
| reversing climate change has been a difficult area to break
| through.
| lovemenot wrote:
| >> We just need to reverse the sign.
|
| Economics looks a lot like entropy. We know of no way to do
| economically valuable work by burying carbon.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The economic benefits of controlling the climate should be
| fairly obvious. What you really meant is that we don't know
| how to make carbon capture enrich the specific person of
| Charles Koch, yet.
| sylvinus wrote:
| I'm surprised by all the negativity here. Usually HN commenters
| are good at understanding exponential growth. Maybe it's easier
| when talking about Active Users?
|
| Climeworks (and others) are just a couple orders of magnitude
| away from having real impact, with a clear roadmap lying ahead.
| Let's support them, along with all other potential solutions?
| We're going to need more than one.
| gfaster wrote:
| The pessimism here is because there is no real money to be made
| in carbon capture without significant and expensive policy
| change. Put simply, carbon capture is a public good, which will
| require significant public expense even in the most optimistic
| of cases. If we're willing to go that far, we're better off
| just implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme for
| emissions.
|
| Our problem is that this is a technological solution for a
| problem that needs a policy solution.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| > The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With
| a CO2 capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be
| almost 10 times larger than Orca.
|
| > While Orca has 8 collector containers each about the size and
| shape of a standard shipping container, Mammoth will have 80.
|
| This doesn't seems practical to scale. To capture 36,000,000
| tons (1/1000 of the current global output) they'd need 80,000
| shipping containers?
|
| > Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year.
|
| > "We started with milligrams of carbon dioxide captured from
| the air," he said. "Then we went from milligrams to grams, from
| grams to kilograms to tons to 1,000 tons." That sort of
| leveling up over the course of 13 years is no small feat.
|
| If it took 13 years to reach the current scale, how many more
| orders of magnitude are left to squeeze out?
| tito wrote:
| Carbon removal is a brand new industry that lacks decades of
| industry and academic development, and potentially has few
| viable business models without a price on carbon. That's equal
| parts terrifying and exciting. We need a thousand shots on goal
| for carbon removal solutions to succeed. For anyone who wants
| to dig in to carbon removal, links in my bio.
|
| I wrote an article specifically on this balance of
| impossibility and necessity here:
| https://tito.co/posts/necessary---impossible.html
| datadata wrote:
| > DAC's energy usage, particularly when it's considered in
| conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 it's
| capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from
| renewable sources helps, but it's still not unlimited nor free.
|
| What are the actual downsides of energy usage here given that the
| enterprise is strongly carbon negative? Given that it is
| consuming geothermal energy in Iceland, 1) wouldn't the energy
| become waste heat in the environment regardless, 2) Is there a
| consumer of the energy that would be "better"?
| [deleted]
| tito wrote:
| (edit: oops was wrong here, updating my comment)
|
| This is addressed in the article: "Or would the geothermally-
| generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars?"
|
| There's no such thing as waste heat really. In the short term
| you can argue that limited units of energy are better used
| towards carbon neutrality, things like powering electric cars.
| Ultimately, we need removal tech, and we need to make it energy
| efficient, fast. Putting money and energy into carbon removal
| systems needs to be looked at as an investment for it to make
| sense. Powering an electric car gets you to go a mile, powering
| a DAC system lets you remove a little carbon and is an
| investment in developing more efficient systems too.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| On the scale that Climeworks is operating at? Probably not
| really.
|
| You can read that "downside" more generally as DAC (and carbon
| sequestration in general) is expensive, and no one really knows
| how efficiently we can do it, especially at the scales we'd
| probably want.
|
| It's also an expression that current low/no carbon energy
| sources are globally sufficiently constrained that we're in no
| real position for large scale (aka meaningful) DAC (and many
| other forms of carbon sequestration - perhaps not all)
| deployment.
|
| Climeworks is clearly out to iterate and gain experience to be
| well positioned for a presumed DAC (and sequestration) market
| that may form as all of the easy to decarbonize sources and
| processes are converted. We're... a ways off here.
| Alupis wrote:
| > The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air
| and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects
| underground, where a chemical reaction converts it to rock.
|
| I'm really worried we have no idea what we're doing, and will
| find out down the road things like this only made things worse,
| or caused other unforeseen problems.
|
| I do not subscribe to the philosophy that "doing something is
| better than nothing", particularly when we likely don't fully
| understand what it is we're doing or actually trying to achieve.
| Doing the wrong thing can be, and often is, worse than doing
| nothing.
|
| > Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for
| scale, that's equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars).
|
| That's some hand-wavy numbers there. 790 of what type of car?
| 1970 muscle car without a catalytic converter and modern fuel
| injection system? Or a 2022 Prius? One outputs a huge amount of
| CO2 and other gases, and the other hardly any at all.
|
| Car emissions are really good on average. As technology
| progresses, it might be fathomable that 7,900 cars, or eventually
| 79,000 cars produce the same amount of emissions as today. This
| "metric" sounds impressive, but it's useless.
|
| > DAC's energy usage, particularly when it's considered in
| conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 it's
| capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from
| renewable sources helps, but it's still not unlimited nor free.
|
| So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering this
| thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes?
|
| > Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year.
| 36,000 tons (the quantity of CO2 that will be captured by the
| Mammoth facility) is a negligible fraction of that total. Is it
| even worth the energy usage, construction and maintenance costs,
| and frankly, the effort? Or would the geothermally-generated
| electricity go to better use powering electric cars?
|
| Ah, they even mention this in the article. Of course the CEO hand
| waves this away...
|
| I'm not convinced this is the future - seems more like a get rich
| quick scheme if anything. Sort of like those companies you can
| pay to "offload" your emission burden and supposedly they plant
| trees or something and you get to claim your carbon neutral.
| Scams... all of them.
| tito wrote:
| I hear you! What do you propose is the future instead? Curious
| to hear about what you're working on, we need people working
| across all areas of planetary solutions.
| datadata wrote:
| > Car emissions are really good on average. As technology
| progresses, it might be fathomable that 7,900 cars, or
| eventually 79,000 cars produce the same amount of emissions as
| today. This "metric" sounds impressive, but it's useless.
|
| Thankfully that's why the article first gave the metric in tons
| of carbon, which has no such ambiguity.
|
| > So why are we not just using the geothermal energy powering
| this thing to charge electric vehicles or power homes?
|
| My understanding is that there is generally an over supply of
| renewable energy in Iceland. Historically it attracted location
| agnostic consumers like aluminum smelting and bitcoin mining as
| consumers of this energy, because there wasn't any other demand
| for the renewable energy in Iceland.
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| How many years before this plant becomes carbon neutral itself? I
| can bet that this is another waste of money and natural resources
| that will not help the environment.
| pengaru wrote:
| TFA makes it pretty clear that the energy source is geothermal.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > TFA makes it pretty clear that the energy source is
| geothermal.
|
| Is it more likely that when this plant switches on, other
| people will just make do with that much less electricity, or
| that when this plant switches on, electricity production will
| go up?
| cinntaile wrote:
| It shouldn't take that long, probably not even a year. It's
| basically 80 shipping containers filled with fans.
| nharada wrote:
| DAC is nowhere near the scale needed to make even a tiny dent in
| our carbon emissions, and it's easy to be cynical looking at this
| (this plant can capture about 2000 American's carbon emissions).
|
| One thing I do like about this is that we get an actual,
| concrete, and correct "cost of carbon" from it. Sure, there are
| caveats (i.e. you can't just build 5MM of these in Iceland), but
| having a real number that doesn't include hand-waving around
| whether the Brazilian farmer would have cut down those trees or
| not is a good thing for offsets, future planning, markets, etc.
| tito wrote:
| "Cost of carbon" -- yes, one scenario is that society dumps a
| few billion dollars into carbon removal technologies only to
| learn "oh shit this stuff is realllllllly expensive to pull out
| later...let's decarbonize overnight". Pretty sure all of us air
| miners would take that as a win.
|
| edit: I've also seen a similar argument made for developing
| geoengineering solutions. Being willing to dump chemicals into
| the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight makes a lot of people
| think "oh shit they're really serious about this climate change
| stuff arent' they", and then the outcome of "we should take
| this more seriously".
| brundolf wrote:
| Does it also serve as a test-bed for improving the technology?
| Like with fusion reactors that will never themselves be energy-
| positive
| kec wrote:
| CO2 makes up roughly 0.04% of the atmosphere. Handwaving,
| that means for every ton of carbon you remove you'd need to
| process at least 250 tons of air. To capture humanities
| current yearly output, you'd need to process over 7 Trillion
| tons of air per year... the scales just don't make sense.
| tito wrote:
| Yes the scales are hard to fathom. And we've been doing
| that for about 100 years. It's not pretty, but there's a
| trillion tons of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
| We need to stop emitting as fast as possible and remove the
| rest. Every gallon of gasoline burned adds 20 pounds of
| carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I imagine we're going to need a number of different technologies
| in order to make a real dent? What about biochar? That seems like
| an obvious choice, too. Easy, can make syngas, makes its own
| energy, enriches soil, etc. No panaceas, but we're going to need
| a lot more than one magic bullet.
| tito wrote:
| Indeed, we need a thousand shots on goal for carbon removal
| solutions. Anyone up for the task is welcome to come join our
| community at AirMiners: http://airminers.org/
| jseliger wrote:
| Direct release from Climeworks:
| https://climeworks.com/news/climeworks-announces-groundbreak...
| dominic_cocch wrote:
| "Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale,
| that's equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars).
|
| Now Climeworks is building another facility that makes Orca seem
| tiny by comparison. The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant
| this week. With a CO2 capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year,
| Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca."
|
| A lot of negativity in this thread, oddly. This is a 10X
| improvement over a previous version. Another magnitude or two and
| this becomes incredible for the environment. Other solutions
| should also happen, but a problem as big as climate change should
| have many parallel solutions. We don't have time to put all our
| eggs in one basket.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I've been sponsoring these guys for a while now. Saw it on my
| credit card bill last night and wondered what they were up too!
| gumby wrote:
| I have no faith in machines that suck the atmosphere through a
| straw. The thermodynamics and fluid dynamics just don't pencil
| out. We need to remove something like 3.5 Tt of CO2, so 3.5 Kt is
| nothing. Our only hope in this regard is solar/uv-powered
| systems, mainly biological, for example algaes in pelagic waters
| (that grow and then die and sink to the bottom of the ocean).
| These systems aren't trivial to build either.
|
| For other GHG and pollutants there are uv-powered systems like
| TiO2, olivine etc, though there are also limits to how much they
| can do.
|
| Basically we have to "mash our hand on the keyboard", i.e. try to
| do them all, but I can't see machines like these making any
| meaningful contribution.
|
| Note: I'm working on methane destruction straight in the
| atmosphere, so I'm putting my money (and my time) where my
| commenting is.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I agree that we need to do be exploring all options, but we
| need to make sure not to destroy other parts of our environment
| in the process.
|
| Massive algal blooms in the ocean gives me nightmares.
| 0des wrote:
| algae blooms in my reef tank give me nightmares, thank you
| for compounding that.
| ParksNet wrote:
| What's the cheapest Carbon Capture system we can imagine - $100
| per tonne? Most are running at about $500/tonne right now.
|
| At just $15/tonne of Carbon Tax, we halve CO2 output, mainly by
| destroying the economics of coal:
|
| https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/what-is-a-carbon-tax-how-...
|
| All the effort and funding currently spent on carbon capture
| should instead go towards lobbying for carbon taxes. The impact
| will be significantly greater.
|
| The best use of Carbon Capture technology would be in building
| ventilation systems. If we can capture and exhaust CO2 from
| inside air, we can reduce ventilation requirements, and
| potentially reach lower-than-atmospheric CO2 levels (which
| could have extraordinary benefits for cognition and sleep
| quality).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > At just $15/tonne of Carbon Tax, we halve CO2 output,
| mainly by destroying the economics of coal
|
| Here is page 122 of NextEra's investor deck. They are closing
| all coal plants by 2028 as they are no longer profitable to
| run. Even without a carbon adder per MWh, coal is dead ("near
| firm" solar and wind are renewables with battery backing to
| make them dispatchable when called on by the grid operator).
| Even existing combined cycle natural gas is under pressure!
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/06/lcoe-
| small.jpg?mrf-s...
|
| Japan is opting out of financing coal plants further in
| Indonesia and Bangladesh, cancelling ~3GW worth of coal plant
| projects.
|
| https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/planned-coal-plants-
| fizzle...
|
| So we're seeing some progress in avoiding electrical thermal
| emissions, which is the cheapest emissions offset.
|
| (Oahu, Hawaii's last coal fired plant turns down in September
| after the Tesla Megapacks replacing their frequency response
| capability are installed, another 200MW of coal taken
| offline)
| landemva wrote:
| Rather than a broad tax that hurts the poor, maybe your
| effort could go toward taxing specific indoor growers who
| burn gas to generate CO2 to get more growth from their MJ
| plants.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Or instead of going after pot growers, maybe your effort
| could go towards making my neighbor stop BBQing every
| weekend?
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Your neighbor has the right to BBQ, there's a point where
| we need to live our lives and stop advocating for denial
| of comfort.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Use the tax to offset the other taxes at lower income
| levels. It should be profit neutral for the government.
| NortySpock wrote:
| It would be simpler to write broad legislation to (a) tax
| all CO2 sources and then (b) give the tax revenue back to
| the people, similar to the child tax credit.
|
| Call it the "American Carbon Dividend" or the "Advancing
| America Dividend".
| henryfjordan wrote:
| We need to reduce the amount of Carbon we take from the earth
| and put into the atmosphere, yes.
|
| We have already taken so much carbon out of the ground that
| we need to put some back. Just slowing down, even to 0, will
| not be enough. The climate has already changed and will
| continue to change because we've already knocked it out of
| whack.
|
| We need to fund carbon capture at scale.
| keithnz wrote:
| so, in the article it says "they're aiming to remove millions
| of tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by
| 2050."
|
| So, this is just a step on the path....but, those numbers do
| seem pretty aspirational at this stage.
| malthuswaswrong wrote:
| Everything is going to be okay.
| OtomotO wrote:
| and in the case it doesn't: no worries, the end was always
| the same, the heat death of the universe :)
|
| so try your best and if it doesn't play out: memento mori!
| [deleted]
| Gigachad wrote:
| Honestly I can't see how it will be. I think we will get
| incredible technologies that cut resource usage. But we have
| already done this several times now and every time we make
| something more efficient we just consume more. We have made
| car engines massively more efficient but the gains were
| entirely lost to bigger cars and driving longer distances.
|
| There are billions of people living almost primitive lives
| just waiting to consume as much as we do driving everywhere
| and buying new iphones every year. We are about to make
| things cheaper and more efficient and give them access to
| this consumption.
|
| Despite all of this advancement, resource usage and emissions
| has never once gone backwards or even slowed down its
| increase.
| FredPret wrote:
| Malthus was wrong, hopefully Gretha as well
| softcactus wrote:
| Any tips for getting into the "climate industry"? What are the
| most promising technologies that aren't just greenwashing?
| tito wrote:
| The book Project Drawdown is a good primer, with pictures!
| [1]
|
| After that, the My Climate Journey [2] and Work on Climate
| [3] communities are excellent entry points.
|
| Climate is a big buffet full of all sorts of cool problems to
| help solve. I'm focused on carbon removal as an example, but
| we need millions of people working across all aspects of the
| planetary system.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Drawdown-Comprehensive-Proposed-
| Rever...
|
| [2] https://www.mcjcollective.com
|
| [3] https://workonclimate.org
| tito wrote:
| What's the methane destruction project you're working on? Enjoy
| those 24x carbon credits, that's good stuff.
|
| Regarding the main part of your comment, what is it you think
| people should be working on instead?
| asah wrote:
| 35 Kt... per year... but yeah it's daunting and we need more
| scale.
| tito wrote:
| Agreed. In case you or others you connect with are looking to
| help create more scale for carbon removal solutions, here's
| an online educational course I helped develop called
| AirMiners Boot Up -- https://bootup.airminers.org/
| Gigachad wrote:
| Carbon capture feels a lot like having a public pool which
| has raw sewerage pumping in to it and the proposals all focus
| on installing more powerful filters which can clean up some
| of the sewerage rather than focusing on stopping the sewerage
| from dumping in to the pool which is a much cheaper and more
| realistic solution.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| How do you destroy methane straight in the atmosphere?
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I'd worry they make things worse and suffocate plant life near
| them.
| theodric wrote:
| 7.5 tons/household/year. This is good for 4800 households. Nice,
| but nothing, ultimately.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Sounds pretty good to me, every 5k households just need to
| build one of their own.
| akomtu wrote:
| Imo, the solution to co2 and plastic pollution won't be a piece
| of high tech, it will be a form of fungi.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| There will be no one solution. The population will shrink,
| we'll switch to electric cars, we'll eat less beef, we'll
| replant some forests, we'll capture some carbon from the air,
| we'll grow some algae in tanks, we'll scoop up the plastic in
| the sea and bury it.
|
| Then hopefully, with a little wishful thinking, future
| generations appreciate our environment a little more.
|
| Hopefully nobody will go to war, or starve, or go bankrupt in
| the process.
| malthuswaswrong wrote:
| There are already self replicating carbon drawing machines. They
| are called trees.
| roamerz wrote:
| Those are not a viable solution as they don't give politicians
| any power. Imagine what good it would bring to society if we
| were able to have a grow / harvest cycle that would give us an
| abundance of inexpensive lumber to build housing.
| 542458 wrote:
| Trees eventually rot or burn, which releases most of the carbon
| again. Once a forest is mature carbon sequestration is minimal
| to zero:
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210325150055.h...
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| trees don't draw carbon in the long term. after a few hundred
| years they decay. also the earth is already near maximum tree
| capacity.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Can AI improve on evolution? Tree DNA and cells must be super
| complicated, but they're evolved things so they must be
| inefficient. Can we figure out how to do the same things they
| do, just faster? Bamboo can grow inches per day, can we make a
| petri dish that grows centimeters per day of carbon capture?
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