The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
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The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
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Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#2Very well written and balanced article. Thanks for sharing these insights. Looking forward to another "tiny corner" of your explorations of these technologies!
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#3Very well written and balanced article. Thanks for sharing these insights. Looking forward to another "tiny corner" of your explorations of these technologies!
It's not mine but if you're interested in more of the author, follow @michael_nielsen on Twitter.
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#4I'd like to know the land use requirements of direct air capture technology. Will it use enormous amounts of land? What is currently on that land? Will this entail scalability issues?
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#5Does direct air carbon capture at scale even exist? Is there plausible reason to think it will exist in the next few decades?
The whole article seems like "If nuclear fusion cost $100 per MWHr, but if it only cost $10/MWHr..."
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#6I'm not sure if this article hammers home the key point: extracting carbon from the air always takes more energy that was gained by burning the fossil fuel to make that carbon. This is inevitable due to the entropy cost of de-mixing CO2 from the air, and from the limited efficiencies of thermal power generation (~33-40% for a coal power plant, perhaps 20% in an internal combustion engine), and limited efficiency of the carbon capture technology.
So it only makes sense to spend energy on sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, once you've already de-carbonised everything which you possibly can.
Maybe it has a future role (>2050? >2100?) to start using excess low-carbon energy to take CO2 levels back to their pre-industrial level, or to constantly offset hard-to-decarbonise technologies such as air travel.
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#7I'm not sure if this article hammers home the key point: extracting carbon from the air always takes more energy that was gained by burning the fossil fuel to make that carbon. This is inevitable due to the entropy cost of de-mixing CO2 from the air, and from the limited efficiencies of thermal power generation (~33-40% for a coal power plant, perhaps 20% in an internal combustion engine), and limited efficiency of t…
> Maybe it has a future role (>2050? >2100?)
It absolutely must, or else it's basically already too late: https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
> This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
> As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
> After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere.... Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
> If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
(emphasis mine)
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#8I'd like to know the land use requirements of direct air capture technology. Will it use enormous amounts of land? What is currently on that land? Will this entail scalability issues?
An estimate I've seen repeatedly is that they'll take about 1/1000 as much land area as the same carbon capture with trees.
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#9Good analysis, but fails to take into account the storage costs of whatever CO2 is sequestered (or the potential to offset those costs by selling the CO2 to whatever industry uses them).
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#10Good analysis, but fails to take into account the storage costs of whatever CO2 is sequestered (or the potential to offset those costs by selling the CO2 to whatever industry uses them).
The article does take storage cost into account (although it does kinda waive it away):
> If this impression is correct then the cost of capturing CO2 is likely to either dominate or in worst case be comparable to the cost of storage and utilization. Still, a more detailed analysis would be careful about this costing