A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by quotemstr » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:40 AM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #48

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…

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...

> 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable

In the eyes of the annoying kind of climate activist, the affordability you've mentioned is a bug, not a feature. Too many people who claim to care about the planet want to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more generally. This sort of activist doesn't see the carbon problem as an engineering challenge, but instead as a political and aesthetic project. It's super annoying, because people like this reject technology that would let us have our modern lifestyle cake and eat it too.

Not all climate activists are like this, but there are enough of these bad faith people around to seriously impair earnest and good faith efforts to solve the actual engineering side of the carbon problem.

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

#52

Post by pjc50 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:52 AM UTC

GistNoesis wrote: post #34

how much co2 is released each year ? -> "The world emits about 43 billion tons of CO2 a year (2019)" This article -> 50$ per ton of capture. product = $2,15 trillion to capture the whole year emissions. US GDP 2020 -> $20.93 trillion Only a few plants and ~10% of GDP from a single country could solve it. Does this mean that global warming is almost a non-issue, but merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot t…

> merely just a game of chicken to see who will foot the bill ?

This was always the real problem.

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

#53

Post by DennisP » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:54 AM UTC

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…

For electricity generation, it'll be cheaper to build low-carbon generators. For long-distance jet travel, it's probably cheapest to turn the captured CO2 into fuel. For emissions from concrete, ambient capture and sequestration might be best.

The great thing about a price on carbon is that the market would sort all this out.

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

#54

Post by Klapaucius » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:54 AM UTC

holoduke wrote: post #49

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.

For any mitigation solution, you have to ask 3 questions 1) How much does it cost 2) How much space does it require 3) How does it scale

Planting trees performs excellent on (1) but terribly on (2) and (3). According to Bill Gates' recent book on the topic (where he aims as best has he can to summarize the state of knowledge as per today), you'd basically have to make a big forest of the rest of the world just to offset US emissions.

In addition, it's not enough to plant trees, you have to plant trees where there wouldn't have grown any if you were not planting (i.e. making forest out of non-forest). This is going to put an additional huge strain on the need for land to feed more mouths, which is a problem that is only becoming more precarious.

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

#55

Post by Aachen » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

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…

> I wonder if this won't be an environmental hazard in itself. What do we do with it after it's captured its CO2?

I don't see coal being an environmental hazard and that's carbon captured in the ground. Plus you have to ask whether some risk of leaks or whatever is worse than not even trying at all.

> I don't think we'll manage to do significant CO2 capture before the effects are irreversible anyway.

- Without joking: not with that attitude we won't. Let's not quit before trying?

- We need all solutions to develop and mature right now. If it turns out cement remains unsolved, for example, or maybe it's fertilizer that we can't find a solution for or we can't get the solution to farmers in low income countries, then having a way of removing said issue indirectly will still be helpful.

- There are different degrees to overshooting. A +3°C climate (already way too hot by current estimates) is still better than a +5°C. Maybe the runaway effects at +3 make it into +5, but also, those effects take time to run their course. Anything we do to slow down, reverse, control, it all buys us time to decide what options to deploy. "We won't manage anyway, why bother" is the only wrong path to walk down. Maybe we can adapt to +4, but without tech to reduce emissions or counter a runaway effect, it won't stay at +4.

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

#56

Post by quotemstr » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

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…

There are really two separate questions that we have to consider when talking about the climate:

1) "Do we as a species need to be able to control the composition of the atmosphere?", and

2) "What is the optimal composition of the atmosphere?".

The answer to question #1 is pretty clearly "yes". We're well on our way to becoming a Kardashev type I civilization. At that planetary scale, humanity's inputs to various global systems will just swamp the natural feedbacks that kept things roughly stable before people, so if we don't exert some kind of stabilizing control ourselves, the system will break down. Are we on the verge of a breakdown right now? Maybe. Maybe not. It's complicated. But at some point, if humanity keeps growing, we will reach a point where active management of planetary systems becomes a necessity --- we're going to have to learn to terraform the Earth.

And as for question #2? Maybe the optimal atmosphere has more carbon than it did in the pleistocene. Finding the right level of carbon in the atmosphere is a task that will depend on fancy modeling and careful experimentation. But it's hard to worry about question #2 when we haven't figured out #1; why worry about exactly the right position for a knob on a complex machine when the machine's knob is currently broken off?

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

#57

Post by pjc50 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:56 AM UTC

LatteLazy wrote: post #48

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…

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...

The flooding is hardly "water world": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z

"Central estimates in the recent literature broadly agree that global mean sea level is likely to rise 20–30 cm by 20503,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. End-of-century projections diverge more, with typical central estimates ranging from 50–70 cm under representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 70–100 cm under RCP 8.53,9,10,12, though more recent projections incorporating Antarctic ice sheet dynamics indicate that sea levels may rise 70–100 cm under RCP 4.5 and 100–180 cm under RCP 8.5, and could even exceed 2 m or more in far-tail scenarios4,7,8,11. Via a structured elicitation of opinion, experts now estimate there is a 5 percent chance 21st century sea-level rise will exceed 2 m"

Bad news for East Anglia and the Somerset Levels, and many estuary cities including London will need mitigation work.

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

#58

Post by PaulHoule » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:57 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #38

GekkePrutser wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok closed loop sounds better, the article didn't clarify this. But the compression itself and the heating will cost significant energy too, don't forget this. But consider for a moment how much coal and oil we've been digging up since the industrial age. CO2 is much less dense once it's uncontained underground. It won't stay liquid at that pressure. In that case we'll need to have underground space of a size of many…

The little detail that injecting CO2 into gas and oil wells can help get more gas and oil out of them is the main reason companies are investing in this tech. If the government can be persuaded to pay for the research, all the better!

In Texas you can find big pockets of CO2 undeground and pdople havd been driling holes into those and pumping the CO2 into oil wells. Thus the pipeline, injection, etc. are all developed.

CO2 at 1200 psi will mix with oil very well and do wonders getting into pores, but to scale up storage there are not enough oil wells and we'd probably store in saline aquifers.

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

#59

Post by GekkePrutser » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 10:59 AM UTC

Jouvence wrote: post #44

elgfare wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

> unless a significant use for captured CO2 is identified

And a significant use that does not end in it being released to the atmosphere after being used :)

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

#60

Post by DennisP » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 11:03 AM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #14

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…

Ok closed loop sounds better, the article didn't clarify this. But the compression itself and the heating will cost significant energy too, don't forget this. But consider for a moment how much coal and oil we've been digging up since the industrial age. CO2 is much less dense once it's uncontained underground. It won't stay liquid at that pressure. In that case we'll need to have underground space of a size of many…

One great idea for storage is underground basalt formations. Inject CO2, and it'll turn into limestone in under two years. It can't solve the whole problem by itself, but there's enough capacity for gigatons of CO2.

There are several entities working on this. Here's a company with a small pilot project, and links to scientific papers: https://www.carbfix.com/