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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

#161

Post by laurent92 »

sporkland wrote: post #153
plutonorm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is transitioning slowly back to a hunter gatherer life style morally a bad idea? If so why?

Depends if you think babies and moms dying is a morally bad thing or not. Estimated 30-50% mortality rate for babies and 1% per birth mortality rate for moms (times say 12 kids). Lotta innocent babies gotta die to achieve your goals. While this may sound tongue in cheek or a gotcha. I do think people underestimate how terrible, hard and brutal it was to live in those cultures as a human. We definitely create our shar…

People always think about medical conditions when thinking about archaic societies; but there is also an associated cost in not having a central ministry in charge of monitoring violence to women. Energy abundance shaped people’s moral values and society, we’ll also lose them when scaling down. In other example: Who cares about PETA during war, who protects the gays, etc.

So yes, scaling down is de facto against our moral values.

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

#162

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #93
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…

It certainly makes no sense to capture CO2 from burning coal. But lots of industries are harder to decarbonize than electricity production. On top of that, we're past the point where just stopping emissions is enough; we have to draw CO2 levels back down.

Capturing CO2 from burned biomass (or waste) would provide a CO2-negative energy source. Not enough to run the world, but nice to have.

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

#163

Post by CharlesW »

londons_explore wrote: post #40
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-…

$47.10 per ton smells like someone has calculated the cost of the reagents and cited that as the price... Any estimate of this process cost would never be to 3 Sig fig.

I don't know why $47.10 is any less credible than $47, but here's more detail on what the estimate represents from TFAMA:

"For the $47.10/metric ton carbon capture cost, 48% comes from CAPEX while the remaining is OPEX. The equipment life of a carbon capture unit would be similar to that of a power plant, about 20-30 years. The $47.10/metric ton cost is just for carbon capture, and does not include transportation and sequestration costs."

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

#164

Post by BurningFrog »

thechao wrote: post #141
tim333 wrote: post #120

For comparison I was looking back at the "Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches" thing. There were estimates of $10-$25 a ton for olivine rock https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415138

I don't know why the Democrats, in particular, don't turn this into political hay: it's literally the perfect counter to the coal issue. 1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings from huge defunct coal mines; 2. All of the mining & transportation infrastructure is already in mining country; 3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue collar work; and, 4. Mining country already has e…

1. The tech isn't ready to deploy.

2. There are hardly any Democrat leaders left who care about or can talk to blue collar workers.

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

#165

Post by headsupernova »

lenkite wrote: post #125
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…

How does one leverage this excellent carbon storage technology ? Plant fast-growing trees/crops, cut them upon maturity and bury them underground ?

Simple - don't light it on fire.

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

#166

Post by Majromax »

linknoid wrote: post #80
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…

Maybe you can help enlighten me on this. I've been struggling to understand the basics thermodynamics of carbon capture for quite some time. So we have a hydro-carbon, we mix it with oxygen, and the oxygen combines with the hydrogen and the carbon, and releases heat as a byproduct. The heat energy increases the pressure of the newly created CO2. This higher pressure is placed on one side of a turbine or a piston, and…

> he heat energy increases the pressure of the newly created CO2. This higher pressure is placed on one side of a turbine or a piston, and we extract useful work by moving it from a high density state to a low density state, causing it to cool in the process.

You run the hot, high-pressure gas through a turbine to give you less-hot, lower-pressure gas. You then extract as much waste heat out of that stream as you can via a heat exchanger process, to pre-heat incoming fuel/air and to recover more energy by boiling water to run through another turbine.

At the end of the process, you have a medium-temperature stream of combustion product that has high concentrations of CO2. You capture the carbon from this stream, before releasing the last bits of gas to the atmosphere.

You gain usable energy out of the process because all of the heat movement happens through a turbine (to directly generate energy) or through a heat exchanger (to recycle the heat to other more useful parts of the process).

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

#167

Post by rebuilder »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #131
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 think we should really reduce our energy usage instead. There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's energy usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a dangerous one. Energy use is fundamentally tied to progress to such an extent that we should always be looking for ways to increase the energy available to us. Of course the energy should be produced in as low-impact a manner as possible, but it's…

Surely we can agree that growth in total energy usage must stop at some point? With continuous growth, you run into the limit of the earth's ability to radiate heat into space, or later on, the energy produced by the sun, in worryingly short timeframes.

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

#168

Post by BurningFrog »

plutonorm wrote: post #140
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think we should really reduce our energy usage instead. There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's energy usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a dangerous one. Energy use is fundamentally tied to progress to such an extent that we should always be looking for ways to increase the energy available to us. Of course the energy should be produced in as low-impact a manner as possible, but it's…

Is transitioning slowly back to a hunter gatherer life style morally a bad idea? If so why?

Humans produce the vast majority of food we eat.

If we stopped that, and just consumed the food that nature spontaneously produces, it supports maybe 50M people. So first you'd have to kill 7000M people.

Even after that, I don't know how you'd stop people from reinventing agriculture.

So on balance, I recommend against this :)

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

#169

Post by nerbert »

rebuilder wrote: post #167
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think we should really reduce our energy usage instead. There is no viable future scenario in which mankind's energy usage decreases. It's a pipe dream, and ultimately a dangerous one. Energy use is fundamentally tied to progress to such an extent that we should always be looking for ways to increase the energy available to us. Of course the energy should be produced in as low-impact a manner as possible, but it's…

Surely we can agree that growth in total energy usage must stop at some point? With continuous growth, you run into the limit of the earth's ability to radiate heat into space, or later on, the energy produced by the sun, in worryingly short timeframes.

We can agree to talk about it again once we’re exploiting the energy of the entire galaxy.

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

#170

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

thechao wrote: post #141
tim333 wrote: post #120

For comparison I was looking back at the "Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches" thing. There were estimates of $10-$25 a ton for olivine rock https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415138

I don't know why the Democrats, in particular, don't turn this into political hay: it's literally the perfect counter to the coal issue. 1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings from huge defunct coal mines; 2. All of the mining & transportation infrastructure is already in mining country; 3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue collar work; and, 4. Mining country already has e…

I think part of this is because there is a group of people that doesn’t want there to be an easy technical solution to climate change. They would rather use the massive threat of climate change as the catalyst for social, economic, and behavioral change. They view climate change mitigation tech that does not require changes in behavior much as religious conservatives viewed birth control and condoms - a technical hack to get around immoral behavior.
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