I can’t wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
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How much carbon dioxide was produced to build this fucking thing.
And then to run it! I hate how these ideas get funding and are immediately being built without question. How much energy was put in the materials, in building it, and how much more will they need to run it to extract how much CO2 exactly? And then let’s say it works. It works so well that in that region CO2 levels fall well below and reach normal levels. What then? They leave it there? Move it?
Ssssssh. Sssssssssssssssh. Only dreams now.
Only kisses Jenny
How much environmental damage from surface disturbance and tailings?
Trees are better carbon capture devices, you even get lumber from them.
I believe that’s what OPs caption in the post body is getting at
And sea algae are even better.
Greenwashing is an issue, but so is avoiding complicated nuance by simply laughing at an idea without understanding it.
The country I live in is mostly powered by renewables, they focus on reducing emissions, then capture at source, but they are currently having a healthy nuanced debate on whether to implement something like this.
The original set of these were built without reguard to their specific carbon offset as they were built to be exerpimental and to experiment with the technology. As with almost anything on engineering.
Modern ones have to go through a Life Cycle Assement (LCA) where they figure out when the break-even point will be before they are built and they are typically built where there is renewable energy sources. They must be net carbon negative for government subsidy.
Arizona and Texas are mostly desert where trees may not be a viable option but they have solar and wind farms. Deforestation is awful and reforestation can be a great option but these two climates in particular have not had forrests for thousands of years.
The largest one in Texas is owned and operated by an oil company, likely powered by oil, and the CO2 is used to frack more oil. For them it needs to be net profit rather then net carbon negative. Protest and ridicule away.
Iceland has the most successful powered by geothermal and is over 90% net carbon negative already and likely to increase the longer it runs.
Other places inject the CO2 into concrete building blocks making them stronger and a viable non destructive form of storage.
Others turn them into burnable fuels effectively “recycling” the CO2.
Others use them for industrial production of urea, methanol, fire exstinguishers, or even for drink carbonation or food preservation. Scrubbing the air for CO2 instead of the traditional method of capturing off-gases.
I would probably name it T.R.E.E. Terrestrial Regeneration and Ecosystem Engine.
Fuck this postt, this is all fiction. There are initiatives that AMERICA IS DESTROYING.
Occidental and 1PointFive can’t secure permits, let alone funding, it’s all hand waving slop.
3 fucking minutes of research is all it takes
I knew it was bullshit the moment I saw “The US is building…” and it wasn’t a concentration camp
Hey now, we also build bigger and bigger stroads and bigger cars every year which kill more and more children every year.
I swear we won’t stop with the urban sprawl until our entire country is covered in asphalt
Occidental’s plant was purely greenwashing. They never had any intention of fixing the damage their company contributed.
Fuck no I hope this fail, plant trees or die
In the middle of a desert? Planting trees is good, but its not enough to save us by itself.
Only if there was a small pipe or “smoke stack” that could emit these in super high concentrations of CO2 where we could just pipe it straight to the ground instead of capturing it through the air. Better yet, if we find all of those sources we could even stop them producing in the first place and leaving all the carbon in the ground. 🤔
/s
There’s actually a new kind of gas turbine thermodynamic cycle that does in fact emit super-critical CO2 in a highly concentrated form that is extremely easy to collect and sequester. https://netpower.com/technology/
They’re building a 300MW facility in Texas right now. I’d say this is a really solid contender for a transitionary power generation while we stand around with our heads in the sand.
Yeah, capturing it from the source is way better than capturing from some random air. A capture rate of 90% as an addon to current coal/gas infra including cement production would buy us a ton of transition time
Well we still need to capture the excess CO2 that we’ve pumped into the air for the last 200 years.
Current state of the art DAC plants are incredibly inefficient. Also, even if they would come with efficiency that is comparable to trees, they would still lack other positive ecological functions of trees.
current state
No state will be efficient. Burning shit in reverse takes more energy than you got out of it in the first place. It’s a physical impossibility to make an energy efficient direct carbon capture plant.
It was always going to be inefficient trying to capture something that’s 400ppm.
Currently running an algae farm. First step is water, which holds 8x the gasous CO2 as the air it is exposed to.
Algae make our oxygen. Biomimicry is the way to go. Or is it bioengineering? Idk
Genetically modifying algae to be more efficient at photosynthesis would be the way to go. However, I think it was attempted many times in the last 30 years and I have not seen any breakthroughs.
I think there could be physical solutions to maximising co2 absorption. Like a sort of vertical farming scenario - put up massive algae farms where alot of air naturally moves through.
People will do anything other than planting more trees and looking after the worlds ocean ecosystem health. Most air is cleaned by algae in oceans and then trees in land, in that order. But people will just make machines for things which were taken care of by mother earth for millennia.
Way to reinvent the tree I guess?
Fun fact, most of the O2 we breathe is processed from CO2 by algae, not trees.
I mean, trees help, but the planet is mostly covered in water, so algae has a bit of an advantage.
The problem is that the ocean has historically been one part that environmental activism has struggled with, because how do you hold someone accountable for ecological damage done on international waters?
Any damage there tends to then affect bays, natural marinas, shore lines, and other areas where algae like living.
Trees are good, but they can probably do more good by replacing these carbon capture systems with algae ponds. They’re powered by the sun too.
carbon capture is always a bad idea because the energy it uses cancels out the co2 it pulls from the atmosphere
Unless it uses hydro, nuclear, wind, solar
then its a waste of money you could have spent to produce electricity renewably
It still uses the energy, and most of the time it just makes more sense to directly swap whatever you’re running to one of those cleaner energy sources instead of using more energy than it would take to run the machine that releases carbon to undo that.
How about we start with using those sources instead of generating co2 we have to clean. Tht would be more effective.
And the amount of CO2 it captures is miniscule in comparison.
This technology doesn’t work. It is nothing more than a way to avoid taking the steps necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change for future and even our generations.
There is no stopping it. We will evolve through crisis, if we survive to evolve at all, which sounds silly now but won’t by the end of the century, or sooner, if we continue on the path we are on.
Which Trump has canceled many projects of those.
Can we start using heat generated by data centers yet?
If you put it right on the exhaust of a power plant it should be good no? Or not good as in good good, but better than nothing.
No. Direct carbon capture is essentially burning fuel in reverse, and at a bare minimum requires roughly the same amount of energy as was released when you burned the fuel. Consider you have a coal power plant operating at 45% energy conversion efficiency. That means for each 1,000 kW of power produced, you actually released 2,200 kW of thermal power total burning the coal. Guess how much energy you need to completely negate the impact of the power plant? It’s much closer to that 2,200 kW number. Let’s say that it only has a thermodynamic requirement of 2000kW due to a favorable storage reaction. However, those machines aren’t 1000% efficient. Even at something like 80% efficiency (much higher than I have ever seen) that still bumps you up to needing 2500 kW, and at 50% efficiency you get to 4000 kW. So in order to run your carbon capture scheme, even in the most optimal conditions, you need more than double (and potentially quadruple) the power output of the plant you’re putting it on. Now you might say “but you could use green energy to run the carbon capture!” But you could also just replace the plant with green energy and bypass the whole problem.
Carbon capture technology is essentially just PR from fossil fuel companies and it’s a total scam the way that it’s sold to the general public. It’s like if you saw a toddler going around dumping out containers of glitter and said “We need to invest in a better vacuum cleaner to keep the house clean of all this glitter to keep up with this toddler” instead of focusing on stopping the toddler from dumping out more glitter first and worrying about the vacuuming up later. Carbon capture cannot possibly keep up with or make a meaningful dent in total CO2 concentrations until we dramatically reduce emissions. It is a thermodynamic impossibility, and it legitimately pisses me off that there are engineers working on these scams who are either too stupid to realize this or are complacent in the scams.
You’re 100% correct. The whole point of burning a fuel is to release its energy and oops we have byproducts. Well the second law of thermodynamics explicitly states that if you want to put that CO2 back, you’ve got an energy cost which is *crunches numbers* roughly the same as that released when you burnt it in the first place.
That being said, if we had some purely green energy sources then it is a laudable goal that could help reduce the harmful effects of climate change.
Personally I think harvesting CO2 in the ocean is the way to go. It already absorbs tons (gigatons) each year. We just need to figure out a way to coax that dissolved CO2 to fall out of solution as lime without waiting on a geologic timescale for humanity to get murdered by sentient iguanas that love the heat.
Direct air capture is a scam. It requires energy that comes from somewhere else. Capturing CO2 requires energy, it’s basic physics/chemistry.
Nothing about it makes sense excpet as an expensive boondoggle and a distraction for correcting the root causes of climate change.
This will only ever make sense when we have carbon neutral energy that is “too cheap to meter.” So, like, nuclear fusion, or solar panels become cheaper than tar roofs. In other words, these systems will make sense after climate change is solved. lol.
Exactly.
We need a study to determine how much energy is released from burning billionaires. That’s the only way these things might be carbon-neutral!
Finally, someone who gets it!
That energy can come from somewhere that doesn’t produce more carbon than these kinds of machine sequester. Solar, wind, nuclear. Obviously we need to stop burning fossil fuels, but also we need to turn the carbon we’ve already produced back into a form that won’t find its way back into the air.
It can, but it isn’t and it won’t. DAC is a scam and a distraction until fossil fuels are out of the equation. It is a false hope, a glamour, to keep us from addressing the root causes.
Once fossil fuels are out of the equation, we will still need to sequester carbon. And at point, it will actually be powered by renewables.
When fossil fuels are out of the equation, civilization will have to learn to live on a roughly 3 to 1 EROEI as opposed to the 100:1 of the prewar period and the roughly 20:1 today.
Your surplus energy decides your civilizational metabolic rate and is a key pillar of what is possible. Are we building shit like this at 3:1? What are we giving up for it?
Are we building shit like this at 3:1?
No, and we never will if the technology doesn’t improve. The carbon has to go, there’s no two ways about it
The carbon, or us has to go. If we couldn’t afford to not emit it in the first place during the years of plenty, there is zero chance of getting rid of it in the lean years.
Any carbon emitted is carbon we will have to try and live with.
Cmon bro
They’re building nuclear plants for AI, you think they’re gonna build what, wind farms to run a DAC plant? They just basically made it unaffordable to put solar on your own home, do you think they won’t be like “lol build a natural gas power plant to run it”
Nothing gets done if the Saudis don’t win.
Kind of stupid to say its all about the Saudis when the US produces more oil and gas products than most every other country. In fact, Saudi Arabia produces literally half as much oil as we do here
None of this addresses the comment I left. I never said the saudis are gonna be the pioneers of renewable powered DAC lmfao
Saudis are a stand-in for “big oil” as a whole. In other words, the oil barons of the world aren’t going to let renewables power anything; DAC will be fossil fuels; “clean” coal/nautural gas and they will release more CO2 than they can capture of course because that’s just thermodynamics.
That article’s only real point is that we shouldn’t pin our hopes entirely on sequestration. Nothing about it being invalid or “a scam.”
Basically summed up in these two paragraphs:
On the one hand, putting more money into carbon removal will help scale up—and drive down the cost of—technologies that will be needed in the future.
On the other hand, the growing excitement around these technologies could feed unrealistic expectations about how much we can rely on carbon removal, and thus how much nations and corporations can carry on emitting over the crucial coming decades. Market demands are also likely to steer attention toward cheaper solutions that are not as reliable or long-lasting.
Carbon sequestration is likely to play a part in becoming carbon negative, and deserves to be explored.
Until fossil fuels are not a part of the energy equation, DAC is a band-aid where a tourniquet is required. Sure do research, but DAC will never work while we are burning fossil fuels for energy. It doesn’t even make economic sense.
So what if it required 1 watt?
You have to do actual math to determine if it’s worth it, not just write it off because it requires energy.
The more you spend, the more you save!
The math has been done to death. CO2 capture requires energy input and doesn’t yield any. This is basic stuff.
Yes, but just because you are spending energy doesn’t mean you are emitting a lot of carbon. Especially if your power comes from nuclear.
Is this the next gen Nvidia card?
My first thought was “bitcoin farm”.
CO2in
Only if we would have natural solution to this problem… Let’s fuck up the planet even more by producing more shit. How about planting trees and stopping the deforestation.
Planting trees doesn’t produce revenue for billionaires and shareholders. This does. Ergo we must produce expensive, over engineered machines to replace trees. Bees are next.
Trees are inefficient too but we actually already know what we need to do to ramp up the efficiency of the photosynthesis process in trees with genetic tinkering.
The bigger problem is that we have reached a point where trees aren’t enough anymore. The oceans have acidified. There’s just too much co2 to capture at this point.
Correct me if I’m wrong but as far as I know trees are no real solution. Yes, they take CO2 to grow, but everything is released again when they die and are consumed by bacteria which just didn’t exist a few million years ago. So they only ever store what the forest is made of and not a bit more. They will rot and never ever become coal again. So while it sounds nice to plant a forest and there are other benefits, when if we planted a forest on every inch of the planet it would not solve our problem. Am I wrong here? Tell me!
The net new total biomass of the forests would all be captured carbon. Yes dead trees may release it again but the total amount of trees would be higher and act as a large buffer.
That carbon will stay sequestered if the trees are cut down, and the wood is used to build something that lasts for a long time.
A long time isn’t forever. Wood burns and wood rots. How many wooden structures from over a thousand years ago are still around?
I’m just saying we aren’t helping ourselves with this plastic throw-away culture we’ve developed. Things like fine wood furniture can last as long as the owner wants it to. Every time something is replaced, it ends up somewhere in the environment, and we have the carbon footprint of something new being made. Beautifully made objects tend to be restored when they get old and ratty. When was the last time a Frank Lloyd Wright house was torn down to be replaced by a McMansion? That wood is sequestered.
The carbon in that wood is only sequestered until it rots or burns. It may be a hundred years, it may be a thousand years, but it has not been removed from the carbon cycle. At best, you’re kicking the can down the road.
Every bit we capture helps.
Not if it’s a distraction from better solutions.
Neither trees nor these can help much if fossil fuels continue to be burned at increasing rates.
That’s for sure. But as I don’t see people going away from fossil fuels anytime soon, we have to at least make it less terrible. EVs aren’t an answer, as making the batteries fucks up the nature a lot, wind power takes more energy to build than it will return in it’s lifetime and the machines will haunt us after they are decommissioned. I live in northern Sweden and because people in south aren’t too keen to look at those ugly things, they place it around their colony, the north. So we have new roads in forests, trees are being cut fo huge wind farms screwing up our ecosystem and being transported up here mostly from Denmark. Everyone trying to minimize their impact is currently at least a dim path forward. People are against nuclear, but if properly executed, it is currently the cleanest energy we have. Let’s hope cold fusion comes quick.
wrong. Wind turbines recoup the energy required to build them within a year of normal operation
Reduction in emissions, absolutely! Direct carbon capture isn’t that. It’s a scam, destroying money for no benefit.
Also this plant are (with the latest technology) really less efficient than trees, like 60-70% less efficient IIRC.
Yeah, and the Wright Flyer could only travel like 30 yards. A 10 megabyte hard drive used to fill an entire room. You can’t build a better machine without building the worse ones first
The goal of this plant isn’t to be a solution : it’s greenwashing. It’s making people believe that capitalism have an answer to climate change
I never said anything about capitalism. Do you think socialists and communists don’t burn fossil fuels? Do you think tree planting initiatives aren’t greenwashing? Technological progress continues regardless of economic systems, and this is an early step in carbon sequestration technology. A technology we will still need after we abolish fossil fuels and capitalism, because we have put more carbon into the carbon cycle than the carbon cycle evolved to handle.
Planting trees is only a temporary carbon hold. Also, it takes like 200 trees to offset the carbon for a years worth of driving from a single car.
I do have strong doubts about the usefulness of these fans, though.
Looks like your get the post text!
The biggest carbon sink on the planet are oceans. We need to stop messing them up.
Too late.
The thing about oceans is they have massive amounts of inertia.
We’re still surviving on the inertia from before we fucked them up, but we’ve already fucked them up, and some of the consequences of that won’t be apparent until 50 or 100 years from now.
Same with fixing them. We won’t see the effects (or the unintended side effects) of anything we do to fix them for decades, and even then they’ll probably be unnoticeable under the effects of how much we fucked them up before trying to fix them.
Stopping is probably indeed the best option, hopefully we haven’t damaged them enough that they won’t fix themselves eventually… but that’ll take hundreds or more probably thousands of years.
