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!
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
I would probably name it T.R.E.E. Terrestrial Regeneration and Ecosystem Engine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
I’ll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective…
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that “refines” the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
(There’s no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
(There’s no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
Only because it’s not being built, so really very very very misleading.
In sunny places like the southern parts of the USA, if you took the land footprint of a typical nuclear power station and covered it with solar panels with regular sized walkways in between, you generate pretty much the same power output, but with none of the toxic nuclear waste.
If you put a used EV battery under every 40-80 of them, now you have 24 hour instantly responsive power.
Onshore wind power is the cheapest way of generating electricity, by some margin.
Guess why we’re not doing all this. Is it the cost? Of course not! It’s far more expensive to build a nuclear power plant. Is it the output? Of course not! Is it the environmental impact? Of course not! Is it the political lobbying and online FUD from vested interests in the power industry? Bingo bingo bingo! Of course it is!
Get energy nearly for free from the sky? But then who would pay for the oil cartel’s overpriced energy?! Exactly. And there you have in one the reason we want this and the reason there’s so much right wing opposition to it.
I started playing around with solar just for hobbyist/emergency preparedness type stuff and it’s actually crazy how good and cheap the tech is now. With blackrock getting into the power grid business and datacenters driving up prices I’m considering investing in enough panels/batteries to run most of my daily power usage so the price hikes don’t hit as hard later on.
Sound plan. I wish I had done so a decade ago before the global price hikes by the oil industry.
The reason i discount solar is that, (i’m assuming) carbon capture requires equivalent amounts of energy that was produced by burning the hydrocarbons
This means, we would need to produce roughly double our current energy consumption (1x to continue current consumption, 1x to carbon capture at a rate comparable to historic carbon emissions)
Also, solar and wind are intermittent, and therefore not ideal for dealing with real-time grid demand. However, that may make them ideal for passive carbon capture
Also, solar and wind are intermittent, and therefore not ideal for dealing with real-time grid demand. However, that may make them ideal for passive carbon capture
I think that’s a huge part of the long term solution: intentionally building overcapacity so that lower production days still produce enough energy to meet needs, but especially sunny or windy days have surplus that needs to be used. If the intermittent energy surplus meets a carbon-fixing method to consume that surplus energy, then we can have carbon capture without that energy use displacing a reduction of greenhouse emissions elsewhere.
Yeah carbon capture is nonsense and we just have to stop burning the carbon, it’s the only sane option.
Wind and solar is absolutely used note for grid, and increasingly. Whoever is telling you you can’t use them for grid is telling a bare faced lie. Onshore wind being the cheapest energy isn’t theoretical. It’s practical. It’s now.
I said
solar and wind are intermittent and therefore not ideal for dealing with real-time grid demand
The grid has to meet demand in real time. You can’t make the wind start blowing within a few seconds to ramp up supply, and battery technology isn’t capable of storing enough juice to handle this either
That’s why the grid uses different power sources, each with different response times, each serving a different purpose
- Nuclear has slow reaction time, so is used to handle the bulk of daily power
- Then natural gas and coal have faster reaction times, and can be used to fill in as demand varies minute to minute
I never said solar and wind cannot be added to the grid
Australia installed battery farms made from of EV batteries to cope with the discrepancies between supply and demand.
You can’t turn the wind on when it’s calm, but you can turn wind turbines off, and solar still generates power on dull days, just less.
Oversupply of cheap clean green energy is the win. Right wingers can fuck right off with the coal firing.
Anyway, you could have written something more balanced from the start instead of leading with the contextless FUD like some maga nut or petrochemical shill would.
Don’t count solar out, the growth trajectory is looking like it’ll supply most of the world’s electricity in a couple of decades. Solar will be the MVP that makes all these inefficient energy uses more viable.
planting trees also only works for carbon capture if you don’t cut them down until they have lived their entire natural lives, which is not the way it’s done anywhere.
Explain that one to me. The tree is made of carbon, storing the tree somewhere outside the carbon cycle would reduce the amount of carbon. Why would they need to be fully mature?
Yeah, just cut it and store it when the growth brings diminishing returns
okay, they would need to fully mature to completely do the carbon capture job we want. point being, these carbon capture plantations are not protected in any way, so they are usually used for farmland after a few years and the trees are burned for fuel. even if they go into something ostensibly carbon neutral, say, housing, they’re usually cut down before having absorbed all the carbon they can.
and then before discussing the lost carbon capture potential that stems from creating big plots of monoculture…
Even if you let them fully mature they will eventually breakdown because that’s what trees do and then all that stored carbon will return to the atmosphere. This carbon capture is mostly fruitless as the amount of carbon they store is negligible compared to how much we are adding to the atmosphere but if they are turning it into “rock” which is likely just graphite that would take carbon out of the carbon cycle and actually sequester it. which we desperately need to do to offset the ridiculous amount sequestered carbon we are adding to the atmosphere
I remember when people said the same of electric cars and grid scale solar and wind.
But planting trees doesn’t provide transportation or electricity, it does pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere though. In this case you can compare the capture technology to trees planted on the same area of land and see which one is better land use for the same purpose.
Youre not getting it. The people suppprting trees only dont comprehend that the tech will get better. Its not stuck as is. This is/was the issue complained about for those other technologies 30-50 years ago. This WILL get better and it will do it faster than trees can evolve. As well as everyone one of the supporting systems for it. Its luddite logic.
I’m not sure I agree. There’s efficiency gains to be had in the tech, but I think it’s better not to count your chickens before they hatch. In arid climates where trees struggle to grow it makes sense to deploy carbon capture tech, but I think there’s a also a profit motive that muddies the best practices. Nobody gets rich by replanting forests and leaving them alone, but there’s a lot of money to be made in these power hungry facilities.
At the core trees are just a more advanced technology in many ways. They have biological processes that don’t only remove the carbon but build it into useful timber; plus they’re entirely solar powered by default.
There’s also the potential to combine high tech solutions with our existing flora, either through genetic modification or specialized sensor based agriculture. Something isn’t low tech or backwards just because it involves plants, they’ve been scrubbing carbon for millions of years and are valuable tools.
Yes they do get rich by this. When policies are created that allow them to avoid taxes and cleanup because they paid to have trees planted. No trees are a haphazard attempt to maintain existense in a chaotic and wildly changing environment. This is more ‘noble savage’ lines of thought. Just because somethings grows on its own doesnt make it better than something designed and created. And modifying a plant to work inside of technology IS a technological advancement not a natural one. The exact kind of development and evolution i was talking about that is explicitly outside the bounds of natural evolution.
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You’d also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you’ll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we’ve generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we’ll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world’s power on CO2 scrubbing, we’d end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won’t do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora’s box and it’ll cost us centuries to close it
You’re right about most of this, but the carbon doesn’t return to the atmosphere “as soon as they die”.
I have a log in the back garden that has been there for twenty years, there’s wood houses a hundred years old
Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that’s left outside will release all it’s carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.
That wasn’t always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that’s where a significant fraction of all coal came from.
I think the wildfires speed things up
Big oof.
Entirely different use cases. Planting trees makes a deeper reservoir to store carbon, but it doesn’t take that carbon out of the carbon cycle. There is still more carbon than the carbon cycle evolved to handle. We need to do both, and also stop bringing more carbon from outside the carbon cycle into it.
This feels like Big Oil PR.
Like, ‘nothing to worry about, we can just scrub the air later.’ Which is a total lie.
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.
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.
