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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.
They can have jobs putting all the carbon back into coal mines.
Because of the low levels of CO2 today, we have and increasingly large areas on earth, were nothing grows anymore...
Well, we should soon have no problem growing crops all over the world, then: https://climate.nasa.gov/syste...
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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 ]
It is strongly expected that vegetation patterns may shift as the climate warms, but in general as arctic permafrost becomes more amenable to new forestation and the line of the tropics edge northward, in general the world will become a 'greener' place. More lush flora will serve as a natural check on carbon dioxide concentrations, just as it always has, and while there may be some lag or hysteresis eventually we achieve a new equilibrium. Ironically this may solve other problems that mankind is facing with regards to feeding a growing population; as new farmland opens up in the northern USA and Canada and portions of northern Europe and Russia, there is an opportunity to vastly increase the amount of food available and relieve the strain on the currently overburdened regions like the central US and California.
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
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.
It usually translates to "It works. But doesn't really scale well, or at all."
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).
In the past the earth had much higher CO2 values, and more plant life.
But no humans.
Nature can handle CO2 just fine, it is just that we want to keep our coastal cities above water and our current crops productive. Maybe, in a few thousand years, new plant life will thrive from the increased CO2 levels but we still need to eat during the transition.
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
You are right. A few millennia ago, Earth had way higher CO2 levels and it did support life. Actually, a lot of life was way better off at higher CO2 levels. It didn't support human life, and it probably cannot with higher CO2 levels, but if that's no requirement, you're right.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nobody ever argued that this was not possible. The question is rather if it makes any sense.
Hopefully there will be an army of ACs holding the flash lights in Canada during winter to ensure that the plants grow in time for a summer harvest.
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;
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.
It's not the absolute level of CO2, it's the rate of change that will lead to mass extinctions. If you said we were headed for 1000 ppm in a million years, I'd say "big deal". If you said we were headed for 100 ppm in eighty years, I'd say, that's very big deal.
If analogies are your thing, it's like the difference diving into the pool and hitting the water at 10 mph vs. hitting the water 12,500 mph. One is a fun experience, and the best thing you could say about the other is that it's not an experience at all.
I have a question for people who spread memes like the above: do you ever actually think for yourself, or do you just repeat what you're told?
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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?
'Big Oil'
'Big Coal'
'Big Finance'
'Big Pharma'
but never, oh, never, 'Big Government.'
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
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.
Surprisingly, the majority of humans start with a baseline agreement that we would like to preserve humanity.Of course, somebody has to point out that humans are capable of bad things (tm), and don't sound far off from a made for TV movie villain. "Humans are the worst, which neatly explains away my incapacity for empathy but not my disinterest in making sacrifices for the greater good!"
"Old man yells at systemd"
In the past the earth had much higher CO2 values, and more plant life.
And no humans
Right, because solving humankind's problems is the most important thing on the planet, and every other species alive should be sacrificed to attain that goal.
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.
Smart doesn't come into it. You don't have to be a genius to think critically; it's more a habit than a talent.
Nobody who spent twenty minutes thinking about the "CO2 was much higher in the past" would realize that this is an idiotic argument; sure they were higher in the Eocene 50 million years ago, but the Eocene warming event was accompanied by global mass extinctions -- as was the subsequent cooling. But both the "rapid" warming and cooling happened much more slowly, slowly enough for new species to emerge as for old ones to disappear. "Rapid" in terms of the Eocene Optimum event was 0.3 C/1000 years. The current rate of warming is sixty times faster.
You don't have to be a genius to figure this out. You just have to be curious enough to look into it. So I have to ask again, do you actually think about this crap before you choose to believe it, or do you just go by how it makes you feel? Clearly, based on your strawman argument, you think how you feel about the messenger makes some difference.
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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?
Don't worry, I've heard the planet rotational axis is going to shift, too.
#DeleteFacebook
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?
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.
#DeleteFacebook
Netflix/other Cowspiracy
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. ;-)
Aha. Caught you in a slip. You may want to be more careful if you're to avoid detection in future.
Requiem for the American Dream
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.
You can't grow crops effectively at high latitudes due to there being no light at all for half the year. Also deserts are growing faster than permafrost melts, so there is still a net loss of farmable land. Thirdly, human accelerated climate change will not give time for many species of plants and animals to adapt as they have in the past, leading to a global crash in biodiversity. Get your head out of your ass
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.
Chances are, you are already living under a MUCH higher CO2 environment. A buddy of mine bought a CO2 meter and let me borrow it for a while. Inside a closed room, like that which you sleep in every night, CO2 levels EASILY reach greater than 1000 PPM because there is NOTHING converting the CO2 that you are generating with every breath back to O2 like outside where all the plants are living (outdoor air is usually around 390 to 420 PPM at the moment).
Worried about CO2? Plant some trees and crack open a window.
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
In high CO2 environments plants produce more vegetative growth, sure. But less nutrients. So you have to eat more calories to get all your vitamins and minerals. How's that been working out so far?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Where's your proof of this? Convenient how it's a nice round number like 500 million. I'm sure some damn fine math went into making that "500 million."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
Actually, no, it really is. Humans consume roughly 5.67 × 10^20 joules of energy per year, most of it from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels contain about 15(cheap coal) to 55(natural gas) MJ/kg of energy, and are almost entirely carbon by mass.
Call it 30MJ/kg on average. So we burn roughly (5.67×10^20 J) / (30*10^6 J/kg) = 2x10^13 kg of carbon per year. Or 20 trillion kg. Factor in the fact that CO2 is mostly oxygen (32g O vs. 12g C), and 20 trillion kg of Carbon translates to 20 * 44/12 = 73 trillion kg of CO2. Close enough for some very rough calculations.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Holy shit - the line of the tropics will edge northward. Woah ! - so not only will the earth's axis of rotation change it will wobble throughout the year to prevent there being any corresponding southward expansion.
We'll all be shaken off the planet by climate change, we'd better reduce emissions right away and hold on tight
Nullius in verba
The maximum sustainable population of humans on planet Earth is 500 million.
[citation needed]
Yup, I was off by a factor of thousands. Sorry. But from the replies I can deduce that the majority of readers understood what I was trying to say, that the carbon dioxide levels used to be higher a few million years ago, before modern human walked the earth, and that other life forms can survive in such a climate.
We, on the other hand, don't do so great when CO2 levels rise. We're fairly sensitive to CO2, due to the way our respiration system works. Our breathing reflex is actually not triggered by a lack of oxygen but by a surplus of CO2. But what really "kills" us here is our brain. That thing really starts to freak out if you flood it with high CO2 levels. If it wasn't dangerous I'd suggest breathing in deeply from a CO2 bottle and see for yourself how your body goes into panic mode.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nobody who spent twenty minutes thinking about the "CO2 was much higher in the past" would realize that this is an idiotic argument; sure they were higher in the Eocene 50 million years ago, but the Eocene warming event was accompanied by global mass extinctions -- as was the subsequent cooling.
All this fuss about how fast CO2 concentrations rose and no thought at all about how long a mass extinction actually takes.
The largest known mass extinction 252 million years ago that marked the end of the Permian period lasted a minimum of 12,000 years and may have taken as long as 108,000 years. You all act like it happens overnight. It doesn't. Natural mass extinctions take thousands upon thousands of years. So many thousands of years that it's relatively easy for human intervention to prevent a lot of them entirely. We will certainly save all the species with cute, fuzzy babies. Odds are we'll save every other species we find useful or interesting, and many more besides. Mass extinctions take so long that you only have to be paying as much attention as we're paying now to notice a niche starting to go empty and do something about it. Foolishly, perhaps, because mass extinctions are natural, have happened repeatedly, and are irrelevant to the survivors. If your species lives through it, you don't care what happened to all the rest. A new food web will grow up in place of the old one. And if you don't think our species can't artificially maintain a food web to support ourselves, you haven't been paying attention—we already do.
That mass extinction involved 6 million cubic kilometers of lava, by the way. That should sound like a big number, because it's a fucking big number. Enough to cover the continental US a mile deep. People who run around waving their hands about "mass extinction" events over a little burning coal should bear that in mind.
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!!!
The maximum sustainable population of humans on planet Earth is 500 million. We have 15 times that many and they're only growing.
Whose ass did you pull that number from?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
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BT
No.
In General, the tropics will become deserts devoid of life, thanks to surge heat (heat waves) in excess of 140F for up to 20 hours at a time
ie., giant crockpots
The low mineral arctic tundra, lined meters deep in algae corpses, will be unuseable by trees or grassland, and will continue to spew methane.
"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.
This is the era of "it sounds like it should be true so it is".
The increase of "baseline", ambient CO2 concentrations will push CO2 concentrations in enclosed spaces even higher. That either spells doom for productivity in office buildings or will significantly increase costs for improved ventilation of said buildings.
Ezekiel 23:20
My mother-in-law lived to the age of 96. By your logic I'm guaranteed another 40 years.
You can't calculate by analogy.
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Soil is nice, but not essential. Hydroponics works.
Plants can grow in sand. Just add water and fertilizer.
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You first.
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The world population has been in excess of 500 million for over 500 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
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I've spent hours 2 feet away from a cooling chamber fed by liquid CO2, breathing the evaporated CO2 and not having breathing or panic problems. The primary nuisance is that the CO2 forms carbonic acid on contact with tears, and it stings a little.
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If it's thin, it's going to be a solar sail. Keeping it in orbit will be a problem. Keeping it from being shredded by debris and meteors will be a problem.
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It's really nice having oxygen around, and 73% of the mass of CO2 is oxygen. Those cylinders aren't going to be light. It's going to take a lot of energy to rocket those cylinders into the sun, and in the process of making suitable fuel we'll make a lot of CO2. Lose - lose.
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Also, Big Wheel!
After reading enough about how 'Bump Stocks' work, it becomes obvious that a skilled gunman can probably make a 'bump stock' out of the right kind of chunk of foam rubber. The idea is to use the resonance of the bounceback of recoil from the previous shot to cause your stationary finger to trigger the next shot.
The only way to shut that down is to ban semi-automatics.
If it is a solar sail then you get to make it orbit the sun and accelerate and decelerate to keep it in-between the sun and the earth.
Only way you can keep it above the poles too.
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