Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

cicero.oslo.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 221 posts

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#151

Post by DenisM »

hedora wrote: post #110
DenisM wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not joking and my observation does not square with your link. A close friend has taken a tour of a local landfill in WA state and was shown a perfectly preserved months-old banana that was dug out by the presenter from the landfill. Apparently the landfills, at least here, are completely sealed. If a banana stays “fresh” for months a sheet of paper will stay fresh for a century. And be that as it may, suppose we…

Modern landfills have pumps to push oxygen into the garbage to accelerate decomposition. Without them, newspaper takes >> 50 years to decompose. Diverting waste paper to a sealed dump would definitely sequester carbon. (But you need to make sure the production of new paper is carbon neutral vs recycling for this to work out).

How can production be not carbon neutral? When trees are cut new trees grow in their place, unless the place is used as a construction site or something.

https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/mass-t...

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#152

Post by joe_the_user »

supernova87a wrote: post #115

CCS technology is uneconomic. Like incredibly uneconomic. Like, the last thing you would pay for after doing all other possible things. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stock/files/gillingham_sto... https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate...

Indeed, CCS is the inherently, a-priori, the least efficient possible way to prevent carbon from being in the atmosphere. That's basic thermodynamics.

But things are sounding really bad and carbon capture technologies may be necessary once ordinary methods of reducing carbon production are exhausted.

But geeks getting excited about carbon capture now reminds me of a guy eating a burger and saying "sure, the cholesterol is bad but I can just get heart bypass".

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#153

Post by tito »

hedora wrote: post #119
tito wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! Add your company to AirMiners, the largest index of companies mining carbon fro the air: http://airminers.org We'll feature it on the top of the list.

Hey, thanks for putting this list together. Is anyone actively curating it one level down: Current $/ton, predicted $/ton, total feasible scale, third party (preferably peer reviewed) vetting for scams, etc?

I would love to add this info! Any suggestions how to pull this data or how to display it?

tito@impossiblelabs.io

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#154

Post by tito »

detritus wrote: post #124
tito wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! Add your company to AirMiners, the largest index of companies mining carbon fro the air: http://airminers.org We'll feature it on the top of the list.

Neat! Not sure how useful it would be to others, but the first thing I tried to do was sort the list by country.

Great feedback. Were you looking for your country in particular, or what would you like to do with a country-level sort?

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#155

Post by throw_14JAS »

the8472 wrote: post #46
Valgrim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cement releases CO2 as part of it's chemical curing process. It contributes to about 8% of worldwide emissions. Another industry where CO2 as a chemical byproduct is vented at a massive scale in the atmosphere is with the steel industry. Both are good targets for carbon capture at the source.

> Cement releases CO2 as part of it's chemical curing process. It contributes to about 8% of worldwide emissions. There are 2 sources of CO2 during cement manufacture. One is from the decomposition of lime, the other is from the energy production needed to make the process work. The latter could be avoided by electrical heating, a solar furnace or other renewable heat sources. The decomposition part can be compensate…

Do you roughly know the relative ratios of emission for the sources?

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#156

Post by acidburnNSA »

strainer wrote: post #150
acidburnNSA wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that intermittent renewable sources plus storage can be built out at astronomical scale without running into unexpected economic, regulatory, or environmental challenges. In many similar expansions of new tech, big challenges show up once the fleet size shows up. This was the central tenant of Komanoff's Power Plant Cost Escalation book (free pdf of it here: http://komanoff.net/nuclear_power/Power_Plant_…

This term "astronomical" applies no more to the scale of renewables needing built than it would nuclear. The existence of a somewhat related pdf doesn't make the prophecy realistic, that big challenges are more likely to show up for future renewable builds than for nuclear builds. The actual situation is nuclear can hardly get built currently due to "economic, regulatory, or environmental challenges" while renewables…

Nuclear went through its economic, regulatory, and environmental challenges as its fleet sizes grew (at 20 GWe low-carbon generation/year for 12 years at its peak), and is still struggling. Intermittent renewables may have their own set of parallel issues. Exhibit A, of course, is [1]. As renewables scale today, we're scaling high-carbon fracked natural gas backup with them. That chicken probably will come home to roost as we continue in this ramp up.

Proponents say that the fracked gas that's inherently tied to intermittent sources is ok because it's a bridge and that the bridge is definitively better than low-carbon 24/7 nuclear. I think that statement is highly debatable.

Given how astronomical the challenge is (replace 84% of the world's energy with low-carbon alternatives, then scale up by 2-5x to allow energy impoverished areas to choose how they want to live their lives, then scale up more to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere), we shouldn't put renewables against nuclear power.

We should be looking for low-carbon partnerships. Let's find ways to pair nuclear better with intermittent renewables so we don't have to build massive infrastructure of fracked gas.

[1] https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/03/01/californias-san-b...

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#157

Post by walleeee »

blueadept111 wrote: post #79
inciampati wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are at the point of last resort. There is no viable way to solve the distributed problem of carbon emission. People can argue all they want about renewables and regulation. Half the world won't give a damn, and we'll be left where we are. Carbon capture is a much more centralized response. It actually might be possible for a few rich nations to get together and implement systems to drive it at scale. Unfortunately…

No viable way? All it takes is a single generation to have 50% less children to cut the world population (and therefore carbon emissions) in half. Not only is it viable, it the solution that will be forced upon humanity if humanity doesn't embrace it on its own terms.

> All it takes is a single generation to have 50% less children to cut the world population (and therefore carbon emissions) in half.

This is not how demography works. Even an instant and global halving of the birthrate, holding all else equal, would not even begin to reduce total population. In 2016, global birthrate exceeded deathrate by a factor of ~2.4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthrate).

There is also serious inertia involved when reducing natality to balance mortality. Exponential population growth has momentum. Population leveling could take decades to manifest.

"...there is a large time lag between the point at which the fertility rate falls to the replacement level and the point at which the population stops rising." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_population_growth)

And in any case, it's by no means obvious that population and total carbon emissions are directly proportional.

I don't disagree that population reduction will likely be forced upon us by ecological and concomitant socio-political crises: e.g., water/food shortages, extreme weather, war, etc. Does that really deserve to be called a solution, though?

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#159

Post by ahartmetz »

Mirioron wrote: post #149
johnmorrison wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and also gives one an appreciation of just how powerful of a greenhouse gas CO2 is It should also be noted that the total atmosphere (dry + water) is about 3% water vapor by weight and H2O makes up the majority of the greenhouse effect. CO2 isn't a problem because it's the biggest greenhouse gas, it's a problem because it's the one (the biggest anthroprogenic one) pushing us over the equilibrium where net warming i…

> It should also be noted that the total atmosphere (dry + water) is about 3% water vapor by weight and H2O makes up the majority of the greenhouse effect. This is actually an incredibly important point, because higher temperatures mean more water vapor in the atmosphere. However, that also means more clouds, which counteracts warming to some degree. The impact of clouds on climate change is one of the biggest diffic…

AFAIK one of the biggest problem in numeric simulations is critical phenomena, where depending on a tiny difference in current state, something either happens or doesn't happen. Critical phenomena include phase changes such as water freezing or condensing (clouds). Obviously that's a problem for weather forecasts.

For a long-term climate model, it might work to average out (over space and time) some critical phenomema and assume a steady function from e.g. average air temperature to ice cap size and cloud cover.

(source: wrote some homework-grade numerical simulations, physics major.)

Re: Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C

#160

Post by leoedin »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #137
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it would even be practical to capture the carbon emitted during the curing process as this is happening at it's final destination rather than during manufacture.

That’s not how CCS or net carbon works. CO2 is basically fungible. You can release it today in Australia and capture it yesterday or tomorrow in Canada to offset, it basically makes no appreciable difference.

I think the biggest reason for capturing at source is the concentration of the gas. Capturing CO2 when it's in atmosphere at 0.04% is much more energy intensive than capturing at source where concentrations could be many orders of magnitude higher.
Post reply on HN