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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

#101

Post by 8note »

Gravityloss wrote: post #61
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…

$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, p…

The government will pay for it so they can keep a few coal workers in business and get their influencial votes

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

#102

Post by acje »

I can’t imagine an industrial approach that won’t fail on scale, lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve the problem these are strategies to get rich.

The only kind of strategy that seems capable of delivering on both scale and lifecycle is one where we enhance the environment to capture the CO2 for us and store it in the organic food chain simply by scaling it up to hold the extra mass.

Most likely we would have to enhance plains and deserts to become forests. Use regenerative agricultural practices and eat less meat. The big opportunity is in the oceans. There are wast “sea deserts” that could be transformed into more biological active habitats by using our industrial base to build some kind of structure to protect small life. Perhaps also disperse nutrients to accelerate biological processes.

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

#103

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

extropy wrote: post #88
layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this include the carbon ultimately released from oil that was sold to other countries by Norway?

I would guess no. The buyer could be pumping it back in the ground for all the seller knows. Requirement to sell "carbon neutral" oil to countries that do not have their own carbon capture rules would be an interesting idea. Could as well add another tax for all the other nasty chemicals the refinement process releases.

>The buyer could be pumping it back in the ground for all the seller knows.

Yeah, I’m afraid I don’t buy this reasoning...

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

#104

Post by DennisP »

HPsquared wrote: post #73
quotemstr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 insta…

Remember those facilities would have very high running costs (energy usage), it's not just a case of building them.

The paper says 2.0 GJ per tonne CO2. One GJ is 278kWh, and annual emissions about 36 gigatonnes, so that comes to 2.4 terawatts to absorb all our emissions.

Global energy consumption is about 18 TW[1], so 2.4 TW is a lot but not outlandishly so. It makes sense to look at global energy rather than just global electricity, because the input to this process is heat. We'd need clean energy sources, but we have those. Since we need heat and can use a fixed amount of energy constantly, high-temperature nuclear reactors would probably be ideal.

It would be silly to do this instead of decarbonizing electricity production and converting to electric cars, but we also have to deal with steel and concrete production, agricultural emissions, long-haul jets, etc. Let's say we need one TW to cover emissions we can't easily decarbonize.

Nuclear power produced 2657 TWh of electricity in 2019.[2] Divide by hours in a year, that's 0.3 TW. Assuming 50% thermal efficiency, it's 0.6 TW of heat energy. So basically, triple the number of nuclear plants in the world and we can absorb 40% of our emissions.

Some of the high-temperature designs are fast reactors or thorium breeders. If we use either of those, we won't remotely strain our nuclear fuel supply.

There are other methods of absorbing CO2, like reforestation, topsoil restoration, and olivine beaches. But most methods have scaling limits. Direct air capture with basalt sequestration[3] and/or carbon-neutral fuel production could easily play a large role.

[1] https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/current_world_energy_...

[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...

[3] https://www.carbfix.com/

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

#105

Post by cryptica »

Jabbles wrote: post #77
cryptica wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 ex…

That's not natural selection, that's artificial selection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding

Your counter-argument is about semantics. Logically, it only reinforces my argument. Unless you're suggesting that global warming is natural and not caused by humans...

If you agree that 'artificial selection' can work quickly (as scientific evidence suggests) and you believe that humans are the main driver of climate change (as is the consensus among climate scientists). Then my proposition that evolution can work very fast in the context of global warming (being an 'artificial', human-driven process) is a logical conclusion.

QED.

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

#106

Post by javajosh »

tjoff wrote: post #75
Gravityloss wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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, p…

Double the price of coal sounds like an excellent thing! Still very cheap. Promotes better sources of energy.

Indeed. The fact is that coal energy externalities have been ignored, artificially depressing the cost. Increasing the cost of a product to reflect those externalities is not a "blow to the industry", but rather the first time in history coal's price will reflect its externalities.

Nope, it's not a great time to be a coal-miner, but I hear Biden is trying to spend $4T on infrastructure so maybe some of those miners can buy a truck and form a road maintenance company instead!

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

#109

Post by acje »

acje wrote: post #102

I can’t imagine an industrial approach that won’t fail on scale, lifecycle or both. These are not strategies to solve the problem these are strategies to get rich. The only kind of strategy that seems capable of delivering on both scale and lifecycle is one where we enhance the environment to capture the CO2 for us and store it in the organic food chain simply by scaling it up to hold the extra mass. Most likely we w…

Wow the downvotes.. was this really that controversial? Are we still trying to solve the problem with the same mindset we created it?

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

#110

Post by pantalaimon »

saddlerustle wrote: post #43
GekkePrutser wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least in Germany, car subsidies (investments in road infrastructure) are significantly larger than any investments in rail infrastructure.
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