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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

#61

Post by Gravityloss »

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…

$50 per tonne? A coal plant produces about a tonne of CO2 for every MWh produced. Industrial electricity price might be $50 per MWh. So just paying for the carbon capture doubles your electricity price? $100 carbon capture charge would triple it. I can't see how this could be competitive.

We have an excellent carbon storage technology, it's called coal. And what's best, it's already there, underground, very safely, proven for millions of years! With no cost!

But we're still building new coal plants in many places. In some places, coal plants and steel factories have shut down, but it's often because industry has been offshored to a place that uses coal, or they're replaced with natural gas, only a somewhat better alternative.

So if leaving coal unused can't be made to work, then more inefficient and thus expensive methods of carbon avoidance likely can't either.

It's like working hard in the car wash for the whole day and then at the end of the day, spending all the money you just earned on having your car washed. It's a bad strategy - you would have spent a lot less time and effort if you had just washed your car yourself.

When the coal and natural gas plants have been shut down, then carbon capture might have a role.

Nice page about world coal usage: https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-information-overview

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

#62

Post by Aachen »

seesawtron wrote: post #21

This [0] AMA from the research group answers most of the questions I am seeing here in the thread. "Technologies range from aqueous amines - the water-rich solvents that run through modern, commercially available capture units - to energy-efficient membranes that filter CO2 from flue gas emitted by power plants. Our newest solvent, EEMPA, can accomplish the task for as little as $47.10 per metric ton - bringing post-…

Clickable link: https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mdouzu/askscien...

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

#63

Post by Klapaucius »

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…

Underground saline aquifers are an excellent place to store CO2, and worldwide storage space is estimated to be orders of magnitude above what is ever going to be needed.

Also, keep in mind that CO2 is not stored as a gas, but in dense phase (liquid-like), due to the high pore pressures at the depths considered (> 3000 feet), well above the CO2 critical point.

At these depths, any leakage to the surface would be negligeable unless you make a really lousy job in choosing your reservoir.

I agree that we should aim to reduce energy usage, but I would argue we would need to both. As often said, there is no "silver bullet" to dealing with climate change, only the possibility of a "silver buckshot", where we'll have to do many large changes at once. Even if we could transit to 100% "green energy" overnight, that alone wouldn't take care of more than less than half of current emissions.

A third of emissions come from industrial processes, much of which entirely unrelated to the energy used. In a nutshell, these emissions can be reduced using CO2 capture/storage, or alternatively we could stop making things such as steel, cement or fertilizer.

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

#64

Post by GekkePrutser »

quotemstr wrote: post #51
LatteLazy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

> to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more generally.

Not roll back. But do smarter.

It's not just global warming. We're shipping billions of tons of stuff from one side of the planet to another in sulphur-blowing rustbuckets. Creating continents of floating plastic in the oceans. Causing toxic lakes from harvesting rare earth minerals.

We can't keep doing this. Maybe we can keep it up so before your lifetime is over, but sooner or later it's going to be a problem that can't be avoided just like climate change is now.

There's many quick wins here. Buying locally produced foods instead of stuff flown in from half a world away. Not flying across europe for a 1 hour business meeting. Reducing plastic packaging.

And there's good news too. We're continuing the excellent path of energy reduction in electric appliances. They had to keep adding "+"es and now rework the entire energy labels in Europe because "A++++" efficiency became too long.

I think COVID already brought us halfway there. We're no longer used to business meetings, the fragility of our supply chains has opened up many eyes, and most office workers now work from home at least part time and do just fine. For the environment this has all been pretty great :)

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

DennisP wrote: post #53
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by GekkePrutser »

Aachen wrote: post #55
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…

> 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.

When it's in the ground it's not, no. But when we try to take it out or put it back in it does cause significant environmental disruption. Especially open mining.

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

Because any effort and money we throw at this won't go to things that are more likely to work. The scale to make CO2 capture actually make a difference is huge. Even the thought of producing and siting all those capture factories is mindbogglingly difficult without creating even bigger problems. For example: If we have to ship all their machinery and steel from China, we're likely to emit more CO2 than they will capture in years.

Like I said I'm open to being proven wrong but I don't think it will ever scale to this level.

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

#68

Post by quotemstr »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #64
quotemstr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 act…

> to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more generally. Not roll back. But do smarter. It's not just global warming. We're shipping billions of tons of stuff from one side of the planet to another in sulphur-blowing rustbuckets. Creating continents of floating plastic in the oceans. Causing toxic lakes from harvesting rare earth minerals. We can't keep…

> We can't keep doing this

In the broadest possible sense, no, we can't keep doing "this": either we limit fertility somehow or we got the Malthusian limit eventually. That's just the consequence of the exponential function. And right now, whether population will stabilize on its own before we hit carrying capacity is an open question.

But if you hold population constant? Yes, we can keep doing this indefinitely, or at least until the sun boils the oceans in 500 million years or so. Why wouldn't we? There's every reason to believe that we can supply oranges in January to everyone.

Show me the math that says we can't. I'm not persuaded by rhetoric about rust bucket cargo ships. It's exactly this sort of sentimentality that makes it difficult to actually make progress on addressing actual climate problems.

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

#69

Post by Aachen »

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…

Well, as another person said, it only works with high concentrations. You'd have to have this country of choice go and install the devices on all exhausts everywhere. There's still a percentage getting past the exhaust, there will still be emissions from fertilizer and the like, methane/nox/refrigerants are still a thing, and so we'd reduce the amount of emissions by, say, 75%. That would be amazing and hugely helpful, but not the solution. In the end we'll need something around 100% (bit more due to overshooting, more likely than not).

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

#70

Post by throwaway316943 »

DennisP wrote: post #60
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…

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/

I believe basalt can be produced artificially as well, is there a chance we could build limestone farms? That would be a neat trick.
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