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World's First 'Negative Emissions' Plant Has Begun Operation (qz.com)
In an effort to reduce the 40 trillion kg of carbon dioxide humans produce each year, three companies have been working to build machines that can capture the gas directly from the air. One such machine in Iceland has begun operation. Quartz reports: Climeworks just proved the cynics wrong. On Oct. 11, at a geothermal power plant in Iceland, the startup inaugurated the first system that does direct air capture and verifiably achieves negative carbon emissions. Although it's still at pilot scale -- capturing only 50 metric tons CO2 from the air each year, about the same emitted by a single U.S. household -- it's the first system to take CO2 in the air and convert the emissions into stone, thus ensuring they don't escape back into the atmosphere for the next millions of years. Climeworks and Global Thermostat have piloted systems in which they coat plastics and ceramics, respectively, with an amine, a type of chemical that can absorb CO2. Carbon Engineering uses a liquid system, with calcium oxide and water. The companies say it's too early in the development of these technologies to predict what costs will be at scale.
The biggest problem is that CO2 doesn't seem to be the big problem. In the past the earth had much higher CO2 values, and more plant life. Because of the low levels of CO2 today, we have and increasingly large areas on earth, were nothing grows anymore...
They should invest more time in solving things like those plastic soup problems in the oceans, instead of wasting their time on the agenda of a group of corrupt global warming advocates...
They can have jobs putting all the carbon back into coal mines.
Well, technically, THAT is clean coal.
As in : this is a technology designed to clean the air, and at the end it produce stone out of the captured CO2 - i.e.: (sort-of) coal (-ish).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I don't think the amount of CO2 humans produce is a low ball number like 40 trillion kg, I think the number is far greater.
If we are producing only 40 trillion kg per year, the Earth is in great shape and we don't need to worry much about man-made CO2.
I have commenced my plan to drain the ocean. Thus far I have removed one bucket of water and flushed it down the toilet.
Then this will increase the pollution!!!!
Look, since climate change is a lie and there is no climate change, then that means all the C02 we pump into the air has no effect. Who knows what effect NEGATIVE amounts of C02 would have.
We must band together to stop this plant NOW. We can't let this sort of thing continue or it will kill us all!!!
Carbon Engineering uses a liquid system, with calcium oxide and water.
Calcium oxide is most commonly made by heating limestone: CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2 Looks like all we're doing here is recovering the CO2 used to create the CaO
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
"The companies say it's too early in the development of these technologies to predict what costs will be at scale.", that is usually science speak for hideously and unaffordablly expensive, but we hope to find a way to make it viable somehow.
So it "eliminates" 50m CO2. How much geothermal energy does it use for this, and how much CO2 could be saved by not running this plant and instead using the power to power whatever is now being powered by a power plant burning coal, oil or gas?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At school I learned that plants already did that for millennia. They take in CO2, sunlight and water to produce sugar, starch and cellulose and they expel O2. Now we have the first negative CO2 emission plant?
When did plants become CO2 producers?
(And yes, I know that they do at night, c'mon, it's a joke, people...)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The irony is that all plants are all negative emissions, yet we burn and chop down rain forests at a football field every few seconds (in metric: a futbol field every few seconds).
Weâ(TM)ve had naturally-occurring âNegative Emissionsâ(TM) plants for centuries - in fact I used to live next one, itâ(TM)s called a forest, and itâ(TM)s populated with plants and trees that actually thrive on greenhouse gasses...
Ken
Nobody ever argued that this was not possible. The question is rather if it makes any sense.
Some solar powered technology to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into a valuable building material.
Even better it should be self replicating - it would produce seeds which, when planted, would grow into copies of itself.
That way humans could plant the seeds in fertile soil to get the process going and then just leave it.
Sigh. Such a shame such a technology doesn't exactly grow on trees...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
On what the plant is powered?
I call bullshit. Perhaps if you counted cyclical carbon as well (such as that which is exhaled by living creatures, emitted by volcanoes, and other natural cycles), but there's no way human activity is dumping that much ON TOP.
Unless they've found a seem of CaO nearby (which will still require fuel to be used to mine it) then it all seems a bit pointless. I suspect its true aim is to get venture capiltal to line some pockets and then after a few years they'll say "Oops, the maths doesn't work, but thanks for the money. First class to the climate conference in the Seychelles rocked!"
It was a 200 year process, but we are finally moving into remediation of the atmosphere. Thank god.
The biggest problem is that CO2 doesn't seem to be the big problem. In the past the earth had much higher CO2 values, and more plant life.
Yes, and no. In the past, the Earth had much higher CO2 levels, and also much higher average temperatures and no ice caps. So, if you don't mind losing the parts of the current land area that are near the ocean, yes, we could have higher CO2 and higher temperatures.
The "more plant life" you mention is speculative. Paleobotany doesn't give us a good measure of total plant biomass.
Because of the low levels of CO2 today, we have and increasingly large areas on earth, were nothing grows anymore...
No. Places where nothing grows are due to lack of water, not lack of CO2. Plants do need CO2, of course, but in very few places is it the main limitation to growth.
They should invest more time in solving things like those plastic soup problems in the oceans, instead of wasting their time on the agenda of a group of corrupt global warming advocates...
Ah, whataboutism! When one problem is brought up, say "what about XX?" to change the subject!
No reason we can't address more than one different problem.
Atmospheric Processor? Isn't that a tool for terraforming? PRETTY NEAT! (50 tons is 50 tons... Its still cool)
Why are they turning CO2 into stone? Why not convert it into something useful, like ethanol?
If you want to see really high CO2, though, you want to go back to the Mesozoic era.
Also known as a tree.
Didn't any of these people learn in grade school about how trees convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen?
Sequestration is quite another.
We've been sucking C02 out of the air for a long long time to make dry ice and carbonated drinks and as a byproduct of capturing nitrogen and oxygen for industrial and medical use. It's easy to capture the stuff...
The problem is long term storage. Where you going to stuff this stuff in Iceland?
So bully on you sir for collecting CO2, but what now? How you going to make this actually work long term? Call me when you have an answer for that one.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
the article mentions the 40 trillion kilograms humans produce every year. Why not use grams? then we can freak out about 40 quadrillion grams of CO2 . quadrillion is lots more than trilion and waaaay more than the usual gigs tons quoted
When I visited Hellisheiði this spring, the capture device was under construction, but our guide did not know what it was. Apparently it uses the plant’s copious hydrogen sulfide emissions to convert atmospheric carbon to a stable mineral compound.
With a bigger budget and some political will.
How? by deploying shade in space, maybe above pole and equator.
Effect? less sun = less heat. yup it's that simple. The obvious engineering challenge is deploying a thin and large material in space but IMO it's easier than going to the moon, nuclear fusion or (sadly) a world action for climate change, it seems.
You do realise that our recorded, written history already goes back several millennia, right?
In evolutionary terms that is a figurative blink of an eye for large animals like ourselves and the sort of ecosystems we can comfortably inhabit.
And that modern humans were around into the hundreds of millennia...
The ballpark consensus number is around 200,000 years from the first emergence of our species. Again in evolutionary time scales for non-microbes that is a short amount of time. We evidently nearly went extinct about 70,000 years ago thanks to a super-volcano eruption (Mt Tobo in Sumatra) and we only ventured out of Africa about 50-80K years ago.
Tks is only true when you totally ignore all that is required to build the plants, the mining of materials used in the process, the distribution of those materials, etc.
Another Slashdot .... see you on Mars.
50? Source please...
I get this is proof of concept but what was the cabon footprint to build the plant. In other words, at what point will the plant negate all the carbon released in order to build it? Can it ever recover enough before the mechanical bits wear out?
Actually, to find carbon dioxide levels higher than today you have to look back to the Miocene epoch, about 5.2 million years ago. There were not humans around then.
Homo Sapiens had not evolved yet but our Orrorin Tugenensis ancestors were alive and well.
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...
Its likely Homo Sapiens could survive as well. We are quite adaptable, as habitation in nearly every climate zone on the planet demonstrates. And now add modern technology.
Now I'm not arguing returning to the climate of that epoch is advisable but lets not pretend its some sort of death sentence for Homo Sapiens. It would be a painful transition given the rapid onset of the changes but quite survivable as an adaptable intelligent species that is not locked into a particular environment niche.
You sound like a real fucking shithead, but I'll engage. Wal-Mart moved into coal communities, wiped out the mom and pops, siphoned local money, and when they were one of the last job providers, moved out. So, in your anger against coastal elites, you were actually fucked by a gang of heartland robber barons. How are going to address that, shitbag?
"take CO2 in the air and convert the emissions into stone."
We'll be fine as stone-based life forms.
Shitbag, you didn't address the point of gp post, worthless.
Try asking that household to store those 50 metric tons of CO2 per year in the backyard. Even in brick form, they'd never agree and/or would run out of room pretty fast.
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Requiem for the American Dream
You think them "city folk" are going to sit on the coast and drown. No, they will migrate inland and contaminate the heartland with their "evil ways". Bringing atheism, socialism and homosexualism to the bible belt. ;-)
Keep them coming shitbag. Reduced arable landmass shouldn't affect how many trees we can grow, right?
In the past the earth had much higher CO2 values, and more plant life.
And no humans
There were ancestral species not so different from us. We would likely survive. We are after all an intelligent adaptable species that learned to survive in nearly every climate zone on the planet with only quite primate technology. It would be a painful transition but likely survivable, we are not locked into one ecological niche like many species. And then there is modern technology.
Before anyone gets all apoplectic. I'm not advocating we go down that path. I like the earth as it is. I'd like to avoid the death of billions that the "transition" would likely cause. But lets not pretend the environment of 5-6 million years ago is not survivable by modern humans.
We've covered the permafrost issue here repeatedly. No, it does not melt into rich farmland. Most often, it melts into a bog: for an example see the entire North Slope. It would be easier to farm the Sahara.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
More commie scum filling our heads with lies! Shut this thing down Mr. President and MAGA!!!!!!!
We do have fairly affordable CO2 collectors, plants. Idea: Why not pipe the CO2 from coal and gas plants into a sealed greenhouse with fast growing plants inside. The CO2 will make the plants grow faster and will absorb the CO2. Maybe then every so often the plant matter in some way can be compressed, bricked and stored. Or the plants can be fed back into the plant, burned, and the CO2 recaptured and piped back into the greenhouse to grow more plants and the cycle can repeat, a closed CO2 cycle.
Fracking's one redeeming quality is that puts stupid people to work, but in the end that isn't worth the damage to the water table or the seismic instabilities. Same people could be better employed building things or even environmental remediation, but this would be too smart and thus it can't be allowed to happen.
Brilliant!! We cut down all the trees, then make machines to remove the CO2...
We need to build more coal plants and run more cars to make up for the losses caused by this new tech.
The point of there having been higher CO2 concentration in the past is that there was no "runaway feedback" (which is one of the many spurious, specious, doomy claims of the Klimate Kultists).
I haven't heard that claim. I certainly haven't heard it from actual scientists, who are quite aware of paleoclimate-- in fact, modeling the ice ages was one of the original things that led to understanding the effect of carbon dioxide on climate in the first place.
There are some positive feedback effects, but none that really get into the "runaway feedback" range.
Now mod this post down and commence the personal attacks!
I'd mod you down as "-1, specious straw-man claim with no citation" if there were such a mod category.
yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman
The number sounds about right, but we *do* need to worry, because that CO2 doesn't really go away.
The problem is that we're a small, fast imbalance in a *very* slow process. Normally the ecological carbon cycle is very stable - geologic carbon is slowly released into the ecological cycle through a variety of processes, and ecological carbon is converted back into stone at approximately the same rate. Both being a small fraction of the rate at which carbon moves around the ecological cycle (~1% as I recall). And since they're approximately equal, the total amount of ecological carbon remains roughly constant.
Burning fossil fuels greatly increases the rate at which geological carbon is released into the ecological cycle - something like 5-10x as quickly I think it is, which causes carbon to build up in the ecological cycle - since the ecological carbon cycle doesn't sequester it any faster as concentration increases. The oceans get more acidic, the atmosphere becomes more CO2 rich, and global biomass may increase (though humanity is doing a pretty good job of preventing that through other means)
At present, our contributions have roughly doubled the atmospheric CO2 levels since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And that's a problem as it's been estimated that for every watt of power produced from fossil fuels, the CO2 released will capture an average of about 1 Megawatt of additional solar energy in the decades it spends in the atmosphere. It's a slow heating process that took decades to be certain it was happening, but it can't just be stopped either. Completely stop all geologic carbon emissions today, and it will still take several decades before atmospheric CO2 levels return to pre-industrial levels. Meanwhile the warming has already begun thawing the icecaps, reducing the planet's reflectivity and causing additional warming - and it's not at all clear that simply revering to pre-industrial levels will reverse that - we may have to go even lower to cool the planet off enough to refreeze the icecaps.
Because plants only hold on to the CO2 for a short time period and then it ends up back out again. The CO2 we ADDED was outside the loop for a very long time until we released it at an extremely fast unnatural rate.
Storing it in plants that are not going to be stored underground for a million years is pointless unless you drastically increase the biomass to consume all that CO2 in a larger ecosystem. Which is even more unrealistic as humans continue to kill off everything and replace it with humans, deserts, corn, and farting cows.
We have plenty of food - we do not need to grow more, it's GMO propaganda making you think we need more production to feed the poor. Well, we don't have enough cows... for our demand but we have way more than is responsible.
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That sounds more like lab scale than pilot plant.
Additionally, this won't be acceptable unless the stone can be sold at a profit. That doesn't look feasible without lots of government subsidies on a permanent basis (possibly as carbon offsets, but some kind of subsidy).
I think the oceanic algae farms are much more plausible. This story counts more as "interesting". And note that it depends on a local source of excess energy. (Geothermal in Iceland, but nuclear could also work. So could wind or solar. But it seems more of a dump for excess energy than something that would be practical on a large scale, even if the result could be sold for more than the cost of hauling it away....and the stone they described didn't sound very strong, so you probably couldn't.)
There's also the question of how much CO2 would be produced in the process of getting the materials used as a base to the plant. It's not like they're converting CO2 into diamonds, they're mixing it with something...and often that something is made by removing CO2 from a naturally occurring compound, They aren't starting with something simple like gypsum, though, so the process chain would need to be evaluated.
Off hand, what this is is some scientists in a lab discovered some process, and then someone at the lab looked for a way to write it up as something newsworthy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
At first I thought it was extracting the carbon and making it into coal, which of course could be used for fuel.
The best way to get rid of CO_2 is to compress it into gas cylinders and put them on rocket ships to the sun.
Is Hawking a real scientist?
https://www.seeker.com/space/planets/stephen-hawking-says-earth-could-become-a-hothouse-planet-like-venus
STOP BURNING SO MUCH OF IT!!!
Crying out loud, complaints about how it's too expensive to stop it, but here we go, trying to suck it out of the atmosphere faster than we put it back out again.
So, no it's not like 10 mph vs 12,500 mph, it more like 10 mph vs 11 mph.
This is EXACTLY the type of technology we should be looking SERIOUSLY at, a opposed to running around like a headless Chicken Little, screaming "HOTTEST *INSERT EVENT* EVARRRRRR!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
World's First 'Negative Emissions' Plant Has Begun Operation
Old News!! This happened back on January 20th, 2017. I recall quite clearly, not that many people showed up.
We're talking about the White House, aren't we?
Sad.
Imagine a scenario where all the CO2 in the local area becomes depleted, then someone lights a cigarette.
It won't be one of those 7 minute cigarettes!
Tracy Johnson
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BT
At this point it's idiotic to pull out free atmospheric CO2 for simple sequestration, it's FAR more cost/energy effective to remove the current sources (fossil power plants, ICE vehicles, etc). Its like trying to clean up a contaminated lake with a little solar powered pump that removes a teaspoon of toxins a day while watching semi trucks full of additional toxins dumped into the same lake each day. Unless it literally costs $0 extra to add this to a plant it would be far more effective to simply subsidize the purchase of an equivalent number of EVs and the electrical generation infrastructure to charge them.
"What the hell man?! We gotta eat too..." Besides, running that 24/7 may cause jet streams to be pulled towards that factory. It would be funny if it stormed there all the time.
Aw shucks pardner, you may have a point there. Oh wait you actually don't. They said carbon negative, which means they are claiming that the system sequesters more carbon than it consumes.