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Sucking CO2 From Air Is Cheaper Than Scientists Thought (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: While avoiding the worst dangers of climate change will likely require sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky, prominent scientists have long dismissed such technologies as far too expensive. But a detailed new analysis published today in the journal Joule finds that direct air capture may be practical after all. The study concludes it would cost between $94 and $232 per ton of captured carbon dioxide, if existing technologies were implemented on a commercial scale. One earlier estimate, published in Proceedings of the National Academies, put that figure at more than $1,000 (though the calculations were made on what's known as an avoided-cost basis, which would add about 10 percent to the new study's figures). Crucially, the lowest-cost design, optimized to produce and sell alternative fuels made from the captured carbon dioxide, could already be profitable with existing public policies in certain markets. The higher cost estimates are for plants that would deliver compressed carbon dioxide for permanent underground storage. David Keith, a Harvard physics professor and lead author of the paper, is also the founder of Carbon Engineering, "a Calgary-based startup that has spent the last nine years designing, refining, and testing a direct air capture pilot plant in Squamish, B.C.," reports MIT. "Carbon Engineering plans to combine the carbon captured at its plants with hydrogen to produce carbon-neutral synthetic fuels, a process the pilot facility has already been performing." The company has secured $30 million, but is seeking additional funds to build a larger facility that will begin selling fuels. CNBC notes that Carbon Engineering is owned by several private investors, including Bill Gates.
All those ideas were the equivalent of "there's too much litter on the sidewalks, we need to ban production of any product that generates trash", while this is more like "there's too much litter, how about maybe someone go clean up all the litter?"
Trees are not free. They take up valuable space that could be used for more profitable things.
$100-200 a ton is a BARGAIN.
The dollar price is a poor metric. We should really be looking at energy requirements, especially the ratio between energy produced per ton of CO2, and the energy required to pull it back from the air.
Trees are not free. They take up valuable space that could be used for more profitable things.
They are also not a net carbon sink.
The scientists are saying "stop throwing your trash on the streets". But everyone else only thinks the alternatives are the only ones you've proposed.
This. Without violating one or both of the laws of thermodynamics, it seems almost certain that any sort of sequestration cannot produce more energy in the form of fuel than it uses as input. After all, you're going from a state that has already reacted with oxygen to a state that will release energy when it burns in oxygen, which means that you have to add energy to get it back to such a high-energy state.
So where is all of that energy going to come from? My best guess would be burning fossil fuels. And thus, the cycle of infeasibility is complete. Either that or this sequestration will consume something else that is in a high-energy state and produce something else in a low-energy state, in which case we can do this, but only until we run out of the required reactant. I'm not holding my breath on that one, though.
Of course, if we somehow manage to get to a point where we can produce all of our energy needs without burning fossil fuels, then I suppose sequestering CO2 into gasoline might become feasible. Then again, if we get to that point, we won't need this technique, because plants will take care of reducing the CO2 for us, and we won't need the fuel that results from it. So I'm failing to see how such a solution could ever be practical or economically viable in any sane universe.
Then again, the theory that CO2 isn't a problem seems to be supported by the U.S. right-wing political establishment, and they have given us a President who seems to think that he is above the law, so maybe he's above the laws of thermodynamics, too.
*shrugs*
Skims paper
Holy crap. I was right. They are talking about burning fossil fuels to make fossil fuels. *sobs uncontrollably* But I don't see anything about producing fuel in the actual article, beyond a passing mention that if someone wanted to come up with a way to create fossil fuels in a carbon-neutral way, they would need to start with carbon. As far as this paper is concerned, they're sticking it in a tank, which is a lot more plausible than doing something useful with it.
The big problem, then, is that there's not likely to ever be any monetary upside to capturing the carbon, and if you do it with natural gas, you only capture about twice as much CO2 as you put out. About 56.1 kg of CO2 are emitted for every gigajoule of CO2 that you burn. If powered by natural gas, this design burns 8.81 GJ of nat gas per metric ton sequestered. That's almost half a metric ton of CO2 emitted per ton of CO2 sequestered, plus about 202 kg of H2O, for a grand total of 696 kg of greenhouse gases for every 1000 sequestered, or only about 44% more sequestration by mass than you emit to produce the power.
And in the end, you have a bunch of tanks of CO2 that nobody wants. Also, this is a net consumer of water (because some of it evaporates). Want to know what's even more precious than energy these days? Fresh water.
I just don't see it, unless they can find a way to turn it into carbon credits or something.
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Gravis Zero opined:
There has been a long history of using environmental capital without consequence and that needs to come to an end if we're going to save this planet.
While I agree completely with the first clause of this statement, the second half (which needs a comma after "and," btw) is a popular cliché that never fails to make me groan in frustration.
The Earth will be fine, regardless of whether we, as a species, manage to solve the slow-motion environmental catastrophe we accidentally created. What's at risk is the current ecosystem to which we're accustomed, including most of the extant species of multi-cellular life.
About 250 million years ago, give or take a million years or so, something very similar to what we've set in motion happened to the Earth. In what's known as the Permian-Triassic Extinction event, carbon dioxide levels rose to much higher levels than they are today, for reaons we still don't fully understand. As a result, the global temperature increased by about 10 degrees Centigrade, and the icecaps melted, releasing large amounts of methane from rotting plant life that had been buried under glaciers during the ice age that began the global extinction event. Methane clathrates in the deepest, coldest parts of the ocean (there was only one, at the time) also melted, releasing a whole lot more methane, and turning the ocean into a kind of anoxic fizzy.
In the ocean, 96% of species went extinct. On land, 70% of multi-cellular species disappeared. The entire ecosystem collapsed within about 100,000 years. The P-T extinction event was so severe, that it's often referred to as the "Great Dying." It was so devastating that it took between 4 and 9 million years before the global ecosystem recovered sufficiently for new species to begin to fill the niches the global warming event had created.
But recover it did - and the result was the beginning (in the Triassic Period) of what eventually (in the Jurassic and Cretaceous) became the Age of Dinosaurs. By the time the Chixiculub bolide smacked into the coast of what is now the Yucatán Penninsula in southern Mexico, about 65 million years ago, the dinosaurian Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha, and Theropoda taxa had dominated the planetary ecosystem for approximetely 120 million years.
And they thrived in the elevated temperatures the Permian-Triassic extinction event created. Once the excess CO2 cleared from the ocean, speciation rapidly filled it with a dizzying variety of fish, invertebrates, plant life - and dinosaurs. From viruses and bacteria to insects and arachnids to grasses, shrubs, and trees to animals of all sizes, the planet teemed with life within a few tens of millions of years after the most devastating extinction event in its history. (Okay, arguably the Oxygen Catastrophe might have caused an even more comprehensive extinction event - but we can't really determine whether that was the case, because, in those earliest days of life on Earth, no species had developed shells or exo- or endo-skeletons, so they didn't leave a fossil record for us to read.)
As evidenced by the eventual recovery from the P-T Extinction, the popular meme of "saving the planet" is hyperbole of the most narcissisitic stripe. The planet - and life itself - will survive the extinction event we have already caused (and will continue to cause for several thousand years to come). Our contemporary varieties of megafauna are almost certainly all doomed (with the possible exception of some familiar commensal and chattel species - I suspect dogs and cats, for instance, will survive as long as humans do). However, you can say "goodbye" to the whales and dolphins, the lions and tigers and bears, the el
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I hear this all the time, "We can't use nuclear power, it's too expensive." What of solar power? What do people have to say about that? "We have to subsidize solar power so we can develop the technology and make it cheaper than coal." Okay then, why not subsidize nuclear power so we can develop the technology until it is cheaper than coal?
The total cost per megawatt of nuclear is about double solar/offshore wind + battery storage.
That's the real cost. Subsidies are only used to make them commercially viable alternatives to coal.
What you are proposing is guaranteed high subsidies for many decades, and a bunch of unknown costs because we are sure to find new safety issues and haven't figured out what to do with the waste yet. Alternatively, we have some temporary subsidies on a clean form of energy that will become the cheapest form of generation ever (cheaper than subsidised coal) within a few decades at most.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
More people die falling off roofs installing solar than die from anything nuclear on an annual basis. The "fallout risk" is higher in running 1960s-era reactors past their designed lifetime instead of building replacements. So why don't we make it easier to build replacements that have vastly improved safety systems?
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Climate change is solid science, and the way to stop it in this case is tech.
Who are you to decide for me that it should be stopped? Perhaps I want warmer weather. Perhaps I want more foliage and larger crop yields due to increased CO2. Perhaps I want northern Canada, Siberia, Greenland and Antarctica to open up and be usable for agriculture and human habitation. Perhaps I want my property that is 5 miles from the coast to become coastal property.
All we ever hear is "climate change bad, must stop, ugh" but why? Ignore the crazies who claim that a few degrees change in the temperature is going to mean the death of the planet, we've been a whole lot hotter with a whole lot more CO2 in the past and the world was teaming with life so that is hyperbolic bullcrap.
So why shouldn't we want a warmer climate, why shouldn't we want northern areas to become more moderate, more land to open up, more plant life? Let's get real here folks, it amazes me how the supposed environmental climate change zealots don't realize this is all a scam about money and redistribution of wealth.
How much does it cost to buy beach front property in the US today? I imagine the rich folks in West Palm Beach are opposed to rising oceans because it means they lose property. Or what would it mean if the US was suddenly no longer the bread basket of the world because the plains got drier but the Canadian tundra became warm enough for large scale agriculture?
And what happens to so called carbon credits? The airlines are paying a tax now due to the Paris Accord but where does that money go? Supposedly it is to help developing nations switch from fossil fuels. Who is managing that activity, managing that money? Follow the dollars and I bet you'll find plenty of pockets being lined before it gets to these developing nations.
Just search for the carbon credits scam Al Gore tried to get adopted. Companies could pay to offset their carbon footprint in a cap and trade model and that would go to an exchange he was a founder of. Exactly how does that reduce CO2?
Rising temperatures and rising CO2 are not a threat to human existence, we've existed during ice ages and we've existed during hotter periods. We'll be fine. So the only reason for all this b***s*** is money and all of you climate zealots, many of who I bet were also supporters of Occupy Wall Street, are the exact definition of useful idiots that certain politicians and oligarchs are thrilled to lead around by the nose.
The climate changes, always has, always will. It might have been influenced by dinosaur farts in prehistoric times, humans might be having an impact on it today, don't know, don't care. The world changes, we adapt, always has, always will.
How about you tell me why you think the climate needs to stay exactly one state and one state only, how is that beneficial to the Earth, the animals, the plants or us?
Climate change denialism may be a rejection of science but that hardly makes ANYTHING under the environment and climate science umbrella "solid" science. Solid science gives accurate answers to 9 decimal places each and every time. Climate science models don't even give consistent accurate results or even agree on outcomes. Just because this science is our best guess doesn't mean our confidence level in it should be high. And really, I know the issue has gotten overly politicized so views are extreme but this particular wing of science and those who support it have been preaching various flavors of doom and gloom for decades to get funding and while the environmental movement is going strong the doom and gloom scenarios thus far have never come to pass.