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A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

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Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#41

Post by cryptica »

Jabbles wrote: post #36
cryptica wrote: post #15

I don't see what is the point to try to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. I don't even understand the fuss around global warming.Why is global warming a bad thing? The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the additional heat. There will be natural selection as usual. New variants of plants will evolve which can absorb more CO2. All species on earth will find a new equilibirum as they always had in the pas…

"The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the additional heat" Evolution takes thousands of years. In that time species will go extinct, so there is no chance for them to evolve. For a simple demonstration of how fast we are changing the climate compared to other periods when ecosystems may have been able to adapt, see https://xkcd.com/1732/

>> Evolution takes thousands of years

Not true. Natural selection can work its magic in a single generation.

For example, given any normal population, choose any trait and remove all individuals which have this trait from the population. The next generation will not have this trait. Specimens with the trait will become extremely rare depending on how accurate the selection process was.

It can be quite radical. For example, if a law was introduced (with death penalty) which prevented all people of normal height and above from having children. In just one generation, all humans would become much shorter.

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#42

Post by mckirk »

chr1 wrote: post #7
chobeat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like with every other solution, under the current political and economic systems, there's no incentive to scale it up quickly enough to make a dent in global warming and it will just live in small local prototypes and in the dreams of techno-solutionists.

That's not a techno solution worth to dream about, the real techno solution is a fine grained control of weather (like https://viento.ai ) and in that case the extra CO2 in atmosphere will be naturally sequestered in fields and farms in Sahara.

To be honest, the layout of that site does not exactly inspire confidence.

But the team is interesting indeed. Incidentally, there's an online SSC meetup with Jaan Tallinn as guest, _today_: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jQQYCdtiH5d3CtrNC/jaan-tall...

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#43

Post by saddlerustle »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #28
shoo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that avoiding emissions in the first place is preferable to trying to figure out how to undo the emissions afterwards. Mental model of emission removal scope is some giant world system maybe 1x or 2x the size of the fossil fuel industry, trying to run in reverse what we've spent the last hundred or two years doing. Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax. Something significant like $250 / ton. Cannot come soon eno…

Exactly that's what I think too. We have to do the removal much faster than we did the actual burning. And the removal will only cost us money, not fuel our economy. I just don't see this happening at significant enough scale. And the capture will have lots of environmental impact too if we do it at that massive scale. And I agree about the carbon tax. It could even pay for some of the removal. The strange thing here…

Most european rail is given huge government subsidies too, though. Also flights in the EU already have to pay for emissions as part of the EU emissions trading scheme.

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#44

Post by Jouvence »

elgfare wrote: post #32
macspoofing wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I feel like CO2 sequestration is second only to nuclear in the amount of unfounded concerns The problem with CO2 capture specifically (specifically from the atmosphere as opposed to at the source) is that CO2 comprises a very small part of air. This means you have to move huge amounts of air through a capture device to capture a very small amount of carbon. How is that ever going to make sense?

I guess the low hanging fruit is to attach this to a power plant or some other CO2 emitting process.

That's true, but then it is surely better to cut out the middle-man and just not use fossil fuels for static generation in the first place.

The energy needs which are hard to meet with renewables (aviation, other large-scale transport) are the same places where CCS is non-viable due to the efficiency hit.

The best we can do is decarbonise as quickly as possible, and live with the fallout of our failure to act this far - unless a significant use for captured CO2 is identified, atmospheric capture technology will always struggle with commercial viability.

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#45

Post by bko »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #8

For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions of tonnes of this "N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine (2-EEMPA)" stuff.. I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? We can't just dump that stuff in the sea. I wonder if CO2 capture does not cause more problems than it solves. Even if we magically could capture CO2 as pure car…

For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions of people reduce their energy consumption..

I wonder if this won't be a governance hazard in itself. What do we do after we create a global governance structure to reduce global emissions. We can't just tell people to stop using so much carbon.

I wonder if reduction causes more problems than it solves. Even if we magically could reduce everyones consumption, how do we deal with population growth assuming humans still produce some carbon.

I think we should really remove existing CO2 from the environment instead. Every ton of CO2 that can be captured and removed from the environment means some family in a poor country can enjoy the benefit of industrialization.

Of course we're already on a path of significant global warning so I don't think we have a choice either way.

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#46

Post by quotemstr »

macspoofing wrote: post #24
iamthemonster wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The solvent in carbon capture runs in a closed loop. You typically heat it, and it releases the CO2 so you can compress it and inject it below ground. 2. You don't necessarily need a depleted natural gas reservoir to inject CO2 subsurface (though they sure are convenient) and there is plenty of room for CO2 subsurface. It also doesn't creep to the surface on any meaningful timescale. 3. How do we transport it ther…

>I feel like CO2 sequestration is second only to nuclear in the amount of unfounded concerns The problem with CO2 capture specifically (specifically from the atmosphere as opposed to at the source) is that CO2 comprises a very small part of air. This means you have to move huge amounts of air through a capture device to capture a very small amount of carbon. How is that ever going to make sense?

It makes sense because brute force engineering solutions are frequently the right ones. If you capture carbon from the air, you can mass produce one kind of capture facility and spam as many copies of this facility as you need (at low cost, thanks to mass production) to give humanity closed-loop control over atmospheric composition.

If you rely on source emissions control only, you need finnicky source-specific installation and control technology everywhere, which greatly increases the cost and complexity of the implementation. And there are places where you can't realistically do carbon capture and sequestration, e.g. jet engines.

On top of all that, we live in a world with multiple governments and jurisdictions, and not all of them agree on the right level of investment in source capture. Do you really expect developing countries to give up on coal generation right away? What are you going to do, bomb them into the stone age? A climate management solution must be robust against the problem of uncooperative actors. We can't rely on everyone getting along and singing carbon kumbaya.

Compared to source mitigations, an atmospheric capture approach is simpler, more robust, and better capable of dealing with uncooperative emitters. Yes, you have to move a lot of air, but that's just energy, and energy is cheap if you're not picky about geography or uptime, and it's especially cheap if you're not squeamish about nuclear.

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#47

Post by magicalhippo »

raverbashing wrote: post #22
adammunich wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only practical on mixtures with high co2 gas concentrations

I wonder how research is doing to concentrate CO2 from the PPM amounts we have "in regular air" There are at least two low-hanging fruits that make it "easier": CO2 is heavier than other important gases and mildly polar.

Plant lots of trees or similar, then burn them for electricity and capture the CO2 from the smoke.

Compared to a lot of the other proposals out there it almost sounds plausible.

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#48

Post by LatteLazy »

iamthemonster wrote: post #13
GekkePrutser wrote: post #8

For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions of tonnes of this "N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine (2-EEMPA)" stuff.. I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? We can't just dump that stuff in the sea. I wonder if CO2 capture does not cause more problems than it solves. Even if we magically could capture CO2 as pure car…

1. The solvent in carbon capture runs in a closed loop. You typically heat it, and it releases the CO2 so you can compress it and inject it below ground. 2. You don't necessarily need a depleted natural gas reservoir to inject CO2 subsurface (though they sure are convenient) and there is plenty of room for CO2 subsurface. It also doesn't creep to the surface on any meaningful timescale. 3. How do we transport it ther…

To put it in perspective, 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable when the alternatives are Water World level flooding or living like a vegan hermit in a cave...

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#49

Post by holoduke »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #8

For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions of tonnes of this "N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine (2-EEMPA)" stuff.. I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? We can't just dump that stuff in the sea. I wonder if CO2 capture does not cause more problems than it solves. Even if we magically could capture CO2 as pure car…

Key is to plant plans and trees. Billions of them. Our energy needs will only become bigger. Transition to renewable economy is in progress. That's good. But there is not enough focus on plants and trees.

Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture

#50

Post by graeme »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #8

For making a dent in global warming we'll need to have billions of tonnes of this "N-(2-ethoxyethyl)-3-morpholinopropan-1-amine (2-EEMPA)" stuff.. I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2? We can't just dump that stuff in the sea. I wonder if CO2 capture does not cause more problems than it solves. Even if we magically could capture CO2 as pure car…

Avoiding emissions would certainly be better. It is supremely inefficient to dig up and burn fuel now then capture it and bury it later.

But current global plan is to keep doing the first part, so we’ll have to undo it. We actually already likely have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if we went to zero emissions today the climate would keep warming from the accumulated CO2 and feedback effects. Takes some years for those to work through the system.

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